“Baps,” he said after a long moment filled up with sheeply baaing in the night, “you’re a joker, you know dat?”
I lay in my bed and tried to think while the sheep bleated in the night and the philosopher snored.
Egbert shuffled out of bed, padded to the window, opened it, and yelled into the darkness of the backyard meadow, “Shut up you rass mouth, sheep!”
“Hi, Egbert!” I protested. “Behave yourself, man!”
A man dressed in shepherd’s robes emerged out of the shadows and bawled up at the window, “Pilgrim, why dost thou bully my sheep?”
“Because dey baaing like bitch!” Egbert yelled back.
“Pilgrim,” the man answered solemnly, “this is heaven. It is written that in heaven sheep shall graze and baa.”
He muttered, “Written you rass,” banged the window shut, and flopped back into bed.
I groaned and said to myself, “Baps, you only just come to dis place called heaven, and look what you already do—mash up God and turn Him into ole negar. Dis is why you dead?”
Chapter 16
We went exploring the next morning, strolling through New York neighborhoods.
Every house had a cloud floating above it like a kite, and as soon as the people walked out into the street and had their breakfast manna that rained down from the sky, they flew up to their private backyard cloud, sat down on it wearing white robes, and began harp-plunking.
Sometimes they flew up there carrying a sheep or two under their arms, and as we walked past we heard plunking and baaing drifting down from the same cloud. In some neighborhoods the sheep would peer over the edge of the cloud as we walked past and baa at pedestrians. Egbert didn’t like the cloud baaing and one time as a sheep baaed at him he turned around and bawled, “Hush you rass mouth, ole sheep!”
A robed shepherd stopped his harp-plunking and peered down at us over the edge of his cloud. “Foreigner,” he cried, “wouldst thou like to sit on my cloud with me and my sheep?”
“Not a backside!” Egbert bawled. “I not sitting with no sheep ’pon no cloud! I am a Jamaican duppy! We don’t walk wid sheep, we curry dem! We don’t play fool-fool harp! We don’t sit ’pon cloud!”
“You don’t have to go on so bad, you know, man!” I hissed at him through the corner of my mouth. “Dis is dere country.”
“I’ll sit with you,” cried the philosopher, floating up to the cloud, where we saw him peering over the edge beside the stranger while the sheep blasted a powerful nosehole baa right into his armpits. “It’s nice up here!” he yelled down to us.
“I going take a look,” I said to Egbert.
He grabbed me by the arm. “Baps, is you bring me to dis madhouse! Now you goin’ pitch on a backyard cloud and leave me alone inna de street?”
“Listen,” I whispered, “you’re God. Nobody can trouble you.”
“My name is Egbert Adolphus Hackington! I am a cultivator. Just because a man own a few acres o’ land and a couple cow don’t make him God, you know, Missah Socialist?”
It was no use arguing, ole negar personality had God so completely in its grip.
I flew up into the cloud, which was pink and stringy like cotton candy, there was fluffiness underfoot, and you could feel a gentle breeze. The sheep came over, sniffed at my crotch, gave a buck, and bawled out a nasty baa.
“Foreigner, are you genitaled?” the cloud owner asked suspiciously.
“Of course. So what you do with youself up here all day?”
The man looked nervous and uncomfortable. He flicked an edgy glance at the sheep that had backed up to a far corner of the cloud, where it sat glaring at me and carrying on with a disgruntled baaing.
“Foreigner, you are frightening my sheep. He doth not abide shepherds who are genitaled.”
“Tell him him safe. We weewee in chamber pot, not ’pon ole sheep.”
The philosopher, meanwhile, had dropped flat on his back on the cloud and was wallowing in it like a hog in mud.
I walked over to the sheep and tried to pat the brute on the head but he gave a vicious buck and shied away, bouncing into the harp with his rump, causing it to tumble off the cloud and crash on the pavement next to where Egbert stood, peering up at us.
“Hey, you sheep!” Egbert bawled crossly. “You nearly bust me head wid you harp! You want me cook up you rass in a stewpot?”
