My Heart Laid Bare Page 55

  (YET: WOULDN’T THE results be bloody? disgusting? For Prince Elihu is a king, a god, yet also a man of nervous and highly refined sensibility.)

  ELISHA CAN SUMMON back by way of his newly acquired powers that miraculous birth out of the raging flood (the Nautauga River, not the Wabash), but the years between are blurred and blinding as a cascade of water in brilliant sunshine.

  Blurred, blinding, the long reign of the Devil Father, until Elisha’s awakening in a Harlem street, when the true nature of the world was revealed.

  ELIHU’S NAME: WHICH means The Lord is God.

  Or: God is God.

  Or: Elihu is God.

  Elihu is of course the fully awakened one, the supreme consciousness, as potent in this age of the Devil Father as in the bygone age, where the blood of mortal black men mingled freely with the blood of gods. Elisha is the part-awakened one, aware of the long sleep of twenty years . . . when he was hypnotized as to his true nature, taught that his skin is nothing when of course it is all . . . yet susceptible at times (when alone, when ill, when drifting into sleep) to the old spell; the luminous chimeras of the marsh; that vast swamp in which he wandered lost, powerless to save himself.

  True, he could not save himself. A child. Too young. Weak-witted, weak in body.

  He could not save himself and so was saved by another; carried aloft, a triumph, a sickly prize, on the shoulder of his tall fair brother . . . whose name, in the name of Elihu the Awakened One, he has forgotten.

  (But even this must be a lie. For the tall blond boy could not have been Elisha’s true brother—except under the spell of the Devil Father.)

  CRIME? WHISPERS FATHER.

  Then complicity.

  Complicity?

  Then no crime.

  PRINCE ELIHU, BORN of the fiery flood, born of rubble and paving stone, born of his own spilled blood and mutilated flesh, brings not peace but a sword: the gift to his people (as he has said in his April 1916 Proclamation of Rights as Propounded by the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union) of a margin of Promise and Hope: a way of seeing with the inner eye that is bound neither by the finite nor by the cannibal-devil’s “infinite.”

  For they who have been slaves are in truth gods, cast low by the vicissitudes of History.

  For they who have been scorned as ugly, and bestial, and accursed by God, are in fact blessed by their own God Allah: His sons and daughters, god-mortals, in whom His spirit breathes.

  For the secret is, they cannot die. He will die in their place.

  PRINCE ELIHU IS falsely accused by his many Harlem enemies (including any number of pious “white men’s black men”) of being swollen with pride; yet, as befits a true son of Ham, he is in fact humble in the face of his destiny. (Thus Elisha thinks a half dozen times a day, I am not I but another; that is, the bearer of another.)

  The envious among both Negroes and Caucasians stop their ears against the power of his speech, murmuring Fraud! Hypocrite! Charlatan! Con man! when the Prince addresses a vast crowd of followers; or when they see him being driven along Broadway in his splendid Rolls-Royce with dark-tinted windows, gleaming white, gleaming chrome, a uniformed Haitian chauffeur, two husky black lieutenants-at-arms on guard. The envious profess to scorn the Prince’s fastidious attire—spotless white fine-spun linen in summer, exquisite white cashmere in winter; his white gloves and white kidskin boots; they dare to ridicule in such journals as The Crisis, The Guardian, The Emancipator, the eighteen-inch ostrich-plumed helmet and the ruby-studded gold sword he wears upon ceremonial occasions. As they can’t conceive of Prince Elihu’s miraculous birth out of the elements of fire and flood, they dare to mock his formal, studied, accentless diction, charging that he’s nothing but an American-born Negro (if not a former field nigger!) like the rest of them: not a West Indian, and certainly not a native African. Having been at a loss to account for Elihu, and embarrassed at the impoverishment of their files on him, the Bureau of Investigation lists Prince Elihu’s official birthplace as Harlem, and the arbitrary date of his birth as 11 June 1889. This Negro is known to be subversive, seditious, unpredictable in his behavior and should be considered dangerous at all times.

