“In this passage,” he said, “we find a terrible story about the sons of Adam and Eve. The younger brother’s murder, which brought death and guilt into our world, is often said to be a prefiguring in the Old Testament of the greater, far grander sacrifice of an innocent who died for our sins at Calvary. For many people—perhaps some of you here today—there is something disturbing in this tale. How can God be just if He rejected one brother’s gifts and exalted the other? The story makes our heavenly Father seem as capricious as any creature conjured from dust and condemned to return to dust.” Littlewood paused, having lost his place momentarily when he peered up to make eye contact. After finding where he left off, he kept a pencil in his right hand to mark his place when he looked again at the congregation. “I can’t believe our Lord is unfair. Remember, it is because He loves the brother who kills that He marks him so no man will do him harm, and it appears none did, for nowhere in the Bible are we told that he dies. And does not God say to the elder brother after rejecting his gift that if thou does well, shalt thou not be accepted? Long ago, in ancient times, the elder brother’s name was interpreted to mean ‘possession,’ and I believe his sacrifice was intended not to honor the Creator but to glorify himself, to win the Lord’s favor like a trophy, or an ornament he might wear. You see, he was given, if not a key to the kingdom, then at least one provocative clue. Oh, a cryptic one, to be sure, but we cannot say that in his moment of dejection he lacked good counsel. His deliverance—and surely ours—is wrapped in the perennial mystery of what that divine counsel, doing well, possibly means. Is there a single answer? I think not. As a question, it is open-ended, admitting of only provisional answers, a riddle that yields an inexhaustible reply, which is cast best not as a clever sentence but rather in the quality of sacrifice and sentience itself.”
Smith squinted all through Littlewood’s sermon, the look on his face skeptical, and he coughed when he heard something questionable. He took out his gum and stuck the wad on the bottom of his seat. I could not tell what he was thinking, though I would have wagered he’d forgotten more about Scripture and the world’s spiritual traditions than the young Rev. Liytlewood ever knew. After the sermon, Bethel’s pastor asked for contributions to help with the church’s remodeling. A silver plate was passed around. Then the congregation sang once more—“Grant Us Light”—and the days service ended, and a tired Rev. Littlewood positioned himself outside the entrance to shake hands with his tiny flock as they left, ask about their health and their children, and tease the little ones, each of whom he gave a candy cane wrapped in plastic.
When Smith and I reached the door, he said, “I noticed you two gentlemen when you arrived. Thank you for coming. I certainly hope you’ll come again. Were you thinking of joining, Mr. … uh …”
“Chaym Smith. No, I didn’t come to join anything.”
“Do you live around here?”
“For the time being. It’s temporary, like everything.”
“Are you a Christian, Mr. Smith?”
Smith chuckled. “You want the truth?”
“Yes, always.”
“Well, the truth is, I don’t know what I am, and I like it that way. Leaves me lots of room to be surprised every day.”
“That’s too bad. As you can see, it wouldn’t hurt if we had a few more people here.”
“Looks like you could use a decent gardener too. Whoever you had before didn’t know jack about landscaping or planting the right flowers for this climate. You want some goldenseal and blackberry lilies out front.”
Littlewood sighed. “Yes, you’re right. I’d do it, except I work at the bank in town. I have to. My salary is … nominal. We need someone to finish the work my predecessor, Reverend McCluskey, started on what was to be the library and a schoolroom for the children. And I wish to God we had someone good to keep up the grounds.”
“We could do that.”
I blurted out, “We?”
“The exercise will do you good, Bishop. The last carpenter they had here didn’t know the first thing about framing.”
“Could you?” Littlewood’s eyebrows raised. “I can’t tell you what a great help that would be to us. My problem is, we can’t afford to pay much,”
“I’m probably not worth much. Whatever you give me is fine.”
“We all have worth,” insisted Littlewood. “If you look in Psalms—”
“Pardon me, Reverend, like I said, I can keep this place up. Thing is, you’re better off, though, if you save the sermons—and all them explanations—for Sunday morning. Is that a deal?”
Littlewood laughed. “I’m hardly in a position to refuse anyone’s help.” He thrust out his right hand. “You have a deal, Mr. Smith.”
