Juneteenth

  Ay, it was I, the Senator said. Yes, I was doing what I had to do at that time in that place. I stood there grown tall, but they didn’t recognize me. My elbows rested where my hand couldn’t reach in the old days, and I looked above their heads and into their hopes. They’d managed a stained-glass window divided into four equal parts and the strawberry light caressed their heads. They’d sweated and saved themselves an organ too, and it rose with its pipes behind me. In the floor at my feet, showing between the circular cut in the red carpet, I could see the zinc edge of the baptismal pool. Looking out at them from behind my face I had the sensation of standing on a hangman’s trap, with only the rope missing. And later, I thought of it as the head of a drum because it throbbed beneath me. I made them make it throb—So yes, it was me; do I have to go on?

  I know what you mean by the throbbing, Reverend Hickman said, because I’ve been there myself. I’ve made that whole church throb. The Word is a powerful force. Go on, Bliss, tell me.

  So I knelt down like I’d seen you do when you were about to take over another man’s pulpit, and when he came close to touch me with his hands he was chewing cinnamon to cover the fragrance of his morning’s glass of corn.…

  Suddenly the Senator struggled upward, his eyes wild as Hickman rose quickly to restrain him. “Bliss, Bliss!”

  “Corn! Corn whiskey and the collection and the pick of the women! And you wouldn’t even allow me ice cream.… In all that darkness, undergoing those countless deaths and resurrections and not even ice cream at the end …”

  Hickman restrained him gently, a look of compassionate surprise shaping his dark face as the Senator repeated as from the depths of a forgotten dream, “Not even ice cream,” then settled back.

  “Steady, Bliss, boy,” Hickman said, studying the face before him. The little boy is still under there, he thought. He never ran way from him. “I guess that must have been my first mistake with you. It wasn’t my teaching you the art of saving souls before you were able to see that it wasn’t just a bag of tricks, or even failing to make you understand that I wasn’t simply teaching you to be another trickster or jackleg conman. No, it was that I refused to let you have a payment. You wanted to be paid. That was probably the first mistake I made. You coulda saved more souls than Peter, but you got it in your mind that you had a right to be paid—which was exactly what you weren’t supposed to have. Even if you were going down into the whale’s belly like Jonah every night. It wasn’t that I begrudged you the ice cream, Bliss. It was just that you wanted it as payment. But that was my first mistake and yours too. Now you take that preacher, he probably took that drink of corn to help him reach up to the glory of the Word, but he took it before he preached, Bliss. And that made it a tool, an aid. It was like the box, or my trombone. But you now, you wanted the ice cream afterwards. Everytime you preached you wanted some. If you said ‘Amen,’ you wanted a pint. Which meant that you were trying to go into business with the Lord …

  “I should have explained it to you better, and I sure tried. But, Bliss, you were stubborn. Stubborn as a rusted iron tap, boy. Well, I’m a man and like a man I made my mistakes. I guess you looked at the collection plates and got confused. But, Bliss, that money wasn’t ours. After all these years I’m a poor man. That money went to the church, for the widows and orphans. It went to help support a school down there in Georgia, and for other things. So you went off for ice cream? Is that it? Is that why you left us? Come on now, we might as well talk this out right here because it’s important. Anything you hold in your heart after so long a time is important and this is not the time for shame.”

  The Senator was silent for a moment; then he sighed.

  “Meaning grows with the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains. Yes, in those days it was the ice cream, but there was something else.…”

  “It had to be, but what?”

  “Maybe it was the weight of the darkness, the tomb in such close juxtaposition with the womb. I was so small that after preaching the sermons you taught me and feeling the yawning of that internal and mysterious power which I could release with my treble pantomime … Oh you were a wonder, if only in quantitative terms. All the thousands that you touched. Truly a wonder, yes. I guess it was just too much for me. I could set off all that wild exaltation, the rending of veils, the grown women thrown into trances; screaming, tearing their clothing. All that great inarticulate moaning and struggle against what they called the flesh as they walked the floor; up and down those aisles of straining bodies; flinging themselves upon the mourners’ bench, or rolling on the floor calling to their God—didn’t you realize that afterwards when they surrounded and lifted me up, the heat was still in them? That I could smell the sweat of male and female mystery?”