  The envious question Elihu’s motives in spending a rumored $50,000 for the English Thoroughbred Ruby Blood, registered in the name of the Negro World Betterment & Liberation Union and boarded and trained at James Ben Ali Hagin Farms, Kentucky; just as, a few years before, the envious questioned his motives in purchasing the oceangoing ship Penelope (rechristened Black Jupiter) and the sport biplane Black Eagle. For, knowing but a low earthly pride, the pride of mere mortals, they can’t conceive of the race pride of a son of Ham.

  And the envious are at a loss to account for Elihu’s courage, if the man is a fraud: for why would a fraud voluntarily return to the United States as Elihu did, in 1918, from Central America, to answer to sedition charges and be jailed; and why would he risk his life countless times as Elihu has, publicly declaring that no threat of physical injury can dissuade him from his mission?

  The envious speak of seeing Elihu one day dead but very few are bold enough to speak of killing him.

  Elihu and Destiny are one says the Prince in his formal, coolly ironic public voice; in which, if even the envious listen closely, they might discern a note of sorrow.

  “ELISHA THAT WAS, and Elihu that is.”

  So Prince Elihu sometimes murmurs to himself, in the midst of his newborn life.

  So ’Lisha, the white man’s puppet, has vanished entirely. The white girl’s plaything. Little Moses, strangely, will emerge in weak moments, in solitude before a mirror—

  “Weel about and turn about

  And do jis so

  Eb’ry time I weel about

  I jump Jim Crow!”

  —the Prince lurching, flailing long arms and legs, jumping with a ferocity of joy, making faces at himself in the mirror, wide white grins.

  Yet perhaps ’Lisha does survive. As Elihu lies perspiring and insomniac between sheets of the most expensive linen in his narrow celibate’s bed with the brass headboard; in his bedroom on the third, topmost floor of the stately brick residence on 138th Street, Harlem (of which the envious have much to say, for whose money has paid for this expensive, heavily guarded house?), listening to the noises of the night-time city that penetrate even the leafy calm of Strivers Row.

  “They will not bring me to earth, here. I am safe, here.”

  He rises early, at 4 A.M. to pray to Allah (in whom he can’t believe) that he will be strong enough to endure Elihu’s terrible spirit for another five or six years at least.

  He prays that he won’t shrink before Elihu’s tragic destiny.

  “For I know, I accept: Prince Elihu will be assassinated one day.”

  And he prays too that his health won’t suddenly deteriorate . . . for Elisha suffers from certain medical problems of which Elihu in his pride knows not.

  (His skull once fractured by a policeman’s billy club; all the fingers of his left hand smashed. Rheumatoid arthritis in the joints of his knees and thighs, a result of the unheated Atlanta prison. A weak stomach, prone to ulcerous inflammations. Migraine headaches, wavering vision. The aftermath of malaria and a sinister parasitic blood fluke, acquired in his West African pilgrimage. These and other maladies are secrets to be kept from even his most trusted aides in the Union.)

  Where Elihu is defiant of all physical infirmity, Elisha carries himself with the caution of a much-kicked dog; where Elihu is a paragon of Negro manhood, robust and still young, a dashing black man whom women turn to watch in the street, Elisha is after all nearing forty—“And not a young forty.” The Prince is six feet tall, supple, muscled, light on his feet as a panther, supremely self-confident; poor Elisha is undernourished, with ribs straining against his slightly jaundiced skin and, perversely, a slack, soft little potbelly. (For there are few foods he can eat and the malarial fevers, striking at will, sweat him dry.) The Prince is a renowned master of rhetorical outrage, in his ost
rich-plume and ceremonial attire in particular, but of course he’s never angry—“For to be angry is to be small”—while Elisha is becoming increasingly short-tempered as he grows older. (Behind his back, his most trusted aides refer to him, not without affection, as “the Hornet.”) The Prince is cavalier enough to tolerate flatterers and fawners and hypocrites while Elisha recoils in disgust; the Prince is shrewd enough to accept donations from virtually any source, for money is but money and is needed for the cause, while Elisha is apt to turn on his heel with a look of nausea and stride out of the room—“There is some shit a man will not even smell.”