Were it not for my debt to Smith, and my concern for his recovery, I would have protested his shanghaiing me into involuntary servitude at Bethel AME. Every few weeks I would receive a postcard from Amy detailing the new job she found at Operation Breadbasket, and ending Miss you. She was all I thought about during the afternoons Smith and I cleared Bethel’s small cemetery, and when we pitched in on the weekends to finish the remodeling left undone and restore areas of the church in ill repair. (Yes, he volunteered me for that too.)
Bethel’s cemetery was centuries old. A boneyard overgrown with pickerelweed and wildflowers that obscured shovel-shaped headstones and weathered markers that leaned at angles. Names and dates for the dead, I noticed, were all but obliterated. Here and there I could make out epitaphs for Amy’s family. We spent the better part of a week ripping out overgrown bushes, moist, matted neckweeds, thistles and brambles, trimming back trees and hauling away barrels of trash. By dusk each day Smith and I worked until we were too tired to stand, with me perspiring so hard you could tell where I’d been standing because there I left a puddle, like some of me had melted away.
I decided this was too much—all this work—regardless of what I owed him for saving my life. In other words, he was doing this to work out his own demons, and all that bedeviled me was the distance between me and Amy.
“Chaym,” I said one evening. “I’m going back to the city for a while. There’re things I need to do there. Do you think you’ll be okay?”
He gave me a headshake. “Do what you gotta do, Bishop. One thing I’ve always believed, you don’t have to do what anybody else does. Only what you have to do. Ain’t no two people on this planet got the same fuckin’ dharma.”
While I cannot speak with authority on the esoteric subject of dharma, I can tell you that I was on the first Chicago-bound Illinois Central the very next day, sitting almost alone in a big, clanking coach, on a hard, cushionless seat as the endless cornfields whipped by outside the train’s unwashed, thick windows. And because Smith always seemed so obsessed with the story of Adam’s two sons, I sat reading a book on them, one I’d borrowed from the college in Carbondale, while the train chuffed and rumbled upstate. In very little time I was lost in this volume that showed how Cain’s lineage was legion. In the Beowulf poem, Grendel’s mother was his child. Down through history, the tribe of Cainites was identified, variously, as that of blacks or Jews who, I recalled, were forced to wear a “mark” by the Nazis (the color black, of course, was its own mark). But by the time Lord Byron wrote his three-act play on the world’s first murderer and outcast, Cain was beginning to transmogrify from a figure of evil to one of righteous, tragic singularity, and it was Abel—the obedient, unoriginal son—who began to seem flawed and lacking in selfhood. As I read, I trembled, suddenly realizing how ubiquitous Cain, the metaphysical revolutionary, truly was. He was there in so many novels I’d only haphazardly read, from Hesse’s Demian to Steinbeck’s East of Eden, from Miguel Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez to Melville’s Billy Budd, and in numerous films I’d enjoyed, such as Shane (another name for Cain), and The Time Machine, where the Morlocks were descendants of Cain and the Eloi were hapless Abelites (read: dinner). Thinking of another classic Western, The Magnificent Seven, it struck me that the besieged Mexican farmers
in that film were Abelites through and through, and the gunmen—the down-and-out murderers—who volunteered to save them were all homeless Cainites on the run (except for one, the young Mexican gunfighter manqué played by Horst Buchholz, who was fleeing from the sterility and boredom of his Abelite roots, but by the movie’s end embraced it for the love of a village woman), with Yul Brynner saying of the farmers in the movie’s last line to Steve McQueen, “We lost. We always lose.”
Slowly, by the time the train reached Champaign, I began to see—as if a veil had lifted—the tortured shadow of Cain everywhere, within me and without, his many cultural reincarnations parading through my mind like frames projected on a cyclorama. He was the first city-builder. Perhaps the father of science and philosophy. His war was with God, the Father who spurned him. Of the two—him and Abel—only Cain possessed subjectivity. A complex inner life. It was said that Western man himself was Cain, cursed with the burden of restlessness and the endless quest for selfhood. Down through the centuries, his name was spelled differently in different times. Caym, Kaym, even Chaym, were etymological variations on it.
