CHAPTER 8

Wait, Wait! the Senator’s mind cried beneath the melodic line of Hickman’s reminiscing voice, feeling himself being dragged irresistibly along. Yes, Bliss is here, for I can see myself, Bliss, again, on the night that changed it all, dropping down from the back of the platform with the seven black-suited preachers in their high-backed chairs onto the soft earth covered with sawdust, hearing the surge of fevered song rising above me as Daddy Hickman’s voice sustained a note without apparent need for breath, rising high above the tent as I moved carefully out into the dark to avoid the ropes and tent stakes, walking softly over the sawdust and heading then across the clearing for the trees where Deacon Wilhite and the big boys were waiting. I moved reluctantly as always, yet hurrying; thinking, He still hasn’t breathed. He’s still up there, hearing Daddy Hickman soaring above the rest like a great dark bird of light, a sweet yet anguished mellowing cry. Still hearing it hovering there as I began to run to where I can see the shadowy figures standing around where it lies white and threatening upon a table set beneath the pines. Leaning huge against a tree off to the side is the specially built theatrical trunk they carried it in. Then I am approaching the table with dragging feet, hearing one of the boys giggling and saying, What you saying there, Deadman? And I look at it with horror—pink, frog-mouthed, with opened lid. Then looking back without answering, I see with longing the bright warmth of the light beneath the tent and catch the surging movements of the worshippers as they rock in time to the song which now seems to rise up to the still, sustained line of Daddy Hickman’s transcendent cry. Then Deacon Wilhite said, Come on little preacher, in you go! Lifting me, his hands firm around my ribs, then my feet beginning to kick as I hear the boys giggling, then going inside and the rest of me slipping past Teddy and Easter Bunny, prone now and taking my Bible in my hands and the shivery beginning as the tufted top brings the blackness down.

And not even ice cream, nothing to sustain me in my own terms. Nothing to make it seem worthwhile in Bliss’s terms.

At Deacon Wilhite’s signal they raise me and it is as though the earth has fallen away, leaving me suspended in air. I seem to float in the blackness, the jolting of their measured footsteps guided by Deacon Wilhite’s precise instructions, across the contoured ground, all coming to me muted through the pink insulation of the padding which lined the bottom, top, and sides, reaching me at blunt points along my shoulders, buttocks, heels, thighs. A beast with twelve disjointed legs coursing along, and I its inner ear, its anxiety; its anxious heart; straining to hear if the voice that sustained its line and me still soared. Because I believed that if he breathed while I was trapped inside, I’d never emerge. And hearing the creaking of a handle near my ear, the thump of Cylee’s knuckle against the side to let me know he was out there, squinch-eyed and probably giggling at my fear. Through the thick satin-choke of the lining the remote singing seeming miles away and the rhythmical clapping of hands coming to me like sharp, bright flashes of lightning, promising rain. Moving along on the tips of their measured strides like a boat in a slow current as I breathe through the tube in the lid of the hot ejaculatory air, hushed now by the entry and passage among them of that ritual coat of silk and satin, my stiff dark costume made necessary to their absurd and eternal play of death and resurrection … Back to that? No!

“Bliss, I watched them bringing you slowly down the aisle on those strong young shoulders and putting you there among the pots of flowers, the red and white roses and the bleeding hearts—and I stood above you on the platform and began describing the beginning and the end, the birth and the agony, and …”

Screaming, mute, the Senator thought, Not me but another. Bliss. Resting on his lids, black inside, yet he knew that it was pink, a soft, silky pink blackness around his face, covering even his nostrils. Always the blackness. Inside everything became blackness, even the white Bible and Teddy, even his white suit. Not me! It was black even around his ears, deadening the sound except for Reverend Hickman’s soaring song; which now, noodling up there high above, had taken on the softness of the piece of black velvet cloth from which Grandma Wilhite had made a nice full-dress overcoat—only better, because it had a wide cape for a collar. Ayee, but blackness.

He listened intently, one hand gripping the white Bible, the other frozen to Teddy’s paw. Teddy was down there where the top didn’t open at all, unafraid, a bold bad bear. He listened to the voice sustaining itself of its lyrics, the words rising out of the Word like Ezekiel’s wheels; without breath, straining desperately to keep its throbbing waves coming to him, thinking, If he stops to breathe I’ll die. My breath will stop too. Just like Adam’s clay if God had coughed or sneezed.

And yet he knew that he was breathing noisily through the tube set in the lid. Hurry, Daddy Hickman, he thought. Hurry and say the word. Please, let me rise up. Let me come up and out into the light and air.…

Bliss?

So they were walking me slowly over the smooth ground and I could feel the slight rocking movement as the box shifted on their shoulders. And I thought, That means we’re out in the clearing. Trees back there, voices thataway, life and light up there. Hurry! They’re moving slow, like an old boat drifting down the big river in the night and me inside looking up into the black sky, no moon nor stars and all the folks gone far beyond the levees. And I could feel the shivering creep up my legs now and squeezed Teddy’s paw to force it down. Then the rising rhythm of the clapping hands was coming to me like storming waves heard from a distance; like waves that struck the boat and flew off into the black sky like silver sparks from the shaking of the shimmering tambourines, showering at the zenith like the tails of skyrockets. If I could only open my eyes. It hangs heavy-heavy over my lids. Please hurry! Restore my sight. The night is black and I am far … far … I thought of Easter Bunny, he came from the dark inside of a red-and-white striped egg.…

And at last they were letting me down, down, down; and I could feel the jar as someone went too fast, as now a woman’s shout came to me, seeming to strike the side near my right ear like a flash of lightning streaking jaggedly across a dark night sky.

Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-sus! Have mercy, Jeeeeeee-sus! and the cold quivering flashed up my legs.

