by Evie Rhodes
The muted lighting and the age-old draperies lent an air of solitude to the small church. An antique table stood in front of the altar in the center. It held the Holy Bible on a wooden stand. On each side of it a flame of fire shot up out of what looked like glass candlestick holders.
The sight of the Bible with the flames of fire held Tracie. She almost wanted to touch it, but she dared not put her hands on it. How could she? She pulled away from the very thought.
Looking around the church, it was almost as though she had gone back in time, as though she had stepped into another era, another place and time.
The church was wrapped in a blanket of serene peace and things unspoken but felt. Although it was small, it felt enormous, as though it were bigger than it looked. The few stained-glass windows in the front of the church cast brilliant, colored rays of light across the pews. It was a breathtaking sight.
Tracie walked down the aisle. She entered one of the pews and sat down. The church was empty, so far as she could see. She stared ahead at the altar, her eyes roaming to rest on the crucifix of Jesus Christ. She stared at the holy relic, depicting the body of the slain Messiah. Briefly she wondered what his life must have been like. There were bloody teardrops streaming from his eyes.
Lost in her reverie, she didn’t notice the old, dignified black preacher, his skin the liquid color of black tar, with the silvery gray hair and beard, who was clothed in layers of colorful robes, until he was nearly upon her. His hair and beard were so silvery, they were the color of silver tinsel that people wrapped their Christmas trees in year after year.
The silvery hair against his tar-black skin was a startling contrast. The eyes that peered out from the sharp, smooth bone structure of his face looked centuries old. They radiated both wisdom and peace.
Tracie ventured a brief, startled glance in his direction as he stopped beside her. “Does your God dwell here?” she asked.
“My God dwells in many places,” the old black minister said with a quiet confidence that conveyed his faith.
Tracie nodded. “I . . . I . . . I don’t suppose he would help a woman who bows her head but cannot pray.” There, it was out. She had said it. For many a year Tracie had bowed her head in supplication, but nary a prayer had fluttered up from the depths of her heart.
She was a woman who was blocked. She simply could not pray. Not even as she had stood viewing the smashed, ruined remains of her dead sons had she prayed. She had bowed her head in abject pain, but the prayer had not come.
Tracie rose quickly from her seat. She slid out past the preacher. She quickly walked back up the aisle, toward the doors of the church.
Suddenly she halted. She turned shakily to face the old preacher. He hadn’t uttered a word. But he was watching her with fatherly, ethereal concern.
“Could . . . Could you ask your God not to let my remaining sons be punished for my sins?”
Tracie’s composure broke. She trembled slightly, biting hard on her lower lip. “Pl . . . pl . . . please,” she stuttered.
The minister nodded his affirmation. He continued gazing at Tracie as she turned, rushing through the doors. When she was gone, he walked down the aisle. He approached the altar; then he reached underneath, pulling out one golden candlestick.
He lit it, bowing his head in prayer. “Heavenly Father, according to thy will let your mercy and grace be upon this woman. And if it be in accordance with your will, let her plea for the remission of her sin not fall on deaf ears. In the name of Jesus Christ, I pray. Amen.”
The preacher felt drained by this simple prayer.
He felt as he did at times when he was in fasting, prayer, and supplication for long periods of time, although it had been mere moments at the most. Tracie Burlingame had somehow spiritually burdened him with her plea for help. It had been laid on his shoulders like heavy cargo.
The preacher lifted his head up. He gazed at the streaks of sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows of the church. Despair washed him in her streams. He somehow knew it would be a long road for this strange woman, whoever she was.
A flicker of something he had seen in the long-ago past flashed in his memory. It couldn’t be. He immediately distanced himself from the thought.
He stared at the flickering light from the candle, trying to empty his mind. There it was again. But there was something more than the volume of words that had crowded into his mind. He shook himself free from the incredible possibility.
When he had bowed his head in prayer, he had seen the vision of the quilt. As she had walked up the aisle of the church, she had been covered in a spiritual patchwork quilt. The hollowed-out patches were raucous with voices of their own. There were multitudes of them. The black patches were seekers, the likes of which the preacher hadn’t even heard whispered about since the ancient times of many centuries before. They were the whisperings of myths and folklore, and he had certainly never witnessed it.
The legend of the quilt had been buried much the same as the Egyptians of old had buried their treasures in tombs.
Years and years ago, when he had been a young man studying in the ministry, he had been taught, and he worshipped under the guidance of an old pastor.
He was every bit of a hundred and twenty years old, the oldest living man on earth at the time. There had been much speculation whether he could have really been that old, but the black, leathery parchment of his skin, and the gleaming wisdom that shone from his eyes had indicated that it might be so.
In any case the old man had shared the vision of the legend with him. He had bestowed on him the gift of the ancient, worn trunk with its precious contents. He had instructed the young preacher on its use. He also bade him be silent until the time should come.
He shook his head at the memory. He didn’t even know if he had believed in it all until today, until this woman had shown up in the church. In the spiritual draping of the quilt, he had seen the vision.
