The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (75 page)

Back in the United States, the spirits seemed to be angry and whirling
around and around themselves and the people to cause anger and fear. Clinton had seen madness and meanness everywhere in the United States, among whites and blacks too. Because people everywhere had forgotten the spirits, the spirits of all their ancestors who had preceded them on these vast continents. Yes, the Americas were full of furious, bitter spirits; five hundred years of slaughter had left the continents swarming with millions of spirits that never rested and would never stop until justice had been done. Clinton didn’t like to waste energy quarreling over little things. If Rambo-Roy wanted to call their army the Army of the Homeless or Army of the Poor and Homeless, that was okay by Clinton. But Clinton would have called it the Army of Justice.

First came the great serpent spirit, the pure and gentle Damballah. Damballah was so shy and apart from the world that he did not involve himself in the trials of humans except as a messenger. All the other spirits were more than eager “to work” for people who fed them generously.

The “Americanized” spirits used the name Ge Rouge after their African names. That was a warning: red for “danger.” Clinton had not been able to remember all the names and disguises the spirits took, but he knew Ogou Ge Rouge was a great warrior; it had been Ogou Ge Rouge who had saved his life. Native Americans had been talking to ancestral spirits who lived in clay jars when the African slaves had appeared. The Native Americans had died off deliberately to spite the Europeans. In death their spirits had been set free to roam at will and to help other powerful ancestor spirits already set loose on the slave masters.

Now it was simply a matter of time, that was all. Clinton knew his life, body and soul, belonged to the world of the spirits. When Clinton had looked around, he saw that people were all terrified, all fearful of death. Poor people were just as scared as rich people. Clinton had noticed that each time he had traveled. Clinton had read somewhere that the number of baptized Christians had been steadily falling in America since the Second World War. Clinton wondered if this had been the effect of the atomic bomb—to drive people away from churches; people blamed God so they did not have to listen to him anymore. Clinton had done the same; he had let go of one God when another had protected him in battle.

The time had come when people were beginning to sense impending disaster and to see signs all around them—great upheavals of the earth that cracked open mountains and crushed man-made walls. Great winds
would flatten houses, and floods driven by great winds would drown thousands. All of man’s computers and “high technology” could do nothing in the face of the earth’s power.

All at once people who were waiting and watching would realize the presence of all the spirits—the great mountain and river spirits, the great sky spirits, all the spirits of beloved ancestors, warriors, and old friends—the spirits would assemble and then the people of these continents would rise up. People would rise up as they had for old Boukman and old Koromantin, the Gold Coast man who had raised the people in 1760.

The spirits worked in many ways. European overseers fell victim to terrible vices urged on by the spirits. Overseers no longer concerned themselves with business; instead, overseers lost themselves for hours in savage sexual pleasures, which commonly began after a midmorning corn-liquor toddy. White overseers had amused themselves with their slaves for hours on end, pausing only for more liquor or occasional naps. The spirits had been behind the excesses of the mine owners and plantation bosses who began to forget their purpose was to make money; the excesses they had committeed on their slaves had required time that had once been spent on keeping accounts, and inspecting the slaves’ work. Gradually the output from the mines, the harvests from the plantations, would begin to decline. The white men would be seen less and less except by a few of the house slaves. Second- or third-born sons without land, the Europeans overseas had been alone, without families to call them back to their senses.

Valuable slave women and children had been mutilated and slaughtered, had been driven mad by the depravity of the colonial masters. Smelter walls had cracked when the fires were allowed to die out, and still the spirits had ruled the overseers’ appetites. Each day the colonials had retired more and more into their private world, a world that shut out their terror because each instant had celebrated their personal power with the flesh of their slaves. European lords had had slaves; so had the Arabs and the Chinese; even some tribal cultures had kept slaves. But nowhere except in the Americas had the colonial slave masters suddenly been without their own people and culture to help control the terrible compulsions and hungers aroused by owning human slaves. Nowhere had so many slaves been consumed so lavishly or so quickly. Child rape and murder had been perfected in the New World by European slave owners, who had later returned to Europe infected with bloody compulsions
they had indulged in the colonies, hidden away from the eyes of their peers and their God as they smeared the fresh blood of slaves on their thighs and genitals.

CLINTON NO LONGER FELT HIMSELF choking on anguish-on the rage and pain he had felt every day of his life, even in the army. What had made the difference were the spirits, and the army he and Rambo were putting together. Clinton was happy Rambo was in no hurry; Clinton had wanted to travel around a little to see which way the wind was blowing in such places as L.A., Houston, and Miami where recent rioting had been worst. Clinton wanted to do a little scouting work, that was all.

