The Museum of Love

by Steve Weiner

  ‘I married when I was fifteen. She was one-quarter Cherokee. We had a little boy. The farms began to fail. Our boss, Mr Dilworth, said there wasn’t but room for one hand now. I would have to contest it with a Mexican boy. We didn’t have much food and the baby was sick, so I really needed that job. The contest started on Thursday morning at six. I picked down one row, the Mexican down another. It was hot, but we never stopped. At seven-thirty in the evening I had picked ninety-eight pounds of cotton and he had picked ninety-nine. So he got the job.

  ‘I met up with him in the woods. I pulled a knife. I told him I needed the job. He went back to his truck and he got his knife. He told me in Spanish that I had to leave Anadarko. He said I’d been beaten fair. He said Mr Dilworth had had coffee with him and had hired him.

  ‘This Mexican boy was a tough fighter but this time I was tougher. He cut my forearms but I cut his leg. He got so scared of the big artery opening that he tied his shirt around it. He had real smooth skin like the finest Swiss milk chocolate. I had my way with him and afterward I got my wife and boy and we left Anadarko.

  ‘We lived in Cordell, Clinton and Foss. My wife died of sceptic poisoning. I took my boy to Woodward and worked in a mail order firm. My boy was killed crossing the highway. I moved to Alva on the Salt Fork. I made money killing dogs for the county.

  ‘I searched for the meaning of life, the cause of my suffering. I attended field gospel meetings. I handled snakes in Bartlesville. Nothing lighted the darkness inside. I went north to Kansas City. There I heard the Rosicrucian Elias D. White. After one of his lectures I went up and told him I figured he had as good a handle on things as anybody.

  ‘I was proud of being a Rosicrucian. I wore the red ribbon crossways on my shoulder. I was rebaptized in Elias D. White’s home. I was wrapped in a clean YMCA towel and anointed with herbs. Handel’s Messiah played on his phonograph. I underwent lavation. He showed me the Codex. We collected snakes and I became the bridegroom. I was taught the Cibation. Henceforth I was known as Delius.

  ‘There was an attempt on White’s life and I became his personal bodyguard.

  ‘White taught me physical metamorphosis. We went into his garden and cast my male seed into the nasturtiums. He gave me a green lion with a red star. I recited the Ode of the First Material and was given the key of Basilius.

  ‘It was the 1940s. We exposed many lodges, fake resurrections. We were attacked from New York and Missouri. There were warrants, suits and perjury trials. We fought the Shriners, the Masons and the Light of Egypt, both the American Mahatma and the Grand Maitre of the USA. The Great White Lodge of Tibet sent proclamations to Kansas City. In the end, a bomb crippled Elias D. White.

  ‘I was burdened everywhere by the collapse of man. It seemed to me the United States was a wasteland of sterility and greed.’

  ‘So I left my body.

  ‘Fox, geese and owls ate anti-tumescent plants. Flames blew out of our bellies and turned lust to sweet generosity. Rainwater washed me clean. I became sweet. We walked arm in arm, the crippled and the holy, into savannahs shrouded with birds of paradise rising over rumbling volcanoes. Eagle feathers fell golden and twirling into the sun-shafts.

  ‘It was the garden of God. There were no soldiers. There were no slaughterhouse workers. There were no felons, homosexuals or blasphemers. Johann Comenius was there, Ezechiel Foxcraft, Solomon Trismosin, and Heinrich Khunrath. I saw Marcus Aurelias. Elias Ashmole was there. Pilgrims pulled themselves out of deep wells. Scribes wrote in silver light. Men crawled out of dungeons waving pennants on which was written IHS. That was how they spent their days: in allegory.

  ‘We grew helleborus niger, Symphytum tuberosum, aconite for friendship, willow wort against enmities. Christ Himself watered clematis under the pergola.

  ‘We became androgynes and danced between the crocus and lilac, through the graveyards of delusions. Exquisite clocks ticked. Nights we heard the Divine monochord. I wrapped myself in wings like an upright bat and slept standing on the lake shore.

  ‘One day we found a perfect-cursed-blessed man in the woods.

  ‘“Look,” he whispered. “In the skies …”

  ‘People were being taken up into the clouds. We said of such a one that he was not, for God took him or she slipped away and became light. As at a train station now I wait. I wait for the angels in handcarts to ride me to the skies. O, so many have already gone up in streams of silver light!

