He taught us about the holy Tree of Life. How we all born part of it. How we all one family. Showed us how the rotten system of this society is about chopping down the Tree. Society hates health. Society don’t want strong people. It wants people weak and sick so it can use them up. No room for the Life Tree. Society’s about stealing your life juices and making you sick so the Tree dies.
He taught us to love and respect ourselves. Respect Life in ourselves. Life is good, so we’re good. He said that every day. We must protect Life and pass it on so the Tree never dies. Society’s system killing everything. Babies. Air. Water. Earth. People’s bodies and minds. He taught us we are the seeds. We got to carry forward the Life in us. When society dies from the poison in its guts, we’ll be there and the Tree will grow bigger and bigger till the whole wide earth a peaceful garden under its branches. He taught us to praise Life and be Life.
We loved him because he was the voice of Life. And our love made him greater than he was. Made him believe he could do anything. All the pains we took. The way we were so careful around him, let him do whatever he wanted, let him order us around like we was slaves. Now when I look back I guess that’s what we was. His slaves. And he was king because we was slaves and we made him our master.
He was the dirtiest man I ever seen. Smell him a mile off. First time I really seen him I was on my way home from work and he was just sitting there on the stone wall in front of their house. Wasn’t really stone. Cinder blocks to hold in yard dirt. Sucked four or five high and a rusty kind of broken-down pipe fence running across the top of the blocks. Well, that’s where he was sitting, dangling his bare legs and bare toes, sprawled back like he ain’t got a care in the world. Smelled him long before I seen him. Matter of fact when I stepped down off the bus something nasty in the air. My nose curls and I wonder what stinks, what’s dead and where’s it hiding, but I don’t like the smell so I push it to the back of my mind cause nothing I can do about it. No more than I can stop the stink rolling in when the wind blows cross from Jersey. Got too much else to worry about at 5:30 in the evening. I’m hoping Billy and Karen where they supposed to be. Mrs. Johnson keep them till 5:00, then they supposed to come straight home. Weather turning warm. Stuffy inside the house already so I say OK youall can sit out on the stoop but don’t you go a step further till I’m home. Catch you gallivanting over the neighborhood it’s inside the house, don’t care if it’s a oven in there. Billy and Karen mind most the time, good kids, you know what I mean, but all it takes is one time not minding. You know the kinda trouble kids can get into around here. Deep trouble. Bad, bad trouble. One these fools hang around here give them pills. One these jitterbugs put his hands on Karen. I’m worried about that sort of mess and got dinner to fix and beat from work, too beat for any of it. My feet ache and that’s strange because I work at a desk and I’m remembering my mama keeping house for white folks. Her feet always killing her and here I am with my little piece of degree, sitting on my behind all day and my feet sore like hers. Maybe what it is is working for them damned peckerwoods any kind of way. Taking their shit. Bitterness got to settle somewhere don’t it? Naturally it run down to your feet. Anyway, I’m tired and hassled. Ain’t ready for no more nonsense. Can’t wait till Billy and Karen fed and quiet for the night, safe for the night, the kitchen clean, my office clothes hung up, me in my robe and slippers. Glass of wine maybe. One my programs on TV. Nothing but my own self to worry about.
When I step off the bus stink hits me square between the eyeballs. No sense wrinkling up my nose. Body got to breathe and thinking about what you breathing just make it worse so I starts towards home which is three and a half blocks from where I get off the Number 62. Almost home when I see a trifling dreadlocked man draped back wriggling his bare toes. Little closer to him and I know what’s dead, what’s walking the air like it ain’t had a bath since Skippy was a pup. Like I can see this oily kind of smoke seeping up between the man’s toes. He’s smiling behind all that hair, all that beard. Proud of his high self working toejam. I know it ain’t just him stinking up the whole neighborhood. It’s the house behind him, the tribe of crazy people in it and crazy dogs and loudspeakers and dirty naked kids and the backyard where they dump their business, but sitting the way he is on the cinder blocks, cocked back and pleased with hisself, smiling through that orangutan hair like a jungle all over his face, it’s like he’s telling anybody care to listen, this funk is mine. I’m the funk king sitting here on my throne and you can run but you can’t hide.
