The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “He’s cold,” said the girl. “You let him be, Ritchie. I think he’s dying.”

  “I’m not dying,” promised I.

  Excitement lanterned her.

  “Good, mister! You think like that, maybe you won’t die.”

  “I am not dying. What is your name, girl?”

  “Bunny Tucker. My papa is Reverend Tucker and my momma is Mrs. Tucker and they’re off fetching a doctor, and that right there’s my brother, Ritchie Tucker. He’s the one who shot you down.”

  Baffling was any scenario involving the discharging of firearms. I rolled my head back and through upside-down eyes made out the branch from which I’d swung, hanged like the Apostle Luke, like the Quaker Mary Dyer, like so many other first-rate martyrs. The branch, though, had been amputated with the same artistry as had my left arm, the brown bark torn open to reveal shards of blond wood. Even the tree’s trunk looked like mine now, gouged with bullet holes. Ritchie Tucker, it could be certified, was no Lee Harvey Oswald; it’d taken repeated shots to blast apart the branch, more than long enough for a martyr to do his thing.

  I sat up and rolled my neck; bones crackled, but my noggin was supported. I heard whispers of disbelief, prayers of exaltation. How had I missed for so long that my absence of physical pain was not an absence at all but a presence? I was on track to outperform Jesus, who, in his own time, had commingled with a disenfranchised radical or two.

  From a distance came the shriek of an ambulance I wouldn’t need. Far closer, several hatted gents—newsmen by the way they flipped open spiral-bound pads—were paying attention to a Negro church group at which, until the theatrics of a white-boy hanging, they’d yawned. My noose had been loosened a touch but still dangled about my neck. I gave it a tug. It didn’t give much, and I found that I enjoyed the pressure, much as a Wall Street baron must enjoy the do-or-die throttling of a Windsor knot against his jugular.

  “Here, mister, let me get that off,” said Bunny Tucker. “But you’re probably still gonna die.”

  “Quite the macabre child,” observed I. “And I insist that we leave it on.”

  II.

  ALREADY I’D FARED BETTER WITH these Mississippians than the indifferent Negro lawn workers of Heavenly Hills. After I refused medical care, the Tuckers took me in forcibly so as to monitor my condition, should I abruptly remember my suicide. Popeyed Ritchie shunned me and took to striding about with his shotgun. Bunny, while much cuter, was only marginally more affable. Room to room she followed me, impatient for me to drop dead. When I did not, she pouted and complained how she’d been hoping to sing at my funeral.

  The Tucker parents, at least, were lionhearted Christians who believed the Vietnam War to be an immoral distraction from the struggles of the powerless in America. Forthright Negro furor discombobulated me, and so I listened more than I spoke, thereby happening across the ideal manner for a martyr. The less I said, the more easily I might symbolize any particular group’s objective.

  Mistaking me for a likeminded ally, the Tuckers rehashed brutal events as others rehash family vacations, the most recent of which had unfolded while I’d been whirling around outer space. A group of Negroes known as the Greensboro 4 had refused to leave a North Carolina Woolworth’s that wouldn’t serve them, sparking months of sit-ins across the South. These actions had inspired an eloquent minister by the serendipitous name of Dr. King to fight the segregationist policies of Birmingham, Alabama—aka “Bombingham.” The Reverend and Mrs. Tucker had been at Dr. King’s elbow throughout and recalled (to the bored eye-roll of Bunny) how a police K-9 had been unleashed upon a six-year-old girl.

  I’d heard of this Dr. King. I’d once listened to a taped broadcast of a speech in which he’d recounted a dream he’d had, one that, like all dreams, was silly—that all men were created equal. All men, Dr. King? Even those incapable of dreaming, those already dead? Would I, too, one day be judged not by the color of my skin but by the content of my character? I could only hope the latter was true, for it was my character I intended to elevate to godlike altitudes.

