Chaneysville Incident (34 page)

But while the Africans accepted Christianity, they did so only gradually, and never completely. Certain central Christian notions, while apparently adopted, retained a distinctly African character. While it was accepted, for example, that the deceased no longer were in contact with the living, they were still believed to be living—they had simply “gone home to Guinea.” (This, of course, explains the often reported “slave suicide” phenomenon, in which transportees would seemingly add to their misery by refusing such food or medicine as was offered, thereby ensuring their demise, or would actively pursue such demise by jumping overboard if the opportunity to do so presented itself. Nor was this kind of thing a matter of individual despair; the suicide attempts were often mass acts. One captain recorded an attempt that involved nearly a hundred men. The attempt did not follow a fit of despondency, but rather what the captain referred to as “a great deal of Discontent.”) In some cases (Haiti being the most celebrated, but Trinidad being equally clear), the African beliefs proved so powerful that the structure of entire Christian sects (Catholic in the case of Haiti, Catholic and Baptist in the case of Trinidad) was bent to an essentially African form. In fact, it is possible that, had slavery been restricted to the islands of the Caribbean, on which the social structure was based upon European notions of class (masters were masters because they were members of a master class, not because they were members of the European race), the advent of abolition would have found all ex-slaves equipped with a religion that provided a model for sane rationalization of the realities of Africa with the realities of an essentially European New World. But slavery was not so restricted. It existed in a nation which held as its basic tenet the notion that class distinctions are not only false but morally wrong. Thus masters were masters because they were racially European, and it followed that any smart African who was dissatisfied with wearing a collar could aspire to change his lot by becoming like them. This was not as difficult as it may seem, since the Europeans had shown a certain willingness to mingle their blood with that of Africans, and had established the practice of assigning slaves having greater percentages of European blood to favored positions in the house (and, some centuries later, in the Senate), while the legal system actually stipulated that a person could have a certain percentage of African blood and still be considered a member of the master race—as much as one eighth, in the case of Virginia. So there was hope for upward mobility through miscegenation, the visible evidence being a light skin. But no matter how light a man’s skin, nobody—not white people and not black people, either—was going to believe he was a European so long as he went around shouting like an African in church, drawing funny pictures on the floor, and declining to believe in heaven, hell, the vengeance of the Lord, et cetera and so forth. The result was logical: smart Africans stopped being Africans in any way they could. They suppressed and repressed, on their own account, things African. They branded those who clung to Africanisms as stupid—and in some senses they were right: if one’s freedom lies in being a European, one is stupid to read the future in chicken bones.

When Abolition came (as a by-product of a totally unrelated economic and political conflict),
de jure
slavery was replaced by
de facto
oppression (which later became a matter of law as well), but the basis of it was still race, and the smart Africans made use of their newfound freedom to pursue the physical and cultural appearance of the Europeans at every opportunity. The brightest
(double entendre
intended) of them revered “good hair” (and straightened theirs if they had to), respected education (to the point where any fool who could wear a suit and preach a sermon was called “doctor”—later, this applied to basketball players—and every piano player was a “professor”), pursued “society” (with elaborate cotillions in which the daughters of morticians, ministers, dentists, postal workers—essentially of middle-class families—impersonated French aristocracy and became debutantes for a day before taking jobs as typists), and, in their religion, emphasized pomp and circumstance to the point where a high-toned black congregation looked like an Anglican minstrel show. It was all useless, of course: the Europeans (now Americans) did not care if a black man was called colored, or negro (pronounced
knee
-grow), Negro (in 1931
The New York Times
decided that the term should be capitalized), or Afro-American; they still regarded him as a spook, spade, smoke, jiggaboo, spearchucker, darky, or dinge—polite people never said nigger, except in anger.