  Yet both the Prince and Elisha hold themselves aloof from the numerous hot-eyed women who claim that Elihu has summoned them by night to be his brides, and the bearers of his sacred issue. (For Elisha is certain there can’t be any truth in the legends relating to Prince Elihu’s remarkable virility . . . .)

  Though Elihu is proudly innocent of such knowledge, Elisha is well aware of the fact that his own people spy on him. And carry tales about the city, even to the cannibal-devils who pay them for their information. It is fate, it is destiny. I am not I but another. The bearer of another.

  4.

  The massed dark-gleaming faces, the eyes uncannily prominent, even to the shadowy rear of the hall: rippling, surging, sighing pulsing life: theirs, and his. Unexpected words spring to Prince Elihu’s lips by way of these people; without them he would be mute. So it is wicked of his enemies to accuse him and his organization of exploiting the poorest Negroes when it is they who speak through him: they who have blessed him with divinity.

  It is not so much Prince Elihu’s strategy as his instinct, that he begins in slow, formal, incantatory tones; then speaks more quickly, by degrees; more forcibly; at last vehemently, his magnificent rich voice raised nearly to a shout. All that he utters at such dazzling moments is holy; and true, because holy; else why would the people shout in agreement with him, why would they adore him so powerfully, so ecstatically? For he tells them precisely that which they already know.

  Our love for America has not been returned, brothers and sisters, though we have given of ourselves virtually all we can give, though they have taken from us virtually all they can take, it must be realized at last . . . today, now, at this very hour . . . that the Negro’s love for America has not been returned: and cannot be returned.

  And why can it not be returned, now or in the future? . . .

  Because, brothers and sisters, there can be no love when the agent of love is accursed; when the agent of love is diseased, degenerate, doomed; a creature of the Age of the Machine, damned by History.

  Because, brothers and sisters, the Caucasian is but a subspecies of the great original tribe of the children of Ham; a subspecies that drifted, many millennia past, from the sun-blessed birthplace of mankind . . . to regions of geography and climate inimical to life . . . and to the soul. Thus, the depth and richness of their spirit were bleached out in them as, by degrees, the pigment of their skin was bleached, to the sickly pale pigment it now possesses.

  And, thus, Prince Elihu is the only man to dare name them what they are: white cannibal-devils!

  And to decry, for all the world to hear, their crimes against us! Which are unforgivable, and not to be forgiven!

  Which dare not be forgiven!

  Which will not be forgiven!

  And never, never, so long as Prince Elihu draws breath, to be forgotten!

  THINKS ELISHA, IN a virtual trance of certitude, The Game is now given over to us: and we must be cruel, as we have been taught.

  5.

  True, perhaps, that Prince Elihu and his staff sometimes give the impression of boasting, in public, of the fact that the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union is the fastest-growing organization of its kind in Negro America—indeed, in the world.

  And of the fact that they are tireless in their campaign to improve the lot of the Negro people: there will be, for instance, a forty-page Land and Indemnity Bill presented to Congress on or before 1 March 1929 seeking restitution of $5 billion from the United States Government as well as a sovereign Negro state; the First Negro Confraternity Rally will be held in June 1929 in Madison Square Garden, which rally is expected to draw more than one hundred thousand men and women from all over the world; negotiations are in process for the purchase of a second oceangoing ship, Black Jupiter II, and to launch Prince Elihu’s proposed Black Jupiter Line (for trade between Negro parties and for the eventual transportation of North American Negroes to Africa). Also, purchases have already been made of an eight-passenger Cessna plane, Black Eagle II; and the two-year-old Thoroughbred Ruby Blood, one day to be the pride of the Negro sporting world, and the envy of the white; and certain properties in Harlem, Jersey City, Newark, Philadelphia and Baltimore, to be renovated by way of contributions from the membership for the establishment of Negro schools and colleges and centers for medical welfare, legal counseling and recreation. (True, these properties are in states of advanced dilapidation and disrepair at the present time, and heavily mortgaged; but Prince Elihu and his staff insist that, within a few years, all will be restored to their former conditions if not improved.) Thus, the acquisition of such properties may be seen as a shrewd investment in preparation for the mass emigration to Africa.

