“Which doctrines?”
“That dark skin was the mark of the brother-killer, Cain, and his seed. That dark skin was God’s punishment of bad souls who had sinned in the pre-mortal life. That dark skin was hereditary of Lucifer’s followers. That dark skin was a sign of debasement and filth. All this had been a cornerstone of Mormon theology since Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, which described the Lamanites—the perennial bad guys—as ‘dark and loathsome and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.’ And later, the second Nephi book elaborates that God ‘did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them’ in order ‘that they shall be loathsome unto my people,’ as they are ‘full of mischief.’”
“You memorized it?”
“Every word is burned into my mind.” Powell knuckled his forehead. “It’s like giving testimony, but of the truth. For example, Smith’s translation of the Egyptian papyrus, in the Book of Abraham, where he described how evil souls were punished by God with a black skin. And his successor, Brigham Young, warned about those with ‘flat nose and black skin.’ He said that they are ‘uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.’”
Rex came into Ben’s bedroom with a bowl of chicken soup. “I figured this would make you feel at home.”
Ben held the bowl and inhaled the steam. “Ah! This is the Jewish Celestial Kingdom!”
They laughed.
He spooned the hot liquid and slurped. “Very good!”
“Haven’t lost my touch.” Rex rubbed his hands. “It’s been a while.”
Turning back to Powell, Ben asked, “What happened next?”
“As an assistant professor at Brigham Young University,” Powell continued, “I had access to a lot of research sources. The incident with my son made me interested in the civil rights movement and the way it had impacted the Mormon Church. I discovered that the leadership had changed the policy to allow blacks, Latinos, and Asians into the priesthood after years of political and commercial pressure, under fear of lawsuits, and because Mormon missionaries were thrown out of foreign countries, in addition to several states, such as New York, which considered legislation to ban racist proselytizing. Mormon racism was becoming too inconvenient, so the open priesthood manifesto was issued. But the Church left untouched the underlying doctrinal and theological foundation of the correlation between dark skin and evil souls.”
“But surely Mormons no longer think that way, do they?”
“They’re very charitable people,” Powell said. “The Mormon Church is incredibly generous in donating food and medicine to African and South American countries. They’re first to help in natural disasters. For example, the people of New Orleans can tell you how LDS teams arrived after Hurricane Katrina, saving lives and feeding the hungry—blacks and whites—while the federal government was spinning its wheels uselessly. Yet at the same time, Mormons believe that everything Joseph Smith and his successor prophets said is true including Brigham Young’s warning: ‘If the white man…mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot. This will always be so.’ The last sentence,” Powell explained, “resonates with every Mormon even today.”
“How do you know?”
“By applying statistical models to social science research, I conducted confidential, blind surveys in which subjects were asked a long series of questions, most of them irrelevant to the real focus of the research.”
“A diversion?”
“Correct. Of the Mormons who indicated that they hold strong belief in their faith, eighty-nine percent said that interracial marriage was sinful and eighty-seven percent said that they would forbid or discourage their children from marrying a dark-skinned person. I published the results in the National Journal of Social Science and Society, including other statistics that demonstrated the lingering racial prejudice among members of the Mormon Church. My conclusion was that Mormon racism would continue until God provided our current leader—the LDS president, seer, and revelator—with an explicit revelation that erased and disavowed all previous black-is-evil revelations, scriptures, decrees, and admonitions.”
“What happened then?”
“The response was swift. My department head instructed me to withdraw the article from publication due to ‘errors in methodology.’ He suggested that I focus my research on my ethnic heritage. For example, the statistical data underlying the failure of traditional family structure among African Americans in urban areas or the high percentage of black male incarcerations. This was not only insulting, but also fundamentally against any notion of academic integrity, or integrity in general. I went over his head to the provost, who was also an apostle and member of the Quorum of Twelve, which is like the Mormon Church’s board of directors. I pleaded with him to take my research and conclusions to heart and work toward changing the Mormon racial doctrines once and for all. I told him: We can’t fool the Gentiles forever—it’s going to catch up with us!”
“Big mistake,” Rex said.
“He laid his hands on my head and blessed me! Can you believe it?” Powell chuckled. “How else could I have interpreted his blessing but as the ultimate expression of warm support? I practically danced my way back to my office, where a letter soon arrived by messenger, suspending me from all teaching and research responsibilities and banning me from the library. The library!”
Having raised his voice, Powell coughed hard, pressing on his chest.
“I begged my colleagues to support me, but they were afraid to lose their jobs. Our bishop took away my Temple Recommend Card for ‘safekeeping’ until I returned to my senses. When I wrote a letter to the Salt Lake Tribune, our bishop instructed my wife to threaten divorce unless I backed down, which I might have done if not for my boys. It was their future I was fighting for! And my wife still loved me! But the pressure on her was relentless—the bishop, stake president, general authorities, her parents—and we ended up in court.”
“Guess who’s coming to court,” Ben said.