So it wasn’t a myth. It did exist. He sighed. To this end was his calling. And it jolted him to know he had been instructed and taught in this matter long ago. It had lain dormant inside him all this time, until this woman had awakened it.
The preacher retreated from the church. He made his way to his tiny personal chambers. His chambers were sparsely furnished, only functional, really.
He did not require elaborate furnishings or everyday comforts in his personal life. In his chambers were a bed, a desk, and a chair, with a lamp on the desk, on which also lay his Bible and his writing journals. He had a phone. Hanging on the wall there was a crucifix of Jesus Christ. The room contained little else. The chamber was attached to his own personal bath.
The preacher shed his robes, hanging them carefully on a hanger in the closet. The colorful robes stood out against the simple plainness of his chamber.
When he had done this, he took a key from the desk drawer and removed some boxes to reveal a door built into the floor of the closet. He unlocked it and reached inside, hefting out the ancient, worn trunk.
This would be the first time since the old minister had passed this on and instructed him that the trunk had ever been opened.
Unlocking the trunk, he took out the old canvas, tweedlike bundle that was laid neatly inside the trunk. He rolled it out to its full length on the floor.
Next he reached inside for the hermetically sealed jar that was filled with a black substance. He closed and locked the trunk.
When everything was safely in its place, he made a telephone call to one of the other house ministers. When the minister picked up on the other end of the line, he said, “I will be in prayer and supplication for the next three days and nights.” He hung up the phone.
The preacher would know he could not be disturbed until this amount of time had passed, as he had indicated.
With that, he shut out all avenues of light to the room. He lay down on the floor, opened the glass jar, and poured the black ashes all over his body, covering himself from head to toe. Then he rolled
himself in the sackcloth canvas bag, on the hard floor, and whispered the Our Father prayer.
After that he prayed for forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ, in His Holiness, for the sins of the royal priesthood of the ministry, of which he was a part, and the Church, as one body, so he could stand in wholesomeness of spirit before the Lord. He prayed for the spiritual washing until tears of exhaustion ran down his face.
He prayed so he could be in favor before the Lord Jesus Christ. He prayed so that his utterances could enter into the Kingdom, returning tenfold with the power of the Holy Ghost, which would be needed.
With the holiness of his preparation done, he proceeded to pray for the repentance and remission of sins for the strange woman who had asked for his help. And for those before her and for those after her, within her ancestry and among the seeds that had been implanted in her womb.
He now had a singular purpose, and to that end he would remain for three days and three nights. Tracie Burlingame. Her name blew from the mists of the air into his mind. He had not known her name. And as her name blew into the recesses of his consciousness, he knew it was true. That thought he had tried to escape. Tracie Burlingame was a spiritual patchwork quilt. Her very birth had been written.
The prayers rose up from the depths of his throat, from the bowels of his being, aligning his spirit as he prayed against the principalities of darkness in high places, and against the rulers thereof.
The blood of Jesus.
The preacher would pray in the sackcloth and ashes for three days and three nights, for Tracie Burlingame. The spirit would be his only sustenance. The path had been set. It was strewn with the legends of old. When his penance and his prayer were fully realized, the chains that bound Tracie Burlingame would be broken.
In his freshly resting place six feet under the ground, the bones of the old minister, who had taught the one repenting in sackcloth and ashes, turned in the grave of their own accord.
His placement in the course of things had been fulfilled. The old dead minister had never laid eyes on the Ancient Book of Prophecies, nor had he ever been told of its being.
But he had been given knowledge of the trunk in a dream. He was told upon whom the mantle should fall: he should be the one to carry out the sacrificial prayer. Upon whom it would fall: he would be the official intercessor.
When the time had come, the old preacher had passed it on to the younger one, of whom he had received the sign. Now that preacher was repenting in sackcloth and ashes.
It had been prophesied to the old preacher that it would be known when the person requiring the sacrificial prayer should appear. And he who would carry out the sacrificial prayer would know when the person arrived.
And so it had been set in place the moment Tracie Burlingame had stepped foot in the church.
When the old preacher had awakened from the dream, the old, worn trunk and its precious contents were sitting in the middle of his chambers. There was no sign or trace of who had left them there.
That had been one hundred fifty years ago, long before Tracie Burlingame had ever existed.
39
Me had arrived in the darkness of the night. He stood in the middle of the exhibition room at The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, on 135th Street and Lenox Avenue.
It was right across the street from where Randi Burlingame had taken his final tumble on the concrete sidewalk in Harlem. He looked on with disgust at the Harlem Renaissance authors whose portraits were proudly displayed on the walls. He snorted, and someone sneezed.
He knew them. Oh, yeah. He had known them all at one time or another. He’d known what their mission was, their slim visions of grandeur in the architecture of words.
But he had made sure, as they had drawn their wordy landscapes over the seasons of time, that not one of them had truly captured or been able to divulge the truth. They had not possessed the underlying foundation that could piece it all together.