  Because a number of these purchases are partly financed by the selling of stocks and bonds, Prince Elihu’s activities have aroused the hostile attention of the Manhattan district attorney, to whose grim office in lower Manhattan Elihu has been so frequently summoned it’s beginning to be charged, even by Elihu’s Harlem detractors, that he’s being persecuted yet again by the United States Government.

  Yet, since Prince Elihu and his staff are scrupulously honest in their Wall Street dealings, and can present remarkably detailed financial records and reports, the white racist officials are powerless to act. At least at the present time.

  (ELISHA KNOWS THAT he and the World Union are being continuously investigated by city, state and federal agents; that Prince Elihu’s file in the Justice Department in Washington must be enormous by now; that it’s only a matter of time before . . .

  “But what does that matter,” Elisha murmurs, critically contemplating his yet fine-boned face in his favorite mirror, examining his veiny yet still alert eyes; and his damned upper gums which were bleeding again during the night, staining his white linen pillowcase. “What does any of that matter?” he says, with a careless smile, “—for The Game is never to be played as if it were but a game when it is in fact life.”)

  6.

  Of course, Prince Elihu must marry. Prince Elihu must father sons to carry on his name and his sacred work.

  But there is no woman in all of Harlem for him.

  Visits with an affable smiling well-to-do black physician, a neighbor here on Strivers Row, the man’s bamboo cane has a brass bird for a handle, his left eye has a merry gleam, but his shy plump daughter of twenty gives off a regrettable odor of starched cotton and dank fruity sweat; and Elihu cannot love her.

  Visits with the family of his minister of finance, ebony-black Jamaicans, gay, watchful, proud, and he sees that the daughter of the household is beautiful, wide-spaced dark-lashed eyes bright with secrets, thin plucked eyebrows curved in crescents, and lips ripe for biting; for love. But Elihu cannot love.

  Next, he is brought to meet a handsome widow of thirty-one, mother of a ten-year-old girl, she tells him her husband died for his country overseas, in France, she too is proud, nervous, tight-cinched waist and heavy melonlike breasts, melonlike hips, she wets her lips with a quick pink tongue and Elihu feels the stir of manly desire but his heart remains unmoved, he cannot love.

  Next, they bring him to a laughing young woman, part Puerto Rican, gold-glinting teeth, hair straightened to a smooth stiff thick-textured sheen, lips rouged, ripe for love, for Prince Elihu—his muscular shoulders and thighs, the promise of his hungry mouth—but though he stares at her entranced he cannot, cannot love.

&nb
sp; And, last, there is a sweet plump too-young girl named Mina, her parents’ boastful chatter distracts him, why is she so young? why have they lied about her age? Mina? Mina? why does the name so upset him? shy, stammering, lips pursed over big white teeth, eyelashes beaded with tears of childish shame; and of course Elihu is polite, Elihu is icily polite, for perhaps after all he’s too old for marriage, for carnal love.

  His ministers inquire worriedly—Will he give up the search? Is there no Negro woman anywhere to please him? Elihu passes a hand over his face, for a terrible weak moment he and ’Lisha are one, the throb of pain behind the eyes that have seen too much, the malaise of the gut that has endured too much, “Yes,” he says, “—I mean no,” he says stiffly, “—it’s just that, my friends, Venus Aphrodite is a strong proposition.”

  7.

  A small-boned girl, white, very blond, in an old-fashioned traveling cloak . . . the hood lifted from her face by a sudden gust of wind . . . her lower lip caught in her teeth and her eyes narrowed in the savagery of The Game, that single glance a razor blade, a lighted match . . . beside her, keeping a jaunty comical flirtatious mocking pace, some yards away but beside her, surely, it cannot be a coincidence, a tall, thin, middle-aged Negro with a goatee, impeccably groomed, graying, rather stoop-shouldered, with a ministerial look: rimless glasses, smart black bowler hat, a cane beneath his arm just like white folks.

  Whispers ’Lisha, How did you do?—did you?

  Whispers the girl, Shut your mouth till we get by ourselves!

  Whispers ’Lisha, Ain’t you a proud little beauty!