See, it’s personal then. Me and him. To get home I have to pass by him. His wall, his house, his yard. Either pass by or go way round out my way. Got my route home I’ve been walking twelve years. Bet you find my footprints in the pavement I been walking home from work that way so long. So I ain’t about to change just cause some nasty man sitting there like he’s God Almighty. Huh. Uh. This street mine much as it’s anybody’s. I ain’t detouring one inch out my way for nothing that wears britches and breathes. He ain’t nothing to me no matter how bad he smell, no matter if he blow up in a puff of black smoke cause he can’t stand his own self. Tired as my feet be at the end of the day I ain’t subjecting them to one extra step around this nasty man or his nasty house.
So I just trots on by like he ain’t there, like ain’t none of it there. Wall. Pipe he’s got his greasy arms draped over. House behind him and the nuts in it. You know. Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. What I do do is stop breathing. Hold my breath till I’m past him, hold it in so long when I let it out on the next comer, I’m dizzy. But I’m past him and don’t give him the satisfaction. Tell the truth, I almost fainted before I made it up on the curb. And wouldn’t that have been a sight. Me keeling over in the street. He woulda had him a good laugh at that. Woulda told all them savages live with him. They could all have a good laugh together. The hounds. But what I care? Didn’t happen, did it? Strutted right past him like he wasn’t there. Didn’t even cross to the other side of Osage like I knew he was sitting there betting I would. Hoping I would so he could tell his tribe and they could all grin and hee-haw and put me on their loudspeakers.
No. No. Walked home the way I always walk home. Didn’t draw one breath for a whole block. Almost knocked myself out, but be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Because the day I’m telling you about, the first time I seen him eyeball to eyeball, wasn’t much more than a year ago. Three months from that day I was part of his family. One his slaves that quick. Still am in a way. Even though his head’s tore off his body and his body burned to ash. See because even though he did it wrong, he was right. What I mean is his ideas were right, the thoughts behind the actions righteous as rain. He be rapping and he’d stop all the sudden, look over to one the sisters been a real strong church woman her whole life and say: Bet your sweet paddy boy Jesus amen that, wouldn’t he now? Teasing sort of, but serious too. He be preaching what Jesus preached except it’s King saying the words. Bible words only they issuing from King’s big lips. And you know he means them and you understand them better cause he says them black, black like him, black like you, so how the sister gon deny King? Tell that white fella Jesus stop pestering you. Tell him go on back to the desert and them caves where he belong.
Got to her Christian mind. Got to my tired feet. Who I been all the days of my life? A poor fool climb on a bus in the morning, climb down at night. What I got to show for it but sore feet, feet bad as my mama’s when, God bless her weary soul, we laid her to rest after fifty years cleaning up white folks’ mess. My life wasn’t much different from my mama’s or hers from her mama’s on back far as you want to carry it back. Out in the field at dawn, pick cotton the whole damned day, shuffle back to the cabin to eat and sleep so’s you ready when the conch horn blows next morning. Sheeet. Things spozed to get better, ain’t they? Somewhere down the line, it ought to get better or what’s the point scuffling like we do? Don’t have to squat in the weeds and wipe my behind with a leaf
. Running water inside my house and in the supermarket I can buy thirty kinds of soda pop, twelve different colors of toilet paper. But that ain’t what I call progress. Do you? King knew it wasn’t. King just told the truth.
My Billy and Karen in school. Getting what they call an education. But what those children learn. Ask them where they come from, they give you the address of a house on Osage Avenue. Ask them what’s on their minds, they mumble something they heard on the TV. Ask them what color they are, they don’t even know that. Look them in the eye you know what they really thinking. Only thing they ever expect to be is you. Working like you for some white man or black man don’t make no difference cause all they pay you is nigger wages, enough to keep you guessing, keep you hungry, keep you scared, keep you coming back. Piece a job so you don’t never learn nothing, just keep you busy and too tired to think. But your feet think. They tell you every day God sends, stop this foolishness. Stop wearing me down to the nubs.
