Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  To kill time he strolls up Market toward City Hall. All-night movie houses are gone, replaced by new glass storefronts with no stores inside the glass. The all-night movies always smelled sickly sweet like those pastel cakes of deodorizing soap hanging in wire halters in urinals. Continuous shows, twenty-four hours. Did they ever air those joints? Uniformed ushers herd derelicts, pimply-faced kids, stray husbands, perverts, college lads, transients, runaways, whoever else is huddled down in the rows of soggy seats, out on Market once a year. High noon and the exiled patrons mill around nervously ill at ease in the sunlight, blinking, heads bowed, hands deep in pockets, necks scrunched into collars, pavement like hot coals under their feet while fumigators spray the corners and crevices of the Palace. A disgruntled bunch sure enough, yanked from sleep, from love bouts with the twenty-foot-tall ladies on the screen. Crusty immigrants disgorged from steerage, gawking and grumbling, light of day like some social worker’s merciless interrogation. The area below City Hall had grown seedier and seedier once the movies switched exclusively to X-rated flicks. No raunchy porn houses and peep shows on Market anymore but nothing much else here either. Another party and nobody showing up. Thick plate-glass windows cloudy, greenish, like the walls of abandoned aquariums. Sawhorses, lengths of plywood and Sheetrock in some of the interiors. Others totally blank. An entire block boarded up. Scaffolding, temporary sidewalks. Hundreds of homeless people could bunk in these storefronts. Did businesses occupy the upper floors. Time of day office workers should be streaming out of buildings. Secretaries in miniskirts and high heels. Cudjoe used to trolley downtown to catch the show. Women in this city knew how to dress. To carry themselves. Philly folks were sharp. Thousands of young ladies looking good, piling out of gray buildings between 4:00 and 5:00. Bottled up all day then free to strut their stuff. A special time. Like the moment the 2:30 bell released Cudjoe’s students from school. Cudjoe loved the women’s touches of style, a rainbow silk scarf, a leather strap spiraling around an ankle, coils of necklace draped where you wouldn’t expect necklace to be, a purple suede purse slung or dangling or clutched. Outrageous hats. Heels elevating them so they clattered by proud as a duchess on horseback. Mize well have been mounted on horseback when they trotted past you on those spindly spike heels. If you pinned a bushy tail on their high, tight behinds it would have sashayed back and forth, working hard as a windshield wiper in a storm.

  More ghosts. No whip-tailed Philly fillies on the street in skimpy sixties costumes. Too late for rush hour. Gaggles of footsore, see-through tourists giving up for the day. Street people. Drinking people. Little knots of men hanging at the entrances of bars. Not night yet. Not day. The city catching its breath between shifts. Cudjoe out of phase again. Maybe he could recruit a crowd for the memorial service. Pied Piper returning with a mob of misfits to fill Independence Square. Hey fellas. It’s about youall. Listen, brothers. If they offed them people on Osage yesterday just might be you today. Or tomorrow. Look at yourselves. If you’d appeared in the vicinity of 6221 Osage that day the bullets and bombs were flying, if you’d sauntered or hip-hopped or swooped down on the neighborhood with your dreadlocks and bare chests hanging out your silk tank tops and baggies and Egyptian sandals and PLO headbands and Indian belts and African jewelry and hair shaved and sculpted or high and wild as Don King or Fred Douglass, youall wouldn’t be congregating here on this corner, grinning at the white gals, smiling at black gals, scaring the piss out of everybody else, surly as you want to be, your fingers round their throats, their wallets, up their asses. No, brethren, you’d be burnt and boiled and blowed up like the rest, if you showed your bearded faces, your narrow behinds on Osage Avenue because that day in May the Man wasn’t playing. Huh uh. Taking no names. No prisoners. A hot day like this, my soul brothers. And here you are again making no connections, taking out no insurance. C’mon. Follow me. Before they decide to sweep your corner clean.

  Cudjoe nods. Nobody pays any attention. He isn’t buying or selling. What the fuck you want, man? Why you looking at me, lame ass? Doo-wop rags circle their foreheads. Could be the old times again. Hair marcelled. Shiny and ripply as Karo syrup drooling on a stack of pancakes.

  He doesn’t speak. They don’t answer. Music trails him. Raps at the boys gathered in the doorway. Music tars and feathers his unguarded back. He can’t help feeling naked. Known. The burden of returning is remembering he has no secrets. No answers. Boys on the comer speak to him as plainly as he speaks to them. Exchanging nary a word. A mumble.

  Hey bro.

  Hey homey.

  He leads no parade back to the square. This is the ho-hum hour the city empties itself. Regular as a tide. Everybody who has a home splits for home. Goody-bye. Goody-bye. Why should they stop today. For a microphone, some black crepe paper, a semicircle of chairs on a platform.