  ‘You have a crippled body. Some day you will kill somebody. But let me tell you something. We’re trying to get it across to you. You’ve heard it before. I’ll tell you again:

  ‘Search for the fruit if you want to, but remember the gender of the root.’

  Fourteen

  I was a Negro.

  I enrolled in a book-keeping course in Wilbur, Nebraska, at the firm of Fitzroy and McKimmon. It was a yellow brick building on the corner of Fifth and Jackson behind the mortuary. It was late May. White blossoms were in the cherry trees. Birds chirped on the funeral hall. It was warm and there was pollen in the lilacs. Our instructor was white and severe. We studied double column, percentage reckoning, carry-over and incremental accounts. There was Adrian Greenberg, who had cancer, Mary St Cloud, Genevieve Kiek and Harrison Bond, all Negroes.

  ‘Jack,’ Harrison said to me. ‘You’re a very nice person. Strange. But nice.’

  Unable to commit suicide, I became a clown.

  I moved to south Indiana, wearing tomatoes in my hair. I stole watches and wore them on my shoulder. I perfected card tricks. I lived in an abandoned railroad shack in Paoli and made potato beer. Two white railroad guards fought with knives. I heard them bawling but I saw nothing, just the water tank. I carved the incident on the walls.

  I dreamed that a black flood covered Indiana but, fast as I rowed, I couldn’t save Antoinette.

  I crossed into Kentucky. The road, now white, now black, curved into the hickory hills. I came across a white skin stretched between birch trees and a mattress rotted in the rain. My mother passed by, sparks in her hair.

  Pzzzzt.

  * * *

  I worked my way through Kentucky. I skinned geese, loaded radishes. I wore my puerility like a badge. The heat paralysed me. The old plantations, the weatherbeaten shacks, sizzled in waves. There were quick white clouds overhead, but slow black rivers below. I told people my father was a Negro who had been killed by a white prison guard.

  At night lightning sizzled over the hills. Ignace led a horde of dead children down Tea Rose Street.

  Pzzzzt.

  I moved to Wingo. White developers were moving cemeteries and Negroes were hired to probe the funeral fields for corpses. They hauled up rotted caskets and sometimes bodies fell out. Brass pins opened, the shrouds unknotted at the head, bones tumbled to the ground. Then there was a field fire. A white couple burned to death in a yellow Ford. They turned black as Negroes, embracing. Then the creek flooded, swept through a graveyard, uprooted coffins. Corpses jumped up stone walls, climbed hickory trees.

  ‘Jean, Jean, the jailer’s son,’ they sang.

  I darkened my face with shoe polish. I stiffened my hair with resin. I perfected my limp.

  I joined the Zion Church of God. I lived in a bus behind a rectory in Louisville. On Saturday I washed the church steps. Negro derelicts came for ham sandwiches. I served non-alcoholic mint drinks at the Louisville Negro Men’s Club. They sang:

  ‘O Death, spare me over one more day.’

  I visited the museum of Negroes.

  It was a tenant farmer’s shack now owned by the Committee of Negro Educators. It was warm, very dark. Sunlight streamed through a hot open door. In the foyer a Negro mannikin hanged by the neck from a cypress branch.

  There was a curved painting of the Atlantic, full of storms. A white sailing ship glided past black clouds. I pressed a red button. The anchor chain rattled out of a porthole, and on each link was a Negro.

  By the stairs was a table of mechanical Negro girls. I turned the crank. The Neg
ro children danced.

  Upstairs was a Negro skull. Arrows showed the cranial tilt, the brain capacity. On a steel tray inside a glass cabinet was a patch of Negro skin. Glass flasks held black pigment. Collections of knotted hair, with name tags, were pinned inside white boxes on beds of purest cotton.

  A table was laid with a Negro dinner: yam, asafoetida, green beans, catfish. On a mahogany dresser was a display of catgut, hair oil, a stuffed Negro dream bird. A Yoruba necklace dangled over a cracked mirror. There was a ticket to a Louis Armstrong concert, and photographs of famous Negro criminals lined the wall. I bought Negroes of Cincinnati by Phelps T. Edwards. I went into the courtyard. A pomegranate tree, broken by red-orange fruit, burst into flame.

  I moved north to Michigan.

  I cleaned cars in Sturgis, hauled dirt in Union City, and cleared brush for Frederick Newcombe in South Haven. I learned dialects. I studied variety, disguise. I studied négritude.

