The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  Then with steady hands, he took hold of Allmon’s chin, turning the boy’s head this way and that, tilting his chin up and appraising the landscape of his hair. He clicked his disapproval behind his teeth. “Don’t nobody know the meaning of pride no more,” he said. He reached over and drew open the medicine cabinet and removed a set of clippers from a crackled pleather bag. “Just a five-letter word that don’t mean nothing to nobody. May as well be a cuss word.”

  He fiddled with the clippers until they came to life with a gentle grinding noise, but he didn’t do anything yet. He just stood there, looking thoughtful. “It ain’t always been like this, believe you me. You think it’s a coincidence that we was looking sharp and taking care of the black body till the Reverend King got himself shot, and the president got himself shot, and then all a sudden, the apparel was getting all goofy and the hair was getting wild? You think that’s a coincidence?”

  “No,” said Allmon.

  “They call it free, I call it giving up. Because that’s what it is. Unlike most folk, I tell it like it is.”

  Allmon gazed up into his grandfather’s face, discovering the tracings of age in his mottled color, the gray in his five-o’clock shadow, the deep ladder lines above his brow. “Grandpa, you gonna die?” he said.

  “Huh—what?” The Reverend drew back, startled, holding the purring clippers to one side. “I ain’t even that old,” he said. “Besides, the Lord can’t afford to kill me. Who else he gonna get to do his work? There ain’t enough Christians in the world, just a bunch of folk who go to church.”

  With care now, he applied the clippers to Allmon’s hairline and made a single stripe down the center of his head like an inverted Mohawk.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “like I was saying, everybody thinks if they’re doing their own thing, then they’re free. Now, they don’t know the first thing. Young folks forget more than they ever learned, and they’re too ignorant to even know it.” He sighed. “Young ladies now, they don’t know they need a man to raise up boys. But tell me, how else you expect a boy to learn? These streets, they’re just full of broken-down Negroes. A boy, he needs to know a man in order to become a man. He’s got to follow him and watch and learn. I had a father, that’s how I know. Women don’t know how to grow up men.”

  “I wanna live here,” said Allmon, following on his mother’s lead.

  The Reverend shook his head in irritation. “A halfway house? Like I already said, this ain’t no place for children. Anyhow, your mother done dug herself into this fool pit, now she’s got to dig her own self out.”

  “There’s a bunch of men in this house,” Allmon said.

  The Reverend nodded. “Children of God.”

  Allmon said, “This ain’t no place for children!”

  At this, the Reverend did something he very rarely did: he smiled. “Well,” he said, “my daughter thinks she got it bad, but these men here, they really got it bad, and I got it bad ’cause I got to take care of them, and when a man’s got the poison of liquor or cocaine or whatnot in his blood, he brings the devil in the house. So they bring him in, and I run him off, and they bring him in again, and I run him off again. It’s a full-time job, and I already got a full-time job. It don’t never end. The Reverend always pushing his boulder up the seven hills. The question I always got to be asking is—who suffers the hardest? ’Cause Jesus says I got to minister to the least among us. Your momma ain’t the least; she just thinks she is, loves to play the victim. My wife spoiled her rotten.”

  He sighed and shaved along Allmon’s left ear, so it vibrated and tickled.

  “Ow!” cried Allmon with high drama, but it didn’t hurt. He leaned into the vibration like a cat into a hand.

  The Reverend ignored his complaint, focusing on the task. “Well, God never said I was gonna end up satisfied if I followed him, no he didn’t. He only promised me the cross. I got a daughter running around with white boys, and my wife, she’s been dead ten years. I got disappointments like some individuals got dollar bills.”

  One last swipe of the clippers and Allmon was shorn like a spring sheep. His head looked about half its usual size. The ledge of his young brow loomed ever more prominent.

  The Reverend looked down at him pointedly. “But when a man gets that old temptation to throw in the towel, you know what he says?”

  Allmon looked up expectantly.

  “Praise Jesus and be not afraid,” the Reverend said evenly, and he passed a clearing hand over the curves and ridges of Allmon’s skull.

  Allmon grinned.

  “What’s he say, young man?”

  Allmon quit the grin. “Praise Jesus.”