  More people in the square now than when he left. A TV news van. Two girls in T-shirts, jeans, black Adidas high tops unrolling a spool of cable. More mikes. Undercover (ha ha) cops in suits and ties with cameras round their necks.

  News teams, mobile cameras, pretty boy and girl reporters with clipboards and remote microphones. Activity onstage. Respectable citizens have taken charge. Cudjoe watches the event stagger into place; he’s a spy, a noncombatant. An insta-cam helicopter buzzes over once, high above the action. If a chopper had hovered over the rally in 1805 the view of the throng transmitted by its video camera would have been like the cross section of a fancy piece of chocolate candy, gooey white inside a dark rim. Then like a balloon bursting, the neat figure flies apart. The center melts, spreads. Dark envelope novas into scattered fragments. Red ants and black ants scurry through a maze of streets along the waterfront. Blacks outnumbered twenty to one never had a chance. Some lie stiff where they’ve fallen. Others crawl off, disappear into underground bunkers. The victors repossess the square. Continue their celebration.

  Cudjoe leans against the edge of a fountain. Not quite part of the meager gathering in front of the temporary stage, not exactly part of the busy indifference of the city behind him. Sunshine. Blue sky. It’s not weather keeping folks away.

  The fountain, a huge dish with an abstract steel sculpture in its center, is dry. Traffic is moving but few pedestrians on the streets. Maybe it’s just the wrong time of day. Someone should have hired jugglers, majorettes, a brass band to grab people’s attention when they got off work.

  A microphone is tapped. A quavering, tentative voice amplified across the stones. I guess it’s working. Ha ha. Cudjoe’s offered a candle by a pasty-faced woman. She’s walked a good ways to reach him, around the fountain to the periphery of the small crowd where he’s stationed himself. She is his mother’s age. She’s overdressed for the heat. Cudjoe doesn’t want to feel sorry for her. A faint mustache he tries to ignore above her determined lip. Her thin mouth curls into a smile. He picks a candle from the box she extends. Each pale candle wears a pale paper cup impaled on its shaft. Cudjoe grasps his so its collar rests on his fist. He wonders if the lady purchased the candles. Someone’s job would have been estimating attendance at the rally and ordering an appropriate number of candles. That number, a hope, a wish, that number minus the few candles Cudjoe saw people holding today would leave stacks of boxes unopened, surplus candles, cups, matches. Simple arithmetic that could break somebody’s heart. The lady in the dark dress, dark turban wound round her hair had passed on, circulating through the forty or fifty Philadelphians who had stopped to see what was going on in the square. Why wasn’t the entire city mourning? Where was the mayor and his official delegation from City Hall? The governor? The president? A dog hit by a bus would draw a bigger crowd.

  People file onstage, occupy the semicircle of chairs. Each one supports a large, hand-lettered poster with the name of a victim against his or her knees. A brace of light-blue heliumfilled balloons tethered to the back of an empty chair bump their heads together, dancing sprightly in a late-afternoon, early-evening breeze.

  A gritty swirl of scrap paper and trash
blows across the square. People shut their eyes. For a moment it seems everyone stops and listens to the scraping, the aimless flutter. Like the ceremony’s over before it begins, Cudjoe thinks, and this silence is coming after, a benediction when the square’s deserted again and the litter left behind by the mourners plays itself to sleep. Night when the balloons will return, shrunken to black specks in the black sky, each speck heavy as a galaxy.

  Wind can’t lift the heat but it teases and strokes, a promise of fall coolness dashed across Cudjoe’s sweaty face. Long shadows from buildings to the north have dropped over one edge of the square. In forty minutes the witching hour. The exact moment when the bomb exploded atop the row house on Osage Avenue.

  Two black men, chests bare, dreadlocks to their shoulders, drum their way into the ceremony. They sit facing each other, above and behind the stage, on the steps of one of the monumental buildings that enclose the square. A slow, easy rhythm rises from African drums clasped between their knees. Cudjoe’s program doesn’t mention them. Invited or not, they become as necessary, as natural as a heartbeat to the event.

  The first speaker, a tall, fiftyish, elegantly brown man in a gray suit, glances over his shoulder at the drummers. Is he considering asking them to stop? If so, he thinks better of it and turns, speaking about those who are absent, explaining to those in attendance why the whole city should be gathered here.

  Cudjoe sees people lighting candles. Clever, clever. The cups push up to shield the flame. He edges around the fountain’s rim, closer to others in the audience so his candle can be touched.

  Share your light, brother. He hears someone say that. A fingernail of flame gutters in the cup a man holds up for Cudjoe and two others. Another man gets a hit from Cudjoe. His face is close to Cudjoe’s, close enough to bump heads as they peer down into their cups, verify shivery points of fire.

