by Amiri Baraka
* * *
I began to act. First hands dropped on the wino’s knee. And she flopped her head spreading that rancid breath. So I pulled her head back against the seat, and moved my fingers hard against her flesh. Tugged at the wool skirt and pushed my hand between the stocking and the bumps upon her skin. Her mouth opened and she sounded like humming. Also, a shiver, like winter, went thru her/and I almost took my hands away.
Donald saw me, and when I looked across at him he felt her too. The others in front gabbled & kept informed by craning in their seats.
I moved my fingers harder, pushing the cloth up high until I saw what I thot was her underwear. Some other color than pink, with dark stains around the part that fit against her crotch.
Her head slumped forward but the eyes had opened, and there was a look in them made me look out the window. But I never moved my hands. (Someone giggled up front.)
The car moved at a steady rate. The dim lights on. Up out of East Orange and into dark Montclair. With larger whiter homes. Some dirt along the way, which meant to us, who knew only cement, some kind of tortured wealth. We wd all live up here some way. Big dogs barked at the car from driveways and Sanchez looked over his shoulder at me to get his signals straight.
Donald said something to me across the woman and she raised her head, glaring at Calvin’s back.
“What the hells goin on?” Calvin laughed. I moved my fingers swifter straining for the top of the pants. Donald simply rolled her stockings down. And the woman grabbed his hand, quietly at first. But when she sensed that we would pile on her in the car shoving our tender unwashed selves in her eyes and mouth, she squeezed Donald’s hand so hard it hurt.
“Bitch!”
“What’re you boys tryina do?” No answer from us. The front riders sat tight in their seats, watching the big houses, and wishing probably it was now, when they are sitting prying the dark with staler eyes.
(In those same houses, waiting until I die when they can tell all these things with proper reverence to my widow.)
* *
The woman changed her mind. (She saw what was happening and stared at me for seconds before she spoke again. She braced herself against the seat and made a weeping sound.)
“Oh my life is so fucked up. So wasted and shitty. You boys don’t know. How life is. How it takes you down. You don’t know . . . Those ties and shirts . . . Shit . . . how hard a woman’s life can be.”
Her voice got softer or she thot she’d make it tender. It came out almost bleaker than a whine. . . .
“I’m sick too. A long time. The kind of thing makes men hate you. Those sores on my self.”
(She meant her vagina.)
This was news to everyone. “I’m sick,” she moaned again, making her voice almost loud. “And you boys can ketch it . . . everyone’a you, get it, and scratch these bleeding sores.”
Donald moved his hand away. The woman screeched now, not loud, but dragging in her breath.
Apprehension now. As if the wall was almost down but the enemy’s hero arrived to pour boiling oil in my warriors’ eyes. I wdn’t have that easy copout. Fuck that . . . goddamit, no pleas.
I made Donald put his hands back. I scowled the way I can with one side of my mouth, the other pushing the woman back. “Shit, I don’t believe that bullshit! Prove it, baby, lemme see! I wanna see the sores . . . see what they look like!”
New life now. Reinforced, the others laughed. I pushed again. “O.K., mama, runout them sores . . . lemme suck’em till they get well.” Another score: but how long, we were deep in Montclair, and some car full of negroes up there wd be spotted by the police . . . that swung thru my mind and I looked up quickly thru my window. Even rolled it down to hear.
“I’m sick . . . and you boys ketch what I got you’ll never have no kids. Nobody’ll marry you. That’s why I’ma drunk whore fallin in the streets.”
Marriage, children. What else could she burn? Donald fell away again. The rest swallowed, or moved their hands. Only Calvin ran to my aid. He grabbed a huge hunting knife still in its scabbard and twisted suddenly in his seat waving it in the woman’s face. But the absurdity of it killed the move completely and we broke running down the slope:
“Shutup bitch” (Calvin) “Shutup . . . I’m a goddam policemen (sic) and we’re (sic) lookin for people like you to lock’umup!”
