Manchild in the promised land

by Brown, Claude, 1937-

  "You've probahjy seen him. He's a short dark-skin cat, and he's really weird looking. I know you've seen him, because he's been around here for years, hollering the truth like a madman, hollering in the wilderness."

  "No, man. I never met the cat."

  "Well, anyway, we have classes on Wednesday and Friday nights around Father Ford's house. He lives on 142nd Street. Man, why don't you come by on Friday or Wednesday night, like next Wednesday night, and check it out?"

  "Yeah, man, I'd like to do that. Give me the address."

  I was so surprised at Billy that I just had to find out about this thing, because something that could take a cat who was a stone junkie and turn him around like that, I wanted to know what it was all about. I decided to go around there that next Wednesday night.

  When Wednesday night rolled around, I went to the address that Billy Dobbs had given me, 142nd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenue. It was a basement apartment. Lonnie Jones answered the door. He looked surprised. He said, "Hey, Sonny, how you doin'?" He had a long goatee. Billy Dobbs had one almost just like it.

  I said, "Hi, Lonnie. How are things?"

  "Oh, fine, fine. I'm glad to see you here, man. I thought everybody was lost down here." Then he said, "How'd you find out about it? What brought you down?"

  "I ran into Billy Dobbs, and he told me to come down. He gave me the address."

  "Oh, yeah, one brother finds another." Then I heard somebody call him St. John.

  "St. John? What is all this saint business about?"

  Billy Dobbs had told me that Lonnie was a priest in the Coptic faith now, but I had forgotten about it. This brought it back to mind. I thought maybe they called them all saints, all the priests.

  He went into the other room, and he called me after he got in there. He said, "Sonny, come here. I want you to meet somebody."

  I came in the room, and there was this little short black man, whom I had never seen before. He was short, skinny, and spooky looking. He had one eye that he couldn't see out of, and it was tuhied around; you couldn't be sure whether the back of the eyeball was facing you or not. It looked a little nasty. He looked ugly and frightening at the same time.

  When Lonnie introduced me, he said, "This is Father Ford."

  I said, "Hello, Father. How are you?"

  He just looked at me, nodded, and said, "Welcome to our house, son, and peace." I felt kind of funny. I didn't know what I was supposed to say. I looked at Lonnie.

  He went on talking about what they were going to do. They were having lessons in Amharic and in numbers, this sort of thing. He was showing some other students, as he called them. There were some younger people, teen-agers; there were a lot of kids around, too, and quite a few adults. This was supposed to be some kind of Bible class, or whatever they were teaching, and language class. Everybody was being taught Amharic, the native language of Ethiopia. I didn't know what was going on. But nobody cared that much. They weren't going to stop just because I didn't know what was going on.

  When the class was over. Father Ford said, "Son, I want you to wait and let me give you a proper introduction to the Coptic." When most of the people had left. Father Ford asked me if I knew anything of the black people.

  I said, "You mean Negroes?"

  "No, I don't mean Negroes. I mean the black people, some of whom are called Negroes."

  "I don't know. I know about as much as anybody else, I suppose, but a lot less than many."

  "Well, do you know anything about the black man's faith?"

  "Do you mean the Baptist faith or something?"

  "No, that's not the black man's faith." He started frowning and grimacing as he talked about the Baptist faith. He said, "All these Western beliefs have been given to you by the white idiots who are running the world today. Do you know that the first civilized people were black? . . . You've heard of the Egyptian civilization, haven't you?"

  "Yeah, I heard of the Egyptian civilization."

  "That was the beginning. That was the very first civilization, even before the Chinese." He said that the ancient Egyptians who built the first civilization were black pe6p1e. They were blacker than the Egyptians of today. They fell because they clashed with their brothers, who were Ethiopians. He said in the beginning there was one great civilized continent, Africa. There were two great powers, Egypt and Ethiopia, and these two powers clashed. A house divided caimot stand, and they fell.