Now, niggers aren’t stupid. When it became apparent that there was no chance for them to be Europeans, they looked around for the little pieces of Africa they had lost along the way. They brought their hog maws and pigs’ feet and watermelon out of the closet, and agitated for courses and whole academic departments to help them acquire a knowledge of their heritage. This, too, is useless; a heritage is something you believe in. One cannot become a believer by knowing facts or even by changing one’s name, wearing a dashiki, and making a pilgrimage to the Guinea Coast.

Which is not to say that Africa is lost to us—it is not. It cannot be. The Africanisms—the anthropologists aptly call them “survivals”—exist in all of us, independent of our knowledge or our volition. Those of us who have learned about them can recognize them in our own behavior; those of us who were raised under conditions that reinforced the behavior can see it in everything we do. Those of us who know less about Africa than did the European slavers nevertheless tell tales that echo African tales, and sing songs that call on African patterns; nobody may know that the form is called “call and response,” but that’s the way you sing a song. And no matter how light-skinned and Episcopalian a black person is, he or she will never tell you that a person has died. “Passed away,” perhaps. Or “gone home.” But never died.

Now, many a liberal white has called all this a fortunate thing. Lucky niggers, heirs to two different cultural traditions. One such gentleman went so far as to suggest that a knowledge of the African past would make all the darkies happy and free and sure about their future. This is simplistic, romantic, half-witted drivel (the gentleman was not, of course, a historian). Because what it all means is that those of us who count black people among our ancestors (they are never
all
our ancestors) must live forever with both our knowledge and our belief. It is not that we must choose between traditions—that has been tried, and the attempt ended in failure. It is not even that we are caught in some dialectical battle between African thesis and European antithesis—then at least we could hope for the eventual synthesis. No, the quandary is that there is no comfort for us either way. For if European knowledge is true, then death is cold and final, and one set of our ancestors had their very existence whipped and chained and raped and starved away, while the other set—a larger proportion than any of us would like to admit—forever burns in hell for having done it to them. And if the African belief is true, then somewhere here with us, in the very air we breathe, all that whipping and chaining and raping and starving and branding and maiming and castrating and lynching and murdering—
all
of it—is still going on.

Or perhaps not. For we have lost some of our belief, and so we cannot
see
our ancestors, and it is therefore possible that things have changed in the Afterlife; that the slaves have rebelled and killed the masters (hardly a comforting possibility) or perhaps something has been worked out, and all the horror is, for the spirits, a matter of little moment. That is possible. But I cannot imagine how it could happen. And I do not believe it has. Because when the wind is right, I think that I can smell the awful odor of eternal misery. And I know for certain that if I allow myself to listen, I can hear the sound of it. Oh, yes. Surely, I can hear.

The funeral was ending. It had been a pretty good funeral so far; not High Church, but stately and dignified. My mother, acting for Scott, of course, had arranged everything. The casket was top-of-the-line, lead-lined, hermetically sealed, guaranteed for five thousand years or until the Day of Judgment, whichever came first. The flowers were plentiful and beautiful. The only disagreement we had had was about how to dress him; she had wanted to put him in a suit, but I had insisted that he be outfitted properly, and so when I purchased my own supplies I had got the things myself: a new union suit of comfortable cotton, a warm flannel shirt by Woolrich, new overalls, Big Murphs, which look a little baggy but wear like iron, wool-cotton blend socks and a woolen watch cap, cotton painter’s gloves, all he would need with the weather turning warmer. (I had bought him a new pair of shoes too, good sturdy hiking shoes by Georgia Giant, but shoes are a tricky thing, and I had thought it best to put his old pair in with him, just in case the new ones hurt his feet.) She had balked a little at all that, but I had simply ignored her, and I suspect that Scott managed to quiet her down, because when I came in with the Mail Pouch chewing tobacco and the mason jar of Georgia Moon corn whiskey, she had said nothing. But I had not been fooled—nobody beats Yvette Stanton Washington that easily—and I had got to the undertaker at the proper psychological moment and told him that she had made a mistake in the instructions, and the casket was supposed to be open at the funeral. (The proper psychological moment had been when I had brought in the things from the cabin, including his shotgun, along with a couple of boxes of factory loads.)