We strolled up and down the city, and saw the same dreary sights everywhere we went.
We saw no cars, no buses, no trucks, no taxis, no motorized transportation of any kind. Occasionally some dignitary would ride past on a donkey or a mule, and on Fifth Avenue we saw a bearded old gentleman sitting atop a camel plucking a portable harp as the beast swayed down the cobbled street.
We wandered into Central Park.
The park benches were gone, as was all the playground equipment and the tennis courts. But sheep abounded like weed.
Sheep was grazing on the walking trails, on the lawns, beside the lake, baaing up a storm. Where on earthly New York you were bound to find a mugger lurking in the bush to lick you down and thief you money, you found a sheep grazing with his shepherd strolling nearby, lugging a crook stick.
We shuffl ed out of the park and onto the street. Manna began falling in a thick rain of flakes.
“Kiss me neck!” Egbert grumbled. “It drizzling bread crumb again.”
Around 7 o’clock in the evening, we heard a tap on our door and the mistress of the house asked us if we’d like to attend a communal Last Supper. I stood hesitantly at the doorway and told her I didn’t like the sound of that, but she said every night in households all over American heaven the Last Supper was celebrated as a daily custom. The philosopher, who was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, ambled to the door and said we’d come, and the three of us joined other guests at the supper table.
We were served bread and grape juice the color of red wine, and around the large banquet table the foreigners who were wearing ordinary clothes looked out of place with the native Americans, all of whom were biblically robed.
An old gentleman from Turkey was sitting on my right. He said his belly button was almost fully grown, and he had travelled to the city to spend his last few weeks in heaven enjoying the brutality of New York’s finest. He said that every day he’d been beaten up by the New York police, and on Wednesday he’d been pounded twice in the morning and afternoon, and so far it was the most joyful vacation he’d ever had. Yesterday, in addition to having his head busted with a policeman’s club, he’d been kicked down a gully by a patrolman’s horse, and he thought he would die, the pain was so sweet.
Our landlord heaved a weary sigh at the head of the table.
“That is what’s wrong with this country!” he said in an exasperated voice. “There’s no real pain. There’s no discomfort. Everything is immoral pleasure. And it’s all God’s fault!”
“No, it’s not,” contradicted the philosopher with a boasty smirk, nibbling on a crust of bread. “It’s my fault.”
“Hush up you mouth,” I hissed at him.
“When I found out that there was no hell,” a young mother said with a quaver in her voice and a tremble to her lip, “I thought I would die.”
“There, there, Alice!” her husband comforted her.
“I realized that all I’d worked for on earth, all the good I’d tried so hard to do all my life, meant nothing. Everyone is ruthlessly happy here, even vicious, drunken Mr. Leonard from the old neighborhood in Iowa who used to beat his wife.”
“Mom!” their little boy cried at her distress, cuddling up to console her.
“All the Girl Scout cookies I sold! The blood drives I organized! The Meals on Wheels I delivered to the homebound!
The no-sex-on-Sunday rule I put my poor husband through.”
The husband sighed over woeful earthly memory.
“For what? To share heaven with nasty Mr. Leonard, who beat his wife, who was always drunk, who never did an honest day’s work in all his life,
and who probably had sex twice on Sundays? And you know what’s even more infuriating? I’m happy! Right now, even as I cry about my wasted, unappreciated Christian life on earth, I’m happy! I’m deliriously happy!”
Here she burst into an uncontrollable sobbing broken by maniacal bursts of laughter. Her husband struggled to comfort her, as did her child, and all three of them soon dissolved in a show of family merriment through the streaming tears.
“Never mind, ma’am,” our landlord said philosophically.
“One day our scientists will figure out how to capture God.
We’ll make Him pay. And we’ll make Him change things, too!”
“You leave God alone!” I snapped.
“Oh, you’re one of those foreign God-lovers, eh?” the landlord said sarcastically.
“God is my friend!” I growled indignantly.
“I wouldn’t say that too loud over here, if I were you,” one of the diners at the end of the table muttered darkly.