  "It was the practice in those days for the victor in any battle to take slavey and sell them to other people, like the yellow people in Asia. That's what was done with the Ethiopians when they lost the battle between Ethiopia and Egypt." He said there were a lot of long-forgotten mysteries that every black man once knew the answers to. He said, "Did you know this?"

  "No. Mysteries like what?"

  "Do you know what the Pyramids symbolize?"

  "No."

  "I'll bet you your first ancestors knew, and I'll bet you your great-great-great-great-grandfathers knew before they were brought to this land."

  "They might have, but I don't know anything about it now. So what does it stand for?"

  He still didn't answer my question. He asked me if I knew what the Star of David symbolized, and I said I didn't. He took out a dollar bill. He said, "You've seen this pyramid before, haven't you?" and he pointed to the back of the one-dollar bm.

  "Yeah."

  "Did you ever know whose eye that was? That's the all-seeing eye of God."

  There were only seven or eight of us left there then. He seemed to hypnotize everybody; his voice filled the room. Everybody got very quiet, and it seemed as though if the dog made a sound, he could look at the dog and the dog would shut up. His voice had a commanding effect on everybody, I think. I know it had a hypnotic effect on me. I could remember everything he said, and he wasn't talking especially slow.

  Then he started talking about the pyramid and the all-seeing eye and how man could rise to this power of all-seeing wisdom, as he put it, the omnipotent wisdom of God. I was stopped. I was really fascinated at this point. After explaining this, he went on talking. I was still listening, but I was looking around at the room. I felt as though I'd gotten high, like somebody getting high off some kind of drug. I looked around at all the pictures of symbols. There was a big poster on the wall of the Star of David, another of the Sphinx, and another of one of the Pyramids. There were pictures all over the room of black crucifixes and of Haile Selassie nailed to the cross.

  After telling me about the all-seeing eye, Father Ford went

  on to speak about the symbol of the pyramid. He said that the pyramid straight up symbolizes woman, the inverted pyramid symbolizes man, and the two of them together are a six-pointed star, or the Star of David. The Star of David symbolizes life, because man and woman, in their holy union, symbolize life.

  Then he told me that Haile Selassie, or somebody from the house of Haile Selassie, was the promised Messiah that the New Testament speaks of. He said, "They don't know too much about it actually. They're expecting some white God to come down here with blond hair and blue eyes. But you can't expect too much of the white people, because they were barbarians not too long ago."

  He asked me if I'd heard about the love affair—he didn't call it the love affair, but that was what it amounted to— between Solomon and Sheba. I said I had, so he asked me if I knew that Sheba had come from Ethiopia. I said, "Yeah, I heard about that too."

  He said in Ethiopia today, there was a piece of the ark of the covenant that had been given to Moses and that had been kept by Solomon. It had been stolen by the son that Solomon and Sheba had, and it was now kept in Ethiopia. Ethiopia was the true Holy Land today. One day, when the promised Messiah came, he would come from Ethiopia. He said that life was a cycle—it would get back to the black man's rule. I became more and more enthralled.

  He said that everything about us was full of spirits, and these spirits were just waiting for some way to express themselves in life. I felt that there was nobody in
the room but me. This cat was talking this stuff, and it really sounded good. It sounded new and dififerent. I hadn't heard anything that sounded so fascinating in all my life.

  He told me about the cycles of life. He said, "When it goes back again, and life is traveling on in this cycle or evolution, the evolution will not be complete until the black man is back on top again." This was what the Christians in their faith thought was the Second Coming of the Messiah. He said, "It is the coming of the Messiah, but it's the coming of Haile Selassie or someone from the line of Haile Selassie. Then the evolution shall be complete. All one has to do is watch Ethiopia, and he shall see the coming of the millennium and of complete peace on earth that the Christian Bible speaks of in confusion."