He waved the knife and Leon even laughed at him. It was over. The woman probably knew but took it further. She screamed as loud as she could. She screamed, and screamed, her voice almost shearing off our tender heads. The scream of an actual damned soul. The actual prisoner of the world.
“SHEEEEEET, YOU BASTARDS LEMME GO.
SHEEEET. HAALP. AGGGHEEE”
Donald reached across the whore and pushed the door open. The car still moving about 20 miles an hour and the sudden air opened my eyes in the smoke. The bitch screamed and we all knew Montclair was like a beautifully furnished room and someone would hear and we would die in jail, dead niggers who couldn’t be invited to parties.
Calvin reached across the seat, and shouted in my face. “Kick the bitch out!” I couldn’t move. My fingers were still on her knee. The plan still fixed in my mind. But the physical world rushed thru like dirty thundering water thru a dam. They ran on me.
“Throw this dumb bitch out.” Calvin grabbed her by the arm and Donald heaved against her ass. The woman tumbled over my knees and rolled, I thought, slow motion out the car. She smashed against the pavement and wobbled on her stomach hard against the curb.
The door still swung open and I moved almost without knowing thru it to bring the woman back. The smoke had blown away. I saw her body like on a white porcelain table dead with eyes rolled back. I had to get her.
I dove for the door, even as Sanchez made the car speed up, and slammed right into the flopping steel. It hit me in the head and Leon wrenched me back against the seat. Calvin closed the door.
I could see the woman squatting in the street, under the fake gasoline lamp as we turned the corner, everybody screaming in the car, some insane allegiance to me.
6. The Heretics
“The whole of lower Hell is surrounded by a great wall, which is defended by rebel angels and immediately within which are punished the arch-heretics and their followers.”
And then, the city of Dis, “the stronghold of Satan, named after him, . . . the deeper Hell of willful sin.”
Blonde summer in our south. Always it floats down & hooks in the broad leaves of those unnamed sinister southern trees. Blonde. Yellow, a narrow sluggish water full of lives. Desires. The crimson heavy blood of a race, concealed in those absolute black nights. As if, each tiny tragedy had its own universe / or God to strike it down.
* *
Faceless slow movement. It was warm & this other guy had his sleeves rolled up. (You cd go to jail for that without any trouble. But we were loose, & maybe drunk. And I turned away & doubled up like rubber or black figure sliding at the bottom of any ocean. Thomas, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, all gone by & I thot agony at how beautiful I was. And sat sad many times in latrines fingering my joint.
But it was dusty. And time sat where it could, covered me dead, like under a stone for years, and my life was already over. A dead man stretched & a rock rolled over . . . till a light struck me straight on & I entered some madness, some hideous elegance . . . “A Patrician I wrote to him. Am I a Patrician?”
* *
We both wore wings. My hat dipped & shoes maybe shined. This other guy was what cd happen in this country. Black & his silver wings & tilted blue cap made up for his mother’s hundred bogus kids. Lynchings. And he waved his own flag in this mosquito air, and walked straight & beauty was fine, and so easy.
He didn’t know who I was, or even what. The light, then (what george spoke of in his letters . . . “a soft intense light”) was spread thin over the whole element of my world.
Two flyers, is what we thot people had to say. (I was a gunner, the other guy, some kind of airborne medic.) T
he bright wings & starched uniform. Plus, 24 dollars in my wallet.
That air rides you down, gets inside & leaves you weightless, sweating & longing for cool evening. The smells there wide & blue like eyes. And like kids, or the radio calling saturdays of the world of simple adventure. Made me weep with excitement. Heart pumping: not at all toward where we were. But the general sweep of my blood brought whole existences fresh and tingling into those images of romance had trapped me years ago.
* *
The place used me. Its softness, and in a way, indirect warmth, coming from the same twisting streets we walked. (After the bus, into the main fashion of the city: Shreveport, Louisiana. And it all erected itself for whoever . . . me, I supposed then, “it’s here, and of course, the air, for my own weakness. Books fell by. But open yr eyes, nose, speak to whom you want to. Are you contemporary?”)