  I went north along Highway 131 and went by the name Jimmy Verhaeren. I cooked eggs for William McKee, who made a steel bar for my right shoe. I moved to Pando and worked for Manning Evans, who made propeller toys. At the mouth of the Père Marquette at Ludington I sold fishing bait with Peter Baldwyn. A locomotive went by, transferring caskets to the north. The corpses sang:

  ‘Death is a hard man to know.’

  I woke up in the Mackinac Café. I must have fainted. The owner, Reynolds Kayran, a blue-black man from Surinam with a bent spine, gave me a room upstairs overlooking his rusted cars by the lake. The yellow walls were soaked in sun. Outside I smelled warm juniperberries, blueberries, black raspberries on the dusty road. There was a hot smell downstairs, too, a smell of endless days. I stood hours at the window.

  ‘You were in bad shape,’ Reynolds said.

  ‘I was in a bad way.’

  ‘But you can rest here, with us.’

  ‘Already I feel better.’

  Reynolds put a hand on my shoulder. He put a string of garlic around my neck. I bowed my head and tapped my iron bar three times. Reynolds shook his head.

  ‘Poor, poor Jimmy Verhaeren.’

  I mopped Reynolds’s floors, delivered his hot sandwiches, and bathed his legs, which were cruelly scarred. It embarrassed him, so I didn’t ask. Reynolds had worked the assembly line in Flint and he taught me to work bumper grilles into sculpture. We charmed each other. Each night I closed the shutters while he shivered, and covered him with an army blanket while the lake rustled beyond the pines.

  Reynolds’s friends came by on Saturdays when huge pots of beef bubbled on Reynolds’s stove. They wore grey jackets, and with slumped shoulders, heads down, gathered on the porch with harmonicas and guitars.

  Reynolds and I took a week off and lived in a cabin on Burt Lake. We fished in the rain and ate filleted perch, eggs with chillies, onions and cinnamon bread. Reynolds drank each day almost a litre of black coffee through his busted yellow teeth. But his chills got worse. I slept with my arm over his shoulder.

  ‘B-b-bless you, J-J-Jimmy,’ he stuttered.

  I stole from motels. A motel owner saw me.

  ‘Hey you – !’

  I butted him in the belly. He was a soft man, and lay trembling in the ragweed. I threw stones at his head.

  ‘White man!’

  Reynolds and I hunted in southern Illinois. It was white property so we crawled through tree stumps and thorns in a charred forest. We became slimy with fatigue. Reynolds couldn’t breathe. I put down my rifle and grilled a racoon. Reynolds made soup of the bones. Slowly he felt better. A blood-bag of a sun sank into the hot blooming lily pads. There was a hydra. The more I knifed it the uglier it got.

  ‘This obsession will kill you,’ he said. ‘Being a Negro.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The Negro is a prisoner.’

  ‘My father is a prison guard.’

  Reynolds spat into the brown water.

  ‘You have a limited concept of prison. Didn’t Colonel Canale teach you anything?’

  ‘I never told you about Colonel Canale.’

  Reynolds showed me his camera. I was amazed by its bellows, its chrome trigger, its tiny wire.

  White foremen were severe. Negroes hauled logs, laid wire, dragged granite from the quarry. It was hot and humid, even at night. River Negroes spitted a baby alligator and their children sat on the backs of pick-up trucks and ate it. Negroes bathed under a lantern. Black knees, black shoulders, dripped, red palms, white teeth, in the hiss of the lantern. By torchlight we staggered down the country roads. I got drunk and fell in the creek to my knees.

  ‘Dry your hands, Jimmy,’ Reynolds said, ‘on my white woolly hair.’

  ‘No, Reynolds. That is one thing I will not do.’

  Reynolds whistled, cooking squirrel brains. Blue vapour circled the lily pads. By midnight the whole forest choked in blue fog. Fireflies winked in blue waves around tree stumps and fish in skillets gleamed blue. The blue-misted shore dripped with négritude. Negroes danced like drugged bears. Reynolds tapped his foot. But he was not American. No, he put his red kerchief on his peeling forehead and kept to himself.

  ‘The métissage,’ Reynolds said irritably. ‘The bloodlines are confused.’

  ‘France has failed.’

  ‘Life is a living horror,’ Reynolds said.

  ‘A nightmare.’