  “But Bliss—all small children and animals do that.…”

  “Yes, but I had produced it. At least, I thought I had. Didn’t you think of what might be happening to me? I was bewitched and repelled by my own effects. I couldn’t understand my creation. Didn’t you realize that you’d trapped me in the dead-center between flesh and spirit, and that at my age they were both ridiculous …?”

  “You were born in that trap, Bliss, just like everyone was born in it. We all breathe the air at the level that we find it, Bliss.”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t put the two things together. Not even when you explained about the Word. What could I do with such power? I could bring a big man to tears. I could topple him to his knees, make him shout, crack him up with the ease with which shrill whistles split icebergs. Then when they gathered shouting around me, filling the air with the odor of their passion and exertion, the other mystery began.…”

  “What was it, Bliss? Was it that you wanted the spirit without the sweat of the flesh? The spirit is the flesh, Bliss, just as the flesh is the spirit under the right conditions. They are bound together. At least nobody has yet been able to get at one without the other. Eatmore was right.…”

  “Yes, but back there between my sense of power and the puzzling of my nose there were all those unripe years. I was too young to contain it all.”

  “Not your power, Bliss; it was the Master’s. All you had to do was live right and go along with your God-given gift. Besides, it was in the folks as well as in you.”

  “Well, I was in the middle and I was bringing forth results which I couldn’t understand. And those women, their sweat …”

  Hickman was silent, his gaze suddenly turned inward, musing.

  “Bliss, come to think about it, it just dawned on me where you might be heading—didn’t you misbehave once on the road somewhere?”

  Suddenly the Senator’s expression was that of a small boy caught in some mischief.

  “So you knew all along? Did she tell you?”

  “She told me some, but now I’m asking you.”

  “So she did after all. How old was she, Daddy Hickman?”

  “Well sir, Bliss, I thought you’d forgot you used to call me Daddy.” Hickman’s eyes were suddenly moist.

  “Everyone did,” the Senator said.

  “Yes, but you gave me the pleasure, Bliss. You made me feel I wasn’t a fraud. Let’s see, she must’ve been thirty or so. But maybe only twenty. One thing is sure, she was a full-grown woman, Bliss. As grown as she’d ever get to be. She was ripe-young, as they used to say.”

  “So. I’ve always wondered. Or at least I did whenever I let myself remember. It was one of your swings around the circuit and she’d taken me to her house afterwards. A tent meeting on that old meeting ground in Alabama …”

  “That’s right.”

  “… that they had been using since slavery days. Thinking about it now, I wonder why they hadn’t taken it away from them and planted it in cotton. I remember it as rich black land.”

  “It wasn’t taken because it was ours, Bliss. It used to be a swamp. The Choctaws had it before that but the swamp took it back. So then we filled it in and packed it down with our bare feet—at least our folks did—long before w
e had any shoes. Sure, back in slavery times we buried our dead out around there, and the white folks recognized it as a sacred place. Or maybe just an unpleasant place because of the black dead that was in it. You’ve been on the outside, Bliss, so you ought to know better’n me that they respect some things of ours. Or at least they leave them alone. Maybe not our women or our right to good food and education, but they respect our burying grounds.”

  “Maybe,” the Senator said. “It’s a game of power.”

  “Yes, and maybe they’re scared of black ghosts. But you ought to know after all this time, Bliss, and I hope you’ll tell me sometimes.… Anyway, boy, it was out there. You remember what it was, don’t you?”

  “The occasion? It was another revival, wasn’t it?”

  “Course, it was a revival, Bliss—but it was Juneteenth too. We were celebrating Emancipation and thanking God. Remember, it went on for seven days.”