Everybody’s got to die, sisters and brothers, Daddy Hickman was saying, his voice remote through the dark. That is why each and every one must be redeemed. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE REDEEMED! Yes, even He who was the Son of God and the voice of God to man—even He had to die. And what I mean is die as a man. So what do you, the lowest of the low, what do you expect you’re going to have to do? He had to die in all of man’s loneliness and pain because that’s the price He had to pay for coming down here and putting on the pitiful, unstable form of man. Have mercy! Even with his godly splendor which could transform the built-in wickedness of man’s animal form into an organism that could stretch and strain toward sublime righteousness—amen! That could show man the highway to progress and toward a more noble way of living—even with all that, even He had to die! Listen to me tell it to you: Even He who said, Suffer the little ones to come unto Me, had to die as a man. And like a man crying from His cross in all of man’s pitiful puzzlement at the will of Almighty God!…

It was not yet time. I could hear the waves of Daddy Hickman’s voice rolling against the sides, then down and back, now to boom suddenly in my ears as I felt the weight of darkness leave my eyes, my face bursting with sweat as I felt the rush of bright air bringing the odor of flowers. I lay there, blinking up at the lights, the satin corrugations of the slanting lid, and the vague outlines of Deacon Wilhite, who now was moving aside, so that it seemed as though he had himself been the darkness. I lay there breathing through my nose, deeply inhaling the flowers as I released Teddy’s paw and grasped my white Bible with both hands, feeling the chattering and the real terror beginning and an ache in my bladder. For always it was as though it waited for the moment when I was prepared to answer Daddy Hickman’s signal to rise up that it seemed to slide like heavy mud from my face to my thighs and there to hold me like quicksand. Always at the sound of Daddy Hickman’s voice I came floating up like a corpse shaken loose from the bed of a river and the terror rising with me.

We are the children of Him who said, “Suffer …” I heard, and in my mind I could see Deacon Wilhite, moving up to stand beside Daddy Hickman at one of the two lecterns, holding on to the big Bible and looking intently at the page as he repeated, Suffer …

And the two men standing side by side, the one large and dark, the other slim and light brown; the other reverends rowed behind them, their faces staring grim with engrossed attention to the reading of the Word, like judges in their carved, high-backed chairs. And the two voices beginning their call and countercall as Daddy Hickman began spelling out the text which Deacon Wilhite read, playing variations on the verses just as he did with his trombone when he really felt like signifying on a tune the choir was singing:

Suffer, meaning in this workaday instance to surrender, Daddy Hickman said.

Amen, Deacon Wilhite said, repeating Surrender.

Yes, meaning to surrender with tears and to feel the anguished sense of human loss. Ho, our hearts bowed down!

Suffer the little ones, Deacon Wilhite said.

The little ones—ah yes! Our little ones. He was talking to us too, Daddy Hickman said. Our little loved ones. Flesh of our flesh, soul of our soul. Our hope for heaven and our charges in this world. Yes! The little lambs. The promise of our fulfillment, the guarantee of our mortal continuance. The little was-to-bes—Ha!—amen! The little used-to-bes that we all were to our mammies and pappies, and with whom we are but one with God.…

Oh my Lord, just look how the bright word leaps! Daddy Hickman said. First the babe, then the preacher. The babe father to the man, the man father to us all. A kind father calling for the babes in the morning of their earthly day—yes. Then in the twinkling of an eye, Time slams down and He calls us to come on home!

He said to come, Brother Alonzo.

Ah yes, to come, meaning to approach. To come up and be counted; to go along with Him, Lord Jesus. To move through the narrow gate bristling with spears, up the hill of Calvary, to climb onto the unyielding cross on which even li’l babies are turned into men. Yes, to come upon the proving ground of the human condition. Vanity dropped like soiled underwear. Pride stripped off like a pair of duckings that’ve been working all week in the mud. Feet dragging with the gravity of the trial ahead. Legs limp as a pair of worn-out galluses. With eyes dim as a flickering lamp-wick! Read to me, Deacon; line me out some more!

He said volumes in just those words. Brother Alonzo, COME UNTO ME, Deacon Wilhite cried.

Yes! Meaning to take up His burden. At first the little baby-sized load that with the first steps we take weighs less than a butter ball; no more than the sugar tit made up for a year-and-a-half-old child. Then, Lord help us, it grows heavier with each step we take along life’s way. Until in that moment it weighs upon us like the headstone of the world. Meaning to come bringing it! Come hauling it! Come dragging it! Come even if you have to crawl! Come limping, come lame; come crying in your Jesus’ name—but come! Come with your abuses but come with no excuses. Amen! Let me have it again, Rev. Wilhite.…

Come unto me, the Master said.

Meaning to help the weak and the downhearted. To stand up to the oppressors. To suffer and hang from the cross for standing up for what you believe. Meaning to undergo His initiation into the life everlasting. Oh yes, and to cry, cry, cry … Eyeeeee.

I could hear the word rise and spread to become the great soaring trombone note of Daddy Hickman’s singing voice now and it seemed somehow to arise there in the box with me, shaking me fiercely as it rose to float with throbbing pain up to him again, who now seemed to stand high above the tent. And trembling I tensed myself and rose slowly from the waist in the controlled manner Daddy Hickman had taught me, feeling the terror gripping my chest like quicksand, feeling the opening of my mouth and the spastic flexing of my diaphragm as the words rushed to my throat to join his resounding cry:

Lord … Lord …

 … Why …

 … Hast Thou …

Forsaken me?… I cried, but now Daddy Hickman was opening up and bearing down:

 … More Man than men and yet in that world-destroying, world-creating moment just a little child calling to His Father.… HEAR THE LAMB A-CRYING ON THE TREE!

LORD, LORD, I cried, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?

Amen, Daddy Hickman said, amen!

Then his voice came faster, explosive with gut-toned preacher authority:

The father of no man, who yet was Father to all men—the human-son side of God—Great God A-mighty! Calling out from the agony of the cross! Ho, open up your downcast eyes and see the beauty of the living Word.… All babe, and yet in the mysterious moment, ALL MAN. Him who had taken up the burden of all the little children crying, LORD …

Lord, I cried.

Crying plaintive as a baby sheep …

 … Baaaaaaaaa!…

Yes, the little Lamb crying with the tongue of man …

 … LORD …

 … Crying to the Father …

 … Lord, LORD …

 … Calling to his pappy …

 … Lord, Lord, why hast …

Amen! LORD, WHY …

 … Hast Thou …

Forsaken … me …

Aaaaaaaaaaah!

WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME, LORD?

I screamed the words in answer and now I wanted to cry, to be finished, but the sound of Daddy Hickman’s voice told me that this was not the time, that the words were taking him where they wanted him to go. I could hear him beginning to walk up and down the platform behind me, pacing in his great black shoes, his voice rising above his heavy tread, his great chest heaving.

