I had started going to church with my mom and Grandmom after the incident in the lot. I can’t say I was making any heroic efforts to obey the commandments, not if it meant turning my back on my boys, but I was trying to make amends for the things I’d done and would do in the future through prayer.
I was wearing my best suit; soft gray, double-breasted, pinstriped, with a black tie and handkerchief. Over my mother’s objections I wore a small platinum crucifix in my left ear. We didn’t have a car at the time so we walked the seven and a half blocks to the massive two hundred year-old Baptist church. We lumbered along at a snail’s pace due to the premature arthritis in Grandma’s knees.
Grandma wore a huge purple hat with a big white bow that matched her purple and white dress. Mom was dressed in a form fitting blue dress that came all the way up to her neck, with an open back that went almost down to her ass. She had a black shawl wrapped around her to make her party dress look more respectable, but that didn’t save her from getting dirty looks from Grandma. Her head was adorned with a blue pillbox hat that matched her dress and she wore black heels and carried a matching black purse. As always, she was the prettiest one in the congregation and stood out both because of her impressive height and beauty and her dress which just barely escaped being scandalous. Jealous whispers and envious eyes trailed us to our seats.
We had sat through three songs, two sermons, and one selection from Hebrews:11 when the choir began to hum softly a tune I recognized: “Jesus Is Calling My Name.” Reverend Thoroughgood told us all to turn to Chapter 42 of The Book of Job. This was the passage in which God rewards Job with “…Fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses…” and also, “seven sons and three daughters.” He then blesses Job with a long life of a hundred and forty years so he could see, “…his sons, and his son’s sons, even four generations…” All this after Job had refused to curse God even after God had smote him with sore boils from head to toe, killed all of his children with a hurricane, and destroyed all his servants, cattle, and wealth in order to win a bet with Satan. The bet was that Job would still praise his name no matter what cruel and torturous shit he did to him.
“And even as Job lay humbled, reduced to poverty and illness he still refused to curse God and God rewarded him with twice what he had before.” The reverend intoned in a deep resonant voice followed by a host of “Amens” and “Praise Jesus” from the congregation.
“So, when God tests you, when your electricity or your heat gets turned off cause you can’t afford to pay the bills, that’s when you should praise God the most!”
“Amen!”
“Praise the, Lord!”
“When you lose your job and you can’t afford to put food on the table. When your loved ones are murdered in the streets or fall prey to drugs or alcohol or crime, when your health is failing, that’s when you need to give thanks!”
“Yes, Lord!”
“Praise his name!”
“When you are victimized and abused by your fellow man. Give him praise!”
“Praise, Jesus!”
“Thank you, Lord!”
It was madness, all of it, complete and absolute insanity. I wanted to jump up out of my seat and scream.
“What the fuck are you people talking about? Give thanks to the bastard that caused all this pain? To some fuckin’ god that doesn’t lift a finger to stop our hardship, tragedy, and disaster in the hopes that he will make it all better eventually? And so what if he does cure your ailments after you‘ve suffered for motherfuckin’ weeks, months, or goddamned years? Couldn’t he have prevented it from ever fuckin’ happening? And when has anyone in the ghetto ever been repaid for their suffering no matter how strong their faith?”
It was lunacy, but I kept my thoughts to myself.
“Just remember in the midst of your suffering that God is merely testing your faith. Once he has seen the truth of your faith and piety, he will set you free. And just as Job was rewarded for his conviction, so shall you receive twice what you had before brothers and sisters. Remember it is all a part of his plan.”
Bullshit! I thought. Fuck his plan!
The whole congregation was on its feet praising God and hanging off the reverend’s every word. Even Mom and Grandmom were waving their hands in the air and shouting for Jesus, but I just sat there boiling in silent rage as Ivan Karamozov’s words echoed in my head.
“It is not worth it. It is too high a price.”
I was enraged that God would put man through such torture merely to test the depths of our love. If God is all knowing then why would he need to test anyone? He would already know who would pass and who would fail. It seemed cruel, capricious, self-centered, egotistical. This God that everyone loved so much seemed to possess some of the most fucked-up human qualities. That day I began to question every notion I’d ever had about God. I began to wonder if God really loved us after all.
I couldn’t understand why we gave thanks to the overseer that kept us enslaved. Why we thanked him for the strength to endure the whip. I thought about all the times I’d heard my Grandma say how blessed we were to have food on the table and wondered if we were then damned on the many nights when we went hungry. I wondered if we were blessed on the nights we laid awake listening to the big sewer rats rumbling through the cracked and water-stained walls and ceilings, afraid to let our hands or feet dangle off the side of the bed at night for fear that one of them might gnaw off a finger or toe while we slept. Afraid the entire ceiling might come crashing down on top of us from where the floor joists had warped and rotted from the leaky toilet above that was constantly overflowing. I wondered if we were blessed when we couldn’t find a single piece of food in the cupboard that wasn’t infested with roaches. I wondered if I was blessed all those times I was teased for wearing hand-me-down clothes that barely fit.