  “Juneteenth,” the Senator said, “I had forgotten the word.”

  “You’ve forgotten lots of important things from those days, Bliss.”

  “I suppose so, but to learn some of the things I’ve learned I had to forget some others. Do you still call it ‘Juneteenth,’ Revern’ Hickman? Is it still celebrated?”

  Hickman looked at him with widened eyes, leaning forward as he grasped the arms of the chair.

  “Do we still? Why, I should say we do. You don’t think that because you left … Both, Bliss. Because we haven’t forgot what it means. Even if sometimes folks try to make us believe it never happened or that it was a mistake that it ever did …”

  “Juneteenth,” the Senator said, closing his eyes, his bandaged head resting beneath his hands. Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

  CHAPTER 7

  No, the wounded man thought, Oh no! Get back to that; back to a bunch of old-fashioned Negroes celebrating an illusion of emancipation, and getting it mixed up with the Resurrection, minstrel shows and vaudeville routines? Back to that tent in the clearing surrounded by trees, that bowl-shaped impression in the earth beneath the pines?… Lord, it hurts. Lordless and without loyalty, it hurts. Wordless, it hurts. Here and especially here. Still I see it after all the roving years and flickering scenes: Twin lecterns on opposite ends of the rostrum, behind one of which I stood on a wide box, leaning forward to grasp the lectern’s edge. Back. Daddy Hickman at the other. Back to the first day of that week of celebration. Juneteenth. Hot, dusty. Hot with faces shining with sweat and the hair of the young dudes metallic with grease and straightening irons. Back to that? He was not so heavy then, but big with the quick energy of a fighting bull and still kept the battered silver trombone on top of the piano, where at the climax of a sermon he could reach for it and stand blowing tones that sounded like his own voice amplified; persuading, denouncing, rejoicing—moving beyond words back to the undifferentiated cry. In strange towns and cities the jazz musicians were always around him. Jazz. What was jazz and what religion back there? Ah yes, yes, I loved him. Everyone did, deep down. Like a great, kindly daddy bear along the streets, my hand lost in his huge paw. Carrying me on his shoulder so that I could touch the leaves of the trees as we passsed. The true father, but black, black. Was he a charlatan? Am I—or simply as resourceful in my fashion? Did he know himself, or care? Back to the problem of all that. Must I go back to the beginning when only he knows the start?…

  Juneteenth and him leaning across the lectern, resting there, looking into their faces with a great smile, and then looking over to me to make sure that I had not forgotten my part, winking his big red-rimmed eye at me. And the women looking back and forth from him to me with that bright, birdlike adoration in their faces; their heads cocked to one side. And him beginning:

  On this God-given day, brothers and sisters, when we have come together to praise God and celebrate our oneness, our slipping off the chains, let’s us begin this week of worship by taking a look at the ledger. Let us, on this day of deliverance, take a look at the figures writ on our bodies and on the living tablet of our heart. The Hebrew children have their Passover so that they can keep their history alive in their memories—so let us take one more page from their book and, on this great day of deliverance, on this day of emancipation, let’s us tell ourselves our story.…

  Pausing, grinning down … Nobody else is interested in it anyway, so let us enjoy it ourselves, yes, and learn from it.

  And thank God for it. Now let’s not be too solemn about it either, because this here’s a happy occasion. Rev. Bliss over there is going to take the part of the younger generation, and I’ll try to tell it as it’s been told to me. Just look at him over there, he’s ready and raring to go—because he knows that a true preacher is a kind of educator, and that we have got to know our story before we can truly understand God’s blessings and how far we have still got to go. Now you’ve heard him, so you know that he can preach.

  Amen! they all responded, and I looked preacher-faced into their shining eyes, preparing my piccolo voice to support his baritone sound.

  Amen is right, he said. So here we are, five thousand strong, come together on this day of celebration. Why? We just didn’t happen. We’re here and that is an undeniable fact—but how come we’re here? How and why here in these woods that used to be such a long way from town? What about it, Rev. Bliss, is that a suitable question on which to start?

