God's Gym

by John Edgar Wideman

  Of course Rastus couldn't read. But he understood what everybody else in town understood. The poster meant niggers coming. Maybe the word Harlem, printed in big letters across the top of the poster, exuded some distinctive ethnic scent, or maybe if you put your ear close to the poster you'd hear faint echoes of syncopated jazz, the baffled foot-tapping of Dark-town strutters like ocean sound in seashells. Absent these clues, folks still get the point. The picture on the flyer worth a thousand words. And if other illiterates (the majority) in Hinckley understood immediately who was coming to town, why not Rastus. He's Hinckley if anybody's Hinckley. What else was he if he wasn't.

  Rastus gazes raptly at the players on the flyer. He's the ugly duckling in the fairy tale discovering swans. Falls in love with the impossibly long, dark men, their big feet, big hands, big white lips, big white eyes, big, shiny white smiles, broad spade noses just like his. Falls in love with himself. Frowns recalling the day his eyes strayed into a mirror and the dusty glass revealed how different from other Hinckley folks he looked. Until the mirror sneaked up, Boo, he had avoided thinking too much about what other people saw when they looked at him. Mostly people had seemed not to look. Or they looked through him. Occasionally someone's eyes would panic as if they'd seen the devil. But Rastus saw devils and beasts too. The world full of them, so he wasn't surprised to see the scary sign of one still sticking like a fly to flypaper on somebody's eyeballs.

  After the mirror those devilish beasts and beastly devils horned in everywhere. For instance, in the blue eyes of soft-limbed, teasing girls who'd turn his joint to a fiery stone, then prance away giggling. He learned not to look too closely. Learned to look away, look away. Taught himself to ignore his incriminating image when it floated across fragments of glass or the surface of still puddles, or inside his thoughts sometimes, tempting him to drown and disappear in glowing beast eyes that might be his. Hiding from himself no cure, however. Hinckley eyes penetrated his disguise. Eyes chewing and swallowing or spitting him out wet and mangled. Beast eyes no matter how artfully the bearer shapeshifted, fooled you with fleshy wrappings make your mouth water.

  Maybe a flashback will clarify further why Rastus is plagued by a negative self-image. One day at closing time his main employer, Barber Jones, had said, You look like a wild man from Borneo, boy. All you need's a bone through your nose you ready for the circus. Set down the broom and get your tail over here to the mirror, boy. Ima show you a wild cannibal.

  See yourself, boy. Look hard. See them filthy naps dragging down past your shoulders. People getting scared of you. Who you think you is. Don King or somebody. Damned wool stinks worse'n a skunk. Ima do you a favor, boy.

  Barber Jones yakkety-yakking as he yaks daily about the general state of the world, the state of Hinckley and his dick first thing in the morning or last thing at night when just the two of them in the shop. Yakkety-yak, only now the subject is Rastus, not the usual nonstop monologue about rich folks in charge who were seriously fucking up, not running the world, nor Hinckley, nor his love life, the way Barber Jones would run things if just once he held the power in his hands, him in charge instead of those blockheads who one day will come crawling on their knees begging him to straighten things out, yakking and stropping on the razor strop a Bowie knife he'd brought special from home for this special occasion, an occasion Rastus very quickly figures he wants no part of, but since he's been a good boy his whole life, he waits, heart thumping like a tom-tom, beside a counter-to-ceiling mirror while fat-mouth Jones sharpens his blade.

  A scene from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno might well have flashed through Rastus's mind if he'd been literate. But neither the African slave Babo shaving Captain Delano nor the ironic counterpoint of that scene, blackface and whiteface reversed, playing here in the mirror of Jones Barbershop, tweaks Rastus's consciousness of who he is and what's happening to him. Mr. Melville's prescient yarn doesn't creep into the head of Barber Jones either, even though Rastus pronounces "Barber" as baba, a sound so close to Babo it's a dead giveaway. Skinning knife in hand, Baba Jones is too busy stalking his prey, improvising Yankee-Doodle-like on the fly how in the hell he's going to scalp this coon and keep his hands clean. He snatches a towel from the soiled pile on the floor. He'll grab the bush with the towel, squeeze it in his fist, chop through the thick, knotty locks like chopping cotton.