  After this, he told me about the symbol of the snake. "The

  snake that was symbolized in the Garden of Eden was merely a sperm." He asked ttie if I'd ever looked at a sperm under a microscope. I said I hadn't. He said, "Well, it has a tail. There're a lot of sperm cells wiggling around, and they all look like snakes. This is the snake in Genesis that caused Adam and Even in the Christian mythology to lose face with God and be thrown out of the Garden." He said that there were a lot of things that no black people would ever believe if they hadn't been subjected to Christian domination and indoctrination for the last few hundred years.

  Father Ford said that the sperm starts down the brain, it goes into what he called the genital sac, and then it starts tempting. It makes you tempt women, because you get riled up when the sperm cell starts moving down. That's how Christian mythology took it as the snake tempting woman. The snake was man getting excited, the beast in man.

  He went from there to the mystery of the Sphinx. Father Ford said that the body of the Sphinx was that of a lion, to symboUze the beast in man. He said that the head on the Sphinx was that of a man, or godlike, to symbolize the potentiality in every man. He said that a man could rise from his beastly nature, which he was bom with and which he was basically, and fulfill, through exercising his mental power, his potential for omnipotent wisdom, or godlikeness.

  I was still fascinated, but nothing else was said. Guys got up and started moving around. I looked at the clock in the room; it was a little after two o'clock in the morning. I had been there since eight o'clock. It didn't seem that I had been there so long. Maybe it was just that what he was saying was so interesting and so enthralling that I just lost all track of time. I wanted to tell him, "Go on. Go on, man. Talk some more." I hadn't heard anything that I had listened to so attentively in I don't know how long.

  When I went home that night, I told Tony about it, and Tony said he just had to see this. I brought him with me the next night I went to Father Ford's. Then he started going regularly. He was just as fascinated by it as I was, but Tony said he didn't think he could get but so involved in this thing, because these people didn't drink, they didn't smoke, they didn't do anything. He said St. John—that was Lonnie's priest name—and Billy Dobbs had told him that they could get high if they just thought, by exerting mental power. Tony

  said he didn't think he had that much mental power, and he was going to have to keep on smoking pot to get high. Since these people didn't go for that, he knew he wasn't going to be in this thing. I thought that after a while he would be able to get high without smoking and could get into it. I had stopped smoking, so it didn't bother me.

  When I started going regularly, St. John gave me lessons in Amharic. It seemed really easy. I was still going to high school at night, and I thought that French was easy, as far as languages went, but Amharic was much easier than French. There were only thirteen characters in the alphabet. They sounded strange at first, primitive utterances like "ugg" and "uhh" and "omm." I couldn't make the sounds at first. I thought it was a crude language, but after I started practicing and getting the hang of it, they were just sounds. In order to write a word in Amharic, you'd take one letter and make a slight deviation. You'd just make one of the lines on "A" a little longer and you had the word "am." After a while, I was convinced that Amharic was the most melodic language I'd heard.

  I wanted to go to Africa more than anything else in the world. I wanted to visit the Holy Land, and I wanted to see where this thing had come from. I wanted to see the piece of the ark that they had in Ethiopia. I started feeling frustrated because I knew I'd never get to Africa. It seemed to be the farthest place in the world. I wondered if anybody in Ethiopia knew anything about us in Harlem and what we were doing. I wondered if they really accepted us as a part of the thing.

  After a while, I began to feel as though the whole thing was just a crazy masquerade. I thought that if I ever went up to Haile Selassie and bowed down and paid my respects to him in Amharic, he would probably look at me as if I were crazy and resent my using the language, being a Negro and all. The few Africans I'd met just didn't seem to dig Negroes.

  I started thinking, This is all a big farce. I started tapering off in my attendance. First I would go once a week, then every other week. Then I just stopped going altogether, after about four months.

  I ran into Billy Dobbs at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, in front of a frankfurter joint. We went in, and he said, "How you been, man?"

  I said, "Okay. How you been?" I figured now was the time

  he was going to ask*toe why I had stopped coming to Father Ford's, why I'd lost interest in the Coptic. He didn't ask me. I sat there and looked at him. I noticed that he looked a little different. He had a two- or three-day beard on his face, and he looked a little greasy. He hadn't looked this way since he had kicked his drug habit. As I sat there, I was thinking that he'd undergone some kind of change.