I stood up and walked out of the church.
“Malik! Malik! Where the hell are you going? What are you doing?”
“I’m going home. This is all bullshit.”
“What did you say?” my Grandmother cried appalled.
“That preacher doesn’t make any damn sense at all. I’m out of here.”
I left with everyone shouting at my back.
I picked up the Bible that day and began to read it. I tried to forget about all the things people had always told me about God and read it with a completely open mind. I wanted to see what the Bible was really saying and not what others said it was saying. Every word I read shook my faith further. Worst of all was the Bible’s condoning of the institution of slavery.
“…And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. Genesis 25:23”
I thought of all those white power groups that used the bible to justify their prejudice and was shocked to find that again and again the Bible does just that. It blatantly stated that Christians should make slaves of the heathen races. It was absurd to me that black people, who had suffered these fates, should worship the God that engineered it all. I could not help but to lose some respect for my own race. It was like they were all blind.
Despite all the begging and praying black folks did and all the millions of dollars they dumped into collection plates, God seemed to avoid the ghetto like the plague. Children got killed every day, and every day the pious were drained of wealth yet none of that ever seemed to shake their faith one iota and not once did I see any of them rewarded with a single oxen let alone a thousand. No sheep. No camel. Nothing. Yet still they believed. It was like God had better things to do than to fuck around in the ghetto with a bunch of poor helpless niggas. He was too busy smiling and tap dancing for the white folks who lived in the nice clean neighborhoods with white picket fences and forty-thousand dollar SUVs.
In my mind, God took on the persona of every other criminal and con-man in the
ghetto getting fat off the desperate hope and naivety of the under-class. Then again, the way fools were killing each other around the way he might just have been scared to come down there. His messengers and so-called “Servants on Earth” certainly seemed to be. They couldn’t wait to climb back into their big shiny Lincolns and Cadillacs and floor it back to the suburbs once all the offerings were counted and all the sheep pacified. Of course, it might not have been so hostile down in the hood if God had taken more of an interest.
I spent many restless nights after the reverend’s sermon reading what was left of my dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamozov, trying to relate it to my life. I read the Book of Job and tried to accept it. I wanted my faith back but I just couldn’t accept it. I kept hearing Job’s impossible declaration: “…Though he slayed me yet will I trust him.” How? Why? Why would God persecute someone who loved him so dearly just to prove to Satan how much Job loved him? How could he merely replace all the wealth and children he’d destroyed with twice what he had before and think it excused the senseless suffering he needlessly allowed Job to endure? It seemed so cruel and insensitive to me to kill someone’s children and then say, “Oh, don’t trip. I’ll make sure you have twice as many kids to replace those.” I wondered if that’s what God thought when he saw little Black kids gunned down in the street? But when Black kids were murdered, when our wealth and our health was blown away by the wind, despite our refusal to curse his name, we didn’t get so much as forty acres and a mule.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I cried myself to sleep wondering what we had done to make God hate us so?
I envisioned God as one of those white business men looking down on the ghetto from one of those towering office buildings downtown, aloof and immune, wondering how he can suck more profit from our misery. In my mind God was white and he hated us just like all white folks did.
My Mom started dating this Muslim brother that tried to tell me that God was Black. I laughed in his face at first but he persisted. He said that we were all God’s chosen people descended from the tribe of Shabazz. He was trying to make me feel better, I know. I’m sure my Mom had told him about my little episode at the church and how I had refused to ever go back. But all he did was piss me off even more. If God was Black than why the hell wasn’t he doing anything to help Black people?
I thought about all the bourgie Blacks I knew: the doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, who talked a good game to gain Black support and achieve their positions and then promptly turned their backs on us once they achieved their desired status. They would put as much distance as they could between themselves and the people who helped to make them what they were. I thought of all the big-time players and pimps, the hustlers and gangstas who leeched off the black community and exploited their own brothers and sisters worse than any white man ever had. If God was Black then he was just another bourgie nigga who got large and forgot where he came from. Somehow the idea of a sell-out, house-nigga god, was worse than the idea of a racist white one.
“But it ain’t God doing all that. It’s that trickster, that blue-eyed devil that Dr. Yaccub created to torment the original man, the Asiatic black man. He’s the one making our lives hell, that white devil”
There was that reference to the white man as the devil again. It seems all these Muslim cats believed that shit. I just couldn’t buy it though. Just like all the other racial conspiracy theories, it gave white people too much credit. I just couldn’t see how they could be that slick and crafty to keep Black people fucked up for so long. All the dirt Scratch was doing in the hood would have been more than enough to convince most mutherfuckers that his ass was Satan. I could definitely believe that he was evil. I just still couldn’t accept that all of them were. Still, even if that shit was true, God created Dr. Yaccub, who created the white man, so it was all God’s fault anyway. Besides, he damned sure wasn’t doing shit to correct the situation.