Crying—amen! Crying, Lord, Lord—amen! On a cross on a hill, His arms spread out like my mammy told me it was the custom to stretch a runaway slave when they gave him the water cure. When they forced water into his mouth until water filled up his bowels and he lay swollen and drowning on the dry land. Drinking water, breathing water, water overflowing his earthbound lungs like a fish drowning of air on the parched dry land.

And nailed NAILED to the cross-arm like a coonskin fixed to the side of a barn, yes, but with the live coon still inside the furry garment! Still in possession, with all nine points of the Roman law a fiery pain to consume the house. Yes, every point of law a spearhead of painful injustice. Ah, yes!

Look! His head is lolling! Green gall is drooling from His lips. Drooling as it had in those long sweet, baby days long gone. AH, BUT NO TIT SO TOUGH NOR PAP SO BITTER AS TOUCHED THE LIPS OF THE DYING LAMB!

There He is, hanging on; hanging on in spite of knowing the way it would have to be. Yes! Because the body of man does not wish to die! It matters not who’s inside the ribs, the heart, the lungs. Because the body of man does not sanction death. That’s why suicide is but sulking in the face of hope! Ah, man is tough. Man is human! Yes, and by definition man is proud. Even when heaven and hell come slamming together like a twelve-pound sledge on a piece of heavy-gauged railroad steel, man is tough and mannish, and ish means like …

So there He was, stretching from hell-pain to benediction; head in heaven and body in hell—tell me, who said He was weak? Who said He was frail? Because if He was, then we need a new word for strength, we need a new word for courage. We need a whole new dictionary to capture the truth of that moment.

Ah, but there He is, with the others laughing up at Him, their mouths busted open like melons with rotten seeds—laughing! You know how it was, you’ve been up there. You’ve heard that contemptuous sound: IF YOU BE THE KING OF THE JEWS AND THE SON OF GOD, JUMP DOWN! JUMP DOWN, BLACK BASTARD, DIRTY JEW, JUMP DOWN! Scorn burning the wind. Enough halitosis alone to burn up old Moloch and melt him down.

He’s bleeding from his side. Hounds baying the weary stag. And yet … And yet, His the power and the glory locked in the weakness of His human manifestation, bound by His acceptance of His human limitation, His sacrificial humanhood! Ah, yes, for He willed to save man by dying as man dies, and He was a heap of man in that moment, let me tell you. He was man raised to his most magnificent image, shining like a prism glass with all the shapes and colors of man, and dazzling all who had the vision to see. Man moved beyond mere pain to godly joy.… There He is, with the spikes in His tender flesh. Nailed to the cross. First with it lying flat on the ground, and then being raised in a slow, flesh-rending, bone-scraping arc, one hundred and eighty degrees—up, up, UP! Aaaaaaaaaaaah! Until He’s upright like the ridgepole of the House of God. Lord, Lord, Why? See Him, watch Him! Feel Him! His eyes rolling as white as our eyes, looking to His, our Father’s, the tendons of His neck roped out, straining like the steel cables of a heavenly curving bridge in a storm. His jaw muscles bursting out like kernels of corn on a hot stove lid. Yea! His mouth trying to refuse the miserable human questioning of His fated words …

Lord, Lord …

Oh, yes, Rev. Bliss. Crying above the laughing ones whom He left His Father to come down here to save, crying—

Lord, Lord, Why …?

Amen! Crying as no man since—thank you, Jesus—has ever had to cry.

Ah, man, ah, human flesh! This side we all know well. On this weaker, human side we were all up there on the cross, just swarming over Him like microbes. But look at Him with me now, look at Him fresh, with the eyes of your most understanding human heart. There He is, hanging on in man-flesh, His face twitching and changing like a field of grain struck by a high wind—hanging puzzled. Bemused and confused. Mystified and teary-eyed, racked by the realization dawning in the gray matter of His cramped human brain; knowing in the sinews, in the marrow of His human bone, in the living tissue of His most human veins—realizing totally that man was born to suffer and to die for other men! There He is, look at Him. Suspended between heaven and hell, hanging on already nineteen centuries of time in one split second of his torment and realizing, I say, realizing in that second of His anguished cry that life in this world is but a zoom between the warm womb and the lonely tomb. Proving for all time, casting the pattern of history forth for all to see in the undeniable concreteness of blood, bone and human courage before that which has to be borne by every man. Proving, proving that in this lonely, lightning-bug flash of time we call our life on earth we all begin with a slap of a hand across our tender baby bottoms to start us crying the puzzled question with our first drawn breath:

Why was I born?… Aaaaaaaah!

And hardly before we can get it out of our mouths, hardly before we can exhale the first lungful of life’s anguished air—even before we can think to ask, Lord, what’s my true name? Who, Lord, am I?—here comes the bone-crunching slap of a cold iron spade across our cheeks and it’s time to cry, WHY, LORD, WHY WAS I BORN TO DIE?

Yes, why? Revern’ Hickman, tell us why.

Why, Rev. Bliss? Because we’re men, that’s why! The initiation into the lodge is hard! The dues are outrageous and what’s more, nobody can refuse to join. Oh, we can wear the uniforms and the red-and-purple caps and capes a while, and we can enjoy the feasting and the marching and strutting and the laughing fellowship—then Dong, dong! and we’re caught between two suspensions of our God-given breath. One to begin and the other to end it, a whoop of joy and a sigh of sadness, the pinch of pain and the tickle of gladness, learning charity if we’re lucky, faith if we endure, and hope in sheer downright desperation!

That’s why, Reveren’ Bliss. But now, thank God, because He passed his test like any mannish man—not like a God, but like any pale, frail, weak man who dared to be his father’s son.… Amen!