A tremor of grumbling rolled around the table, especially among the clotted groups of robed Americans. Several diners glared at me. On earth, they would have definitely charged and lynched me from a lamppost. But up here, the dogs-inthe-manger spitefully decided to withhold the pleasure of the rope.
The uncomfortable silence was broken by our landlord.
“We Americans are an enterprising people!” he boasted patriotically. “Our scientists are working on a vaccine to instill real pain even as we speak. We’ll have pain up here, sooner or later. We’ll have our hell. Its fire will sear fl esh, singe hair, and really hurt. Sinners will shriek. Fornicators will howl. Adulterers will tremble and shake. Just wait!”
“Do you know,” remarked the philosopher, turning to the old gentleman from Turkey, “the most amazing thing, now that you mention it? I have a fully grown belly button, too.”
He peeled open his shirt and exposed a knobby belly button as thick and swollen as Miss B’s had been.
“Oh,” exclaimed the old Turkish gentleman, “that’s a big one. Want to come out with me tomorrow? I can promise you a good beating. You might even get kicked in the head by the police horse.”
The philosopher shook his head and muttered that there was no sheep, no policeman, and certainly no pleasurable beating.
I asked the Turkish gentleman what he did to provoke the beating and kicking, and he chuckled and said he unzipped his fly and flashed the sheep.
“Exposing yourself to peaceful Christian American sheep?” the mother challenged nastily. “That’s a wholesome hobby?”
“It’s a pastime,” the old gentleman shrugged, adding modestly, “I don’t have much time left up here. I think the sheep like it. Especially the ewes.”
“Our sheep do not like it!” the woman shrieked, red-faced and glaring. Then she added with a high-pitched laugh, “And hearing your sick story makes me very happy, too! I hate this heaven! I want to go back to Iowa!”
“No pain,” our landlord sighed. “How can you have heaven without pain? It’s impossible!”
Egbert leaned over and whispered, “Baps! What a weird set of people, eh?”
Chapter 17
Everywhere we travelled in New York we heard the same complaints from Americans: They couldn’t stand that there was no pain in heaven; that they always felt happy even though they had the constitutional right to feel miserable; that a crook got the same size backyard cloud as a baptized Christian; that a murderer executed on earthly Texas would brazenly walk the streets of heaven among decent citizens like the wretch had belonged to the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
I met a gentleman from Chicago and he explained to me that without a hell, there was no point in heaven. He told me that on earth he had been a loyal Republican, a taxpayer, a war veteran, and if he had known he would die and go to Democrat heaven, he would have killed himself. I asked him what difference killing himself would have made, and he said that suicides went immediately back to earth, taking the shape of the first available body—whether human, worm, animal, or bug. He was quite bitter and said that even if he had recycled back to earth as a dog and ended up in a Chinyman’s stew pot, it would still have been better than to find himself in a nasty Democrat heaven where thrifty wage-earners had to enjoy the same pleasures as hardened gas-guzzlers and crooks.
I asked him why he kept calling it a Democrat heaven and he growled and said because it was just like the kind of heaven a pork-barrel Democrat hog would think up: freeness everywhere; compulsory laughter and joy; no struggle or pain. He said that in Republican heaven every man would have a different size cloud depending on his own initiative and sweat. None of this ugly standardization of cloud, sheep, and harp. If a soul worked hard, he would earn a bigger cloud, louder harp, fatter sheep. If he was idle and good-for-nothing, he would end up on a mashup cloud with only one scrawny sheep for company. And if he didn’t make his monthly payments, the bank would repossess his cloud and pitch him out on the street.
“You can’t have homeless man in heaven!” I objected.
“Why not?” he growled.
“Because de man is dead. Him reach heaven!”
“That’s just a technicality,” he snapped. Then he added, “Maybe God isn’t moral, but America is!”
And even as he was grumbling about this, he was laughing for he was happy—poor chap.
One morning we came out of our lodgings and found crowds milling about on the sidewalks. We asked a passing stranger what was happening and he told us that today was “Hell Day,” and that everyone was waiting for the grand parade to start.