And it seemed a world for aztecs lost on the bone side of mountains. A world, even strange, sat in that leavening light & we had come in raw from the elements. From the cardboard moonless world of ourselves . . . to whatever. To grasp at straws. (If indeed we wd confront us with those wiser selves . . . But that was blocked. The weather held. No rain. That smell wrapped me up finally & sent me off to seek its source. And men stopped us. Split our melting fingers. The sun moved till it stopped at the edge of the city. The south stretched past any eye. Outside any peculiar thot. Itself, whatever it becomes, is lost to what formal selves we have. Lust, a condition of the weather. The air, lascivious. Men die from anything . . . and this portion of my life was carefully examining the rules. How to die? How to die?
*
The place, they told us, we’d have to go to “ball” was called by them Bottom. The Bottom; where the colored lived. There, in whatever wordless energies your lives cd be taken up. Step back: to the edge, soothed the wind drops. Fingers are cool. Air sweeps. Trees one hundred feet down, smoothed over, the wind sways.
And
they tell me there is one place/
for me to be. Where
it all
comes down. &
you take up
your sorrowful
life. There/
with us all. To
whatever death
*
The Bottom lay like a man under a huge mountain. You cd see it slow in some mist, miles off. On the bus, the other guy craned & pulled my arm from the backseats at the mile descent we’d make to get the juice. The night had it. Air like mild seasons and come. That simple elegance of semen on the single buds of air. As if the night were feathers . . . and they settled solid on my speech . . . and preached sinister love for the sun.
The day . . . where had it gone? It had moved away as we wound down into the mass of trees and broken lives.
The bus stopped finally a third of the way down the slope. The last whites had gotten off a mile back & 6 or seven negroes and we two flyers had the bus. The driver smiled his considerate paternal smile in the mirror at our heads as we popped off. Whole civilization considered, considered. “They live in blackness. No thought runs out. They kill each other & hate the sun. They have no God save who they are. Their black selves. Their lust. Their insensible animal eyes.”
“Hey, son, ’dyou pay for him?” He asked me because I hopped off last. He meant not my friend, the other pilot, but some slick head coon in yellow pants cooling it at top speed into the grass. & knowing no bus driver was running in after no 8 cents.
“Man, the knives
flash. Souls
are spittle
on black earth. Metal
dug in flesh chipping
at the bone.”
I turned completely around to look at the bus driver. I saw a knife in him hacking chunks of bone. He stared, & smiled at the thin mob rolling down the hill. Friday night. Nigguhs is Nigguhs. I agreed. & smiled, he liked the wings, had a son who flew. “You gon pay for that ol coon?”
“No,” I said, “No. Fuck, man, I hate coons.” He laughed. I saw the night around his head warped with blood. The bus, moon & trees floated heavily in blood. It washed down the side of the hill & the negroes ran from it.
I turned toward my friend who was loping down the hill shouting at me & ran toward him & what we saw at the foot of the hill. The man backed the bus up & turned around / pretending he was a mystic.
* * *
I caught Don(?) and walked beside him laughing. And the trees passed & some lights and houses sat just in front of us. We trailed the rest of the crowd & they spread out soon & disappeared into their lives.
The Bottom was like Spruce & Belmont (the ward) in Nwk. A culture of violence and foodsmells. There, for me. Again. And it stood strange when I thot finally how much irony. I had gotten so elegant (that was college / a new order of foppery). But then the army came & I was dragged into a kind of stillness. Everything I learned stacked up and the bones of love shattered in my face. And I never smiled again at anything. Everything casual in my life (except that life itself) was gone. Those naked shadows of men against the ruined walls. Penis, testicles. All there (and I sat burned like wire, w/ farmers, thinking of what I had myself. When I peed I thot that. “Look. Look what you’re using to do this. A dick. And two balls, one a little lower than the other. The first thing warped & crooked when it hardened.” But it meant nothing. The books meant nothing. My idea was to be loved. What I accused John of. And it meant going into that huge city melting. And the first face I saw I went to and we went home and he shoved his old empty sack of self against my frozen skin.