  Discontent led to objections, objections led to demonstrations, and demonstrations always had a use for showy schticks. In other words, people were waiting for someone just like me. I didn’t need to ask. On a piece of church stationery, Reverend Tucker wrote the addresses of several simpatico objectors. I thanked him (silently) and bid the Tuckers farewell (ditto). The egg-eyed, shotgun-strangulating Ritchie applauded sarcastically when I gathered my belongings and stepped from the porch, but his sister cried enough to disturb the swallows. I had grown used to silence, yet felt that I owed the family a gesture. Besides, I’d grown fond of the brat; she’d devoted many hours singing and dancing in my vicinity in hopes of pulling from me a second compliment. I knelt before her.

  “Don’t you tell me to stop crying!” blubbered she. “I can cry all I want.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Even your cry is musical.”

  She sniffled, her tears stopping—there, she’d gotten her flattery.

  “Daddy said you have to leave,” she said. “He says you have big things to do.”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe you do, too,” said I.

  Her eyes sparkled. More tears, yes, but these were large, proud ones. On impulse, I pulled one of her pigtails, then the other. She sputtered, genuinely aggrieved. Good—it made leaving all the easier. I stood and looked to the Mississippi horizon. A single Bunny, even one this talented, was too few; larger warrens awaited.

  I traveled on foot like the sandal-clad martyrs I’d studied. This was 1964, Reader, and the decade had yet to catch fire. Reverend Tucker’s Southern associates were hesitant to include in their protests a one-armed man who, despite some degenerative browning, was still, when observed closely, quite white. But when I arrived at the last address on Reverend Tucker’s list, Nashville’s Fisk University, I knew I’d found my next target. Apologies—my next stage. Formerly known as the Fisk Free Colored School, the university thumped with the tiger heart of Negro restiveness, and on the day I ambled toward stately Jubilee Hall, students dotted the lawn, building signs for a march. Their wary stares I ascribed to both the ambiguous color of my skin and the accessory I’d kept as my signature: my sawed-off noose, hanging about my neck like a lavaliere.

  Record players, those boxy descendants of Dr. Leather’s Victrola, supplied bouncing beats to the students’ labor. Between the falsettos of Smokey Robinson and the seductions of Marvin Gaye, I heard a sharper, more scornful voice, quite unconcerned with romance.

  “Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?”

  If you are waiting, Reader, for the background singers to sha-na-na, I hope you are comfortably seated. The artist, if that’s what you’d like to call him, was pictured on his LP sleeve as a bespectacled, pokerfaced Negro with the absurd name of “Malcolm X,” and his recorded ferment against the white man discomfited me. The Negro features about which he spoke were all over this campus. One simply did not discuss such things, Mr. X—no, sir, one did not!

  My role, of course, was not to question the motives of protestors; a Better God could not be selective. I wandered until I identified the man who, by the number of questions he fielded, looked to be in charge. Several peppy young Negroes awaited his attention, but I nudged myself in front. Surely my business took precedence.

  “Mr. Clifford Jackson, I presume?”

  Perhaps he recognized a Caucasian cadence, for he swiveled as if expecting to block a punch, only to go still upon seeing my arm stump and swollen, discolored flesh. Though not gifted with Mr. X’s dapper looks, Mr. Jackson had done well copying his style: trim suit, pencil tie, cropped hair, black horn rims, and an expression of intense concentration. Fastened to his lapel was a golden pin of a star
and crescent against a scarlet background.

  “As-salamu alaykum. Who’s asking?”

  What of this garbledegook? I kept my response as brief.

  “Zebulon Finch. Reverend Tucker of Biloxi, Mississippi, sent me to help.”

  “Help? You want to join our line?”

  The confident smile I offered was playacting. Many of the Negroes, I’d begun to notice, wore the same star-and-crescent, the young men sporting funny caps, the young women chaste bonnets. Mr. Jackson gave me a visual frisking, the sharp line of his glasses scraping across my skin like a shaving razor. Eventually he shrugged.

  “Mr. Tucker’s a good man. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us to open our arms to those who feel the same about our oppressors.”

  A-ha, the Honorable So-and-So! So I’d met my first Muslim, had I? I’d heard my share of horror stories regarding the Nation of Islam’s mercenaries, but this chap seemed more scholar than roustabout. I gave him a careful nod.

  “Good,” said he. “I’m glad we come down on the same side of the issue.”

