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Lauren Collins on the unraveling of an expert on serial killers.
David Grand's impossible to put down stories of mutiny and murder. Subscribe at newyorker.com slash dark and you'll get access to all of it. Plus a free New Yorker tote bag. I must say the very best tote bag around. That's newyorker.com slash dark. Clarksdale, Mississippi. Just tell me why y'all need to come on down to Clarksdale. They're
Dozens of music venues. At Ground Zero, everybody likes to party. Live music every night. You could go out every night and your liver would hit you and you'd go broke because there's so much, you know. A city centered around the blues. Specifically, tourism related to the blues. We'll show you inside. A place where every year... Hi, where y'all from?
Thousands of people come from all over the world to listen to live music and walk in the footsteps of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. And then in March, the pandemic hit. And all of this stopped. The clubs closed. The tourists left. This is In the Dark, Coronavirus in the Delta. I'm Madeline Barron.
I've spent the past two months, along with the rest of the In the Dark team, reporting on coronavirus in the Mississippi Delta, the poorest part of Mississippi and one of the poorest places in the entire country. In this series, we're bringing you stories of people trying to live in this really hard time, trying to make decisions, trying to get by in a situation that none of us have faced before. In this episode, a story of just one man, a man who, in the middle of the pandemic, came to understand something.
Not about the virus, but about himself. Episode 4, Watermelon Slim. A few years ago, I spent a few hours in Clarksdale, Mississippi, with our producer Natalie. We'd stop by the Bluesberry Cafe to get breakfast. And our waiter was this older white guy, kind of weathered looking, messy hair, disheveled in an approachable kind of way. As best I can recall, he was wearing a dirty white apron and corduroy pants. He didn't sound like he was from the Delta.
When he cleared our plates, he scraped off the extra grits with his hand. He seemed like the kind of guy who knows he's a total character. He just goes with it. After breakfast, we went to this really tiny rock and blues museum run by a guy from the Netherlands. It was crammed with all kinds of old records. Charlie Patton, Lead Belly, displayed in glass cases along the walls. Every inch of extra space was covered with layer upon layer of ephemera. There's even a little curtain you could pull back to see a sketch that John Lennon had made of people having sex.
And in all of this, a face on a poster jumped out. The face of our waiter. And that's how I learned that our waiter was also a blues musician named Watermelon Slim. There was something about this man that was hard to forget. I looked him up online and went down a rabbit hole.
I learned that Watermelon Slim was born William Homans III in 1949, that he'd grown up in Massachusetts and North Carolina, that he'd been married and had been a soldier in Vietnam, and an anti-war activist who'd once chained himself to a Navy ship, and a farmer, and a grad student, and an environmental activist, and a trucker, and a leftist blogger, and a self-styled expert on the Oklahoma City Bombing.
And on top of all that, Watermelon Slim was also a guy who played the booze. He'd released a bunch of albums that were pretty popular, especially in Europe. Albums with names like Travelin' Man and Escape from the Chicken Coop. And he toured all the time, sometimes more than 100 shows a year.
So when the pandemic hit, I wondered how Watermelon Slim was doing.
Hello. Hi, this is Madeline. I'm the reporter. Are you Madeline? Okay, I've been waiting for your call. Yeah, so I actually met you with a friend. We went and got some food in Clarksdale, and I think you were our waiter. And then later we were at the museum there, and we saw your photo on a poster, and we're like, oh, I think our waiter was Watermelon Slim. Well, thanks for coming into our little joint. So yeah, what's it like in Clarksdale today?
Well, it's a beautiful sunny day. I got a cloud in the sky. It's a lovely spring day. I'm out here on my back porch. I'm looking at my garden grow. That's good. Are those wind chimes I'm hearing?
Oh, you hear the chimes. That's my wind chimes. And they're remarkably pleasant and calming no matter what you're doing. You hear the chimes and it focuses you.
Watermelon Slim told me that the other night, they'd had 70-mile-an-hour winds come through. Yeah, well, we had a hell of a storm. I had a couple of pieces come off my fence, and in front of my house, my flagpole snapped clean in two. I found my American flag sitting on the ground the next morning.
He told me he'd been keeping to himself, mostly staying home, trying to protect himself from getting the virus. I've known from the beginning that I'm a high-risk candidate. A, I smoke. B, I'm almost 71 years old. I have no illusions that if I go out and I catch it, the chances are better than 50% that I'm going to die.