  “And be not afraid. Says it a bunch of times in the Bible. Got to live by it.” With all the lingering hairs swept to the floor, the Reverend fell suddenly silent and his warm, dry hand remained resting on Allmon’s head. A soft, comfortable silence crowded around them and, for the better part of a minute, they stood enveloped in its haze, utterly still.

  Then Allmon reached up and put his hands on the Reverend’s shoulders. “Grandpa?”

  “Huh?” the man said, startled. In his deep-set eyes, there roosted a faraway look, as if he were contemplating something in another room or another time. Then he said softly, “Jesus is coming into my mind. That’s how it is on a Saturday night, I get to thinking, and he gets to speaking. He comes like a trouble in the mind you got to sort out.”

  He turned and laid the clippers down gently on the pink windowsill and, without really seeing him, lifted Allmon off the toilet seat and set him on the floor.

  “I’m listening,” the Reverend said vaguely. “Ain’t I always listening? I ain’t no eyeservant.”

  Then he nudged Allmon with a hard finger. “Get on now,” he said, “I got to converse with the Lord.”

  Allmon turned to leave, passing a tentative hand along the short hair where his Afro had been. He glanced down at the black tumbleweeds on the cracked tile floor and felt a new, strange feeling. That hair, once a part of him, was discarded, flung away … His stomach made a funny, unexpected flip.

  “Son,” the Reverend said suddenly, seeing him hesitate. “Jesus loves you, but the world don’t. The important question is—you look black, but are you colorfast?”

  Then he closed the door with a clap and locked himself in the bathroom to pray.

  * * *

  Now in the spare bathroom down the hall she’s looking in the mirror as she gets ready for bed—what it was, what it was … Something isn’t there, she frowns, she turns to the side, it’s just hugging up on her face like … nothing, it doesn’t have a good shape, if her eyes were just a little more open, less almond-shaped, and lighter, if her whole skin was just like a shade up from this, she didn’t want to be white, she just wanted to be pretty; she sighs, don’t cry, the reality is you live so long, the fact your momma told you you were pretty gets showed up for what it is, just pitter-patter baby talk, just the things you say raising kids; you tell them what they need to hear, and then later they grow up and look at this ugly potato nose and fat cheeks and go, oh yeah, money don’t buy you love, but pretty does. And I got nothing in the bank.

  She sees him staring up at her in the mirror, his eyes full of something he’s seen, but when she turns, he’s gone. For a second she didn’t recognize him without his hair.

  * * *

  In the morning, Marie dressed Allmon in a gray striped button-up and his blue rayon suit, and together they walked the four blocks west to Race Street. From the corner of Race and Liberty, gazing south along the city blocks toward the river, all that you could see of the church among the relic brownstones slumming on their past glory was the gray steeple topped by a white cross. The church was an old Flemish bond structure built by Tennessee Presbyterians in 1849 when they fled the South for abolition’s sake. It had stood abandoned all through the fifties before the Reverend decided to establish the House of Sanctuary Christian Church there in 1962 after a visit from Abernathy in the spring of that ye
ar. A fearsome angel of the Lord, the Reverend had stalked the suburban churches for months, guilting funds from the city’s affluent blacks until he had just enough to purchase the dilapidated building for a song—a song and a tap dance for the Fancy Black, as he called them. The church’s roof needed repairing, which never came; its sanctuary was a shipwreck—pews toppled and water-stained, glass windows replaced with frosted Plexiglas, the lectern dismantled and heaped like kindling on the dais—but it didn’t matter to the Reverend. His churchgoers in the early years were those he’d salvaged from whatever the drugs left on the streets of Over-the-Rhine. They wouldn’t have been comfortable in a sanctuary anyway, so he led his sheep to the dank basement, where they could listen without cringing shame. It was there in the concrete basement under the fluorescent lights and cracked ceiling that grown men wept and women sang themselves hoarse, and all manner of sin was burned and sucked away like smoke up a flue. “The hull is ugly,” the Reverend would say, “but the fruit is ripe!” The Reverend had little formal schooling, but he had wisdom in abundance and will as well, so his congregation grew. The spirit was in the building, they said, and word soon spread up the hills of the city, all the way to the suburbs. Soon, the crowd that gathered on Sundays mixed Over-the-Rhine with folks from the distant neighborhoods—the streets of flight, as well as the men from his halfway house. But no matter the provenance of the sinner, no matter how blue-chip the dress or the shoe, the services remained in the basement. The Reverend wasn’t budging; it was the principle of the thing. He had built his church on a rock, and the rock was himself.

