Part 22 (1/2)

He's weak with relief, tears streaking his face, he isn't going to die as that man who'd been his father that man who'd been the white Devil-Daddy had prophecized.

Though vowing it won't be Black Jesus who takes him home.

REVEREND DRISKUS PRICE of the United African Baptist Church . . . Right Reverend Sloc.u.m Diggs of the Free Evangelical Brotherhood . . . Father Moses of the African Methodist Episcopal Church . . . Reverend T. J. Skirm of the Mount Pisgah African Church of Christ . . . Brother Druse Mohammed of the Bethel African Fellows.h.i.+p . . . Doctor Willard Graver of the Lenox Avenue American-Liberian League . . . Supreme Potentate Dougla.s.s Fox of the United Negro Colonization Society . . . Brother Ebenezer King of the First Zionist Church of Christ, Harlem . . . Commander Diaz Attucks of the Consolidated Free Afro-American Christian League . . .

Some of the preachers urge Jesus onto their flocks, others urge ma.s.s migration back to Africa, others believe fervently that Jesus is to be found in Africa, in the Sovereign Free State of Liberia (founded by freed American slaves in 1847), or in the Sovereign Free State of Sierra Leone . . . .

So many preachers, and so much genuine faith: and what difference, brothers and sisters, has it ever made in your lives? . . .

”Little Moses” for all his cunning is to die a Negro death after all: shortly past midnight of 7 June 1915, in the neighborhood of Amsterdam Avenue and 140th Street. In the very street, in fact.

He will die of a savage beating by three New York City mounted policemen, ”riot” police, in the midst of a six-hour uprising by Negroes occasioned by the rumor (afterward verified) that a seventeen-year-old Negro boy had earlier been beaten to death by police elsewhere in Harlem.

(The boy had been arrested on 134th ”fleeing the scene of a crime” . . . manacled and beaten savagely for ”resisting and threatening police officers” . . . his limp bleeding body, an arm dangling broken, carried away by a speeding police van. More than a dozen witnesses looked on in horror; the incident had taken place across the street from the Afro-American Baptist Brotherhood League.) In all, eleven Negroes will die in the rioting, nine of them men. A forty-three-year-old pregnant woman, a six-year-old girl.

And among these Little Moses . . . though there will be no official record of his death as there is no record, official or otherwise, of his life.

EXCEPT: ON THE night of 6 June 1915, less than six hours before his death, he debates with a barroom acquaintance (Marcus Caesar Smith, formerly of the Barbados) the metaphysical conundrum of whether a man's ident.i.ty lies in what he resembles to the outer eye, or what he is.

For though a man might inhabit a certain shade and texture of skin, that's hardly proof that he must be defined by that skin. And though he resembles other men who inhabit that selfsame skin, it can't be proved that he must be identified with them.

Smith responds, winking at the crowd that has gathered around them, ”Brother, look here: if you is talkin' about yourself, or myself, or whoever, say so-without no further ob-fus-ca-tion. If you is claimin' not to be a n.i.g.g.e.r like the rest of us, then what is you?”

Much laughter, hooting and whistling.

Little Moses, unaccustomed to being laughed at, stiffens; but manages to smile, and winks to draw the crowd onto his side. Saying ”Friends, the metaphysics of it is the secret that no ignorant imagination can grasp: some folks is only what they look like by way of their skin and others, only what they is.”

”Tell it, bro-ther! Tell it!” Smith laughs.

” . . . And the two categories stand apart and never can mingle, like oil . . . ” Little Moses had been drinking, his tongue slurs his smooth words, ” . . . and blood.”

”That so, bro-ther? How so?”

”Because it is,” Little Moses says. ”And some things is not.”

Smith plays to the gathering of drinkers saying, ”Now you come to your senses, man, and explain to me how come you know so d.a.m.n much and I that's older than you and wiser don't know nothin'.”

And Little Moses drinks whatever this is he's drinking, orange flame in his throat, searing his eyes, he's confused saying, ”Because it's inside, brother. It's been told in-side.”

”Howso? Inside what?”

”In-side.”

”Look, man-there got to be some outside, like a rind or a husk, that there's an inside of, don't there?-ain't that so?” Smith cries.

”No. There don't.”

”Like there's gonna be a, say, catfish-without no skin to keep 'im in? There's gonna be a hog, a cantaloupe, a baby, a flower-and not no outside for the inside to press up against? Not hardly!”

Little Moses removes his wide-brimmed fedora, incensed.

”G.o.d-d.a.m.n don't need to fool n.o.body,” Little Moses cries. ”I mean-I don't need to fool you. Don't give any G.o.d d.a.m.n, that s.h.i.+t you sayin'.”

”Then how come you talkin' to me, brother?-how come you here, and sweatin' it?”

”Because I got to be some place.”

”Yes man, but how come you got to be here?”

”Because it has come to this,” Little Moses says, suddenly panicked. ”Because-I don't know.”

”Now you tellin' us straight, you don't know no G.o.d-d.a.m.n more than anybody else,” Smith shouts happily, clapping Little Moses' back so hard Little Moses begins to cough, ”-because you is the same as anybody else inside and out. Because you is me, n.i.g.g.e.r, on the inside just as on the outside, should anybody investigate innards and guts and kinda stuff. Somebody do autopsy on you, my friend, and then on me, you think they gonna find much any different? What you think they gonna find?”

Little Moses is leaning against the bar, head lowered, watery eyes squinched up tight. His mouth feels as if somebody has kicked it. ”s.h.i.+t, man-I don't know.”

”Louder, man!”

But Little Moses shakes his head, sulky and insulted. If he could retreat somewhere, if he could have some peace and stillness he'd figure out how to reply; but these fools grinning at him, laughing and pointing-it's hopeless.

Smith persists, like a horse that can't stop trampling some poor broken-boned b.a.s.t.a.r.d under his hooves, ”You think they goin' to find black guts in one, and no-color guts in the other? I seen n.i.g.g.e.r guts come spillin out and the sight ain't pretty, and I sure don't want to see it another time but I'd swear they ain't black any more'n a white man's guts is gonna be white; but maybe you got to see it, friend, like Thomas he got to poke his finger in Jesus' side before he get the point. Or you getting the point now?” Smith generously lays a hot, heavy hand on Little Moses' neck, a hand like a small furry animal. Little Moses shudders at the feel of it. ”Say what,” says Smith, ”we have ourself one more drink and forget that 'meta-whatyoucallit-phys-cal' s.h.i.+t. That stuff, my man, only get in the way.”

NEXT EVENING HE'S running out into the street cursing paying no heed to a woman shouting into his face, ”Go back, they killin' folks out there!”-the night sky is awash with flames, policemen on horseback swinging billy clubs, a girls' head streaming blood, about to fall beneath a horse's plunging hooves and he's shouting he's cursing not drunk but stone-cold sober making a grab at the policeman's reins, a grab at the man himself, trying to wrench him down from his saddle but a second policeman sidles his horse close and strikes him on the shoulder, on the side of the head, on the crown of the head as he falls, he's writhing on the cobblestone pavement trying to s.h.i.+eld his bleeding head, his stomach, his groin, as the white-man billy clubs swing in wide arcs like clock-pendulums . . . and the horses whinny and froth in terror . . . bone-crus.h.i.+ng hooves strike blindly . . . his right leg, his right arm, his backbone, his unprotected head cracked like a melon.

One of the unidentified bodies. Negro, male, casualty of Harlem uprising.

VENUS APHRODITE.

Does my hand tremble?-it does not. Do I doubt?-I do not. Am I an ordinary suitor, fearful of rejection?-I am not.”