The whites of his eyes were turning red. I backed away.
What kinda dam’ whistle is that, he said. It bet’ not be what I think it is.
He doubled up his fists.
I watched his eyes.
It blows some real bad-smelling tunes, don’t it, Bliss? one of the others said.
I watched his eyes, red. You ain’t the only one who knows stuff like that, I said. Just because I’m a preacher, don’t think you can run over me.
They were laughing at him now.
Tell him ‘bout it, Rev!
Ole Bliss is awright!
Watch out now, ole Rev’s colored blood is rising….
Indian, man! Look at him!
Ole Bliss is awright! Look at him, y’all. He probably got him some mean cracker blood too, man!
He looked angry, his lips pouting. Maybe you know this one, I said.
Clank, clank, clank, I said and waited, watching his eyes.
What you mean, “clank, clank, clank,” little ole yella som’bitch?
Clank, clank, clank, I said, that’s your mama walking in her cast-iron drawers.
Seeing his face looming close, I moved.
He came on at me but too late, I wasn’t there. Always switch the rhythm—
Watch out, Bliss! they called, but I missed him not. I struck hard, seeing his surprise as the blood burst from his forehead like juice from a crushed blackberry. His face went gray as his hand flew to his forehead. I looked, then I ran backwards with sin running with me in my eyes. I held the rock cupped in my hand like an egg, feeling his blood on my fingers. On this rock I will build my … Kept it with Teddy, my leather-bound Bible.
You shoulda used some catpiss, man, their shouts sounded behind me. ‘Cause he ain’t missed nothing. Look at ole Rev run! Boooom! Barney-O-Bliss, man! Barney-O-Blissomobile.
Put some salt on his tail. You aim to catch him you got to turn on the gas, man.
Man, he may be a reverend but he runs like hell!
Taking it on the lamb chop, man.
Aches, breaks. Wine and crackers, you’re out, Bliss. Out!
No, I’ll be there when he arrives. We agreed…. I’ll…
They relaxed in their chairs, the whiskey between them. Only the air-conditioning unit hummed below their voices. O’Brien was intense.
Listen, he said. Dam’ it, we’re losing your state and my state and even New York seems doubtful. You’ll have to lay off the nigger issue because the niggers and the New York Jews are out to get us. This year they don’t have to take it and they won’t. Here, try one of these. No, smoke it. There’s plenty where that comes from…. But you restrain yourself, you hear? We want you to curb that mouth of yours or else…. Make me whole, patch my sole … It hurts here and here and there and there.
We made every church in the circuit. Lights! Camera!
Suffer the little children to come suffer the little children to come sufferthelittlechil-drentocome Sufferthelittlechildrentohospodepomeli—
Why don’t they hurry and open the light? Please, Please, Please, Daddy!
And I rose up slow, the white Bible between my palms, my panicky head thrusting up into frenzied shouting and the hushed silence, up, up, up, up—into the certainty of his mellow voice now soaring isolated and calm like a note of spring water burbling in a glade haunted by the counter-rhythm of tumbling, nectar-drunk bumblebees….
Teddy, Teddy! Where’s my bear? Daddy!
You bear as you’ve sown. A growl.
Then, he appeared out of the brilliant darkness, dark and handsome.
You must not be startled at this blessed boy-chile, sisters and brothers, he intoned. Not by this little jewel. For it has been said that a little child shall lead them. Oh, yes! Where He leads me, I shall follow. Amen! And our God said, “Go ye into the wilderness and preach the Word,” and this child has answered the sacred call. And he obeys. Suffer the little children. Yes! And it is said that the child is father to the man. So why be surprised over the size, shape, color of the vessel? Why not listen to his small sweet voice and drink in the life-giving water of the Word?…
Listen to the lamb, he said. But I heard the bear a-growling. Teddy! Teddy! Where? Gone on the lamb’s chop.
I used to lie within the box, trembling. Breathing through the tube, the hot air heavy with muted hypnotic music, hear the steady moaning beneath the rhythmic clapping of hands. And boxed they marched me down a thousand aisles on a thousand nights and days. In the dark! Trembling in the dark. Lying in the dark while the words seemed to fall like drops of rain upon the resonant lid. Until each time, just at the moment the black shapes seemed to close in upon me, smothering me, Deacon Wilhite would calmly raise the lid and I’d rise up slowly, slowly, creating a scene. Frightened, I arose, slowly, stiffly, as melodramatic as della Francesca’s bombastic ham actor flaunting his shroud. With my white Bible between my palms, carefully lest the pink lining disturb my parted hair. Trembling now, with the true hysteria of my voice giving cry: LORD, LORD, WHY….