Oh, we must dare to be, brothers and sisters.… We must dare, my little children.… We must dare in our own troubled times to be our Father’s own. Yes, and now we have the comfort and the example to help us through from darkness to lightness, a beacon along the way. Ah, but in that flash of light in which we flower and wither and die, we must find Him so that He can find us, ourselves. For it is only a quivering moment—then the complicated tongs of life’s old good-bad come clamping down, grabbing us in our tender places, feeling like a bear’s teeth beneath the shortest of our short hairs. Lord, He taught us how to live, yes! And in the sun-drowning awfulness of that moment, He taught us how to die. There He was on the cross, leading His sheep, showing us how to achieve the heritage of our godliness which He in that most pitiful human moment—with spikes in His hands and through His feet, with the thorny crown of scorn studding His tender brow, with the cruel points of Roman steel piercing His side … crying …

Lord …

 … Lord …

LORD! Amen. Crying from the castrated Roman tree unto his father like an unjustly punished child. And yet, Rev. Bliss, glory to God.… And yet He was guaranteeing with the final expiration of His human breath our everlasting life.…

Bliss’s throat ached with the building excitement of it all. He could feel the Word working in the crowd now, boiling in the heat of the Word and the weather. Women were shouting and leaping up suddenly to collapse back into their chairs, and far back in the dark he could see someone dressed in white leaping into the air with out-flung arms, going up then down—over backwards and up and down again, in a swooning motion which made her seem to float in the air stirred by the agitated movement of women’s palm-leaf fans. It was long past the time for him to preach Saint Mark, but each time he cried Lord, Lord, they shouted and screamed all the louder. Across the platform now he could see Deacon Wilhite lean against the lectern shaking his head, his lips pursed against his great emotion. While behind him, the great preachers in their high-backed chairs thundered out deep staccato amens, he tried to see to the back of the tent, back where the seams in the ribbed white cloth curved down and were tied in a roll; past where the congregation strained forward or sat rigid in holy transfixion, seeing here and there the hard, bright disks of eyeglasses glittering in the hot, yellow light of lanterns and flares. The faces were rapt and owllike, gleaming with heat and Daddy Hickman’s hot interpretation of the Word.…

Then suddenly, right down there in front of the coffin he could see an old white-headed man beginning to leap in holy exaltation, bounding high into the air, and sailing down; then up again, higher than his own head, moving like a jumping jack, with bits of sawdust dropping from his white tennis shoes. A brown old man, whose face was a blank mask, set and mysterious like a picture framed on a wall, his lips tight, his eyes starry, like those of a blue-eyed china doll—soaring without effort through the hot shadows of the tent. Sailing as you sailed in dreams just before you fell out of bed. A holy jumper, Brother Pegue …

Bliss turned to look at Daddy Hickman, seeing the curved flash of his upper teeth and the swell of his great chest as with arms outspread he began to sing … when suddenly from the left of the tent he heard a scream.

It was of a different timbre, and when he turned, he could see the swirling movement of a woman’s form; strangely, no one was reaching out to keep her from hurting herself, from jumping out of her underclothes and showing her womanness as some of the ladies sometimes did. Then he could see her coming on, a tall redheaded woman in a purple-red dress; coming screaming through the soprano section of the big choir where the members, wearing their square, flat-topped caps, were standing and knocking over chairs to let her through as she dashed among them striking about with her arms.

She’s a sinner coming to testify, he thought.… But white? Is she white? hearing the woman scream,

He’s mine, MINE! That’s Cudworth, my child. My baby. You gypsy niggers stole him, my baby. You robbed him of his birthright!

And he thought, Yes, she’s white all right, seeing the wild eyes and the red hair, streaming like a field on fire, coming toward him now at a pace so swift it seemed suddenly dreamlike slow. What’s she doing here with us, a white sinner? Moving toward him like the devil in a nightmare, as now a man’s voice boomed from far away, Madam, LADY, PLEASE—this here’s the House of God!

But even then not realizing that she was clawing and pushing her way toward him. Cudworth, he thought, who’s Cudworth? Then suddenly there she was, her hot breath blasting his ear, her pale face shooting down toward him like an image leaping from a toppling mirror, her green eyes wide, her nostrils flaring. Then he felt the bite of her arms locking around him and his head was crushed against her breast, hard into the sharp, sweet woman-smell of her. Me. She means me, he thought, as something strange and painful stirred within him. Then he could no longer breathe. She was crushing his face closer to her, squeezing and shaking him as he felt his Bible slipping from his fingers and tried desperately to hold on. But she screamed again with a sudden movement, her voice bursting hot into the sudden hush. And now he felt his Bible fall irretrievably away in the well-like echo punctuated by the heaving rasp of her breathing as he realized that she was trying to tear him from the coffin.

I’m taking him home to his heritage, he heard. He’s mine, you understand? I’m his mother!

It sounded strangely dreamy, like a scene you saw when the big boys told you to open your eyes under the water. Who is she, he thought, where’s she taking me? She’s strong, but my mother went away, Paradise up high.… Then he was looking around at the old familiar grown folks, seeing their bodies frozen in odd postures, like kids playing a game of statue. And he thought, They’re scaird; she’s scairing them all, as his head was snapped around to where he could see Daddy Hickman leaning over the platform just above, bracing his hands against his thighs, his arms rigid and a wild look of disbelief on his great laughing-happy face, as now he shook his head. Then she moved again and as his head came around the scene broke and splashed like quiet water stirred by a stick.

Now he could see the people standing and leaning forward to see, some standing in chairs holding on to the shoulders of those in front, their eyes and mouths opened wide. Then the scene suddenly crumpled like a funny paper in a fireplace. He saw their mouths uttering the same insistent burst of words so loud and strong that he heard only a blur of loud silence. Yet her breathing came hard and clear. His head came around to her now, and he could see a fringe of freckles shooting across the ridge of the straight thin nose like a covey of quail flushing across a field of snow, the wide-glowing green of her eyes. Stiff copper hair was bursting from the pale white temple, reminding him of the wire bristles of Daddy Hickman’s “Electric Hairbrush.” … Then the scene changed again with a serene new sound beginning:

JUST DIG MY GRAVE, he heard. JUST DIG MY GRAVE AND READY MY SHROUD, ’CAUSE THIS HERE AIN’T HAPPENING! OH, NO, IT AIN’T GOING TO HAPPEN. SO JUST DIG-A MY GRAVE!

It was a short, stooped black woman, hardly larger than a little girl, whose shoulders slanted straight down from her neck inside the white collar of her oversized black dress, and from which her deep and vibrant alto voice seemed to issue as from a source other than her mouth. He could see her coming through the crowd, shaking her head and pointing toward the earth, crying, I SAID DIG IT! I SAID GO GET THE DIGGERS! the words so intense with negation that they sounded serene, the voice rolling with eerie confidence as now she seemed to float in among the white-uniformed deaconesses who stood at the front to his right. And he could see the women turning to stare questioningly at one another, then back to the little woman, who moved between them, grimly shaking her head. And now he could feel the arms tighten around his body, gripping him like a bear, and he was being lifted up, out of the coffin; hearing her scream hotly past his ear, DON’T YOU BLUEGUMS TOUCH ME! DON’T YOU DARE!

