… My grandpap said the colored don’t need rights, Donelson said: they only need rites. You get it? Just give niggers a baptism or a parade or a dance and they’re happy. And that, Karp said, is pappy-crap … And I was stunned.
So now when I changed places I changed me, and when I entered a place that place changed imperceptibly. The mystery went with me, entered with me, realigning time and place and personality. When I entered all was changed, as by an odorless gas. So the mystery pursued me, shifting and changing faces. Understand?
And later whenever instead of taking in a scene the camera seemed to focus forth my own point of view I felt murderous, felt that justifiable murder was being committed and my images a blasting of the world. I felt sometimes that a duplicity was being commissioned, an ambuscado trained upon those who thought they knew themselves and me. And yet I felt that I was myself a dupe because there was always the question aroused by my ability to see into events and the awareness of the joke implicit my being me. Who? So I said, What is the meaning of this arrangement of time place and circumstance that flames and dampens murder in my heart? And what is this desire to identify with others, this need to extend myself and test my most far-fetched possibilities with only the agency of shadows? Merely shadows. All shadowy they promised me my mother and denied me solid life. Oh, yes, mirrors do steal souls. So indeed Narcissus was weird….
“Rev. Bliss,” Hickman was saying, “in the dark of night, alone in the desert of my own loneliness I have thought long upon this. I have thought upon you and me and all the old scriptural stories of Isaac and Joseph and upon our slave forefathers who killed their babes rather than have them lost in bondage, and upon my life here and the trials and tribulations and the jokes and laughter and all the endless turns-about that mark man’s life in this world—And each time I return, each time my mind returns and makes its painful way back to the mystery of you and the mystery of birth and resurrection and hope which now seems endless in its complication. Yes, and I think upon the mystery of my involvement in it—Me, a black preacher’s wilful son, a gambler-musician who rejoiced in the sounds of our triumph in this world of deceitful triumphs. Me, given you and your gifts, your possibilities in this whirlwind of circumstance. How and why did it happen? Why was I, the weakest of vessels, chosen to give so much and to have to try to understand so much which hardly seems understandable? Why did he give me this mysterious burden and then seem to mock me and challenge me and let men revile and despise me and wipe my heart upon the floor of this world after I had suffered and offered it up in sacrifice because in the coming together of hate and love and life and death, that marked the beginning, I looked upon those I love and upon them who caused their death and was unable to accept it except as I’d already accepted the blues, the clap, the loss of love, as the fate of man … I bared my breast, I lowered my head into the ashes where they had burned my own, my loved ones and accepted Thy will. Why didst Thou choose me, single me out for further humiliation who had been designated to humiliation by men unworthy, by men most unworthy, Lord. Why? Why me? me who had accepted my blackness as my fate, in the dark and shadowy complication of Thy will? And yet, down there in the craziness of the southland, in the madhouse of down home, the old motherland where I in all my ignorance and desperation was taught to deal with the complications of Thy plan, yes, and at a time when I was learning to live and to glean some sense of how Thy voice could sing through the blues and even speak through the dirty dozens if only the players were rich-spirited and resourceful enough, comical enough, vital enough and enough aware of the disciplines of life. In the zest and richness Thou were there, yes! But still, still, still, my question Lord! Though I say, quiet, quiet, my tongue. So teach me, Lord, to move on and yet be still; to question and not cry out, Lord, Lord, WHY?. Why?.” And Hickman slept.