I stopped believing in God. I was convinced that the lives of Black folks, and mine in particular, was just some cruel-ass joke. I started drinking again and getting high. I had never stopped fighting but even that got worse. More and more often I skipped school. Mrs. Greenblade kept trying to bring me back around but I had lost all interest in school or anything else. It was all pointless anyway.
“What’s going on with you, Malik? You were doing so well. Is everything all right at home? Do you need someone to talk to? You are just too bright and you’ve got too much potential to just throw it all away like this. I might have to fail you if you keep going like this,” the overweight, middle-aged schoolteacher pleaded with me. She looked like she was on the verge of tears.
“Do what you gotta do. Ain’t no thang to me.”
“Malik, please. Just tell me what’s going on?”
“Remember that last book you gave me by Jean Paul Sartre? Being and Nothingness, I think it was. You gave it to me after I told you my thoughts about God and Black folks.”
“Yes?” she seemed relieved that I was opening up. I guess she thought I was giving her a chance to talk me out of whatever I had gotten into my head.
“I gotta confess. I really didn’t understand much of it. But, it seemed to be saying that if there is no God and life is without meaning than there are no rules, no restrictions. That man is as free as he allows himself to be. I think that’s what he meant by the idea of an absurd freedom. If life is absurd then we are free to create meaning, define our own destinies. Anything is possible.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what he meant. I wanted you to see that your race or your economic situation need not hinder you in becoming anything you wanted to be.”
“Yeah, I got that. But if life is without meaning then there may be no restrictions on our actions, but that also means that there ain’t no motivation either. If everything is meaningless then there’s nothing holding us back, but there’s nothing to drive us either and what type of freedom is that shit? It’s like puttin’ a kid in a candy store, but first removing his taste buds. The fact that life is meaningless makes me want to do nothing, but you can’t live doing nothing and everything you do creates conflict, especially in the ’hood. Conflict creates pain, and that pain demands the question ‘What the hell am I suffering for?’ To which Sartre answers, ‘Nothing.’ That’s truly fucked up, man. As much shit as we go through it should mean something. It should be worth more.”
“Malik, you’re wrong. There’s plenty in this world that’s worth doing. That’s just one man’s perspective.”
“But he’s right. Maybe there’s something worthwhile in your world, but not in mine and despite all that bullshit about freedom my world is all I’ll ever know.”
That was pretty much my last day of school. I’m mostly self-educated. I continued to read about philosophy and only succeeded in depressing myself further. No one had anything that was worth believing in. All the philosophers were just cowards and liars, afraid to see the truth or afraid to speak it for fear of being unpopular. No one knew the truth and no one even seemed to be looking for it anymore. I gave up on everything but my friends.
Huey, Tank, and I began going downtown into Center City, to South Street, almost every night to jack white boys for their cash or even their clothes if they looked expensive enough. It was during this time that I got arrested for the first time.
We were down on South Street on a Saturday night feeling roguish and hostile. It was just three nights before Halloween and about ten minutes before midnight. There were already many people out in costume. Early Halloween parties disgorged onto the street and blended in with the gaggle of freaks and weirdos that packed the dozen blocks that led from the harbor to the Broad Street subway. South Street was Philadelphia’s version of Greenwich Village or Haight Ashbury Street. Every nationality, sexual persuasion, and alternative lifestyle the city offered paraded up and down the street in outlandish regalia. From thugs to transvestites, punk rockers to pimps, there was not a single group lacking representation in some form
or another. Even the suburbanites from New Jersey and the main line jammed the sidewalks snapping pictures at the urban cultural oddities.
The closer it got to Halloween the weirder South Street became. Between Seventh Street and Front Street cops occupied every corner looking nervous and tense, clearly aware that they were outnumbered and probably outgunned as well. Riots on South Street were almost a Philadelphia tradition. They were so common they hardly even made the news anymore unless someone got killed or something. From Eighth Street to Broad Street however, a short mile that took you within a few blocks of the Martin Luther King projects, there was not a police officer in sight. There the streets were dark with shattered street lights and abandoned tenements. Each alleyway you passed was a potential death trap. And if you were dumb enough to leave South Street anywhere along it’s length, even as far down as Front Street, you were just asking for pain.
The three of us stood outside the pharmacy at Fifth and South watching the hoes, hookers, and naïve young suburban bitches stroll by. The suburban girls were even easier to pick up than the hoodrat hoes. You could almost hear the rap lyrics playing in their heads when they looked at us, wide-eyed and expectant. There was a six-foot red-headed girl grinning at me from inside the store and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was fucking gorgeous! I knew Huey would have some shit to say about me fucking with some gray bitch, but all I was thinking about was getting my dick wet. Fuck all the politics. It’s all pink on the inside.
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