When I got off the train, lugging my backpack, I felt strange, a bit like a rootless wanderer myself as I boarded a crowded city bus that passed near my studio apartment on the South Side. Beside me on an empty seat I found another rider’s discarded Sun-Times and tried to read a story about Pablo Picasso’s design for a fifty-foot sculpture planned for the plaza in front of the new Civic Center, but from the rear of the bus, on the backseat, a group of Brillo-haired black boys began cursing and laughing way too loud for the comfort of other passengers. They were swapping tales about white people, each one trying to top the others on whether Jews, southern crackers (or northern whites), or Asians mistreated blacks the worst. And then, as if to remind me how much I’d lost the rhythms of the city while at the Nest, they began to sing:
Jingle bells, shotgun shells,
Freedom all the way,
Oh what fun it is to blast
A trooper man away …
I had not been in Chicago in months. I had forgotten how deeply hatreds ran here. I was out of touch with this big-shouldered, frontierlike city onto which King had futilely tried to graft the transcendent ideals of Gandhi. Although Chicago was nearly fifty percent black, and was first settled by a Haitian black man (Jean-Baptiste Du Sable) who built his cabin on the north bank of the Chicago River in 1772, all the gleaming buildings and skyscrapers I saw as my bus moved through the Loop, all the twenty-story department stores and high-hat restaurants, the smoking factories, stockyards, movie theaters and museums, libraries, playhouses, radio and television stations, amusement parks and stadiums, were owned by white people, as if the Negro was hugely in this Second City but hardly of it. Here, he could be deeply in ward politics, yet where was his economic power, the font from which real politics sprang? Back in the city, I began to feel what Smith called the singular Negro emotion. Envy. It came upon me, like a cold or a summer flu, when I stepped down from the bus and onto the sidewalk two blocks from the building I’d lived in before the riots, as if I’d fallen or been flung into an already finished world, one where people like me would never, ever fit.
At my building on the South Side, I climbed three flights, hoping no one had broken into my place. I walked down the musty hallway past the communal toilet to my studio apartment—one large room attached to a kitchenette—and turned the key in the lock and entered my city-cave. I wanted to call Amy immediately. But when I switched on the light I was staggered by what I saw. The air felt tight, dead. Months had passed since I’d seen this room with its lumpy Salvation Army sofa, a coffee table I’d picked up at a church rummage sale, and bookcases constructed from cinder blocks and planks of wood. We’d left so quickly for southern Illinois when King okayed Smith’s training that my studio was exactly as I’d left it. Dishes caked with Chinese takeout were piled in the sink. Roaches scattered along the counter and cabinets. On the floor by my sofa were pamphlets and application forms for Roosevelt and Columbia College, where I’d planned to reapply, if I could only find financial aid. That, I recalled, had pretty much been my life before Smith appeared: shifting constantly between prayer and economic panic, waging a kind of one-man War on Poverty (my own), because for all President Johnson’s promises, and all the ink he’d used signing into law the Civil Rights Act (he went through seventy-two pens), I was always broke. I dropped my backpack inside the door, closed it quietly, and fell onto the sofa, realizing that if anyone had broken into my place, they would have found precious little worth stealing—nothing, that is, unless they hoped to pawn my five-volume set of the Summa Theologica, boxes of notebooks, or my back issues of Mind.
Except for books and a closet of threadbare clothing, I owned nothing. (And even this pitiful studio was a Winter Palace compared with many places where blacks lived.) I wondered: if the minister was right in saying we must not think about what we might get but rather what we might give in a relationship, then what in this world could I offer Amy Griffith? How could I serve her? Looking around this room, I saw what a poor catch I was. Very unhip. An old fuddy-duddy at (now) age twenty-five when American culture in the mid-’60s was becoming so fluid, so polymorphous you could change your identity—reinvent yourself—as easily as you restyled your hair. It was the first truly theatrical decade. A moment when role-playing and how things appeared took primacy over reality (and who, after all, knew what that was anymore?). And me? In this world of flux, I was cursed with a shy, Victorian personality, one Smith’s powerful presence had begun to change when I fell into his orbit; but away from him, back in Chicago in my dismal room, I felt again like a moon unmoored. As a colored man raised in the 1950s, I’d learned the hard way to guard my emotions, particularly when I was around white people. I was stiff and proper. Formal and guided by religious principles almost everyone around me (except for King) regarded as obsolete. On the dance floor I drew a blank. (What the hell was “The Bop” anyway?) In social situations I was easy to lose. Or shout down. I tried to be polite, as my mother had taught me (and the minister urged us to do), by patiently listening closely to other people and letting them finish their thoughts, no matter how long that might take, but most often they cut me off or interrupted me in midsentence since I was not an imposing presence and I often quoted from literature or philosophy to reinforce my point, so what I usually had to say went unfinished until I reached home and pulled out my journal and, in the privacy of my studio, completed my end of the conversation there. Hadn’t Amy once told me that in a movie I’d make a good prop? That together the best we would ever create was mud? Slowly it dawned on me that perhaps her postcards of the last few months were not declarations returning the love I felt for her, but simply examples of her kindness, the sort Amy might show to anyone she pitied.