  The younger man speaking now into the microphone clearly belongs to the tribe of the drummers. Natty dreads. Naked above the waist except for a crocheted tricolor vest—green, black, red—draping mahogany shoulders. He chants and the drums respond, punctuating his phrases. He echoes them, pounding a fist into his palm. Fire. Fire. Fire. A hymn to death and rebirth by fire. Fire the word each time his fist smashes into his hand. Fire the chorus prodding the drums louder, faster. Fire Fire Fire. As you live. So you shall die. By fire fire fire. And those who kill by fire shall die by fire fire fire. And then there are no more words, only the power of the pounding drums, pounding heart, the fist pounding the anvil where fire burns and is transformed from word to force by this man’s chant and curse and prophecy.

  Two black women read short poems. White college kids riff and scat an elegy for four voices. Then the dreadlocked priest up again, demanding the release of eleven of his brothers and sisters locked in the devil’s prison for the murder of a cop they didn’t commit. Then he intones a dirge for the ones gone who must not be forgotten whose names face us today crying for vengeance, justice, for vindication and peace. Drums rumble behind him again till he looks at his watch and raises his arm for silence and begins the countdown.

  Chopper’s over the house now . . . cop in a flak vest riding shotgun with a Uzi in his lap is the bombardier . . . checks the satchel of death . . . guides the pilot down closer, closer . . . rotors chuck chuck . . . he sees gasoline cans on the roof . . . closer closer . . . inside the house they hear it chuck chuck . . . just seconds now 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 pig grins and says this is gonna be something . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . Hit it! Fist . . . slams into his palm. No word. No drumbeat. His head is bowed. People rise from the arc of chairs, lift their placards. Wear names like giant masks. Shins and shoes all you can see of them. The first speaker releases the balloons. They soar upward. Divide into two groups. The larger bunch explodes, rising, scattering in every direction. A smaller group of three seems to be traveling together. Their ascent is more gradual, stately, after they separate from the others. Cudjoe had not understood the fall sky’s blueness, its depth, how it arches like a floating vault over the city, the numbing distance of it, till these three sacks of air paused as if caught on the rim of something, hesitating, gathering courage to launch themselves, to plunge into the limitless reaches stretching blue above them.

  The three balloons have formed a kind of family, hovering above the stage, resting, trapped. Afraid to let go. To be gone. For a few moments it seems they’ll never leave. Stuck under some invisible ledge. Bound by a string that loops them and connects them to the earth. They bob, spin, their tails dangle. Then a breeze catches them. They bounce once and shoot off. Soap bubbles. Air bubbles. Climbing to find the others that are mere dots already, miles above the highest thing in the city.

  The invisible string mooring them had unraveled from Cudjoe’s chest. As the balloons raced away they emptied him. His lungs. His heart. He knew the precise moment when the string snapped. A kind of twang, pop. He has no more to give. The string’s played out. He lowers his eyes. Can’t stare after the balloons any longer. They can’t carry him on their flight. He can’t anchor them to the square.

  From the platform the victims’ names are being recited. As each name is called Cudjoe wonders why words are so heavy. Why didn’t words rise and fly like balloons? Words are shell, husk, earth-bound. He heard the names fall. Watched the mourners drop one by one back onto their chairs as the man at the mike reads the names on their posters.

  A hush again after the last name. Then the drums commence a meditative rifling. Faster. Slower. Faster. Slower. Smack and thump and shuffle of skin on skin. People onstage and in the audience sense there’s nothing more to say, to do, the program’s over, it’s time to go.

  Cudjoe wants to run. He doesn’t know what to do with the candle in his fist. Will the candles be collected and saved for another day, to commemorate another massacre? Will they be recycled next year, same time, same station.

  He checks the sky. It remains serene and seamless. No sign the lost souls have been welcomed or refused. What had those balloons been to him? Why had he been tied to them, drawn after them, emptied, when they swept away? Eleven had died May 13, 1985. He couldn’t say their names now. The heavy names. He’d stared at the posters, trying to memorize the victims’ names. No time to learn them before they became something else, whisked away, elsewhere, where they would always be, waiting, gone.

  Fire . . . Water. Earth. Air. Names bound those elements, twisted around them, held them close, breathed life into their combinations. Binding. Pulling.

  The man in the suit said pray for them. The dreadlocked man promised more fire next time. Drums bound them, braided them, infused them with the possibility of moving, breathing, being heard.

  Cudjoe hears footsteps behind him. A mob howling his name. Screaming for blood. Words come to him, cool him, stop him in his tracks. He’d known them all his life. Never again. Never again. He turns to face whatever it is rumbling over the stones of Independence Square.

  ‘Wideman's writing, like Toni Morrison's, is so pure and convincing that he can break the rules of classical storytelling even invent some new ones’

  Boston Globe

  ‘A genre-defying mix of history, biography and memoir’

  Philadelphia Inquirer

  ‘A rare triumph . . . Wideman has succeeded in understanding his brother’s life and coming to terms with his own’

  New York Times