The Salt Eaters (16 page)

It was said though in the stories, songs, jokes and riddles of the district that the lamp was not gas but electric and drew upon the power line that fed the Regal and the rest of the establishments of the Hill, that, of course, had to foot the bill, and wasn’t that just the way? And more than one community sage would look toward the Heights on viewing the dimming halo of the Regal’s marquee on foggy nights or upon hearing the groan as the Infirmary switched to its own generators, power from the main line dwindling, would nudge a kid and point toward the top of the hill and explain, “Their world-wide program, their destiny, youngblood, is to drain the juices and to put out the lights. And don’t you forget it.”

When the scaffolding went up in the spring of 1871, the stone masons mounted the face of the Infirmary to chip free from the chosen stones all manner of messages responsibles might read to their charges. Some messages written out to be read by anybody who’d mastered the alphabet. Others, more finely carved and worked over, to be read by initiates of the order only, those selfsame secrets of alchemy attempted in the carvings of Notre Dame miles away from the seat of knowing, those selfsame instructions of the arcana burned, buried, smothered in the cradle but persistent, those selfsame knowledges
and mnemonics sacked, plundered, perverted. But over the Infirmary arch all of it pure, insistent. And when new, had urged the originals to transverse the globe to share the wisdoms with the peoples of the Solomons, the Philippines, the China Seas, the Indian Ocean, Mexico, Europe, Arabia, Mesopotamia—the neighbors who’d been set adrift at the splitting of Pangea.

All of it gazing down in stony insistence on Dr. Julius Meadows standing on the steps, looking over his shoulder at the paint job in the halls of the Infirmary. White, white with a flush of pink, like an udder left too long without milking. That’s my country self talking, Dr. Meadows frowned, coming down the steps. And it was his country self admiring the tabby wall that wrapped around the back of the Infirmary holding the woods off. And it was his country self wanting to set foot on the crushed-oyster-shell walkways that led to the sheds where the generator hummed. Looking up, he saw merely sandstone faces, wheels, five-sided puzzles, basalt, grape clusters, bricks and coils that could be snakes to the fanciful of mind. Figures, glyphs, warnings, bricks, carvings, arches—it was all the same to him, a building. He looked toward the curtains of the treatment room, then turned his back, blushing, for the idea of actually making a journey through the woods in search of two catatonic women branded him a fool in his city mind.

Dr. Meadows moved quickly toward the avenue as if with purpose, trying to make some sense of his behavior earlier, his actions now. Reviewing the Hippocratic oath after all this time, it was peculiar, a compulsion. He had wanted to call them out, dialogue with those beings behind the names, know the gods he’d given allegiance to. To converse with one’s principles seemed both the height of sophistication and the height of ridiculousness at the same time. Seemed primitive. Seemed
 … He lost his point and then lost himself among the children out of school, adults out of work, shoppers, workers from the chemical plant’s second shift smudged and smelly and in search of a quick bite to eat.

There seemed to be a contest going on between the record shop and the neighboring bar, an ear-splitting electronic version of an old Wild Bill Doggett piece he had once danced to hitting him at his back, and a spastic rock piece he’d never heard assaulted him head-on. “Band of Thieves” he tagged the first group, and it was getting so he had to look hard at the musicians on the bandstand when he went into a club these days, the white boys had it down. “Chinese band,” he labeled the latter, as his father had called the group he’d planned to hook up with. “A bunch of opium heads.” So Meadows had gone to medical school.

“We need to bring scientific thinking to the masses,” a kid in a Levi suit was haranguing his buddies, the youths marching along four abreast. Meadows had to step into the street and walk around a parking meter to avoid getting hit by their book satchels. “The masses are still reacting out of infantile emotionalism.”

“Mostly it’s diet,” maintained the one who had almost broken Meadows’ kneecap. “Diet and stress.”

“Izat right?” an indignant drunk, snatching at the passing satchel, was challenging the four young men to a talk-off. But they continued on and left the man reeling, so once again Meadows moved toward the curb. This time he was stopped by a group of skinny old men in shirt-sleeves leaning up against a Coup de Ville, eying three young girls dancing in the middle of the street, swinging a red plastic tape recorder back and forth as in a relay race.

