Justin Taylor in Bookforum:
YOU OPEN BOX 34, take the typescript from its folder. You can see right away that the song is pretty much finished. He’s got the first four verses locked in, save one lingering question about Ma. Should she be forty but say she’s twenty-four, or eighty claiming sixty-four? Or what if she’s twenty but wants you to think she’s sixty-four? Is that better? Nah. But this is small potatoes, a distraction from the real problem, which is the fifth and final verse, which is still stumping him.
He writes it longhand in the white space below the typing: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” Makes sense that after dealing individually with Maggie’s brother, Pa, and Ma over the last three verses, he’d finish by returning to the farm itself. But now what? He writes “You” on its own line. Adds nothing. He leaves some space, gives it a fresh go:
if you ain’t like everyone else
they think they’ve been insulted
everybody try keep track of the
He pauses. This isn’t working. Maybe he takes a break, stays away for a while, because what’s written next is written with a different implement, something darker and thicker. Could be charcoal pencil but who knows. In the white space beside the abandoned fragment, he writes:
I try My best t be just the way I am
but everybody wants me to be just like them
theythey SAY SING WHILE YOU SLAVE
/ I just bored
And there it is.
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