  Look at yourself in the mirror, boy. This the way you want to go round looking. Course it ain't. And stop your shakin. Ain't gon hurt you. You be thanking me once I'm done. Hell, boy, won't even charge you for a trim.

  Lawd, lawd, am I truly dat nappy-haired ting in de mere. Am dat my bery own self, dat ugly ole pestering debil what don look lak nobody in Hinckley sides me. Is you me, Rastus. Lawd, lawd, you sho nuff tis me, Rastus confesses, confronting the living proof, his picture reversed right to left, left to right in the glass. Caged in the mirror like a prisoner in a cell is what he thinks, though not precisely in those words, nor does he think the word panopticon, clunkily Melvillean and thus appropriate for the network of gazes pinning him down to the place where they want him to stay. No words necessary to shatter the peace in Rastus's heart, to upset the détente of years of not looking, years of imagining himself more or less like other folks, just a slightly deformed, darker duck than the other ducks floating on this pond he'd learned to call Hinckley.

  Boom. A shotgun blasts inside Rastus's brain, cold as the icy jolt when the driver cracks the Studebaker's window, as cold and maybe as welcome too, since if you don't wake up, Rastus, sleep can kill you. Boom. Every scared Hinckley duck quacks and flutters and scolds as it rises from the pond and leaves Rastus behind, very much alone. He watches them form neat, V-shaped squadrons high in the blue empyrean, squawking, honking, off to bomb the shit out of somebody in another country. You should have known long ago, should have figured it would happen like this one day. You all alone. Your big tarbaby feet in miring clay. You ain't them and they ain't you. Birds of a different feather. You might mistake them for geese flying in formation way up in the sky, but you sure ain't never heard them caw-caw, boy. Huh-uh. You the cawing bird and the shotgun aimed for you ain't gon miss next time. Your cover's busted, boy. Here come Baba Jones.

  You sure don wanna go around looking just so, do you boy.

  Well, Rastus ain't all kinds of fool. He zip-coons outta there, faster than a speeding bullet. (Could this be it—not the instant the jump shot is invented, we know better than that, but one of many moments, each monumental, memorable in its own way, when Rastus or whoever chooses to take his or her game up another level—not a notch but a quantum leap, higher, hyper, hipper—decides to put air under her or his feet, jumpshoot-jumpstart-rise-transcend, eschew the horizontal for the vertical, operating like Frantz Fanon when he envisioned a new day, a new plane of existence, a new reality, up, up, and away.) Maybe he didn't rise and fly, but he didn't Jim Crow neither. No turning dis way and wheeling dat way and jiggling up and down in place. Next time the baba seen him, bright and early a couple mornings later, Rastus had shaved his skull clean as a whistle. Gold chains draping his neck like Isaac Hayes. How Rastus accomplished such a transformation is another story, but we got enough stories by the tail feathers, twisted up in our white towel—count 'em—so let's switch back to the moment earlier in the story, later in Hinckley time, months after Rastus clipped his own wings rather than play Samson to Jones's Delilah.

  Rastus still stands where we left him, hoodooed by the Harlem Globies' flyer. Bald, chained Rastus who's been nowhere. Doesn't even know what name his mother intended for him. Didn't even recognize his own face in the mirror till just yesterday, Hinckley time. Is the flyer a truer mirror than the one in the barbershop, the mirror Rastus assiduously keeps at his back these days as he sweeps, dusts, mops. He studies the grinning black men on the poster, their white lollipop lips, white circles around their eyes, white gloved fingers, his gaze full of longing, nostalgia, more than a small twinge of envy and regret. He doesn't know the Globies ain't been nowhere
neither, not to Harlem nor nowhere else, their name unearned, ironic at this point in time. Like the jump shot, the Globies not quite invented yet. Still a gleam in the owner/driver's eye, his wishful thinking of international marketing, product endorsements, movies, TV cartoon, prodigious piles of currency, all colors, sizes, shapes promiscuously stacking up. Not Globies yet because this is the team's maiden voyage, first trot, first road game, this trek from Chicago to Hinckley. But they're on their way, almost here, if you believe the signs tacked and glued all over town, a rain, a storm, a blizzard of signs. If he weren't afraid the flimsy paper would come apart in his hands, Rastus would peel the flyer off the pole, sneak it into the barbershop, hold it up alongside his face so he could grin into the mirror with his lost brothers. Six Globies all in a row. Because, yes, in spite of signs of the beast, the players are like him. Different and alike. Alike and different. The circle unbroken. Yes. Yes. Yes. And whoopee they're coming to town.