And again it was as though they had all receded beneath the water to a dimly lit place where nothing would respond as it should. For at the woman’s scream he saw the little woman and the deaconesses pause, just as they should have paused in the House of God as well as in the world outside the House of God—then she was lifting him higher and he felt his body come up until only one foot was still caught on the pink lining, and as he looked down he saw the coffin move. It was going over, slowly, like a turtle falling off a log; then it seemed to rise up of its own will, lazily, as one of the sawhorses tilted, causing it to explode. He felt that he was going to be sick in the woman’s arms, for glancing down, he could see the coffin still in motion, seeming to rise up of its own will, lazily, indulgently, like Daddy Hickman turning slowly in pleasant sleep—only it seemed to laugh at him with its pink frog-mouth. Then as she moved him again, one of the sawhorses shifted violently, and he could see the coffin tilt at an angle and heave, vomiting Teddy and Easter Bunny and his glass pistol with its colored-candy BB bullets, like prizes from a paper horn of plenty. Even his white leather Bible was spurted out, its pages fluttering open for everyone to see.

He thought, He’ll be mad about my Bible and my bear, feeling a scream start up from where the woman was squeezing his stomach, as now she swung him swiftly around, causing the church tent, the flares, and the people to spin before his eyes like a great tin humming top. Then he felt his head snap forward and back, rattling his teeth—and in the sudden break of movement he saw the deaconesses springing forward even as the spilled images from the toppling coffin quivered vividly before his eyes then faded like a splash of water in bright sunlight—just as a tall woman with short, gleaming hair and steel-rimmed glasses shot from among the deaconesses and as her lenses glittered harshly he saw her mouth come open, causing the other women to freeze and a great silence to explode beneath the upward curve of his own shrill scream. Then he saw her head go back with an angry toss and he felt the sound slap hard against him.

What? Y’all mean to tell me? Here in the House a God? She’s coming in here—who? WHOOOO! JUST TELL ME WHO BORN OF MAN’S HOT CONJUNCTION WITH A WOMAN’S SINFUL BOWELS?

And like an eerie echo now, the larger voice of the smaller woman floated up from the sawdust-covered earth, JUST DIG MY GRAVE! I SAY JUST READY MY SHROUD! JUST … and the voices booming and echoing beneath the tent like a duet of angry ghosts. Then it was as though something heavy had plunged from a great height into the water, throwing the images into furious motion, and he could see the frozen women leap forward.

They came like shadows flying before a torch tossed into the dark, their weight seeming to strike the white woman who held him out of one single, slow, long-floating, space-defying leap, sending her staggering backward and causing her arms to squash the air from his lungs—Aaaaaaaah! Their faces, wet with wrath, loomed before him, seeming to enter where his breath had been, their dark, widespread hands beginning to tear at his body like the claws of great cats with human heads; lifting him screaming clear of earth and coffin and suspending him there between the redheaded woman who now held his head and the others who had seized possession of his legs, arms, and body. And again he felt, but could not hear, his own throat’s Aaaaaaaaaaaayee!

The Senator was first aware of the voice; then the dry taste of fever filled his mouth and he had the odd sensation that he had been listening to a foreign language that he knew but had neglected, so that now it was necessary to concentrate upon each word in order to translate its meaning. The very effort seemed to reopen his wounds and now his fingers felt for the button to summon the nurse but the voice was still moving around him, mellow and evocative. He recognized it now, allowing the button to fall as he opened his eyes. Yes, it was Hickman’s, still there. And now it was as though he had been listening all along, for Hickman did not pause, his voice flowed on with an urgency which compelled him to listen, to make the connections.

“ ‘Well, sir, Bliss,” Hickman said, “here comes this white woman pushing over everybody and loping up to the box and it’s like hell had erupted at a sideshow. She rushed up to the box and …”

“Box?” the Senator said. “You mean ‘coffin,’ don’t you?”

He saw Hickman look up, frowning judiciously. “No, Bliss, I mean ‘box’; it ain’t actually a coffin till it holds a dead man.… So, as I was saying, she rushed up and grabs you in the box and the deaconesses leaped out of their chairs and folks started screaming, and I looked out there for some white folks to come and get her, but couldn’t see a single one. So there I was. I could have cried like a baby, because I knew that one miserable woman could bring the whole state down on us. Still there she is, floating up out of nowhere like a puff of poison gas to land right smack in the middle of our meeting. Bliss, it was like God had started playing practical jokes.

“Next thing I know she’s got you by the head and Sister Susie Trumball’s got one leg and another sister’s got the other, and others are snatching you by the arms—talking about King Solomon, he didn’t have but two women to deal with, I had seven. And one convinced that she’s a different breed of cat from the rest. Yes, and the others chock-full of disagreement and out to prove it. I tell you, Bliss, when it comes to chillun, women just ain’t gentlemen, and the fight between her kind of woman and ours goes way back to the beginning. Back, I guess, to when women found that the only way they could turn over the responsibility of raising a child to another woman was to turn over some of the child’s love and affection along with it. They been battling ever since. One trying to figure out how to get out of the work without dividing up the affection, and the other trying to hold on to all that weight of care and those cords of emotion and love for which they figure no wages can ever pay. Because while some women work and others don’t, to a woman a baby is a baby. She ain’t rational about it, way down deep she ain’t. All it’s got to be is little and warm and helpless and cute and she wants to take it over, just like a she-cat will raise a litter of rabbits, or a she-bitch dog will mama a Maltese kitten. I guess most of those deaconesses had been nursing white folks’ chillun from the time they could first take a job and each and every one of them had helped raise somebody’s baby and loved it. Yes, and had fought battles with the white women every step of the way. It’s a wonder those babies ever grow up to have good sense with all that vicious, mute-unspoken female fighting going on over them from the day they was passed from the midwife’s or doctor’s hands into his mother’s arms and then from the minute it needed its first change of swaddling clothes, into some black woman’s waiting hands. Talking about God and the Devil fighting over a man’s soul, that situation must make a child’s heart a battleground. ’Cause, Bliss, as you must know by now, women don’t recognize no rules except their own—men make the public rules—and they knew all about this so-called psychological warfare long before men finally recognized it and named it and took credit for inventing something new.