  The congregation was already settling when Marie and Allmon arrived, squeezing down a row to claim two folding chairs in the middle. Allmon hopped up on his chair for a moment, eyeballing the crowd. There, at the front of the sanctuary, his grandfather sat in a chair as if asleep, his hands folded on his belly, his chin tipped steeply to his chest. He might have been asleep for how still he was. Close by, a rangy youth stooped over a keyboard, pressing out chords Allmon immediately recognized: there is wonderful power in the blood; power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb; power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb. The sound grew thick and his heart pulsated to the rhythm until he stomped his legs to assuage the biting joy there—and his mother tugged him down onto his behind. The Reverend had risen slowly to his feet, pointing up to the ceiling just like the white hands atop all the steeples of Over-the-Rhine, and as the hymn poured out the last of its blood, he cried, “Let the holy spirit fill this room!”

  “Amen!”

  “Help me preach, Lord,” he said, bowing his head again.

  “Amen.”

  “Bring down the words in the voice of my brothers, not the voice of the schools.”

  “Amen!”

  “’Cause ain’t no school ever taught me right from wrong.”

  “No…”

  “Bring me the truth in the words of my father and his father.”

  “Amen.”

  “And the Holy Father, Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  “All right!” the Reverend cried suddenly, sharply, and raised his head with a ferocious gaze. But immediately the severity of his face eased as if he was about to make a joke, and his voice was dangerous, slippery when he said, “So … how many y’all sinned this week?” Behind that half smile, there was the hardness of carbon that his humor broke itself upon. There was only silence in reply, sudden and heavy. The quick enthusiasm he’d drawn banked.

  “Ha!” he cried out into the surprised silence. “Wasn’t expecting that, huh? Thought I was gonna warm y’all up, say something pretty about how Jesus is watching out for you and all that. But, oh, Jesus is mad—can’t you hear him storming up there in heaven? That’s the sound of Jesus in the temple, just mad as can be.” He held a hand to his ear and cocked his head. “Now, I asked how many y’all sinned?”

  He raised his own hand, peering at the people turned out in their Sunday best, ironed and perfumed, fake-pearled, lipsticked, hair straightened and curled and oiled. “Ain’t nobody sinned? Well,” he said with his arms stretched wide, “it’s a miracle.”

  Then a low voice said, “Reverend, I sinned.”

  “Who—what? Who sinned?”

  A man stood quietly in the midst of the congregation. He wore a western shirt washed thin as parchment, his stained wifebeater showing through. Some of the women in the front rows turned right around in their seats to stare at the man with eyes wide. He locked eyes with the Reverend and passed a nervous hand up and down over the pearled buttons of the shirt. He said again, with gravity, “I sinned.”

  “Well, did you like it?” asked the Reverend.

  “Uh…” The man’s eyes slid corner to corner.

  “’Cause if you ain’t liked it, then it wasn’t sin!”

  The room broke up and the man said, “Aw,” like a scolded child, and then, with a grin that turned his somber face brilliant, he said, “I liked what I can remember!”

  “Ha! That’s sin! That’s sin! If you sin, sin like you mean it! Sin bold!” The Reverend pointed a finger straight at the man’s chest, the man who was seating himself again, and he began to pace excitedly side to side directly in front of the first row of chairs, in front of the old watchdogs in the amen corner who murmured and nodded. Now the sermon was really beginning, now the Reverend was shedding the weight of his person, his voice rising, his face illuminated by a light from within and without. He looked simultaneously fierce and overwhelmed with joy. He said, “That there is a child of God! A true child of God! If you love Jesus, then you own up. You say, ‘I’m a dirty old sinner!’ Now, I hear you all laughing, but who else sinned? Huh? Tell me. Who else sinned?”