  Our boy Rastus sniffs opportunity knocking and decides—with an alacrity that would have astounded the townsfolk—to become a Globie and get the hell out of Hinckley.

  As befits a fallen world, however, no good news travels without bad. The night of the game Rastus not allowed in the armory. Hinckley a northern town, so no Jim Crow laws turned Rastus away. Who needed a law to regulate the only Negro in town. Sorry, Rastus, just white folks tonight.

  I neglected to mention an incident that occurred the year before Rastus dropped into Hinckley. The town's one little burnt-cork, burnt-matchstick tip of a dead-end street housing a few hard-luck Negroes had been spontaneously urban-removed, and its inhabitants, those who survived the pogrom, had disappeared into the night, the same kind of killingly cold night roughing up the Studebaker. That detail, the sudden exodus of all the town's Negroes, should have been noted earlier in story time, because it helps you understand Hinckley time. A visitor to Hinckley today probably won't hear about the above-mentioned event, yet it's imprinted indelibly in the town's memory. Now you see it, now you don't, but always present. A permanent marker separating before and after. Hinckley truly a white man's town from that night on.

  And just to emphasize how white they wanted their town to be, the night of the fires everybody wore sheets bleached white as snow, and for a giggle, under the sheets, blacked their faces. A joke too good to share with the Negroes, who saw only white robes and white hoods with white eyes in the eyeholes. We blacked up blacker than the blackest of 'em, reported one old-timer in a back issue of the Hinckley Daily News. Yes we did. Blacker than a cold, black night, blacker than black. Hauled the coloreds outdoors in their drawers and nightgowns, pickaninnies naked as the day they born. Told 'em, You got five minutes to pack a sack and git. Five minutes we's turning these shacks and everythin in 'em to ash.

  Meanwhile the wagons transporting the Globies into town have arrived, their canvas covers billowing, noisy as wind-whipped sails, their wooden sides, steep as clipper ships, splashed with colorful, irresistible ads for merchandise nobody in Hinckley has ever dreamed of, let alone seen. A cornucopia of high-tech goods and services from the future, Hinckley time, though widely available in leading metropolitan centers for decades. Mostly beads and baubles, rummage-sale trash, but some stuff packed in the capacious holds of the wagons extremely ancient. Not stale or frail or old-fashioned or used or useless. No, the oldest, deepest cargo consisted of things forgotten. Forgotten? Yes, forgotten. Upon which subject I would expand if I could, but forgotten means forgotten, doesn't it. Means lost. A category whose contents I'm unable to list or describe because if I could, the items wouldn't be forgotten. Forgotten things are really, really gone. Gone even if memories of them flicker, ghosts with more life than the living. Like a Free Marcus button you tucked in a drawer and lived the rest of your life not remembering it lay there, folded in a bloodstained head kerchief, until one afternoon as you're preparing to move the last mile into senior citizens' public housing and you must get rid of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the junk you've accumulated over the years because the cubicle you're assigned in the high-rise isn't much larger than a coffin, certainly not a king-sized coffin like pharaohs erected so they could take everything with them—chariots, boats, VCRs, slaves, wives—so you must shed what feels like layers of your own tender skin, flaying yourself patiently, painfully, divesting yourself of one precious forgotten thing after another, toss, toss, toss. Things forgotten in the gritty bottom of a drawer and you realize you've not been living the kind of life you could have lived if you hadn't forgotten, and now, remembering, it's too late.