“So there this poor woman comes moving out of her territory and bursting into theirs. Mad, Bliss, mad! That night all those years of aggravation was multiplied against her seven times seven. Because down there her kind always wins the contest in the end—for the child, I mean—with ours being doomed to lose from the beginning and knowing it. They have got to be weaned—our women, I mean, the nursemaids. And yet, it just seems to make their love all the deeper and the tenderer. They know that when the child hits his teens they can’t hold him or help him any longer, even if she gets to be wise as Solomon. She can help with the first steps of babyhood and teach it its first good manners and love it and all like that, but she can’t do nothing about helping it take the first steps into manhood and womanhood. Ha, no! Who ever heard of one of us knowing anything about dealing with life, or knowing a better way of facing up to the harsh times along the road? So the whole system’s turned against her then from foundation to roof; the whole beehive of what their folks consider good—‘quality,’ we used to say—is moved out of her domain. They just don’t recognize no continuance of anything after that: not love, not remembrance, not understanding, sacrifice, compassion—nothing. Come the teen time, what we used to call the ‘smell-yourself’ time, when the sweat gets musty and you start to throb, they cast out the past and start out new—baptized into Caesar’s way, Bliss. Which is the price the grown ones exact for the privilege of their being called ‘miss’ and ‘mister.’ So self-castrated of their love they pass us by, boy, they pass us by. Then as far as we’re concerned it’s ‘Put your heart on ice, put your conscience in pawn.’ Even their beloved black tit becomes an empty bag to laugh at and they grow deaf to their mammy’s lullabies. What’s wrong with those folks, Bliss, is they can’t stand continuity, not the true kind that binds man to man and to Jesus and to God. My great-great-granddaddy was probably a savage eating human flesh, and bastardy, denied joy and shame, and humanity had to be mixed with my name a thousand times in the turmoil of slavery, and out of all that I’m a preacher. It’s a mystery but it’s based on fact, it happened body to body, belly to belly over the long years. But then? They’re all born yesterday at twelve years of age. They can’t stand continuity because if they could everything would have to be changed; there’d be more love among us, boy. But the first step in their growing up is to learn how to spurn love. They have to deny it by law, boy. Then begins the season of hate AND SHAMEFACEDNESS. Confusion leaps like fire in the bowels and false faces bloom like jimsonweed. They put on a mask, boy, and life’s turned plumb upside down.

“ ’Cause what can be right if the first, the baby love, was wrong, Bliss? Tell me then where’s the foundation of the world? The tie that binds? You tell me, if with a boy’s first buzz and a gal’s first flow ‘warm’ has to become ‘cold’ and ‘tenderness’ calls forth ‘harshness’ and ‘forthrightness’ calls forth ‘deviousness,’ and innocence standing on the shady side of the street is automatically to be judged guilt? Hasn’t joy then got to become flawed, just another name for sadness, like a golden trumpet with a crack in the valves and then with a pushed-in bell? Yes, and gratitude and charity and patience, endurance and hope and all the virtues Christ died to teach us become nothing but a burden and a luxury for black, knotty-headed fools? Speak to me, Bliss. You took their way, so speak to me and let me see by the light of their truth. I have arrived in ignorance and questioning. I’m old; my white head’s almost forgot its blacker times and my sight’s so poor I can almost look God’s blazing sun straight in the face without batting my fading eyes. And I’m a simple man and nothing can change that. But I’m talking about simple things. For me, Bliss, the frame of life is round, and looking through I see the spirit does not die and neither does love when she smells of she and he smells of he, and the skirts git short and the voice cracks and deepens to mannish tones. No, but the way they’ve worked it out, tears become specialized, boy; and Jesus looked at the lot of man and wept for everybody. But those people put a weatherman in control of the sky. They cut the ties between the child and the foundation of his love. Laughter cracks down like thunder when tears ought to fall. And would have too, the year before. But standing in the doorway of manhood and womanhood you have to question yourself how to feel in the simplest things. You fall out of rhythm with your earliest cries, your movements. Little signs have to be stuck up and consulted in the heart: How must I feel, Mister Weatherman? His face over there is dark; though I used to know it, can I say howdy? She stretches forth the same old hand for charity that used to cook the fudge and plait my braids, can I acknowledge it? She cries for understanding and a recognition of that old cut nerve that twitches in my heart—can I afford to hear the voice of this bowed-down heart? How much money will it cost me, Mister Weatherman? He wrestles over there in pain; ain’t this the time to laugh, with misery monkeying up his wrinkled face? Or he speaks polite and steps aside, isn’t this the way of fear and a sign that God has spat on him? Bow down, bow down! Step aside and out of my exalted human sight.

“Then a little later, Bliss, when he’s found a mate, that old severed nerve throbs again. They’re laughing like fools out in the quarters—is it to mock my dignity? Is it zippered up? Listen to them praying, is it for my abject destruction? I built my house on King Mountain stone, will it crumble before their envying eyes? In the dark in the alley, in the summer night some mister man is making a woman howl and spit like a rapturous cat—could that black tomcat have prowled in my bed? Could he? Could he? How now! He’s a buck stallion full of stinking sweat, I’m an eagle, bright with the light of God’s own smile. His woman’s a bitch and mine a doe … Ah, but think about it with the blue serge hanging on the rack: Has a black stallion ever mounted a snow-white doe at her frisky invitation when the sun was down? What goes on in that darkness I create when I refuse to see? What links up with what? Who reaches out to whom within that gulley, under that lid of life denied? You want me to hush and go away, Bliss?

“Not now, it’s been too long and some things just won’t stand not being said. Oh, all I’ve been talking about is human, Bliss. All human weakness and human pride and will—didn’t Peter deny Christ? But you had a choice, Bliss. You had a chance to join up to be a witness for either side and you let yourself be fouled up. You tried to go with those who raise the failure of love above their heads like a flag and say, ‘See here, I am now a man.’ You wanted to be with those who turn coward before their strongest human need and then say, ‘Look here, I’m brave.’ It makes me laugh, because few are brave enough to be for right and truth above all their other foolishness. There wasn’t a single man in that jail that night they beat me who didn’t know I was innocent and there wasn’t a single person in that town who didn’t know that woman was crazy, but not a single one was brave enough and free enough simply not to beat me. I don’t mean defend me, I don’t mean take up the cause of Justice, but just say to the others, ‘Listen, this man is innocent. He was preaching before a tent full of people and so couldn’t have touched that woman with a ten-foot pole.’ No, Bliss, I didn’t expect that because I knew the score. But even knowing it I found I still had something to learn. I had to lay there while they beat me and what I learned was that there wasn’t a mother’s son among them who, knowing my innocence, had the manhood and decency to refuse to whip my head. I guess if there’d been a preacher among them he’d’ve got in his licks with the rest. I lay there and laughed, Bliss. Sure, I laughed. I laughed because there is some knowledge that’s just too hopeless for tears.