A SONG OF INNOCENCE
IOWA REVIEW 1 (SPRING 1970): 30–40
Mr. McIntyre was standing there and I didn’t recognize him, and then it started happening. I thought one of my bad spells was coming on, the words were coming out of me so fast that while I could hear them inside me I couldn’t connect up with them. It was like in the night when you’re in bed and somebody walking along in the middle of the street in the dark lets out one of those ole long, slow-winding whoops that’s neither a word or a song—you know…. And you hear it come sailing over the houses and the trees and on until it’s starting to die away like a train’s whistle when it’s moving way yonder, out in the west, and then somebody else hears it falling away in a far street and he lets out a whoop because he can’t help but keep it going and you hear it floating back out of the shadows and the dark while you lie there listening to both of them walking and listening and whooping and whooping and walking and listening with neither one knowing what those whoops are saying or who they’re saying it to. But you know that they’ve got to be saying something because all that lonesome rising and falling of sound like singing has you by the short hair and dragging you out into the ole calcified night of loneliness toward the unsayable meaning of mankind’s outrageous condition in this world (See, there they go again! Pay them no mind, Mr. McIntyre, they on their own. I try, I try awfully hard but they won’t behave)….
So I roll over on the pallet and listen to those whoops rising and falling and dying and you try to understand what they’re saying and even though you will never in this world quite make it before sleep comes down, you know just the same that it means beyond anything the straight words could ever say. You’re here and they’re there and there and you’re still here and they’re moving on and the sound and the meaning’s passing out there back and forth in the night. So you fall asleep and the sound falls off the soft edge of your mind into the depths of all you can’t hold or understand, or see or be, and they keep walking and whooping as though you’d never been born or had no ears to hear. Have some lemonade, Mr. McIntyre.
Listen. So when he had walked in here I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t control those words and he was standing on the steps by now so that I couldn’t get up and struggle down to where I could hear the freight trains making up down in the yards. I get up in the night sometimes and watch them just like I used to do when he was living here and was always with me in case I had a spell and fell and hurt myself, and I stand there on the hill back of the house and look down through the dark at the light and smell the good clean smell of the steam as it comes purling from the engine and there’s red coals glowing in its grate and it’s standing there huge in the dark, looking just like it’s breathing and waiting to take off to all those places I always wanted to see but never could, and I can feel the words moiling up inside me and I want to go along with it. Sometimes I come to the very edge of a spell too, but never over it when I’m standing there looking. So, yes indeed, I want to go, with it big and black and full of fire and steam and just rolling all over the land through the daylight and the dark on those shining rails. It’s a dream without rhyme or reason, but just the same, I could go along sitting right up there behind that smokestack where I could look all around and see over the hills and through the towns like it was the daddy and I was the baby riding high on his shoulders. Sure, this said so my soul sighs and what’s your silly dream, Mr. McIntyre? A one-eyed man in this town stole an elephant once when Severen was a boy, and hid him in a patch of trees and was trying to feed him on yard grass, and he’s one my words didn’t make up.
Anyway, Severen knew though I was sitting here ignorant of his coming. He knew all about me and the trains even way back there, and once he drew me a tablet full of engines and colored them with crayons, because he knew how the trains eased me. In fact he was the first to understand what they did for me. He used to go with me to watch the trains and after he went away Miss Janey took me to watch whenever she had the time. She used to say, “Cliofus, you really must have been born with a truly aching heart to need a whole big engine and line of cars to soothe your agitation.”
Miss Janey’s right, though; thos
e trains ease me. —Eeeeease me! What I mean is, they ease my aching mind. When I watch those engines and boxcars and gondolas I start to moving up and down in my body’s joy and when I see those drivers start to roll, all those words go jumping out to them like the swine in the Bible that leaped off the cliff into the sea—only they hop on the Katy, the Rock Island and the Santa Fe…. Space, time and distance, like they say, I’m a yearning man who has to sit still. Maybe those trains need those words to help them find their way across this here wide land in the dark, I don’t know. But for me it’s like casting bread on the water because not only am I eased in my restless mind, but once in a while, deep in the night, when everything is quiet and all those voices and words are resting and all those things that I’ve been tumbling and running and bouncing through my mind all day have got quiet as a ship in a bottle on a shelf, then I can hear those train whistles talking to me, just to me, and in those times I know I have all in this world I’ll ever need—mama and papa and jelly-roll….