At first I thought he was running a joke, but as we mixed up with the throng, we kept hearing excited chatter about national “Hell Day,” about how it was even better than Thanksgiving, and realized that we were witnessing the festivities of an American federal holiday. Berobed citizens and their flocks of sheep milled about on the sidewalks, wearing an air of revelry and excitement.
We jostled our way into the crowds and gawked as floats sponsored by various civic organizations and drawn by harnessed sheep lumbered past, depicting scenes from an imaginary hell.
For example, I remember that one float rumbling past showed a fiery dungeon of torture in which horned demons chopped off the heads of sinners over and over again, causing the volunteers playing the parts of the damned to squeal with delight at each whack of the axe and ruin an otherwise horrible spectacle. The float rattled down the cobbled street drawn by about forty sheep draped with signs notifying the public that it had been constructed by the Kiwanis Club of Brooklyn at its own expense and donated in the spirit of good citizenship. Applause rippled through the crowd as the axe cut off the sinner’s head, causing it to bounce on the floor of the float like a beach ball, until it snapped back onto the bloody neck stump.
Another float, put on by an association of American women, featured a damned male fornicator hanging upside down from a wooden pole and being lowered into a pot of boiling oil by stern demonettes. One demonette had clamped the volunteer’s imagined privates (he had none, for he had been governmentally dehooded) with a pair of red-hot pliers and was pretending to crack his earthly balls. Naturally, the young man playing the part of the upside-down fornicator was quite jolly, and every time he was dunked into the scalding oil, his peals of laughter rolled over the parade route, causing some disgruntlement among the crowd of onlookers who understood, however, that the poor fellow could not help expressing compulsory bliss.
Float after float showed similar scenes of wicked torture and cruelty that the sponsoring civic group thought belonged in hell. The parade of rumbling hell floats brought out my indoor parson from where he had been skulking, causing him to occasionally bawl, “Yes, sah! Now you talking!” much to the delight of nearby spectators, some of whom clapped me jovially on the back and congratulated me on having good sense for a foreigner.
As the parade clattered slowly past, the only incident to mar the festivities was the uncouth behavior of rude-boy youths who charged the floats a
nd demanded that the costumed demons torment them, too, or they would stone the parade. The demon volunteers, for the sake of peace, would dutifully lash out at the rudies prancing beside the rumbling floats, slashing them with butcher knives or pouring molten lead over their bodies, causing them to dance and squeal with sheer joy, spoiling the solemnity of the occasion.
“Juvenile delinquents!” I heard an elderly gentleman grumble.
“What an ugly generation,” a well-dressed American lady sighed.
The crowd occasionally booed these spirited youngsters, and once in a while an indignant member of the clergy or bearded civic leader would charge among them and add to their merriment with a few good thumps.
Egbert, meanwhile, through all the confusion and noise, had curled up against the wall of a building and fallen asleep, snoring so loudly that he attracted glowering stares of disapproval from some in the crowd. One man standing next to me suggested to the others that they lynch the impious foreigner, and another hurried off, saying he was going to get a rope.
I elbowed my way through the crowd and warned Egbert to wake up, or he would presently be lynched. He stirred and peered up drowsily at me just as the grand prize–winning float rumbled past, showing a mechanical worm gnawing its way into a sinner’s wide-open eyeball, its tail wriggling in the air and batting against eyelash, while the sinner shrieked and laughed from all the fun. On a platform in the rear of that particular float perched four harpists who played a hymn about “Gnawing Out Eyeball of Sinner on the Appointed Day,” drawing rounds of goodhearted, patriotic applause from the keenly watching citizens.
“A worm eating out a sinner’s eyeball! Is this a great country or what?” a matronly American lady squatting on the pavement beside Egbert chortled, her chest bursting with national pride.
“Egbert!” I nudged God, leaning over to whisper. “Wake up! Dem gone to get a rope to come lynch you.”
He rubbed his eyes sleepily. “What me do?”
“You snore on dem parade. You hurt dem patriotic feelings. Come! Make we go before dem come back wid de rope.”
The Duppy Page 10