“That was a long time ago and a few years before you were to make your choice, Bliss, but the devilment I’m describing has been going on for years and it’s a process for blinding and all the hell unleashed in the church that night sprang from it. The eye that was trained by two women’s love to love and respond to life now must be blind to the spirit that shines from all but a special few human eyes, and now you can’t look beneath the surface of a windowpane and see fire and the mirrors are rigged so you can’t see what you would deny in those whom you would deny. Oh, sure, Bliss; you can cut that cord and zoom off like a balloon and rise high—I mean that cord woven of love, of touching, ministering love, that’s tied to a babe with its first swaddling clothes—but the cord don’t shrivel and die like a navel cord beneath the first party dress or the first long suit of clothes. Oh no, it parts with a cry like a rabbit torn by a hawk in the winter snows and it numbs quick and glazes like the eyes of a sledge-hammered ox and the blood don’t show, it’s like a wound that’s cauterized. It snaps with the heart’s denial back into the skull like a worm chased by a razor-beaked bird, and once inside it snarls, Bliss; it snarls up the mind. It won’t die and there’s no sun inside to set so it can stop its snakish wiggling. It bores reckless excursions between the brain and the heart and kills and kills again un-killable continuity. Bliss, when Eve deviled and Adam spawned we were all in the dark, and that’s a fact.”

Suddenly the old man shook his head. “Oh, Bliss; Bliss, boy. I get carried away with words. Forgive me. Maybe a black man, even one as old as me, just can’t understand the mystery of a white man’s pain. But one thing I do know: God, Bliss boy, is Love.”

The Senator looked up at the fading voice, gripped by the fear that with its cessation his own breath would go. But there was Hickman still beside him, looking down as with the wonder of his Word for God.

“Perhaps,” the Senator said, “but it makes the laces too tight. Tell me what happened while there’s still time.”

“Lord, Bliss,” Hickman said, “here I’ve gone off and left you suspended in those women’s hands and you crying to beat the band. Well, for a minute there it looked like they were going to snatch you limb from limb and dart off in seven different directions. And the folks were getting outraged a mile a minute. Because although you might have forgot it, nothing makes our people madder and will bring them to make a killing-floor stand quicker than to have white folks come bringing their craziness into the church. We just can’t stand to have our one place of peace broken up, and nothing’ll upset us worse—unless it’s messing with one of our babies. You could just see it coming on, Bliss. I turned and yelled at them to regard the House of God—when here comes another woman, one of the deaconesses, Sister Bearmasher. She’s a six-foot city woman from Birmingham, wearing eyeglasses and who ordinarily was the kindest woman you’d want to see. Soft-spoken and easygoing the way some big women get to be because most of the attention goes to the little cute ones. Well, Bliss, she broke it up.

“I saw her coming down the aisle from the rear of the tent and reaching over the heads of the others, and before I could move she’s in that woman’s head of long red hair like a wildcat in a weaving mill. I couldn’t figure what she was up to in all that pushing and tugging, but when they kind of rumbled around and squatted down low like they were trying to grab better holts I could see somebody’s shoe and a big comb come sailing out; then they squatted again a couple of times, real fast, and when they come up, she’s got all four feet or so of that woman’s red hair wrapped around her arm like an ell of copper-colored cloth. And Bliss, she’s talking calm and slapping the others away with her free hand like they were babies. Saying, ‘Y’all just leave her to me now, sisters. Everything’s going to be all right. She ain’t no trouble, darlings; not now. Get on away now, Sis’ Trumball. Let her go now. You got rheumatism in you shoulder anyway. Y’all let her loose, now. Coming here into the House of God talking about this is her child. Since when? I want to know, since when? HOLD STILL DARLING! she tells the white woman. ‘NOBODY WANTS TO HURT YOU, BUT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THAT YOU HAVE GONE TOO FAR!’

“And that white woman is holding on to you for dear life, Bliss; with her head snubbed back, way back, like a net full of red snappers and flounders being wound up on a ship’s winch. And this big amazon of a woman, who could’ve easily set horses with a Missouri mule, starts then to preaching her own sermon. Saying, ‘If this Revern-Bliss-the-Preacher is her child then all the yellow bastards in the nation has got to be hers. So when, I say, so when’s she going to testify to all that? You sisters let her go now; just let me have her. Y’all just take that child. Take that child, I say. I love that child ’cause he’s God’s child and y’all love that child. So I say take that child out of this foolish woman’s sacrilegious hands. TAKE HIM, I SAY! And if this be the time then this is the time. If it’s the time to die, then I’m dead. If it’s the time to bleed, then I’m bleeding—but take that child. ’Cause whatever time it is, this is one kind of foolishness that’s got to be stopped before it gets any further under way!’

“Well, sir, there you were, Bliss, with the white woman still got holt of you but with her head snubbed back now and her head bucking like a frightened mare’s, screaming, ‘He’s mine, he’s mine.’ Claiming you, boy, claiming you right out of our hands. At least out of those women’s hands. Because us men were petrified, thrown out of action by that white woman’s nerve. And that big, strong Bearmasher woman threatening to snatch her scalp clean from her head.

“And all the time Sister Bearmasher is preaching her sermon. Saying, ‘If he was just learning his ABC’s like the average child instead of being a true, full-fledged preacher of the Gospel you wouldn’t want him and you’d yell down destruction on anybody who even signified he was yours—WHERE’S HIS DADDY? YOU AIN’T THE VIRGIN MARY, SO YOU SHO MUST’VE PICKED OUT HIS DADDY. WHO’S THE BLACK MAN YOU PICKED TO DIE?’