Oh, they had tried. Many of them had been extremely gifted, and skilled at their crafts. But the written legacies they had created were missing the essentials. They had not truly understood the full scope of things at all.
Nor would they have believed the sheer incredibleness of the raw truth. He knew that their basic natures would not allow them to accept something that had been staring them in the face since the beginning of time. Not these people. They had been stripped from the first stage play.
But he had to acknowledge that as separate entities they had managed to carve out tidbits. They had strewn them around like pieces of a puzzle, in many cases around the world. And if a person had the vision, the dawning realization could have grave consequences.
That he could not allow. That was why many of their spirits were sequestered, the gifted ones. Yet he was lucky, as there was not one yet who truly knew how to string together the tidbits to make up the whole.
Me scowled with scorn at the small wooden stage platform in the exhibition room. The Harlem Writers’ Guild, he knew, took great pride in holding their meetings in this particular room, where they felt that their ancestors and predecessors had laid a foundation of future success for them. They clung to these relics like drowning rats. Me laughed. He loved it when he had time to reflect on the well-placed stumbling blocks that had been placed in front of these people.
He hated these people. He specifically hated writers, those crafters of words, trying with all their might to be like their maker.
His utter destruction over time, as well as his deep hatred of them and his role in their pain and suffering, should have been enough. But it wasn’t. So on that night he decided to leave them something else to remember.
He had already been to the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books division in the research center. This precious division held personal papers, records of organizations and institutions, subject or thematic collections, literary and scholarly typescripts and playscripts, sheet music, broadsides, programs and playbills, ephemera, and rare books.
It held the history, literature, politics, and culture of peoples of African descent, or it had before Me’s visit tonight. After his visit, it just held many thousands of sheets of paper. Blank paper.
It served them right, Me decided. This center was the pride and joy of Harlem. What a shallow people they were. Me snorted. Tracie Burlingame’s future contribution would never be seen here, that was for sure.
As Me looked on with scorn, the rage welling and swelling inside him, Rashod Burlingame stared in rapt fascination and vivid horror as the implications of what this bald bodybuilding monster had been doing began to take shape in his mind.
From his place in Me’s biceps Rashod struggled to see through Me’s eyes. His gift was becoming stronger. When he had lived in his body on earth, his gifts, he realized, had been limited due to the abuses he heaped on himself on a day in, day out basis.
But having shed the restraints of his body, his spirit was somehow growing stronger. Along with it, his view and his ability to manuever were somehow gaining strength, credence, and power as well.
Soon he hoped to figure out how to speak to Ms. Virginia. He knew she was here. He had heard the familiar voice not long after his arrival, but he had not known quite how to communicate with her. He’d heard about her death shortly before his own.
The woman had been a mainstay in the Harlem literary scene since before he was born. She had probably educated more black babies than Harlem’s entire school system combined. Her store, Visionaries, had been a much beloved home and icon in Harlem. Like a favorite pair of old, comfortable slippers, always there for you.
Although he had never had any aspirations other than getting high and sketching when he was living, Ms. Virginia used to hire him. She’d give him a little change to run errands and move boxes of books and stuff for her. The fact that he was a junkie had never stopped her from doing it when she felt he was in need. Or when she wanted to give him what she called “productive work.” She was one of his mother’s oldest
salon customers.
He needed to talk to her. He just had to concentrate hard and figure out how he could do it. The space in which they were contained was like a vast vacuum with invisible walls. They were invisible but extremely solid.
He wondered briefly if he had enough strength to prevent Me from totally destroying this section of the Schomberg Center, because that was exactly what Me intended to do.
He had run up on the fact that Me’s destroying the Schomberg Center was a personal vendetta. In truth it was only a distraction from the true events that would take place.
Rashod was beginning to peer inside—just brief glimpses of pictures, really, were being transmitted to him from Me’s mind, and he didn’t like the portraits he was seeing. Whether he could do anything about them was a different story. But he would try because he wasn’t going to let this bald monster take out his home ground like that. Me was an evil incarnate.
He kept seeing pictures of Tracie. Rashod didn’t like it one bit that his mother was residing in this monster’s mind. He didn’t have the full picture, but he was not going to let this beast hurt his mother if he could help it.
He hoped Michael would gain some understanding from what had happened in his studio. They needed to put a plan in effect to take this bastard down.
But he had a feeling that Michael had fallen for Me’s little mind game. Michael actually thought Rashod had been suffocated and swallowed up by the snake and that he couldn’t communicate with him anymore.
It wasn’t true; all Me had done was put forth a grand illusion before Michael, so that he could back him off and scare him. He’d wanted to create doubt.
But, that was all right, Rashod decided, because what went around came around. He would find a way to defuse this demon.
Me approached his first portrait. He had never before stolen pictures. He did not intend to do so now, so he quickly swallowed the names and dates of birth and death of the immortalized authors. He found this a bit unsatisfying. He needed to defile the faces of his enemies. So he generated a heat that caused the images to melt.