  ‘Yet living has sweet things.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Women.’

  ‘Women? Hazel eyes, houses that divide in the rain? But who pays the price? Tell me that. Who pays the price?’

  ‘Simmer down,’ Reynolds said.

  ‘Women! Make me crazy!’

  ‘You’re the craziest person I ever met.’

  ‘Who said that?’ I suddenly asked, looking behind at the dark, moving forest.

  ‘I did. I said that.’

  ‘Oh. I thought … somebody … women … were eavesdropping …’

  We drove back to Michigan. It was July and the fields were yellow. Reynolds’s room was like a grotto, dark with blue blankets on the walls, one bed, a pot-bellied stove, some tools he had stolen from the assembly line. Over his bed was a pig’s foetus in a tin can. He showed me his fetishes, tree boles stuck with parrot feathers.

  ‘You feel okay, Jimmy?’

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘You were a little … depressed, I think … in Illinois.’

  ‘I felt nervous. I don’t know why.’

  He unwrapped his votive painting. It was three feet square, dated New Albina, 1934. In it, a Negro prisoner struck a soldier with a rifle butt. From the soldier’s mouth came a green balloon.

  ‘What’s the balloon?’ I asked.

  ‘His soul.’

  ‘Soul?’

  ‘When it leaves the body, you die.’

  Under the soldier was an inscription:

  ‘Sa-a di’m lipet

  Conn’n fe abi min

  L’ap mouricamem.’

  ‘What does it mean, Reynolds?’

  ‘So you’ll die like everybody else.’

  ‘What happened, Reynolds? Why are your legs scarred?’

  Reynolds took a degraded Camel from his plaid shirt. He said nothing. He looked old as a bear. I put the cigarette in my mouth, lit it, and put it between his lips.

  ‘Why did my brother die?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Why is my mother insane, my father unemployed?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Why can’t I be a Negro?’

  Reynolds stared at the glowing end of the Camel and dropped ash on the cold, cracked floor. He got a tin cup and scooped the ashes into it.

  ‘Why does life hurt?’ he asked.

  The Maroon

  ‘I was an orphan.

  ‘I grew up in the outskirts of Popakai, Surinam, in an orphanage run by Catholic missionaries. Father Reynolds taught me to read and gave me his name. I ran away, lived with the Indians, then with the Bush Negroes. When I was fourteen I followed a coloured girl
home from missionary school and raped her. After that I lived alone.

  ‘I lived on stealing pigs and manioc. I got drunk on manioc beer and raped an Indian woman. I moved away from Popakai and drifted downriver toward the Atlantic surf. I earned money stripping bark. I raped a white woman and was sent to prison camp at New Albina.

  ‘New Albina was a mile up the Maroni River from Albina, full of kunu, souls of murdered prisoners. Prisoners cut timber, stripped the bark, boiled resin, and stacked planks. The camp had prisoners’ huts, Governor De Groot’s house, and outlying buildings for the guards. There was a saw mill, planking house, and a river dock.

  ‘We worked from five-thirty in the morning when it was cold and foggy. By noon the camp steamed with heat and we got mash and water. We lay in the shadows until two-thirty and worked until sunset. Electric lights came on and we worked to nine at night. Men fainted from the heat. Many broke out in boils. Flies clung to them. We bathed only in low tide when no sharks came up the river.

  ‘The Dutch gave us bugnee. What is bugnee? Gifts. For example, bonne-bouche, mutton balls roasted with ground nuts. They gave us rum, cheap rum, and cordials, bitters, and roast pig, bananas and manioc, sweet gum. These orgies lasted days. But we were enslaved by them. They gave us white towels and these towels were very beautiful. Men wiped their sweat with flourishes. They worked very hard for towels. The Dutch gave us brass rings for the women’s arms, which the women prized.

  ‘We had soirées dansantes. What were they? On Saturday night, to amuse the Dutch, we danced to Radio Maracaibo. De Groot put a radio on a stump, the Dutch got drunker and drunker. They picked the best females and took them to the basement of De Groot’s house.

  ‘The Negro women the whites so badly wanted. De Groot put on a three-day colungee. Colungee is a bridal party. They picked a good-looking woman and dressed her and took her into the governor’s house where white men stripped, chewed hallucinogenic leaves mashed in nicou and cacheiry. After the bridal colungee De Groot opened the men prisoners’ huts and threw her in.