  Right, the issue! Which issue was it, again? Eh, best not to concern myself. What mattered was that the setting of the afternoon’s enthusiastic picket line was a large Nashville hotel, outside of which the Fisk contingent, all thirty-five of them, decried this injustice or that maltreatment while marching in an oval wide enough to circumscribe a riser and podium, and above which ran a bridge as part of the new interstate. By the time a freshman go-getter and local pastor had deferred to Mr. Jackson’s firebranding, I’d slipped away, climbed the hill, and made my way to the bridge’s edge. From that height, I could see that the crowd we’d drawn was paltry, more irritated white folk than bold black. The approaching police cars and paddy wagon did not look friendly either. Pish-posh, as Bridey might have said. None of that had any bearing on my duty.

  My stolen library books had taught me that history prized one method of martyrdom above all others—burning, ideally at a stake. From the legendary (Joan of Arc, thrice incinerated in 1431, ashes dumped into the Seine) to the relatively unknown (John the Apostle’s pupil Polycarp, whose 167 AD burning was noteworthy for how his gush of blood doused the flames) to such modern purveyors as Thích Quang Đúc, the method was spectacular and conclusive. Fires left no bodies to be enshrined and worshipped, no relics to be collected and hallowed.

  I, however, lacked the courage to burn, for it would, at the very least, render me so hideous and lame that the rest of my days would be spent charred and writhing. Besides, there were a surfeit of other sanctioned ways to off it for a cause; one need only flip to a random page of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and follow the grisly step-by-step. How else do you think I learned of the sacrifice of James the Less, cast down by the high priest Ananus from the Temple tower?

  My rope-free copycat plunge was, if you’ll allow the boast, superb, head-first for maximal shock value but with a flopsy slackness just right for flaunting one’s disinterest in one’s own fate. With disgruntled motorists honking and applause still smattering from Mr. Jackson’s frisky finale, I heard no reaction to the show of my free-fall dive before crunching to the sidewalk thirty feet below.

  Once more there was a blip of blissful oblivion, from which I emerged to find a huddling of Negroes similar to that which I’d experienced in Biloxi. There were whispers of “Did you see it?” and “Why’d he do it?” and Bunny Tucker’s favorite, “He’s dead!” before I opened my eyes, noted the partial break of my right hip, and gave them a beatific smile.

  “Praise Allah,” gasped Mr. Jackson into the microphone.

  How they frolicked and fervored, and from their glorification I took great gulps of pride. But sounds of triumphalism are so close to those of violence. I knew not when police had formed a line, nor when they’d ordered us to disperse, nor who’d thrown the first punch. I knew only that billy clubs were abruptly cracking against bones; only that rednecks in shirtsleeves had pitched in with blackjacks and tire chains; only that the Negroes, behind Mr. Jackson, whose scrupulous attire hid one hell of a bruiser, were stirred by the miracle of my fall and rise, and fought back with fists and feet. An all-out race war raged in front of that hotel that day, brown and pink skin smearing to a tan tangle, while the color red was shared by all.

  I was helped up by two students, but it’d take time to learn how to work a shattered hip, and a white man, foaming at the lips, rushed me with a crowbar, howling that the only thing worse than Martin Luther Coon niggers was Martin Luther Coon nigger-lovers, but I only had to absorb one blow before students enveloped him as would a pack of wolves. A parked automobile exploded into fire—sheer chaos, unmitigated anarchy!—but a fire engine was there, and its hoses, when done drenching the blaze, turned upon us with force enough to tear the skin off my elbow. I stared at the nub of bone, so bright and clean compared to my mulch of flesh, and found it to be a perfect analogy: scrub off America’s decay, and you might find strong new bones beneath.

  Then a smoke bomb exploded, billowing unbreathable fumes until all combatants had to scatter. But what elation that scramble contained and what stories were told back at Fisk as one protestor bandaged the next! While I practiced walking with my screwy hip, the students kept an eye on me and with a degree of respect. I liked it—nay, relished it—but smothered the gloat, for a Better God should not expect hymns composed and churches built in his honor. A Better God’s body was but rungs up which one might climb toward victory, however one chose to define it.