He told me he'd been doing some reading. I have so much to keep on top of. And he was trying to get better at playing the drums. Taking time every day to at least slimmer myself up on the drums. Watermelon Slim had a ton of time on his hands. Frankly, we both did. So we talked for a long time. I asked him how he got his name. A long, many times told tale. He told me that the story of his name began in a watermelon field in Oklahoma in 1980.
It was the third week of July, he said. He was a farmer then, and he was there tending his field. It was hot. He was eating a slice of watermelon. At the same time, he reached into his pocket with his other hand and pulled out his harmonica. And that's when the idea hit him. And I looked at the watermelon, and I looked at the harmonica, and suddenly I call on the Damascus road, ma'am.
It was, he said, a mighty revelation. So I've been watermelon slim for going on 40 years.
Watermelon Slim told me that blues songs, at least the way he sees it, come down to three themes. Watermelon Slim told me that the pandemic had wormed its way into his songwriting.
So you've written a song like in the last week?
You bet your little bippy I have. Any chance I can hear this song? I can play it for you. I've got it right here. I don't know how it would sound over the... Let's try it. One, two, three. Roll the vibe, roll. You're sneaking up my back stairs.
Yeah, thank you so much. Do you have a name for your song?
Well, yeah, Corona Funk. Corona Funk. Watermelon Slim told me that since the pandemic hit, it's been hard on him to not perform in front of an audience. It's not so much the loss of money. Living in Clarksdale is cheap. And he said he's been able to get by on his $1,000 a month or so Social Security check without much trouble.
It's the feeling of a live performance that he misses, the closeness of the crowd, all those people pressed up close together. People are shaking hands all over the place. There are kisses exchanged, all this stuff. You can't kiss anybody anymore, and that's radical stuff. That's a radical change of human behavior. He'd done some online shows recently, streamed on Facebook. What toast you all?
I'm going to just play some songs here. I will probably tell you what the names of them are, but I'll try not to talk too much. But it wasn't the same. All the warmth and spirit of a live performance, the abandon, the noise, the vibrations from the speakers, all those things that make a person's heart beat just a little bit faster, had now been reduced to just a video you can watch on your phone. Like so many parts of our lives now, it felt small and pathetic and just boring.
Oh, so you like performed to like an empty room. I performed on an empty stage. It's the first time I've ever done it. We kept talking in that way that we all talk now. Each of us knowing that the other has nowhere to go, nothing else to do. Knowing that all the normal ways that conversations used to end, hey, sorry, but I have to go to work. I have to run to quick errand. Can I call you back later? Are gone. And so we just continued. Do you think it's possible that you've performed your last performance before a live audience?
Man, that's a horrible question. It's possible. It wasn't just a question about performing. What we were talking about was this larger question. How do you know whether something has come to an end? How do you know that something is gone forever? That things aren't going back to the way they used to be? When do we realize that something is over? That that was before, and that we're now in after?
As we talked, Watermelon Slim told me he'd been thinking not just about blues music and the shows he's missed, but about his life, his entire life, work, relationships, and death. I was widowed in June after 30 years. I knew her for 48 years. She died last year in June. Watermelon Slim told me that he considers himself widowed, even though he and his wife hadn't lived together in years.
My wife and I were separated on New Year's Day 2002. There were trust issues, and my wife was a drug and alcohol abuser. And I never could completely pull her out of the self-destructive tendencies that she had. He'd found himself thinking more about his wife lately.
about how much of his life he'd spent with this person who's now gone. And that made him think of other absences, too. The loss of his brother, who killed himself a few years back, and how he didn't make it to his brother's memorial service because he had to be somewhere else. And one more loss, the loss of his beloved dog, his sidekick, a lab mix named Pino. So it was the greatest dog I ever had, and he was just...
He was only average smart intellectually for a dog, you know. At eight years old, we were working on rolling over. But he was an emotional genius. I really felt like I was coming home when he was here. He was so special.
Lately, cooped up in his house alone, Watermelon Slim said that he sometimes has moments where he forgets that Pino's gone. I'll be thinking and doing nothing in particular, sitting in my computer carrier, and some part of the house will creak, and I'll look around thinking to see it. Standing out on his porch, Watermelon Slim told me the story of how Pino died.
Watermelon Slim had been on tour in Europe about two years ago when it happened. A friend who was checking in on Pino waited until Watermelon Slim got back from tour to tell him. Pino didn't just die, Watermelon Slim said. He'd been shot. He died from three bullets in him.