Mankind? What? Correct. Lights in. Camera!
Donelson, the makeup is too pasty. The dark skin shines through like green ghosts.
Yeah, but you tell me how to make up a flock of crows to look like swans.
Donelson, you can do anything that you really try. In the beginning is the image. Use your imagination, man. Imagine a nation. New. Look into the camera’s omniscent eye, there’s a magic in it. And the crows shall be…
Whiter than swans? Balls! Let’s change the script and make them Chinamen or Indians…. What do you say, Karp?
And in the confusion birthed by women that world rolled on like rushes on a Moviola. There’d be shouting and singing and that big woman in Jacksonville came running down front, looking like a fullback in a nurse’s helper’s uniform, crying, He’s the Lamb of God, he is! And trying to lift me out and Teddy coming up with my legs and my cap pistol catching in the lining and Daddy Hickman grabbing her just in time to prevent the congregation from seeing, saying sotto voce, Deacon Wilhite, git this confounded woman away from here even if you have to put a headlock on the fool! She’s about to upset everything!
He took Teddy and refused to buy me a soda and the next night I refused to rise up. I refused the call, just lay there in the throbbing death-like stillness with the top up and my eyes closed against the brilliant light and him looming with outstretched arms above me, until he got them singing strong and came down and promised me I could have Teddy back…. When? Beary me not in lone Calv’ry…. Then standing there above me the shadow leaving and the light bright to my opened eyes, saying, This boy chile, brothers and sisters, lies here in a holy coma. No doubt he’s seeing visions beyond this wicked world. Ah, but he shall rise up as all the saved shall rise up—on that morning….
But I didn’t budge, demanding an ice-cream cone with silence. Vanilla I wanted.
Suffer the little children to come….
Flora was in the alley picking sunflowers. We were alone. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours, I said.
What! Button up your britches, lil ole boy, she said. You ain’t even old enough to dog-water.
But I just want to see.
You goin’ see stars, that’s what you gonna see, ‘cause I’m goin’ to tell my mama if you don’t go ‘way.
Nine stitches saved Choc Charlie, or so they say.
One morning shining his shoes in Georgia I heard him singing,
I’m going to the Nation, baby,
Going to the Territory.
Says I’m going to the Nation …
Going to the Territory…
like any lonesome sinner but making it sound like “Beulah Land,” puzzling me.
It haunts here and there; in and out.
Why don’t Revern’ Hickman open…. They were all hicks; I told me then, that’s why I renounced them beyond all recovery. What a hickery-docket was Hick hock—the camera, Donelson; we’ve got to keep moving west. Hail to the great hickrocracy. It hurts there. T
he waters of life. Thirst. Texas hots. Ladies and gentlemen, I swear, it was a strange adventure.
I met Mr. Rabbit
Down by the pea vine
And I asked him where he’s gwine
Well, he said, Just kiss my b’hin’
And skipped on down the pea vine
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker! I should like to call to the attention of this great body the insidious activities of those alien-minded groups who refuse the sacred obligations of becoming true Americans…. How here I reject them and out of my rejection rule them. They create their own darkness and in their embarrassment left all to chance my changed opportunity. It haunts hard in this moment…. Oh, they sweep around us with their foreign ways. Yes, and in the second and third generations they reject even these foreign but respectable traditional modes of their parents and become barbarians, maimed men; moral terrorists, winos, full of self-pity. Men filled only with the defeatist spirit of rejection. They become whiners and complainers, demanding the deification of their sloth. The soft touch. Nothing here in our fine, hard-won American tradition is good enough for them. Always it is some other way of life which wins them. It is the false promises of our enemies for which they thirst and hunger. Yes, and sabotage! Mr. Speaker, in their arrogance they would destroy our tender vines. And in their fury they would weaken the firm foundation of our way of life. In their malicious frenzy to evade responsibility they would destroy that which has given them shelter and substance, and the right to create themselves. Oh yes! Yes! These rootless ones would uproot us all! Consider the time-scene: When they watch our glorious flag passing on parade they greet it with an inward sneer. When we honor our fallen dead, they secretly applaud the marksmanship of our enemies. When we set forth to preserve our honor and the sanctity of our homes and the health of our customs they would cast into the smooth machinery of our national life their intractable and treacherous wooden shoes. Abuse, abuse! In the name of lawful dissent they seek our destruction. They would poison the spring of our unity. They would destroy the horses of our power. They would reduce our sacred diversity and dominate us! They would send the zapper of their hate to mine the defenses of our belief. They would pull down the protective walls of our fortress. But leave us to the peaceful glories of this great land they will not!