  In other words, the wagons carried tons of alternative pasts—roads not taken, costumes, body parts, promises, ghosts. Hinckley folks lined up for miles at these canvas-topped depots crackling whitely in the prairie wind. Even poor folks who can't afford to purchase anything mob the landing, ooohing and ahhhing with the rest. So many bright lost hopes in the bellies of the schooners, the wagons might still be docked there doing brisk business a hundred years from now, the Globies in their gaudy, revealing uniforms showing their stuff to a sea of wide eyes, waving hands, grappling, grasping hands, but hands not too busy to clap, volleys of clapping, then a vast, collective sigh when clapping stops and empty hands drop to people's sides, sighs so deep and windy they scythe across the Great Plains, rippling mile after endless mile of wheat, corn, barley, amber fields of grain swaying and purring as if they'd been caressed when a tall Globie dangles aloft some item everybody recognizes, a forgotten thing all would claim if they could afford it, a priceless pearl the dark ballplayer tosses gratis into the crowd of Hinckleyites, just doing it to do it, and the gift would perform tricks, loop-de-looping, sparkling, airborne long enough to evoke spasms of love and guilt and awe and desire and regret, then disappear like a snowflake or a sentence grown too large and baroque, its own weight and ambition and daring and vanity ripping it apart before it reaches the earth. A forgotten thing twisting in the air, becoming a wet spot on fingers reaching for it. A tear inching down a cheek. An embarrassing drop of moisture in the crotch of somebody's drawers.

  Wheee. Forgotten things. Floating through the air with the greatest of ease. Hang-gliding. Flip-flopping.

  Flip-floppety-clippety-clop. The horse-drawn caravan clomps up and down Hinckley's skimpy grid of streets. Disappears when it reaches the abandoned, dead-end, former black quarter and turns right to avoid the foundation of a multi-use, multistory, multinational parking garage and amusement center, a yawning hole gouged deeper into the earth than the stainless steel and glass edifice will rise into the sky.

  Is dat going to be the Mall of America, one of the Globie kids asks, peeking out from behind a wagon's canvas flap. A little Hinckley girl hears the little Globie but doesn't reply.

  Then she's bright and chirrupy as Jiminy Cricket and chases after the gillies till she can't keep up, watching the last horse's round, perfect rump swaying side to side like Miss Maya's verse. Feels delicious about herself because she had smiled, managed to be polite to the small brown face poking out of the white sheet just as her mother said she must, but also really, basically, ignored it, didn't get the brown face mixed up with Hinckley faces her mother said it wouldn't and couldn't ever be. Always act a lady, honey. But be careful. Very careful. Those people are not like us. Warmed by the boy's soft voice, his long eyelashes like curly curtains or question marks, the dreamy roll of the horse's huge, split butt, but she didn't fall in love. Instead she chatters to herself in a new language, made up on the spot. Wow. Gumby-o. Kum-bye-a. Op-poop-a-doop... as if she's been tossed a forgotten thing and it doesn't melt.

  She wishes she'd said yes to the boy, wishes she could share the good news.

  Daddy said after the bulldozers a big road's coming, sweety-pie, and we'll be the centerpiece of the universe, the envy of our neighbors, Daddy said I can have anything I want, twenty-four seven, brother, just imagine, anything I want, cute jack-in-the-box, pop-up brown boys, a pinto pony, baby dolls with skin warm and soft as mine, who cry real tea
rs. Word. Bling-bling. Oop-poop-a-doop.

  After a dust cloud churned by the giant tires of the convoy settles, the little girl discovers chocolate drops wrapped in silver foil the chocolate soldiers had tossed her. In the noise and confusion of the rumbling vehicles, she'd thought the candies were stones. Or cruel bullets aimed at her by the dark strangers in canvas-roofed trucks her mother had warned her to flee from, hide from. Realizing they are lovely chocolate morsels, immaculate inside their shiny skins, she feels terrible for thinking ugly thoughts about the GIs, wants to run to the convoy and say Danke, Danke even though her mother told her, They're illiterate, don't speak our language. As she scoops up the surprises and stuffs them in her apron pocket, she imagines her chubby legs churning in pursuit of the dusty column. The convoy had taken hours to pass her, so it must be moving slowly. But war has taught her the treacherous distance between dreams and reality. Even after crash diets and aerobic classes her pale short legs would never catch the wagons, so she sits down, settles for cramming food into her mouth with both hands, as if she's forgotten how good food can be and wants to make up for all the lost meals at once. Licking, sucking, crunching, chewing. The melting, gooey drops smear her cheeks, hands, dimpled knees—chocolate stain spreading as the magic candy spawns, multiplies inside her apron pocket, a dozen new sweet pieces explode into being for every piece she consumes. She eats till she's about to bust, sweet chocolate coating her inside and out, a glistening, sticky tarbaby her own mother would have warned her not to touch. Eats till she falls asleep and keels over in the dusty street.