The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (73 page)

“Like God is on our side? That kind of stuff?” Roy said. He smiled so Clinton wouldn’t accuse him of being an asshole. Clinton believed it was important for the people to understand that all around them lay human slavery, although most recently it had been called by other names.
Everyone was or had been a slave to some other person or to something that was controlled by another. Most people were not free, Clinton knew from experience, yet man was born to be free. The first slaves Europeans kept had been white. Slave keepers didn’t care about color so long as the slaves were strong and stayed alive. The European kings had slaves called royal “subjects” who worked obediently and paid their taxes to the kings. One kind of slavery had often been traded for another slavery as bad or worse. Slaves of past centuries had shelter and food. Yet today in the United States, so-called “free” men, women, and children slept under cardboard on the street.

White people wouldn’t like being called “slaves” by a black man, but Roy didn’t think most radio listeners would know what color Clinton was except red, commie red. Roy had found out the hard way Clinton couldn’t be teased about communism. Clinton had been all over him so fast Roy hadn’t ever seen where the razor had come from.

“Don’t ever call me that again! Don’t ever say my name
Clinton
and
communism
in the same breath!” Communism was dead. Communism was a failure, and that was
not
what Clinton was talking about. Maybe Rambo-Roy himself was the communist, Clinton said. Rambo was the one who had gone to all the rich people’s houses to steal in the name of the homeless and poor.

Roy had laughed out loud then, at Clinton and his razor; he laughed at himself. No wonder human beings never improved themselves over hundreds of years. He and Clinton would just as soon fight and kill each other as go to the trouble to confront a crooked politician.

Clinton had explained why his camp was separate from the others this way: he had been kicked out of rooms and then out of shelters or halfway houses because of his religion.

Roy studied Clinton’s face. “Religion?”

Clinton nodded, his face full again with indignation: “Because of my shrine. You think in the United States of America—” But then he broke off, shaking his head. Roy nodded. No one could argue: the U.S. was a Christ-biased nation. So Clinton kept his camp separate from the others because of his shrine. He set up the shrine in the center of his storage shed. At night he slept behind the shrine, keeping it for protection between himself and the door. Clinton had done that in his hooch in Vietnam at the firebase camp where the enemy had crept in at night to slit men’s throats while they were dreaming.

Clinton’s shrine held the knife, or the blade of a knife and what remained of a handle, a skeletal piece of metal. Clinton had kept the
blade razor-sharp; he had carried the knife in combat because it had never failed him in the dangerous alleys and streets at home. Clinton’s people—women and men alike—all carried knives. Clinton had been hit by flying shrapnel that killed three men nearby. The handle of the knife had been shattered by shrapnel, but miraculously, Clinton had escaped with minor injuries. Clinton woke up and learned the medic had sent the knife along because anyone could see, the knife had saved Clinton’s life. The knife had power all its own. Clinton felt this power long before he studied African religions in black studies and realized his family’s regard for knives was a remnant of old African religion. Clinton had carried the blade wrapped in a piece of red velvet he had cut from the draperies in a whore’s room in Manila.

When he was not wearing the knife sheathed on his combat belt, Clinton kept the knife on its shrine. He had bought the local incense to burn for the shrine, which of course worked to cover the odor of opium or reefer. He bought tiny Japanese porcelain dishes he put in front of the red velvet bundle surrounded by small candles burning in glasses. Clinton put pinches of food on the tiny dishes and sprinkled rum on the blade each time he unwrapped the red velvet.

Roy pointed out that people might not want someone burning candles and spilling rum because it might cause a fire. Typical white-man thinking! Clinton had learned to expect that even the best of them, such as Roy, sometimes just didn’t see. Candles, rum, and incense didn’t necessarily mean a fire. The white man would stop everything before it started; the white man would pretend to know all the answers ahead of time, but of course, really, the white man didn’t have a clue. The white man had made some monumental errors in the five hundred years Europeans had disrupted Africa, China, and the Americas. The Chinese and Africans had broken free; now it was only a matter of time before all captive people on the earth would rise up.

Clinton talked to the blade when he poured the rum over it. The cutting metal edge of the knife was Ogou’s favorite dwelling. In Africa, metalworkers were Ogou’s priests, Clinton’s people all revered the knife. Clinton offered this prayer:

Ogou, Warrior and Metal-maker,

Ogou wages war every day.

Ogou, we suffer a great deal in this battle with our oppressors.

Ogou protects those who serve him.

Ogou is watchful.

Ogou has boundless energy.

Ogou is powered by anger.

Ogou-Feray you magnet power!

Pull iron fragments together

gather the lost to your chest!

Ogou, your father-love heals them—

all the scattered fragments—

ancestor spirits gathered!

Ogou-Feray you lead them to war

for the sake of us, their descendants.

Ogou-Feray, Commander of the Army-of-the-Lost-Is-Found,

Ogou fires the cannon to announce the uprising.

Rage blind rage destroys all in reach,

mad dog warrior, Ogou!

The shrine had made people, even other blacks, afraid of Clinton because Americans had swallowed all that Hollywood bullshit about voodoo and the Devil. Some guys even objected to the apples Clinton left out for the spirits. Clinton did not blame people for their ignorance, but at some point a man had to teach himself or learn something. He explained the apples had to be left to rot so the ancestor spirits could “eat” them.