  He asked me if I knew some girl by the name of Ann, who lived on 147th Street, a tall light-skinned girl, nice looking, kind of shapely. I said, "No, man. I don't know her. Why?"

  "She's my brother Doug's woman."

  I said, "Oh, yeah? How is Doug, and what's he been doing?' I hadn't seen Doug in about three or four years. The last time I saw him, he was jostling, working the Murphy. I never was tight with Doug. He was about five or six years older than me.

  Billy said, "Man, he ain't doin' nothin'. The nigger is strung out. He's not trying to kick his habit. He's not trying to do anything." At first, I didn't pay much attention to the hostility in Billy's voice. It seemed to be the ordinary animosity that a cat would have for a brother who was strung out, because when somebody in the family got strung out on stuff, everybody had to suffer. The junkie would steal from everybody in the family and scheme on everybody to get money to support his habit.

  Then he said, "Ann is a damn nice girl."

  I didn't know what this thing was about, but I knew he wanted to talk about this girl. I said, "Yeah, man, she sounds like somethin' nice to look at."

  "She's more than that. She's got a couple of kids, but she's a nice girl. I mean . . ." Then he grabbed my arm and started getting excited about it. He said, "Sonny, I mean, she ain't no bitch. She's got a couple of kids, but she ain't no bitch. She's a nice girl. She's a good-doin' woman; she wants to be a good mother."

  "Yeah, uh-huh, I understand, man."

  "I knew her first."

  "Oh, yeah? You knew her first outta who?"

  "I knew her before Doug met her. I knew the chick in high school. He came on and pulled her. He don't know how to treat her, man. H^ treats her like she's just an average old funky bitch out there. The cat gets high front of her. He comes up to her place, and he brings the junkies up there, you know? They all get high in front of her, in front of the

  kids. He leaves his works around there; he does all kinds of shit. He brings stolen goods up to the chick's house and leaves it there."

  I said, "Yeah, well, you know how it is when a cat's strung out. They don't consider anybody too much. You know how that is. You were strung out too." I got the feeling that Billy resented this, because he wanted me to give him some kind of support in what he was saying.

  I just sat, and Billy went on ranting. "Son
ny, the nigger steals everything she's got, man. He takes the money she's got to feed the kids with, and all kinds of things hke that. He steals everything in the house, pawned her television, stuff like that." I just sat there and didn't say anything.

  He looked at me as if to say, "Man, aren't you going to agree with me or at least say something?" Then he said, "Now the nigger wants her to go out on the corner and sell body for him. He's gon make a whore out of her just to support his habit. And she ain't that kind of chick, man; she ain't no bitch."

  I realized he wanted me to encourage him to take his brother's woman, but I didn't feel as though I had the right to do this. I couldn't say anything.

  He started pulling on my arm and telling me, "That nigger ain't no good, man. He ain't never treated no bitch good in his life."

  "Yeah, uh-huh. Look, Billy, have you talked to Father Ford about it?"

  He looked at me and smiled. He said, "Come on. Sonny, man, you know how those people are in that Coptic thing."

  I got the impression that he had somehow been disillusioned with the Coptic faith. I said, "Look, man, I got to go," and I guess I sounded a little angry when I said it.

  He looked at me and said, "Okay, Sonny, I'm sorry, man."

  "There's nothing to be sorry about. Look, Billy, I'll see you around. And whatever you do, good luck to you." I started walking out, and he called me.

  He came up behind me after he paid for, the franks and the orange drinks. He said, "Look, do you come uptown any more, man?"

  "Yeah, I'm up there quite a lot, and I don't see you around."

  "Do you ever come around the Low Hat Bar on Seventh Avenue?"

  "The bar?" I w^ surprised, because I knew that he wasn't drinking when I cuf into him about six months before, at the beginning of the year.