“A bunch of very friendly Mormons—the judge, the lawyers, the social workers, the witnesses, and even the psychiatrist—the honorable Dr. Neibauer, who reported on his diagnosis, based on input from family and friends, of my acute schizoid-paranoid affliction. And there I was, in a lovely, wood-paneled courtroom, surrounded by the nicest white people in the world, all working in happy harmony to save my wife and boys from a raving lunatic in Lucifer’s dark skin.” He pulled out a worn photo. “Here, do I look insane?”
Ben examined the photo of a much younger Powell, smiling, his arm around a pretty brunette, the boys dressed in their Sunday best, their skin color a smooth chocolate. “Good-looking kids,” he said.
“Don’t bullshit me.” Powell took back the photo. “I know what your white mind is thinking. Half-breeds. Ugly little mutts.”
“You are paranoid,” Ben said. “My white mind was thinking about my black girlfriend and how one day we’ll have kids looking just like yours.”
Powell burst out laughing. “You’re dating a black sister? I’d never have guessed that about you, boy! What’s her name?”
“Keera, and she’s not happy right now.”
Part VII:
The Descendent
Chapter 51
It had rained the rest of Friday and all of Saturday, which mattered little as Ben had remained in bed, propped up on pillows, reading the books. Powell and Rex took turns in the kitchen, but there was no sign of Streep or Dreyfuss.
Sunday morning brought back the sun. After a breakfast of eggs, toast, and a fresh salad, Rex changed the dressing on Ben’s wound and suggested they go for a ride.
Stepping out of the house, Ben took in the open views of the surrounding landscape. The stone house was only one of several farm buildings clu
stered together against a hillside. The farm was old, but not in disrepair—two large barns, an equipment shed, an inactive chicken coop, and a green tractor of an old vintage under a carport made from galvanized steel. There were no neighbors in sight, and the rolling hills showed signs of past cultivation, probably corn fields and apple orchards, now repossessed by nature.
“I put the bikes out of the rain.” Rex pulled open the doors of a storage shed. Ben’s GS was inside, together with the white Ducati, a black Harley Davidson, and a dual-purpose Kawasaki KLR650. He rolled out the GS and the KLR.
Getting into the jacket was a little painful, but once Ben was sitting on the GS, everything else disappeared into the back recesses of his mind.
Rex took off on the light KLR. The unpaved road was packed with gravel, which provided solid traction, except for areas where it had been washed away by the rain, leaving rutted mud that required careful balancing, especially for the heavier GS.
They reached a gate, which was locked. Rex stopped, got off the bike, and unlocked the gate, holding it open for Ben. After pushing his KLR through, Rex locked the gate behind them. Moments later, they reached a paved country road.
The pace grew faster. Rex seemed to know the area well, leading the way through hills and valleys, passing by active and neglected farms, across a dam and down to a rushing river, where he stopped, signaling to Ben to do the same.
From a duffel bag that was strapped to the back of his KLR, Rex took out a bunch of sticks, which he assembled into a fishing rod. After fixing a bait on the hook, he cast far into the water and sat on a rock.
“Nice spot,” Ben said, settling down on another rock.
“I used to come here with my grandfather.” Rex tugged on the rod, reeled in a bit, and let it sit. “It reminded him of a similar river, back in Russia. We fished every Sunday and fried the catch back at the farm, together with fresh onion and cabbage.”
“Now it’s your farm?”
Rex nodded. “I put it into a trust to keep my name out of the records. Harder to track me down that way.”
“Can’t they find you at Best Buy, like I did?”
“Not anymore.” He tugged on the rod, but it loosened again. “I’ll go back after this operation is over.”
They sat in silence for a while. Then the line went taught. Rex reeled in and paused, reeled in more and paused, until a healthy-sized fish emerged from the dark water.
Ben helped unhook it into a net, which Rex tied in the shallow water to keep the fish alive until they were ready to leave.
Rex cast again. “We are betting everything on you.”
“Why are you involved in this? How did the Mormons hurt your family?”
“No family to hurt.” Rex reeled back the line, which came empty, and put a new bait on the hook. “I left the saints many years ago, soon after I finished my service.”
“Why?”
He cast the line far in. “You like asking questions.”
“It’s my job.”
“Do you know the Marine Corps motto?”
“Semper Fidelis.”
“That’s right. Always Faithful. But faithful to whom?”
Ben waited for him to answer his own question.
“My grandfather escaped from Russia with his young wife after the Cossacks killed everyone else in the pogroms. Try to watch Fiddler on the Roof without the sound, without the songs and dancing, and you’ll have a good idea of how Jews lived in Russia a century ago. They came here after a distant cousin lent them money to buy cheap land and recreated the life they had lost. My grandfather remained faithful to his Jewish religion and the only way of life he knew. But my father, an only son, hated everything about the pitiable, grungy existence his immigrant parents had imported from Russia.”
“It’s not unusual,” Ben said, “for immigrants’ children to become alienated from their parents, or even ashamed.”