  He turned on them and the room fell quiet and Allmon yawned and leaned across his chair into the warm side of his mother. He felt the first blurring of sleep coming on the steady waves of her breath. Fatigue and morning heat lulled him. Marie stared unblinking at her father.

  “Mmmmm, it got so quiet in here all a sudden.” The Reverend laughed a grim laugh.

  No one stirred.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna speak up? Oh, I see, I see. Y’all are just mad at me. I can hear you now,” he said, and shifted onto his hip suddenly, wagging a finger, and in a creaky little voice: “Aw, now, Reverend, you always be so hard on us. Your Jesus ain’t no fun.” He straightened up. “Well, that’s right—Jesus wasn’t no fun. His disciples was ignorant and couldn’t make no sense of what he was saying, and the people was even more ignorant, and sometimes he got mad like a snapping dog and stormed through the temple, laying it down, and then, you know what? They assassinated him. They strung him up. So, that’s right. Jesus wasn’t no fun. What part the cross don’t you understand?”

  Allmon’s jaw loosened, then he slipped into sleep.

  “No, wait, wait, now I know why ain’t nobody fessing up,” said the Reverend. “I know what y’all are thinking: We’re so tired of all this sin talk, all the struggle stories. Isn’t it time for Easy Street? After all, we ain’t the generation that got dragged over from Africa. No, we ain’t the generation that slaved and slaved for the white man. We ain’t the generation that creeped up under cover of night from Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, when they was still sending your sorry behind back on the L&N with a note said ‘Property Of,’ that generation like my great-great-grandfather’s who swum across that muddy river”—he pointed behind him at the claybank wall, that muddy yellow space an intimation of the river beyond—“and once he done established himself and got himself a family, hung himself in a white man’s attic from a rafter he done raised with his own two hands! Now you think that man—that Scipio—when he was swinging from the rafters, he was busy paying your all’s bill? Well, now you say, things are so different now. They’re all so different now. The last century paid the bill. Or maybe y’all think the cotton pickers paid the bill? That come up to Chicago, Detroit, to Toledo, right here to Cincinnati? Like how I come up with my o
wn dearly departed folks from the little town of Shelburne, Arkansas? Brothers and sisters,” he said with his hands on his hips, his eyes carefully surveying their faces, “did the good Reverend pay your bill with his own hard life? Was my generation paying the bill when we was young men marching in the streets of this fair city and Selma and Birmingham and the capital of this nation? When the dogs was biting and the hoses was baptizing, when the streets of this country was running with black blood? Let me ask you: Was the Reverend King paying the bill on your all’s life when he got shot down on that day in April? Maybe y’all think 1968 was busy paying the bill. I got to admit, that’s a awful nice way to think. The bill paid by your forefathers, paid by slaves.”

  Now he stopped and turned forward, wily eyes on the congregants. Very quietly, almost shyly, he said, “Oh, Lord Jesus.” Then louder, with his eyes cast up, “Oh Jesus, forgive all the little children. They try to love you, Jesus, they do, but they’re so ignorant! Just like in Bible times, so it is today.”

  Now he strutted and mocked: “Ah, no, Reverend! We just think the times, they changed! It’s 1984. We ain’t Negroes no more, we’re Afro-Americans. We vote, we got white friends that invite us over, nobody calls us names to our face no more, some of us is vice presidents of the company, some of us even lay down with white men.” He stumbled here, his voice stuttering. Marie glanced wearily down at the floor.

  “Well, good for you!” the Reverend spat, resuming his back-and-forth walk but pointing at them. “But your brother in the city ain’t up there with you! He’s still stuck on the ghetto plantation with the overseer at his back, he’s still trapped up in the Jim Crow prison! Think about it! While you’re laying down with the lion, you ain’t tending to no lambs, and Jesus, he loved the little lambs. There wasn’t no lions in that shepherd’s flock. If the lion’s even tolerating you in his presence, maybe you’re doing something wrong! Maybe he’s just pitying you. You ever think about that? ’Cause ain’t it the nature of the lion to eat the lamb? So what’re you doing with the blond-haired lion in the first place? Ain’t nobody paid the bill for you to lay down with the lion! Fancy black folks always wanting you to hush the struggle story! What part the cross don’t you understand?”