“I feel so sanc-anc-tee-fie-eyed.”

“Before you can get sanctified, girlie, you gotta be saved.”

“Save your breath, Shakey Bee, can’t tell these young girls a thing.”

The third man was squinting like he was in need of an aspirin. It was Meadows’ guess that he simply wanted his cronies to shut up so he could watch the girls in peace.

“How you get saved?” one of the girls asked in mock seriousness, arms out like the radio was a kid sister she was swinging. The quiet man with the headache appealed to Meadows. Couldn’t he make everybody be quiet and just enjoy the floor show? The girl asking the question had superb tits, Meadows noticed. “How you get saved?” she asked again, her head to the side as if she didn’t know she had magnificient tits, as if that was not why she wore her crushed leather belt like a tourniquet. “I seriously want to know.”

“Surrender.”

“Surrender?” She rolled her eyes and did a snaky move with her hips the headache man fully enjoyed. “What kind of surrender?” She was looking straight at Meadows. Meadows thought it wise to cross the street.

“Surrender? Counterrevolutionary batshit,” said the skinnier of the three girls, imitating someone who evidently wore a cap with a bill, for she mimed the yanking down of a cap as she spoke. “Surrender is antistruggle,” she announced in this other person’s voice, making the third girl giggle, but Meadows doubted she knew why.

“Is that what they’re teaching you at school these days?” The man was shrugging off the headache man’s hand plucking at his sleeve. “To curse your elders?”

“Aww, man, it’s spring and it don’t cost us anything to enjoy all the pretty flowers. Why you want to get overheated?” Headache pleaded.

“Wait up now. I ain’t through talking to you.”

“We through listening, less you got some money,” Tits said.

“I got some money,” Headache spoke right up, both hands digging in his pockets.

“What you got?” The other two had shot past him, but the brazen one was once again looking Meadows square in his mouth. “Gloria, check this out. Ever seen a nigger blushing?”

“He a nigger?”

Meadows crossed back over to the other side, wondering why he was putting himself through all these changes. But it had been so long since he had simply walked in a Black neighborhood, been among so many Black people. He wished he knew someone in Claybourne he could call up and invite for a drink, or call up and be invited for dinner.

“Supper. Suppah.” He mouthed the word, relished it. There was an elderly man at the bus stop greeting the passers-by. He looked like Meadows imagined his grandfather had looked. He laughed and showed his bridgework. He looked like a man who might be interesting to have suppah with. Meadows was tempted to take the bus, strike up a conversation and … But then there was a sidewalk café coming up where two good-looking women were eating salad out of one plate with their fingers and talking, enjoying themselves. A nice place with chinaware and amber-colored glasses and silverware that shone. Not at all what he’d have expected to find in this neighborhood. He thought about sitting down and having a glass of white wine. But in front of the entranceway was a group of young men and women so intent upon what a tall man with a bow tie bobbing at his throat had to say, that they wouldn’t make room for him.

“I’m not here to boogie, but to jolt you back into your original right minds.”

“You a dreamer, mistuh.” A woman coming out of the café, stuffing an apron into her handbag, broke through the group and backed Meadows up against the white ironwork fencing.
She looked like she knew a thing or two, it seemed to him, at least about how to make an opening for herself. “Dreamer,” she sighed, looking straight at Meadows as though they’d spoken of just this topic at breakfast and she would now take his arm and they would go home together. She was looking at him and then she wasn’t, had moved on. And Meadows changed his mind about the wine.

He continued toward the corner, hearing the voice of the tall man in bow tie clear over the heads of the crowd—“History is calling us to rule again and you lost dead souls are standing around doing the freakie dickie”—and adjusting his pace to each beat in the traffic, people scurrying or dawdling or bumping into each other, dreaming along the pavement—“never recognizing the teachers come among you to prepare you for the transformation, never recognizing the synthesizers come to forge the new alliances, or the guides who throw open the new footpaths, or the messengers come to end all excuses. Dreamer? The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.” Meadows was out of earshot, but the words still resonated. His city and his country mind drew together to ponder it all.