  Muslim protestors received little press. Nevertheless, I ran their circuit for months and came to appreciate their grit in the face of formidable odds, their unsnappable communal spirit, and most of all their lack of questions regarding who I was or why I’d chosen to support them. They accepted me because of the reference of Reverend Tucker, or Clifford Jackson, or whoever came next, and when I died for their cause, they were gracious but rarely worshipful, for they recognized the progress for what it was: just one more rung up a long, long ladder.

  In February, Malcolm X was shot—and shot, and shot, and shot, ten times or more while delivering a speech in Manhattan. I’d hardly subscribed to his affronting doctrine; his recorded screeds, played on vinyl until I’d memorized every the white man this and the white devil that, had nearly made this Better God feel bad about his holy self. And yet, Reader, his murder drove me to the dankest mood. Like JFK, Malcolm X had achieved in one fateful second what I was being forced to crawl toward inch by inch—sainthood for people who were in the sorest need of a saint.

  I wanted what he had. So it came to pass three weeks later outside a Chattanooga ghetto, while I prepared another program of march-and-martyr to go alongside a prison vigil, that a strutting adolescent volunteer in a taqiyah cap asked for my name to add to his attendant list. To him I debuted an alias becoming of a god who planned to be all things to all people.

  “You may call me,” declared I, “Zebulon X.”

  The kid raised an eyebrow. “Like Malcolm?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You jivin’ me?”

  “Am I what, boy?”

  “X replaces a slave name, you dig?”

  “Dig? With one arm? Can’t I have a different assignment?”

  “You know you aren’t black, right?”

  Hadn’t eighty-six years as unqualifiable “other” entitled me to make finer distinctions?

  “My name,” repeated I, “is Zebulon X.”

  The kid frowned, wrote it down, and walked away muttering, “Obnoxious White Motherfucker. That oughta be your name.”

  III.

  ZEBULON X WAS NOT PRESENT at the “Bloody Sunday” of Dr. King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, but what I saw on television was the Nashville brawl on a broader scale, as horsebacked, helmeted, gas-masked troopers rushed Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, the hooves of the animals chopping down marchers so that stormtrooper boots could climb across the fallen and drag twisting bodies from tear-gas fog.

  In Selma’s aftermath I ma
rtyred frequently, but our rallies were brush fires. A Better God should engulf whole forests, which required larger numbers of viewers, which required, to be blunt, white folk, as the cameras, operated by other white folk, preferred them. By 1965, white college students had caught up not only to black music but black unrest, and associations to organize cross-state protests were cropping up like mushrooms, and so I isolated one of the most prominent—the Nonviolent Student Task Force, or NSTF—and paid a visit to the closest chapter in Cincinnati.

  Located down the street from Xavier University, the office was an uninspiring one-story Craftsman house with slivering yellow paint and a handpainted signpost stabbed into lawn overgrowth. The sign was the size of a magazine with illegible lettering done by an artist who’d lost interest halfway through. For that reason I attributed it to the daydreaming teenager drifting about collecting a bouquet of dandelions. Dozens had been delicately tied together to form a tiara resting atop her head of long, straight blond hair. The craft must have taken hours, a constructive expenditure of time, I’m sure you’ll agree, in such tumultuous times.

  From behind pink-lensed sunglasses she noticed me.

  “Oh, hello!”

  Next she noticed my damaged flesh and missing arm. Her head listed in a childlike gesture of sympathy.

  “Oh, wow. They’ve put you through the wringer.”

  “Who has?”

  “They. The Man.”

  “And which man might that be?”

  She sashayed on bare feet as if to a waltz only she could hear, her rumpled dress swishing about grass-stained calves. I had no idea what to make of this wood nymph. Her eyes were red and unfocused, but she looked sublimely happy, and when she reached me, she beamed. For one disciplined to expect the paradoxical reaction, it was disconcerting.

  “I have come to speak to he who is in charge,” said I.

  “That would be Harvey.”

  “Is this Harvey in?”

  She nodded, quickly like a little girl. A sweet scent wafted from her blowsy hair. I recognized it from my Harlem days, back when street peddlers called it “reefer.” Modern youngsters called it “grass.”