THE ONLY SUBJECT Clinton had ever cared about in college had been black studies. In black studies classes they had read about the great cultures of Africa and about slavery and black history in America. But Clinton had not agreed with Garvey and the others who wanted to go back to Africa. Clinton disagreed because blacks had been Americans for centuries now, and Clinton could feel the connection the people had,
a connection so deep it ran in his blood. Clinton had been told by the old women talking when he was still a kid; they had been discussing all the branches of the family. The original subject had been marriages with whites, but one whole branch in Tennessee had been married to Indians, “American Indians.” “Native Americans.” And not just any kind of Indian either. Clinton had not got over the shock and wonder of it. He and the rest of his family had been direct descendants of wealthy, slave-owning Cherokee Indians. That had been before Georgia white trash and President Andrew Jackson had defied the U.S. Supreme Court to round up all the Indians and herd them west. Clinton had liked to imagine these Cherokee ancestors of his, puffed up with their wealth of mansions, expensive educations, and white and black slaves. Oh, how “good” they thought they were! No ignorant, grimy cracker-men dare touch them! So pride had gone before their fall. That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions. Lampshades made out of Native Americans by the conquistadors; lampshades made out of Jews. Watch out African-Americans! The next lampshades could be you! Clinton did not trust the so-called “defenders of Planet Earth.” Something about their choice of words had made Clinton uneasy. Clinton was suspicious whenever he heard the word
pollution.
Human beings had been exterminated strictly for “health” purposes by Europeans too often. Lately Clinton had seen ads purchased by so-called “deep ecologists.” The ads blamed earth’s pollution not on industrial wastes—hydrocarbons and radiation—but on overpopulation. It was no coincidence the Green Party originated in Germany. “Too many people” meant “too many
brown-skinned
people.” Clinton could read between the lines. “Deep ecologists” invariably ended their magazine ads with “Stop immigration!” and “Close the borders!” Clinton had to chuckle. The Europeans had managed to dirty up the good land and good water around the world in less than five hundred years. Now the despoilers wanted the last bits of living earth for themselves alone.

Military solutions were no solutions at all; Clinton had seen what a “military solution” was in Vietnam: destruction on all sides; everywhere burned earth, and the souls of the people tortured. Clinton believed education was the answer although he had had his education cut short. Still, while others off the street used the downtown public library to wash and shave, Clinton always went from the rest room to the reading room. Clinton had plans. He kept pages and pages of notes from the books he read at the public library. Then Clinton had moved
up to the university library where little blond sorority sisters roamed in fours looking for black athletes; no other black men would do but jocks.

Clinton took careful notes of inspirational passages and sudden ideas that came to him while he was reading. He was saving all his notes for use on the broadcasts he planned to tape for the radio. Clinton didn’t waste time worrying where or how he’d get hold of a radio station for his broadcast. That was something the white man did—worry ahead of time. The white man had had the radio waves all to himself; but funny thing was, white man didn’t have nothing alive left to say. Clinton wanted black people to know all their history; he wanted them to know all that had gone on before in Africa; how great and powerful gods had traveled from Africa with the people. He wanted black Americans to know how deeply African blood had watered the soil of the Americas for five hundred years. But there had been an older and deeper connection between Africa and the Americas, in the realm of the spirits. Yet for a while, it must have seemed to the Africans who had survived ocean crossings that their gods had indeed forsaken them. The Spanish plantations and mines of Hispaniola had been a fate worse than death for the Caribbean tribes, who had deliberately died rather than live as slaves. African slaves had been shipped in as replacements for the Indian slaves, who had proved to be nearly worthless.

From the beginning, Africans had escaped and hid in the mountains where they met up with survivors of indigenous tribes hiding in remote strongholds. In the mountains the Africans had discovered a wonderful thing: certain of the African gods had located themselves in the Americas as well as Africa: the Giant Serpent, the Twin Brothers, the Maize Mother, to name a few. Right then the magic had happened: great American and great African tribal cultures had come together to create a powerful consciousness within all people. All were welcome—everyone had been included. That had been and still was the great strength of Damballah, the Gentle. Damballah excluded no one and nothing.

Clinton wanted his radio broadcasts to emphasize the African people’s earliest history in the Americas because slave masters had tried to strip the Africans of everything—their languages and histories. The slave masters thought Africans would be isolated from their African gods in the Americas because the slave masters themselves had left behind their God, Jesus, in Europe. The Europeans had been without a god since their arrival in the Americas. Of course the Europeans were terrified, but did not admit the truth. They had gone through the motions with their priests, holy water, and churches built with Indian slave labor. But
their God had not accompanied them. The white man had sprinkled holy water and had prayed for almost five hundred years in the Americas, and still the Christian God was absent. Now Clinton understood why European philosophers had told their people God was dead: the white man’s God had died about the time the Europeans had started sailing around the world. Clinton found himself smiling.

Clinton did not think of the knife blade itself as Ogou. He did not think the tribal people had confused the gentle, huge snakes at the shrines for the Great Damballah or his wife. The spirit of God had only been manifested in the blade and in the giant snakes. God might be found in all worldly places or things. Clinton was careful not to use any names that had been poisoned by Hollywood’s lies. Clinton simply called the religion “ancestor spirits.” Clinton wasn’t trying to scare anyone with his radio broadcasts; scared fuckers would kill you faster than any cocky son of a bitch. Clinton simply wanted people to know the truth. Clinton’s only regret was not listening more to the old granny women talking. The “spirits” had emerged as the most dangerous and potent forces against the European colonials after only two hundred years. Then once the spirits of Africa and the Caribbean Islands had made their marriage, the white man had heard rumors about the union of African and Indian spirits. The “spirits” had been outlawed by the French in Haiti, but too late. The French plantation men of Haiti went gunning for the traveling herb man the other slaves called Don Petro. Planters put a big price on the old man’s head. Creole slaves could only laugh privately at the white men’s mistake. Because old Don Petro, he was one of the “ancients” the white man could never catch. And each year this Don Petro had stirred up more and more trouble for the plantation and mine owners. Don Petro was the head of a new family of spirits, high in the Caribbean mountains.