So there Severen was and I couldn’t do anything about those words—which is what makes me me. They say that folks misuse words, but I see it the other way around, words misuse people. Usually when you think you’re saying what you mean you’re really saying what the words want you to say. It’s just like a drunk piano player I know who says that when he’s drinking he plays where his fingers take him. Well, once upon a time they took him straight into the biggest church in town and got him thrown into jail for playing “Funky Butt” on the godbox, which is Mr. Fats Waller’s name for the pipe organ. One never knows, do one, as he used to say, Vox Humana, vox excelsis…. Mr. McIntyre. But words are tricky, they keep a thumb stuck in their noses and wave their fingers at you all the time, because they know that a sign or a gesture is the only thing you can control because no matter what you try to do, words can never mean meaning. Now you just wave your hand at somebody and it means bye-bye. Throw a kiss or hold out your arms and even a baby can understand you. But just try to say it in words and you raise up Babel and the grapes of wrath. If you nod your head and smile even folks who don’t speak your language will get the idea, but you just whisper peace somebody will claim you declared war and will insist on trying to kill you. No wonder we have war! No wonder history is a bitch on wheels with wings traveling inside a submarine. Words are behind it all.
And with me it’s even worse because since I can’t always control my body even my gestures make me out a fool. Like the time the teacher said, Cliofus, who was the father of our country?
This was the first grade, even though the desk was already so small my knees stuck out in the aisles and my head was high enough to make the best target in the class.
Who was the daddy of our country? she said.
I don’t know, mam, I told her.
You don’t know? Then think a bit, she said.
So I thought a while with all the others watching and then I tried to guess. I said, Is it Him who art in heaven?
She grinned then, then she tried to hide it, but those outlaws like Buster, and Leroy, and Tommy Dee started to laughing and banging on their desks and jeering at me, saying.
Cliofus is a dummy! Cliofus is a pure fool! And the teacher looked at me real disgusted.
Quiet, she said, Quiet! And she started to frowning so hard it confused me. I wasn’t very sociable in those days even though Miss Janey had tried to teach me my manners long before they decided to let me go to school.
Cliofus, the teacher said. You must know history, she said. Just like that.
And I said, Yes, mam …
But because I thought she was talking about Mister History, who was the father of our country I told her, “I be pleased to meet him, mam” … and I knew even before the words got out that I was wrong because Buster was already saying,
Listen to ole Seeofus, y’all. He a bad granny-dodger this morning!
I heard him plain as day, but I was losing ground to those words so fast I was already saying,
but do you think Mr. History would have time to be bothered with somebody like me, mam?—Not because I was sassy, you understand, but because I already felt despised and so unnecessary. Folks were already calling me a fool and in those days I didn’t know whether I was or wasn’t or even just what kind of a fool I was. I just figured I was pretty lucky that they let me go to school even though they waited so long to do it. So you see, the words had betrayed me twice over, and those fiends were really laughing at me now. It was like it was springtime recess near the last day of school and they’d already broken out most of the window-lights. So when the teacher slammed a book on the desk and said,
Boy, what do you mean, all I could do was stutter and shake, because I didn’t know what the words would do next. Then the pains burst in the back of my head and everything around me started rushing away like a fast freight leaving a tramp and right in the middle of it I heard a voice just like mine saying, Why shucks, Miss Kindly, I’m plumb full of history; even the dogs know that.
And for a second there I thought it was the words playing a mean new trick on me, but it was Jack. He was throwing his voice from the back of the room and that set those howling heathens off again. Buster jumped out into the aisle and did a buck dance, singing,
Well, if at first you don’t succeed
Well a-keep on a-sucking
Till you do sucka seed
and the rest joined in yelling:
Cliofus ripped it, he ripped it, he ripped it, he
really ripped it
like a fool!
And before the teacher could say a word, Tyree jumped on top of his desk and spread out his arms like a Calhoun or a Cicero and yelled,
Friends, Romans and Country women, Cliofus
is an ape-sweat with too much mustard on his
bun!