Ah Bliss, Bliss, so you’ve come to this. And I believed…
Nay! Nay! They would sweep over us with their foreign ways. They would undermine us with their un-Christian doubt. They are a thorn in our flesh, a dagger in our back; a putrid offense in the nostrils of every true red-blooded American. And it is time that we defend ourselves. We have been asleep, Mr. Speaker, my fellow citizens; asleep in our dream of security! Asleep in our well-meaning, sportsmanlike way of wishing the other fellow well. Asleep in the false security of accepting all men of goodwill who would be free as men of honor. And, I’m sorry to say, we have not been vigilant enough in administering our heritage. Our stewardship has been indeed faulty, so the fault is our own. For while we’ve looked the other way these internal enemies have become in the words of that great Irish poet, kinsman no doubt to many of our colleagues here, in the words of Yeats—these enemies have become all too full of passionate intensity! Though fluent and often multilingual, they have not learned to speak in the true spirit of our glorious tongue—and yet, they strive to destroy it! They have not earned the right to harbor such malice, for this country has been kind to them. It has demanded little of them, and yet, they declare us decadent, deceptive, immoral, and arrogant. Nor has our social life given them justification for such cynical disillusionment; such loss of confidence. Indeed, the country has strengthened them. It has freed them of the past and its terror. Yes, we have given them the strength which they would use against us. They have not the right even when most sincere to criticize us in the name of other so-called democracies. For they believe in no democracy! For there are those among us who yearn for the tyrant’s foot upon their necks! They long for authority, brutal and unyielding. It is their nature to lick the boots of the strong and to spit in the faces of those weaker than themselves. This is their conception of the good life. This is their idea of security! This is their way, the way they would substitute for our principle of individual freedom, the way in which man faces nature, society, and the universe with confidence. Moving from triumph to triumph, ever increasing the well-being of all…. Each and every true American is the captain of his fate, the master of his own conscience.
Ah, yes! But somewhere we failed. We let down the gates and failed to draw the line, forgetting in our democratic pride that there were men in this world who fear our freedom; who, as they walk along our streets, cry out for the straitjacket of tyranny. They do not wish to think for themselves and they hate those of us who do. They do not desire to make—they tremble with dread at the very idea of making—their own decisions; who feel comfortable only with the whip poised ever above their heads. They hunger to be hated, persecuted, spat upon, and mocked so that they can justify their overwhelming and destructive pride and contempt for all who are different, for they are incapable of being American. They are false Americans, for being an American is truly to accept the hero’s task as a condition of our everyday living and to bring it off with conscious ease! It is to take the risk of loneliness with open eyes; to face the forest with empty hands but with stout heart. To face the universal chaos in the name of human freedom and to win! To win even though we die but win and win again each day! To win and take the suffering that goes with winning along with the joy. To look any man in the face, unhindered by Europe’s deadweight of vicious traditions. It is to take a stand, a man alone…. Going West.
Ah, it holds hard. Camera! Lights! Lights! Never cut call—now action.
Bliss, he said, there’s but one thing keeping you from being a great preacher—you just won’t learn to sing! A preacher just has got to sing, Bliss. But I guess from whoever it was gave you that straight hair and white skin took away your singing voice. Of course you’re still pretty young. I just don’t know, Bliss. I guess I have to do a lot of praying over you, ‘cause you’re definitely a preacher….
Preach, cried the King and forty thousand strained out the words.
Mr. Speaker…. How far the heights?
Yes, preach! But how could I sing the Lord’s song, a stranger man?
Mr. Speaker, I will be recognized….
I took her for a walk under the cottonwood trees. The sticky buds lay on the ground. Spring warned me but I was young and foolish and how could I not go on and then go on? How make progress with her along? I had nothing, I was a bird in flight. And it was as though I mounted her in midair, and we were like a falcon plummeting with its prey. Pray for me—now. No, I was gentle then. She melted me. She poised me in time tenderly. Pray, for it was so. A gentle bird, but I was high and flying faster, faster, faster. I traveled light, Donelson said, so I could roll up the moss. To make the most of circumstance, I flew. What was possible was possible in one way only, in a spiralling flight. Who could release more than vague hopes for heaven on a movie screen…. Lights!