Wasn’t like King told me something new. Wasn’t like I had a lot to learn. Looked round myself plenty times and said, Got to be more to it than this. Got to be. King said out loud what I been knowing all along. Newspapers said King brainwashing and mind control and drugs and kidnapping people turn them to zombies. Bullshit. Because I been standing on the bank for years. Decided one day to cross over and there he was, the King take my hand and say, Welcome, come right in, we been waiting. Held my breath walking past him and wasn’t more than a couple months later I’m holding my breath and praying I can get past the stink when he’s raising the covers off his mattress and telling me lie down with him. By then stink wasn’t really stink no more. Just confusion. A confused idea. An idea from outside the family, outside the teachings causing me to turn my nose up at my own natural self. Felt real ashamed when I realized all of me wasn’t inside the family yet. I damned the outside part. Left it standing in the dark and crawled up under the covers with King cause he’s right even if he did things wrong sometimes, he’s still right cause ain’t nothing, nowhere any better.
Cudjoe stops the tape. Was Margaret Jones still in love with her King, in love with the better self she believed she could become? He’d winced when she described King lifting the blanket off his bed. Then Cudjoe had leaned closer, tried to sneak a whiff of her. Scent of the sacred residue. Was a portion of her body unwashed since the holy coupling? She had looked upon the King’s face and survived. Cudjoe sees a rat-gnawed, bug-infested mattress spotted with the blood of insects, of humans. Her master’s face a mask of masks. No matter how many you peel, another rises, like the skins of water. Loving him is like trying to solve a riddle whose answer is yes and no. No or yes. You will always be right and wrong.
Not nice to nose under someone’s clothes. Cudjoe knows better. He had cheated, sniffing this witness like some kind of evil bloodhound.
The spools spin:
My lads wouldn’t have nothing to do with King. When I moved into his house they ran away. I think Karen might have moved with me but Billy, thank goodness, wouldn’t let her. Went to my sister’s in Detroit. Then Detroit drove to Philly to rescue me. A real circus. I’m grateful to God nobody was hurt. King said, You nebby, bleached negroes come round here hassling us again I’ll bust you up. He was just woofing. But he sounds like he means every word and I’m standing in the doorway behind him amening what he’s saying. My own sister and brother-in-law, mind you. Carl worked at Ford. My sister Anita a schoolteacher. Doing real good in Detroit and they drove all the way here to help me but I didn’t want no help. Thought all I needed was King. They came out of love but I hated them for mixing in my business. Hated them for taking care of Karen and Billy. See, I believed they were part of the system, part of the lie standing in the way of King’s truth. The enemy. The ones trying to kill us. Up there in their dicty Detroit suburb living the so-called good life.
Cudjoe fast-forwards her story. Would she tell more about the boy this time? Or would the tape keep saying what it had said last time he listened.
. . . Had the good sense not to sell my house when I moved out. Rented it. Gave the rent money to King. If I’d sold it, would’ve give all the money to him. Wouldn’t have nothing now. No place for Billy and Karen to come back to, if they coming back. Don’t want them here yet. City spozed to clean up and rebuild but you see the condition things in. My place still standing. Smoke and water tore it up inside but at least it’s still standing. Next block after mine looks like pictures I seen of war. Look like the atom bomb hit. Don’t want Karen and Billy have to deal with what the bombs and fire and water did. They see the neighborhood burned down like this, they just might blame me. Because like I said, I was one of them. King’s family. Rented my house and moved in with them. Yes. But for the grace of God coulda been me and my kids trapped in the basement, bar-b-qued to ash.
I still can’t believe it. Eleven people murdered. Babies, women, didn’t make no nevermind to the cops. Eleven human beings dead for what? Tell me for what. Why did they have to kill my brothers and sisters? Burn them up like you burn garbage? What King and them be doing that give anybody the right to kill them? Wasn’t any trouble till people started coming at us. Then King start to woofing to keep folks off our case. Just woofing. Just talk. You ask anybody around here, the ones still here or the ones burnt out, if you can find them. Ask them if King or his people ever laid a hand on anybody. You find one soul say he been hurt by one of us he’s a lying sack of shit.