“And then, Bliss, women all over the place started to taking it up: ‘YES! That’s right, who’s the man? Let us behold him! Amen! Just tell us!’ and all like that.… Bliss, I’m a man with great puzzlement about life and I enjoy the wonderment of how things can happen and how folks can act, so I guess I must have been just standing there with my mouth open and taking it all in. But when those women started to making a chorus and working themselves up to do something drastic I broke loose. I reached down and grabbed my old trombone and started to blow. But instead of playing something calming, I was so excited that I broke into the ‘St. Louis Blues,’ like we used to when I was a young hellion and a fight would break out at a dance. Just automatically, you know; and I caught myself on about the seventh note and smeared into ‘Listen to the Lambs,’ but my lip was set wrong and there I was half laughing at how my sinful days had tripped me up—so that it came out ‘Let Us Break Bread Together,’ and by that time Deacon Wilhite had come to life and started singing and some of the men joined in—in fact, it was a men’s chorus, because those women were still all up in arms. I blew me a few bars then put down that horn and climbed down to the floor to see if I could untangle that mess.

“I didn’t want to touch that woman, so I yelled for somebody who knew her to come forward and get her out of there. Because even after I had calmed them a bit, she kept her death grip on you and was screaming, and Sister Bearmasher still had all that red hair wound round her arm and wouldn’t let go. Finally a woman named Lula Strothers came through and started to talk to her like you’d talk to a baby and she gave you up. I’m expecting the police or some of her folks by now, but luckily none of them had come out to laugh at us that night. So Bliss, I got you into some of the women’s hands and me and Sister Bearmasher got into the woman’s rubber-tired buggy and rode off into town. She had two snow-white horses hitched to it, and luckily I had handled horses as a boy, because they were almost wild. And she was screaming and they reared and pitched until I could switch them around; then they hit that midnight road for a fare-thee-well.

“The woman is yelling, trying to make them smash us up, and cursing like a trooper and calling for you—though by the name of Cudworth—while Sister Bearmasher is still got her bound up by the hair. It was dark of the moon, Bliss, and a country road, and we took every curve on two wheels. Yes, and when we crossed a little wooden bridge it sounded like a burst of rifle fire. It seemed like those horses were rushing me to trouble so fast that I’d already be there before I could think of what I was going to say. How on earth was I going to explain what had happened, with that woman there to tell the sheriff something different—with her just being with us more important than the truth? I thought about Sister Bearmasher’s question about who the man was that had been picked to die, and I tell you, Bliss, I thought that man was me. There I was, hunched over and holding on to those reins for dear life, and those mad animals frothing and foaming in the dark so that the spray from their bits was about to give us a bath and just charging us into trouble. I could have taken a turn away from town, but that would’ve only made it worse, putting the whole church in danger. So I was bound to go ahead since I was the minister responsible for their bodies as well as their souls. Sister Bearmasher was the only calm one in that carriage. She’s talking to that woman as polite as if she was waiting on table or massaging her feet or something. And all the time she’s still wound up in the woman’s hair.

“But the woman wouldn’t stop screaming, Bliss; and she’s cussing some of the worst oaths that ever fell from the lips of man. And at a time when we’re flying through the dark and I can see the eyes of wild things shining out at us, at first up ahead, then disappearing. And the sound of the galloping those horses made! They were hitting a lick on that road like they were in a battle charge.

“ ‘Revern’?’ Sister Bearmasher yelled over to me.

“ ‘Yes, Sister?’ I called back over to her.

“ ‘I say, are you praying?’

“ ‘Praying,’ I yelled. ‘Sister, my whole body and soul is crying out to God, but it’s about as much as I can do to hold on to these devilish reins. You just keep that woman’s hands from scratching at my face.’

“Well, Bliss, about that time we hit a straightaway, rolling past some fields, and way off to one side I looked and saw somebody’s barn on fire. It was like a dream, Bliss. There we was making better time than the Hambletonian, with foam flying, the woman screeching, leather straining, hooves pounding and Sister Bearmasher no longer talking to the woman but moaning a prayer like she’s bending over a washtub somewhere on a peaceful sunny morning. And managing to sound so through all that rushing air. And then, there it was, way off yonder across the dark fields, that big barn filling the night with silent flames. It was too far to see if anyone was there to know about it, and it was too big for anybody except us not to see it; and as we raced on there seemed no possible way to miss it burning across the night. We seemed to wheel around it, the earth was so flat and the road so long and winding. Lonesome, Bliss; that sight was lonesome. Way yonder, isolated and lighting up the sky like a solitary torch. And then as we swung around a curve where the road swept into a lane of trees, I looked through the flickering of the trees and saw it give way and collapse. Then all at once the flames sent a big cloud of sparks to sweep the sky. Poor man, I thought, poor man, as that buggy hit a rough stretch of road. Then I was praying. Boy, I was really praying. I said, ‘Lord, bless these bits, these bridles and these reins. Lord, please keep these thin wheels and rubber tires hugging firm to your solid ground, and Lord, bless these hames, these cruppers, and this carriage tongue. Bless the breast-straps, Lord, and these straining leather belly-bands.’ And Bliss, I listened to those pounding hoofbeats and felt those horses trying to snatch my arms clear out of their sockets and I said, ‘Yea, Lord, and bless this whiffletree.’ Then I thought about that fire and looked over at the white woman and finally I prayed, ‘Lord, please bless this wild redheaded woman and that man back there with that burning barn. And Lord, since you know all about Sister Bearmasher and me, all we ask is that you please just keep us steady in your sight.’

“Those horses moved, Bliss. Zip, and we’re through the land and passing through a damp place like a swamp, then up a hill through a burst of heat. And all the time, Bliss …”

The voice had ceased. Then the Senator heard, “Bliss, are you there, boy?”

“Still here,” the Senator said from far away. “Don’t stop. I hear.”

Then through his blurring eyes he saw the dark shape come closer, and now the voice sounded small, as though Hickman stood on a hill somewhere inside his head.

“I say, Bliss, that all the time I should have been praying for you, back there all torn up inside by those women’s hands. Because, after all, a lot of prayer and sweat and dedication had gone into that buggy along with the money-greed and show-off pride. Because it held together through all that rough ride even though its wheels were humming like guitar strings, and it took me and Sister Bearmasher to jail and a pretty hot time before they let us go. So there between a baby, a buggy, and a burning barn I prayed the wrong prayer. I left you out, Bliss, and I guess right then and there you started to wander. But you, I left you in some of the sisters’ hands and you misbehaved. Bliss, you was the one who needed praying for and I neglected you.…”

Hickman leaned closer now, gazing into the quiet face.

The Senator slept.