When I was 10—or around then, it’s hard to remember—I died in a car accident. Or so I heard during one gray Sunday mass, when a muttering deacon solemnly pronounced me dead in prayer, the casualty of a few bigger boys more duly departed in a true crash. My parents weren’t there, so no one noticed that I was in fact alive and well, squirming in the pew, an unlikely companion for a sedan full of drunk teenagers. It
was a dull shock—no triumphant Tom Sawyer moment—and I never figured out if it was
a morbid joke on the part of my classmates or an honest mistake. (Shortly after my “accident,” I won a MADD-sponsored poster contest, sanctioned by my Catholic elementary school, with a gory drawing of a young man splayed over the blood-drenched hood of a crushed yellow Corvette.) In college, I narrowly survived a wintry wreck on Christmas Eve, pried from my father’s Geo with the Jaws of Life and airlifted to Boston Medical with several broken ribs, one of which had punctured my right lung, filling it with blood. But it was a bus that finally buried me.

       The Black Camel of Death found me first in autumn, in a school bus in Avalon, Mississippi. There is no sign for Avalon Road, and I’m no navigator, but I’ve managed to find the spot twice in as many years, on two separate pilgrimages to bluesman Mississippi John Hurt’s grave. The dirt road rises sharply from the edge of the Delta, winding into the kudzu-bruised hills above the river’s furthest fingers aching eastward. The Hurt family plot, when you finally stumble upon it, resembles not so much a graveyard as a forest clearing
 faintly hiding its dead beneath untidy ridges. Of the dozen or so knolls, many remain unmarked, while others have been planted with placards, faded into obscurity, or folded into tin signposts like those found in botanical gardens. John Hurt’s resting place is a sturdy stone slab littered with guitar picks, a few stunted candles, a cracked CD or two, and once, oddly, a hand of sodden Pokémon cards.

       The bus in question, entombed a good 50 yards from Hurt’s grave, is no longer roadworthy in the functional sense but, swallowed up to its yawning emergency doors in an embankment, it is perhaps love-worthy. On my first visit, I noted it but rolled on by. On my second visit months later, the crows sniping at a clutch of rotting fish just outside somehow emboldened me. Stepping through its exposed rear maw into the thick heat, I quickly realized, despite the darkness of soil beyond the windows, that it was a short bus, maybe a ’50s model, sufficient for a rural community, but cozily coffin-like in its present subterranean setting. Inside, among the uprooted seats and drifts of detritus, I came across an old Camel cigarettes sign, the dromedary silhouette blacked out with rust. A simple advertisement, darkened with age, the ruined image remains as vivid to me as the cemetery destination itself, somehow as attuned to death as Hurt’s humble hole outside. Its silence was blaringly appropriate after hours of listening to Mississippi John’s music—itself so keenly familiar
with mortality—on the car stereo driving south.

       Not so silent was the preacher who, over seven decades before my encounter, warned his faithful of the inexorable coming of the Black Camel.

Ahh, we’re going to speak now from the subject: the Black Camel’s Death, travels in the path of misunderstanding. The locomotive engineer misunderstood his message. Fails to take the siding, and the Black Camel of Death meets him and others, ah, swept into the judgment. There are many passengers and the engineers all gone to the judgment by failing to understand—Black Camel’s Death pulled him into eternity.

       The fast driver of a car, the auto car, sees the curves and the signals and fails to understand the dangers. He rides on in a hurry. He’s in such a hurry—the faster he goes, the faster he wants to go. `Til he meets another fast-going car right around the curve. And it goes on a head on collision and the Black Camel Death meets them in the path of misunderstanding and into the judgment he goes. Oh yes, that loving wife, he fails to understand her, and she goes her own route, and by and by it winds up, ah, in dissatisfaction and death, because the Black Camel Death got on the trail, and so with a flying machine, the man that jets in the air and flies away like a bird and goes way over towards the ocean and the seas, take a long journey, fails to put enough oil in his machine, and fails to put enough gas in his machine, and he goes on flyin’, and by and by into some hamlet into some wilderness he’s going down, and we’ll see him no more. Black Camel Death that met him.

       I’m not uneasy, my Lord.
       Well, I’m not uneasy, my Lord.
       Well, I got my ticket, checked for Zion.
       Well, I’m not uneasy, my Lord.

       Yes, I got good religion, my Lord.
       Well, I got good religion, oh my Lord.
       Well, I got my ticket, well I’m checked for Zion.
       Well, I’m not uneasy, my Lord.

       Well, you better get your ticket my Lord.
       Well you better get your ticket, oh my Lord.
       Well, I got my ticket, well, I’m checked for Zion.
       Well, I’m not uneasy, my Lord.