* *
Shadows, phantoms, recalled by that night. Its heavy moon. A turning slow and dug in the flesh and wet spots grew under my khaki arms. Alive to mystery. And the horror in my eyes made them large and the moon came in. The moon and the quiet southern night.
* *
We passed white shut houses. It seemed misty or smoky. Things settled dumbly in the fog and we passed, our lives spinning off in simple anonymous laughter.
We were walking single file because of the dirt road. Not wanting to get in the road where drunk niggers roared by in dead autos stabbing each others’ laughter in some gray abandon of suffering. That they suffered and cdn’t know it. Knew that somehow, forever. Each dead nigger stinking his same suffering thru us. Each word of blues some dead face melting. Some life drained off in silence. Under some gray night of smoke. They roared thru this night screaming. Heritage of hysteria and madness, the old meat smells and silent gray sidewalks of the North. Each father, smiling mother, walked thru these nights frightened of their children. Of the white sun scalding their nights. Of each hollow loud footstep in whatever abstruse hall.
* * *
THE JOINT
(a letter was broken and I can’t remember. The other guy laughed, at the name. And patted his. I took it literal and looked thru my wallet as not to get inflamed and sink on that man screaming of my new loves. My cold sin in the cities. My fear of my own death’s insanity, and an actual longing for men that brooded in each finger of my memory.
He laughed at the sign. And we stood, for the moment (he made me warm with his laughing), huge white men who knew the world (our wings) and would give it to whoever showed as beautiful or in our sad lone smiles, at least willing to love us.
He pointed, like Odysseus wd. Like Virgil, the weary shade, at some circle. For Dante, me, the yng wild virgin of the universe to look. To see what terror. What illusion. What sudden shame, the world is made. Of what death and lust I fondled and thot to make beautiful or escape, at least, into some other light, where each death was abstract & intimate.
* * * *
There were, I think, 4 women standing across the street. The neon winked, and the place seemed mad to be squatted in this actual wilderness. “For Madmen Only.” Mozart’s Ornithology and yellow greasy fags moaning german jazz. Already, outside. The passage, I sensed in those women. And black space yawned. Damned and burning souls. What has been your sin? Your ugliness?
And they waved. Calling us
natural names. “Hey, ol bigeye sweet nigger . . . com’ere.” “Littl ol’ skeeter dick . . . don’t you want none?” And to each other giggling at their centuries, “Um, that big nigger look sweet” . . . “Yeh, that little one look sweet too.” The four walls of some awesome city. Once past you knew that your life had ended. That roads took up the other side, and wound into thicker dusk. Darker, more insane, nights.
And Don shouted back, convinced of his hugeness, his grace . . . my wisdom. I shuddered at their eyes and tried to draw back into the shadows. He grabbed my arm, and laughed at my dry lips.
Of the 4, the pretty one was Della and the fat one, Peaches. 17 year old whores strapped to negro weekends. To the black thick earth and smoke it made to hide their maudlin sins. I stared and was silent and they, the girls and Don, the white man, laughed at my whispering and sudden midnight world.
Frightened of myself, of the night’s talk, and not of them. Of myself.
The other two girls fell away hissing at their poverty. And the two who had caught us exchanged strange jokes. Told us of themselves thru the other’s mouth. Don already clutching the thin beautiful Della. A small tender flower she seemed. Covered with the pollen of desire. Ignorance. Fear of what she was. At her 17th birthday she had told us she wept, in the department store, at her death. That the years wd make her old and her dresses wd get bigger. She laughed and felt my arm, and laughed, Don pulling her closer. And ugly negroes passed close to us frowning at the uniforms and my shy clipped speech which they called “norf.”
So Peaches was mine. Fat with short baked hair split at the ends. Pregnant empty stomach. Thin shrieky voice like knives against a blackboard. Speeded up records. Big feet in white, shiny polished shoes. Fat tiny hands full of rings. A purple dress with wrinkles across the stomach. And perspiring flesh that made my khakis wet.