“As Dr. Arias is wont to say, Butch, ‘The most confounding labyrinth of all is a straight line.’ ” Doc Serge was holding forth.

“Buster,” the boy muttered, glancing around him, embarrassed by his surroundings.

“Take money. If you want it, getting it is the easiest thing in the world. One need understand just a few simple principles that govern supply and demand. Understand? The problem is not to get it, but to stop getting into a funk about wanting it, going all around Robin’s barn dodging and feinting trying to justify the appetite. Simple laws is all. Laws as inexorable as
gravity. But they don’t teach basic principles in the schools. So people have no discipline about living. They have no religion. You hear me talking to you?”

“Yessir.”

“And what is religion, you might ask. It’s a technology of living. And what do I mean by technology? The study and application of the laws that govern events in our lives. Just that. Now, take one of the first principles, supply and demand …”

Buster knew he wouldn’t get what he came for. He might just as well have stayed in the healing room. All he wanted to know for his paper was what pageant the Brotherhood planned to do for the Spring Festival. The rumor was they were going to reenact an old slave insurrection. The writing workshop at the Academy had been working on a script, he knew, about the rebellion that had taken place on the Russell and Alcorn plantations just days before Harpers Ferry. And one of his classmates, who’d offered to work with him on the term project and then changed her mind, had already interviewed Sophie Heywood, who was said to be the great, great something of the boardinghouse keeper who had bankrolled the uprising and, together with another boardinghouse keeper from the Coast called Pleasants, was prepared to bankroll the original plan for Harpers Ferry, which was to arm the slaves. But then John Brown had “broken discipline,” as the brothers at the Academy would say. And Harriet Tubman and Fred Douglass stepped back, “You got it, white boy, run it,” and the boardinghouse women had taken their money and booked.

Sitting there on the stepladder, trying to keep towels from falling on his head and trying to keep his hands off the stacks of soap he wouldn’t mind pocketing, it occurred to him that there was no reason why Dr. Serge should tell him what had always been kept secret until the very last minute. Only the
Brotherhood—the sons, grandsons and nephews of what years ago had been the Mardi Gras Society before gangs then drugs busted up the network—knew what route the parade would take to the park and knew what skit would be performed as the main event of the festival. The most anybody else could find out was the general look of the costumes or at least the colors of the various “families” or “tribes,” or “gangs” or “clubs.”

He’d tried asking around the Academy, but brothers his own age said right to his face that his paper was dumb and that he should be working with one of the committees if he wanted to get into something hip. He’d tried to approach Obie, figuring as a neighbor and all he might help. He’d listened, but then he’d pretty much said the same thing, that the committees were hurting for workers. There was a research team working up a paper to take to the UN a petition as was Malcom’s directive. And there was a fund-raising team pledged to contribute so much toward the formation of a Black Commission of Inquiry to dig further into COINTELPRO. And there was a group that had shown him a petition calling for a safe earth. He supposed all of that was important, but he was just trying to get his paper together and do the student thaang. His instructor wanted the first draft in the morning.

“You’ve got good skills and you’ve got drive,” one of the brothers from the karate studio had told him. But just when Buster had thought he had an ally, the brother had added, “But skills and drive without consciousness and purpose make you dangerous, man, dangerous to the community.” And he’d turned his back on Buster to shadowbox in the mirror. Then Obie and another dude Nadeen’s uncle had sent them to talk to, a marriage counselor no less, started piling papers on him: Amnesty International, UN Charter on Human Rights, COINTELPRO, the Freedom of Information Act, Panthers, RAM, IRS, AIM, Attica, the Wilmington Ten, the Charlotte
Three, the FBI, the CIA. But not a scrap of anything about what he’d come for.

The most he could get out of his cousin Ruby, who never stopped feeding papers into the copier and moving back and forth between phones and tables and baskets and clipboards saying she had no time to talk, had to go open her shop, was that thinking seriously on insurrection might just set the future in motion. He’d written it down, not sure if she was putting him on or not. One never knew with Ruby. And he’d filed through the material they loaded him down with. Maybe when he got to editorial writing the stuff might come in handy.