Now the Senator could hear a voice quietly calling, Bliss? You hear me, Bliss? but was too weary to respond. His lips refused to answer, his throat throbbed with unstated things, the words starting up from deep within his mind and lodging there. He could not make them sound, and he thought, The circuit is out; I’m working with cables like those of Donelson’s lights, scenes go dark and there’s only a sputtering along the wire.
Yet his mind flowed dreamily and deep behind the purple shadows, welling from depths of time he had forgot, one short-lived self mysteriously surviving all the years and turns of face. Once I broke the string I whirled, I scudded the high places, bruised against treetops and building spires, snagged here and there for a time but always sailing. But once spring turned me turtle, I tried to sing—that’s a part he doesn’t know. The old bliss still clung to me, childlike beneath my restlessness, stubborn. Liked the flight of birds then; cardinals streaking
red across the fields, red wings on blackbirds and whistling quail at eveningtide. And metal-blue dragonflies and ladybirds in the dust, and catleaps in the sun. Black cat poised on hind feet like a boxer, paws poised, waiting to receive a squirt of milk from a cow’s teat, the milk white on the whiskers and the flash of small pink tongue.
Inwardly he smiled. Where—Kansas? Bonner Springs, Kansas City, buildings black from the riots. No one would believe it me, not even for that flash of time and pleasure which I have denied on platform and in Senate a million times by word, gesture, and legislation. Now it’s like a remembered dream or screen sequence that—listen to the mockingbird up in his apple tree—that time-slain moment breathed in and cried out and felt ago. This Bliss that passeth understanding you never know, you Reverend H, but still a turn in the dance…. Where am I?
Bliss? I say, can you hear me, Bliss? You want the nurse? Just move your fingers if you do and I’ll get the girl.
Girl? There was a girl in it, yes. What else? There and then. Out there where they thought the new state a second chance for Eden…. Tell it to the Cherokees!
What are you trying to say, Bliss? Take it slow, boy. I’m still with you. I’ll never leave now, so…
… We were under the trees, away from the town, away from Donelson, Karp, and the camera. There, how glorious to have been there. Below the park-space showed; shade here, sun there, in a dreamy, dappled mid-afternoon haze. We were there. High up the trees flurried with birdsong, and one clear note sang above the rest, a lucid, soaring strand of sound; while in the grass cicadas dreamed. For a moment we stood there looking down the gentle rising-falling of the land, while far away a cowbell tinkled, small across some hidden field beyond the woods. Milkweed ran across the ground. Imagine to remember—was it ever? Still. Thistle purple-blue, flowers blue, wisteria loud against an old rock wall—was this the season or another time? Certainly there were the early violets among the fallen pine needles—ago too, but that was Alabama and lonesome. Here she was close beside me and as we moved down the grassy slope the touch of her cool sweat-dampened arm came soft against me and went and came coolly again and then again as we went down the hill into the sun. Oh keep coming coming—Then through the sun into the dappled shade. How long ago, this comes comes a fall? Aches here, aches in spring like a lost limb refusing to recognize its dismemberment, no need to deny. Then too, but sweet. Coming just above my shoulder her glossy head her hair in two heavy braids, and I seeing the small gold ring sunk snug in the pink brown berry of her ear. A smile dreaming on her serenely profiled face. And I remembered the Bliss years. He, Bliss, returned. (Laly was like ‘lasses candy, with charm of little red socks in little girls’ black patent-leather shoes on slim brown legs, her gingham panties playing peekaboo beneath a skirt flip as a bird’s tail, and her hair done up in tight little braids. Bliss loves Laly, I wrote in the sand where the ladybirds lived but the me preacher wiped it out. Then I wrote, Bliss loves you know who, and the preacher me wiped that away. So only ‘Bliss’ and loves’ remained in the sand.) But she coming now was no Laly and I no preacher for a long time now and Bliss no more, though blissful beside her moving there. Saying inside my head, Touch me, touch me, touch me, you … And remembered the one phrase, “teasing brown,” and used it, feeling her cool bare flesh so thinly veiled with fragrant sweat against my short-sleeved arm and said aloud,