If that was so, how could I call her?
Two weeks passed before I mustered up the courage to pick up the phone. I busied myself with cleaning the refrigerator and stove, filling out college applications, and at last when I could stall no longer, I picked up the phone and dialed her extension at work.
“You’re here, Matthew?” In the background I heard the voices of other Operation Breadbasket workers, “What about Chaym?”
“He’s downstate. I think hell be okay. Uh, listen … I was thinking if you’re not busy tonight, maybe we could go out for dinner, then take in a show—”
“No.”
“Oh …” I should have known.
“There’s somewhere special I want to go.”
“Where?”
“It’s a new place I’ve been hearing about. Some of the people I work with here have been raving about it, but only black people can get inside. Can you pick me up at five when I get off work?”
“Sure. I’ll rent a car. But, Amy, where are we going?”
“It’s on the West Side, not far from where I used to live. I don’t know much about it, Matthew, but I think it’s called the Black People’s Liberation Library.”<
br />
9
The library was in a poor neighborhood, squeezed between a pool hall and a tavern. To its left was a vacant lot filled with garbage. Children were playing there, knee-deep in refuse the building’s residents dumped from their windows. The smell of decay was overpowering, but no less so than the heartrending sight of black and Puerto Rican families crammed into a building that should have been condemned by the Housing Authority decades before. The El ran right behind the building, rattling its windows. On the first floor, in what had once been a storefront, we found the Black People’s Liberation Library. When I parked directly in front of its door, it was 6 P.M. There were about fifteen people inside, white and black, examining the ceiling-high shelves of books on the library’s back wall. Nothing about this place seemed exceptional, except for its impoverishment.
“It’s supposed to look unimportant,” Amy said. “People at work told me this is just a front. C’mon, we better get inside before they start.”
After checking that the rented car’s doors were locked, I followed her through the entrance. Just inside the door, a young black woman sat at a folding card table, a blackbound register open before her. We signed our names, as she asked us to do, then mingled in the small room with other visitors examining titles on the shelves. I saw seminal works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, and dozens of other cultural nationalists and Marxist revolutionaries from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. I noticed several volumes by Yahya Zubena, a prominent local activist who often got his picture in black publications like the Daily Defender and Jet. I’d never seen him, but I knew his story. His real name was Willard Bailey, and he was sentenced to twenty years downstate in Marion Penitentiary for murdering a nineteen-year-old black filling-station attendant during a stickup (Willard had cut off the boy’s genitals and stuffed them in his mouth). But that was only the crime he was convicted for. There were others, ones he wrote about after his release from prison—rape, dozens of rapes on the South Side, with some of his victims being only twelve years old. After them, he moved on to assaulting white women on the North Side. In prison, Willard discovered the pleasures of poetry in a creative writing class, as well as the very texts I’d seen by Du Bois and Garvey. According to his interviews and published essays, he was reborn after those experiences, “baptized in blackness,” as he was fond of saying. He apologized for his crimes in scathing liberation verse that flowed from his prison cell to periodicals like Ramparts. There, a few prominent white authors who published on those same pages declared him too brilliant to be behind bars; they agitated for Yahya’s release, and by 1967 he was back on the streets of Chicago, reading agitprop poetry in Lincoln Park (“Nigger, Nigger, Wake Up!” was his best-known piece), and some said he was organizing street gangs for the Revolution. Amy pulled down one of Yahya’s books and, after pushing her eyeglasses back up her nose with two fingers, began flipping through its pages and frowning. Truth to tell, I found his work puerile, and while I pretended to peruse a copy of The Souls of Black Folks, which I deeply respected, I was actually watching Amy from the corner of my eye, wondering if I’d completely blown my first evening out with her.
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