“True.” The line tightened, and Rex tugged on it, but it came out empty. He hooked another worm and cast the line into the water. “For Grandpa, western Pennsylvania was heaven, a place to rebuild the same way of life, but without the murdering Cossacks. For my father, the farm was a gulag to escape from. He aspired to become a real American, free and successful, which meant going to college. The only school that gave him a full scholarship was Brigham Young. He left his Judaism behind, on the farm, together with the Yiddish yakking and Eastern European drudgery. As a freshman, he took the mandatory classes about LDS history and scriptures, joined his classmates on Sundays, and discovered Mormonism to be a real American religion, filled with pioneering spirit, strong community, and a celebration of material success. The fact that a blond, blue-eyed stunner was madly in love with him, well, that didn’t hurt either.”
“Your mom?”
Rex nodded. “My sisters got her looks. I’m a poor mix.”
Ben laughed.
“By the time my dad was a junior, he was married with a kid on the way. A decade later, he was an executive with IBM. My parents had just bought a new house when dad crashed his car during a snowstorm, dying at the scene.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too. It was terrible during the first few months. But our Mormon community provided everything we needed—cooked meals, childcare, mortgage payments, and later, a series of potential husbands for my mom, who settled for a lawyer, a father of five whose wife had died in childbirth. My mom was soon pregnant again, and again. We all worked hard to be helpful and happy, but it was kind of fake. I spent my summers here with my grandpa and grandma. I was Jewish on the farm and Mormon the rest of the time. It was interesting.”
“I bet.”
“After doing my Mormon mission in Alabama, I enlisted in the Marines and spent time in Japan and Germany. Both my grandparents died during my first year back, and I discovered that you can’t be Always Faithful when you face two competing values.”
The line tightened, and it wasn’t a false alarm. Rex reeled in a hefty striper that fought to get away.
Once it was safely in the net, Rex started disassembling the rod. “These two will give us enough food for tonight.”
Ben helped him tie the rod sections together. “What values were in conflict?”
“My last name is Levi. Do you know what it means?”
“Your family traces its roots to the tribe of Levi.”
“That’s right.” Rex shook the net with the two fish until all the water drained off and slipped them into a plastic bag. “When I left the Marine Corps, I found a job in Baltimore as a computer tech. I attended services at the LDS ward and dated nice Mormon girls who wanted a good husband and a bunch of kids. During my annual interview with the bishop, he gave me a date to do the posthumous baptizing for my grandparents. I hesitated, explaining how the old man was a Jew through and through, how my grandma was the daughter of a rabbi and so proud of it. The bishop was very kind, spending time with me, discussing Grandpa’s life and our family’s history back in Russia. In the end, I accepted that it was my duty to invite their souls into the True Church. But then, things went weird. I was called to meet the president of the DC temple and was asked to sign a statement requesting posthumous baptisms for all my relatives, not just Grandpa. Turned out that the Church had been dealing with unhappy Jewish leaders, who were resentful of posthumous baptisms for Holocaust victims. The LDS Church agreed to sign a settlement agreement, which led to more problems and another agreement. Now, only dead relatives of Mormons could be baptized by proxy.”
“And your relatives include all Jews.”
“You got it.” Rex tied the duffel bag back on the bike. “My last name—Levi—meant that our hereditary line had been carefully maintained under Jewish tradition for centuries. It was a proof that I was a direct descendent of Levi, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham—the ultimate Jewish patriarch. It meant that, according to the Jews’
own rules, I was a direct relative of all Jews who ever lived. Therefore, even under the strict settlement the Mormon Church had signed with the Jewish leaders, I had the right to request posthumous baptisms for every one of my dead relatives, i.e. every dead Jew in history.”
“But you felt it was devious?”
Rex nodded. “It was technically defensible according to the lawyer from Salt Lake City, who flew in to obtain my signature on the paper requesting posthumous baptisms for all my dead relatives. But it stunk of deceit and put me in a terrible bind. I had to choose whether to be faithful to my Mormon Church or to Grandpa’s memory. Being a young man, fresh out of the Marine Corps, I decided that Always Faithful wasn’t about obeying authorities—military or religious. It was about faithful adherence to principles: Tradition. Integrity. Honor.”
The ride back followed a different route, which took them into a small town with a single gas station, a general store, and a cemetery. Rex stopped the KLR on the side of the road. Without getting off the bike, he pointed at a double stone, set slightly to the side from the other graves. It was carved with a Jewish star and the name Levi.
Chapter 52
Ben pushed aside his dinner plate, having eaten every last crumb of Rex’s fried fish with onions and cabbage. “That was delicious!”
Streep, Powell, and Dreyfuss nodded, their mouths still full. Rex was at the sink, scrubbing the frying pan. “Practice makes perfect,” he said.
“Which is why I don’t feel ready for tomorrow,” Ben said. “By the way, what if they ask about the nasty wound on the back of my shoulder?”
“Memorize this information.” Dreyfuss gave him a piece of paper. “Dr. Glenda Monroe is your dermatologist. She operated on you in her office last Friday, outpatient procedure, to remove skin cancer from your upper left back. Her office is near Inova Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia. She just left on a cruise to the Greek Islands, but her nurse will answer the phone and confirm your story, if it ever comes to that. Her name is Eve, and she’s a friend.”
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