It was a pretty crowded coffin by the time I got finished. And when the final viewing took place, there were a few shaken heads. Quite a few. As a matter of fact, there had been a good deal of whispering; they all thought I was crazy. But Yvette Stanton Washington had stared them all into silence, her haughty glance giving the impression that everything was exactly as she had planned it, and if they didn’t understand the deep religious significance of it all, it was simply because they were ignorant.

The preacher had done almost as well. The eulogy was a masterpiece, a web of half-truths and, if you knew anything about Old Jack, you would have had to add, of heresies, for he had possessed all the virtues the preacher called Christian without once embracing the faith.

The undertaker was good too, smooth without being slippery, and he had orchestrated the ticklish business of getting the casket out of the church and into the hearse with great style. The pallbearers, except for me, were old men not far from the grave themselves. But the dolly on which the coffin had sat rolled smoothly, and the undertaker had collapsed it at precisely the right time, and all we had to do was ease the box down the cement steps and onto the tailboard. And he had skillfully maneuvered the heavy hearse across the Hill, making it seem as though he were driving on solid pavement instead of a rutted, muddy track that only the charitable or the deluded could call a road. It was harder for the rest of us—we had to contend with the mud firsthand. But somehow we had formed ourselves into an oddly shaped stream of humanity, and we had flowed into the burial ground and pooled around the open grave: the minister, small and solemn, and the undertaker, professional and detached, both of them as comfortable in the presence of the dead as they were in the presence of the living; my mother and a few of what had once been the army of the WH&FMS ladies, seeming shrunken now, their once fleshy bosoms fallen almost to their waists; a few of the old men, Uncle Bunk Clay among them; surprisingly, Miss Linda Jamison, her face looking ravaged, but her body slim and her coat understated and expensive; and then, ranged out in a line down the slope a little ways where the earth had not been torn open by the gravedigging and they could stand on the grass that covered somebody else’s grave so as to keep the mud off their shoes, Randall Scott and his buddies, the sons of those whom Moses Washington had suborned with whiskey and money.

Then the preacher began to pray, reading from the Book of Common Prayer instead of the Methodist Discipline, no doubt at my mother’s request. But the words were probably the same, anyway: “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust….” I did not listen to him; I stood on that hillside and listened to the air. But there was no wind. It would come, though; I believed that it would come. “…Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world the earth and the sea shall give up their dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in Him shall be changed, and made like unto His own glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.” The white men stirred a bit, thinking that the final amen was near, knowing that, in their church, it would have been. But it was not their church. And nothing was finished; it had just begun.

The minister looked at Uncle Bunk and nodded. Uncle Bunk stepped forward, stood in front of the casket and looked at those arrayed before it. “I knew this man,” Uncle Bunk said. “Knew him well. He wasn’t much for preachin’ and he wasn’t much for prayin’, but he knew how to help as good as any Christian ever did. I mind a time, back before the War, end of the Depression, when didn’t none of us have nothin’ to eat. He come to my house and the eight of us, me an’ my wife an’ six kids, was eatin’ boiled beans, and not much of that. He said to me, ‘Bunk, how long you gonna eat them beans?’ I said I didn’t know, but there wasn’t no work, an’ I suspected we was gonna eat beans until they was gone, an’ then start in on the walls. He just shook his head an’ went out, but he come back later with four chickens. Now, we knew he stole them chickens. And some folks would say stealin’ ’em made him a sinner. But the good Lord knows a sinner from a brother, and I thank God I do too. A sinner’s a man who steals a chicken an’ eats it. A brother’s a man who steals a chicken an’ shares it.”

“Amen,” the people said. The white men stirred again, shuffling their feet, thinking that was it. But it was only a small amen, not the final one. Because then Uncle Bunk began to sing, his voice off key and wavering and old: “My brother’s gone to glory, I want to go there too….”