And he frowned and slammed his fist down hard on his desk (Bang!) and shook his cheeks like a bad bull dog.
That really started them to yelling and holding their noses and saying Phew! and He aint on my mama’s table and things like that even though an ape-sweat was what they used to call a hamburger when they didn’t want anybody to beg for a bite.
Tell us some more, they said, and ole Tyree flapped his arms like a rooster and strutted around in a circle pecking with his head and said, Brothers and sisters and grand-mammy-dodgers, Cliofus is a soft horse-apple and a ripe goose egg!
That started them off again, yelling, Yaaaay! He ripped it, he ripped it, he ripped it! Cliofus really ripped it like a fool! Then somebody hit the blackboard with a biscuit soaked in molasses and a baked yam sailed past my head and squashed all over the big map of the United States that hung up front on a stand. But Miss Kindly was looking straight at me. The woman didn’t even dodge!
Young man, you march right up here and apologize to me and to the rest of the class, she said.
But before I could move Jack spoke up in his natural voice, which he had already made as rough and deep as Mister Louis Armstrong’s.
Said: Why, Miss Kindly, what do you mean apologize? All Cliofus means is that he’s fulla brown and that’s a natural fact. You don’t believe him, sniff him….
They exploded then and even those good little girls, whose mama wrapped their braids in gingham rags, joined in. Started shooting off cap pistols, rolling in the aisles and throwing erasers at my head.
You a good boy but you got no brakes or steering wheel, have you Cli, Jack said, and I felt something slimy hit the back of my head and run down my neck. And when I turned to look, a bunch of grapes hit me square in the face. They really had my range that morning. Jack had swiped a whole crate of overripe grapes from the produce house and passed them around to the other outlaws. When I tried to stand everybody seemed to be hitting me with those grapes. You could just see my white sweater turning purple beneath your eyes, just like somebody was stirring it in a tub of Concords and that started me to getting sick. I dearly loved that sweater because Miss Janey knitted it for me and I could feel a spell coming down
and Miss Kindly’s banging on her desk didn’t help me fight it off. I would rather have died than have a spell hit me in front of those fools but when I held up my hand to be excused my doggone fingers wouldn’t open. It looked like I was shaking my fist at the world and Miss Kindly turned a gallish green and her eyes started to pop and it was getting dark and I could feel myself falling. Then I was in the aisle and it was turning from black to red in my eyes and all I could hear, back there in the fire and gas where I had gone was Miss Kindly yelling ORDER!
Which she didn’t get because by the time Miss Janey drove the mule and the wagon over to get me they had poured ink in my ear and painted my face white with eraser chalk. Miss Janey gave them hell—
But I was telling about Severen and it was almost the same. After all that time, he came through the gate and on up here on the porch with me rocking slow and watching him and batting at the flies round my rocking chair while I was thinking on the New Jerusalem, which is what Miss Janey likes to call this State—You know:
Give me my Bow of burning gold
Give me my Arrows of desire
Give me my Spear: O clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire ….
which was dancing in my mind like gnats around the eyes of a sleeping dog, and Severen came on not saying a word and stopped right there beside that post and was looking at me when the words started to talk to him. It was as though he’d asked a question and they were out to answer before I had a chance to stop them. They didn’t need me anyway, they were in there waiting to get out and didn’t even care how they got started. Because they had recognized him long before I did, smelled him or heard him coming from a long way off like dogs do. And I don’t know who he is even after they get started, although I might have, just by his standing there looking pokerfaced and listening. Which should’ve told me that he was somebody who knew something about me because no stranger would look at me, sitting here weighing over 300 and talking break-neck as I have to talk. Oh I see me. Mr. McIntyre, do you see you? Because all things considered I got a built-in feed-back, if you know what I mean. The words take over but I listen and remember. Anyway, a stranger would’ve listened a minute and then backed down those steps and cut out. Wouldn’t even’av said goodbye.