King had his ways. We all had our ways. If you didn’t like it, you could pass on by. That’s all anybody had to do, pass us by. Hold your nose, your breath if you got to, but pass on by and leave us alone, then we leave you alone and everybody happy as they spozed to be.
The boy?
Cudjoe is startled by his voice on the tape, asking the question he’s thinking now. Echo of his thought before he speaks it.
The boy?
Little Simmie. Simmie’s what we called him. Short for Simba Muntu. Lion man. That’s what Clara named him when she joined King’s people. Called herself Nkisa. She was like a sister to me. We talked many a night when I first went there to live. Little Simmie her son. So afterwhile I was kind of his aunt. All of us family, really. Simmie’s an orphan now. His mama some of those cinders they scraped out the basement of the house on Osage and stuffed in rubber bags. I was behind the barricade the whole time. Watched it all happening. Almost lost my mind. Just couldn’t believe it. I saw it happening and couldn’t believe my eyes.
Those dogs carried out my brothers and sisters in bags. And got the nerve to strap those bags on stretchers. Woman next to me screamed and fainted when the cops start parading out with them bags strapped on stretchers. Almost fell out my ownself watching them stack the stretchers in ambulances. Then I got mad. Lights on top the ambulances spinning like they in a hurry. Hurry for what? Those pitiful ashes ain’t going nowhere. Nkisa and Rhoberto and Sunshine and Teetsie. They all gone now, so what’s the hurry? Why they treating ash like people now? Carrying it on stretchers. Cops wearing gloves and long faces like they respect my brothers and sisters now. Where was respect when they was shooting and burning and flooding water on the house? Why’d they have to kill them two times, three times, four times? Bullets, bombs, water, fire. Shot, blowed up, burnt, drowned. Nothing in those sacks but ash and guilty conscience.
What they carried out was board ash and wall ash and roof ash and hallway-step ash and mattress ash and the ash of blankets and pillows, ashes of the little precious things you sneaked in with you when you went to live with King because he said, Give it up, give up that other life and come unto me naked as the day you were born. He meant it too. Never forget being buck naked and walking down the rows of my brothers and sisters each one touch me on my forehead. Shivering. Goose bumps where I forgot you could get goose bumps. Thinking how big and soft I was in the behind and how my titties must look tired hanging down bare. But happy. Oh so happy. Happy it finally come down to this. Nothing to hide no more. Come unto me and leave the world behind. L
ike a new-born child.
My brothers and sisters and the babies long gone and wasn’t much else in the house to make ash, so it’s walls and floors in those bags, the pitiful house itself they carting away in ambulances.
His mother died in the fire.
All dead. All of them dead.
But he escaped.
She pushed him and two the other kids out the basement window. Simmie said he was scared, didn’t want to go. Nkisa had to shove him out the window. He said she threw him and then he doesn’t remember a thing till he wakes up in the alley behind the house. Must of hit his head on something. He said he was dreaming he was on fire and took off running and now he doesn’t know when he woke up or when he was dreaming or if the nightmare’s ever gon stop. Poor Simmie an orphan now. Like my Karen and Billy till I got myself thinking straight again. Till I knew I couldn’t put nobody, not even King, before my kids. They brought me back to the world. And it’s as sorry-assed today as it was when I walked away. Except it’s worse now. Look round you at the neighborhood. Where’s the houses, the old people on their stoops, the children playing in the street? Nobody cares. The whole city seen the flames, smelled the smoke, counted the body bags. Whole world knows children murdered here. But it’s quiet as a grave, ain’t it? Not a mumbling word. People gone back to making a living. Making some rich man richer. Losing the only thing they got worth a good goddamn, the children the Lord gives them for free, and they ain’t got the good sense to keep.
You’ve talked to Simmie?
Talked to people talked to him.
Do you know where he is?
I know where to find somebody who might know where he is. Why do you want to know?
I need to hear his story. I’m writing a book.
A book?
About the fire. What caused it. Who was responsible. What it means.
Don’t need a book. Anybody wants to know what it means, bring them through here. Tell them these bombed streets used to be full of people’s homes. Tell them babies’ bones mixed up in this ash they smell.
Philadelphia Fire Page 2