Somebody came over my fence, shot my dog, and then went back over the fence. Shot and killed in Watermelon Slim's yard, maybe by someone who's trying to break into the house. They never did figure it out. While we were talking, Watermelon Slim left his porch and walked across his backyard.
I'm looking at his grave right now. I'm sitting, just planted a box of petunias on the grave. But the gravestone is beautiful. I got this gravestone, and for $204, I got an absolute monstrous piece of art. He told me he'd sent a photo of Pino to a place that turns photos into gravestone etchings. That's the way they do it, by nature.
They cut Pino and 2010 through 2018, his dates, and his picture with my legend, my darling dog, unconditional love forever in my heart. But I will always, always, always take care of Pino's grave. This grave for Watermelon Slim didn't seem to be just for Pino. Not exactly.
This grave in Watermelon Slim's backyard seems to stand in for all the others. The grave of his brother, his wife, his parents. I got nobody else's grave to take care of. My mother never had one. My father, she was in a huge cemetery in Cambridge called Mount Auburn Cemetery. And my brother, who committed suicide in 2015, I have no idea where he's buried.
But there was something else that Watermelon Slim had been thinking about. Something else that he wanted to tell me. One last thing. And it didn't have anything to do with dead people or dead dogs or graves of any kind. That's after the break. He killed at least 19 people during the 1980s in South Africa. Very dark times. People were desperate. We were looking for him. We couldn't find him. And nobody knew where he was. Every single one of his victims...
He reached such a stage where he was now hunting.
Support for this podcast comes from Sutter Health, from doctors who never stop answering your questions to cardiac specialty centers that never stop helping hearts. Sutter is more than 220 hospitals and clinics that never stop caring for Californians. SutterHealth.org. There's a time for being a man of action, and I've been thinking there must, at some point in time, come my time for reflection.
In his solitude over these past few months, living in quarantine, with no audience to impress and nowhere to go, Watermelon Slim hadn't just been mourning his dead loved ones. He'd also been finding himself returning to a thought that he'd long had. I had girlfriends. I had two marriages. That's just what everybody did. A thought for how his life could be, something he's known that he's wanted for many years. And toward the end of our conversation, he finally said it.
At this point, I don't mind anybody knowing. As a matter of fact, I want anybody to know because the right person might end up hearing. I want a husband if I ever get married again. A husband. I want to take the chance to make a try at being a properly married gay man.
Watermelon Slim told me that he had had a relationship with the man. It was such a long time ago. He said they were more like friends, fellow activists, than partners. It was a sort of relationship that was more common back then. Together, but not really.
If I had been growing up in this day and age, instead of in the 1950s and 60s in the South, if I had grown up today, I'd have just been gay and been done with it. But if I have to do it again, well, I'd like to meet a man that I really get along with and have a partner, not die alone.
And now, now that Watermelon Slim actually had time, not just to think, but also to plan, he finally had clarity. He finally knew what he wanted his life to look like. It may have taken him seven decades and a global pandemic to fully come to this realization. But Watermelon Slim doesn't see that as the worst thing. The way he sees it, there's still time.
We talked for so long that Watermelon Slim's phone was about to die. So we said our goodbyes. Until that day, when Watermelon Slim can finally live the life he wants...
He'll be sitting on his porch in Clarksdale, practicing the drums, tending the grave, humming a tune, and waiting.
In the Dark, Coronavirus in the Delta is reported and produced by me, Madeline Barron, managing producer Samara Freemark, producer Natalie Jablonski, associate producer Raymond Tungakar, and reporter Parker Yesko. This series was edited by Catherine Winter. The editor-in-chief of APM Reports is Chris Worthington. This episode was mixed by Corey Schrappel. Original music for this series by Gary Meister. To see photos that accompany our series, you can go to our website,
InTheDarkPodcast.org. Photography for this series by Ben Deth. Hey!
Hi, this is David Remnick, and this year's New Yorker Festival returns October 25th through the 27th. We'll be joined by Rachel Maddow, Sarah Bareilles, Atul Gawande, Seth Meyers, Mohsin Hamid, Audra McDonald, The National, Julio Torres, Ayad Akhtar, and many others. Plus live podcast recordings and panels on politics, literature, technology, and much more. And you can learn all about it at newyorker.com slash festival.
From PR.