  God bless you, Rev. Hickman, I think that’s just the place we have to start. We of the younger generation are still ignorant about these things. So please, sir, tell us just how we came to be here in our present condition and in this land….

  Not back to that me, not to that six–seven-year-old ventriloquist’s dummy dressed in a white evening suit. Not to that charlatan born—must I have no charity for me?… Not to that puppet with a memory like a piece of flypaper….

  Was it an act of God, Rev. Hickman, or an act of man?…

  We came, amen, Rev. Bliss, sisters and brothers, as an act of God, but through—I said through—an act of cruel, ungodly man.

  An act of Almighty God, my treble echo sounded, but through the hands of cruel man.

  Amen, Rev. Bliss, that’s how it happened. It was, as I understand it, a cruel calamity laced up with a blessing—or maybe a blessing laced up with a calamity….

  Laced up with a blessing, Rev. Hickman? We understand you partially because you have taught us that God’s sword is a two-edged sword. But would you please tell us of the younger generation just why it was a blessing?

  It was a blessing, brothers and sisters, because out of all the pain and the suffering, out of the night of storm, we found the Word of God.

  So here we found the Word. Amen, so now we are here. But where did we come from, Daddy Hickman?

  We come here out of Africa, son; out of Africa.

  Africa? Way over across the ocean? The black land? Where the elephants and monkeys and the lions and tigers are?

  Yes, Rev. Bliss, the jungle land. Some of us have fair skins like you, but out of Africa too.

  Out of Africa truly, sir?

  Out of the ravaged mama of the black man, son.

  Lord, thou hast taken us out of Africa …

  Amen, out of our familiar darkness. Africa. They brought us here from all over Africa, Rev. Bliss. And some were the sons and daughters of heathen kings …

  Some were kings, Daddy Hickman? Have we of the younger generation heard you correctly? Some were kin to kings? Real kings?

  Amen! I’m told that some were the sons and the daughters of kings …

  … Of kings!…

  And some were the sons and daughters of warriors …

  … Of warriors …

  Of fierce warriors. And some were the sons and daughters of farmers …

  Of African farmers …

  … And some of musicians …

  … Musicians …
r />   And some were the sons and daughters of weapon makers and smelters of brass and iron …

  But didn’t they have judges, Rev. Hickman? And weren’t there any preachers of the word of God?

  Some were judges, but none were preachers of the word of God, Rev. Bliss. For we come out of heathen Africa …

  Heathen Africa?

  Out of heathen Africa. Let’s tell this thing true; because the truth is the light.

  And they brought us here in chains….

  In chains, son; in iron chains …

  From half a world away, they brought us …

  In chains and in boats that the history tells us weren’t fit for pigs—because pigs cost too much money to be allowed to waste and die as we did. But they stole us and brought us in boats which I’m told could move like the swiftest birds of prey, and which filled the great trade winds with the stench of our dying and their crime….

  What a crime! Tell us why, Rev. Hickman….

  It was a crime, Rev. Bliss, brothers and sisters, like the fall of proud Lucifer from Paradise.

  But why, Daddy Hickman? You have taught us of the progressive younger generation to ask why. So we want to know how come it was a crime?

  Because, Rev. Bliss, this was a country dedicated to the principles of Almighty God. That Mayflower boat that you hear so much about Thanksgiving Day was a Christian ship—amen! Yes, and those many-named floating coffins we came here in were Christian too. They had turned traitor to the God who set them free from Europe’s tyrant kings. Because, God have mercy on them, no sooner than they got free enough to breathe themselves, they set out to bow us down….

  They made our Lord shed tears!

  Amen! Rev. Bliss, amen. God must have wept like Jesus. Poor Jonah went down into the belly of the whale, but compared to our journey his was like a trip to paradise on a silvery cloud.

  Worse than old Jonah, Rev. Hickman?