He reminded himself to be realistic. He wasn’t going to find many poor blacks in L.A. or Miami who would waste time listening to him. The poor were tired and sick. They would rather watch TV. A few were making big money from the others who bought a few minutes of forgetfulness from a pipe or a needle. Illness, dope, and hunger were the white man’s allies; only dope stopped young black men from burning white America to the ground. Clinton felt an obligation to try to locate recruits because numbers were not as important as loyalty or determination. Small groups had been changing the history of the world from the beginning. Clinton had seen the bloodshed in the black and brown neighborhoods—all the ammunition and guns, all the energy young people used up every night in L.A., San Jose, Oakland—never mind Washington, D.C. and New York City. For now, Clinton would settle for recruiting a few of the best men, and women too, who wanted to fight a real war, instead of selling crack to keep white men rich
and
safe. If he couldn’t find young recruits, then Clinton would go after old ones like himself, Vietnam vets. There might be one or two like himself still alive.

Clinton did not expect success overnight. He knew they would call
him a crazy old man. But he would just keep hammering away at the young ones—he knew someday they would find out money alone wasn’t enough, because money didn’t buy respect. Sure, they could make money off one another; they could bleed on the street while white men got richer and richer selling them dope, and future warriors were killed by booze or dope. They were free to continue with all that. Clinton did not want his radio broadcasts to sound like Hitler’s, but people had to be warned: alcohol and drugs were intended to keep them weak, to keep them from rising up—to demand justice. Black slaves had labored to make the United States rich and powerful. The United States still owed African-Americans just as the U.S. owed Native Americans.

Clinton’s Slavery Broadcast

Opening music (Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Aretha Franklin)

Voice reads: Now is the time to keep the promise you make.

Curse him as I curse him!

Spoil him as I spoil him!

May he have no peace in bed

no peace at his food

nor can he hide!

Waste him and wear him!

Rot him as these rot!

Voice-over continues:

1. Slavery is any continuing relationship between people and systems that results in human degradation and human suffering.

2. Women and children are the most frequently enslaved because slavery relies on violence and systematic terrorism to maintain control.

3. Terrorism takes many forms, but most often the violence is sexual, to convince victims suffering is part of their very identity, as unchangeable as their sex or skin color.

4. The slave is the polestar of the Master’s life. The slave will always receive the Master. The slave becomes part of the Master, and perfection becomes possible.

5. The slave has no identity but through the Master; slave identity is not a fully human identity.

6. Slaves may serve as laborers, but slaves exist primarily to satisfy sexual and ego needs of the Master.

7. The Master craves the pulse of cruelty and pleasure the slave arouses in him again and again.

8. Strike the Master’s son but never the Master’s slave; the son is a separate being, but the slave and Master are one and the same.

9. Slavery is highly productive and yields fabulous profits. Slavery makes cruelty valuable and useful.

10. Europe got fabulously wealthy off slave power in the Americas. Where does the greed of the European originate? Greed arises out of terror of death. People of snow and ice are haunted by freezing and starving. The wood on the fire never lasts for long.

11. Wealth from slavery buys storehouses of food and armies and the finest physicians. Wealth obtains more slaves and more property to barricade the Master in the world of the living.

12. The slave is offered to Death in place of the Master; thus the slave “becomes” the Master if only for an instant as the slave dies.

13. The slave accumulates power in the realm of the Master’s dreams. Gradually, the slave inhabits the Master’s idle thoughts during his waking hours. The Master’s obsession enslaves him. (End of broadcast.)

Clinton’s Radio Broadcast #2
First Successful Slave Revolution in the Americas

Slavery joined forever the histories of the tribal people of the Americas with the histories of the tribal people of Africa. On La Isla de Hispaniola escaped African slaves called maroons fled to the remote mountains where the remaining bands of Arawak Indians took them in.

In 1791 the slaves’ war for independence began with a ceremony to the spirits. Boukman, Biasson, and Jean François led the people into battle. Guerrilla army units of maroons and black Indians came down from mountain strongholds at night to leave various charms and “poisons,” and to burn barns and the mansions of the rich. In 1801, the Revolutionary Army of Slaves at Santo Domingo defeated 25,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers,
commanded by Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. The French are defeated with the help of the spirits.

The spirits of Africa and the Americas are joined together in history, and on both continents by the sacred gourd rattle. Erzulie joins the Mother Earth. Damballah, great serpent of the sky and keeper of all spiritual knowledge, joins the giant plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl. When someone dies, the spirit goes to the Dead Country. Legba-Gede, Lord of the Crossroads of Life and Death, directs the traffic of the human souls.

Spirits inhabit the “thunderstones” or flint blades the Ar-awaks and Caribs once carved. The spirit inside one “thunderstone” caused the stone to sweat profusely; another famous stone named Papa Gede urinated. The spirits are the most powerful beings. That is how the outnumbered and ill-equipped people’s army had held off the French navy and army.

First Legba-Gede takes on his favorite incarnation, Lord of the Cemeteries, who gave his secret followers special power against European soldiers occupying Haiti. The Lord of the Cemeteries had given his secret followers the power to hypnotize then overpower victims along the road. The soldiers of the Lord of the Cemeteries carried nooses of dried human gut to strangle new victims after midnight. Europeans are terrified.

Gede Ge Rouge has always been a cannibal.
Ge Rouge
is synonymous with the Americas. The power of Gede and spirits of the dead is original to the Americas. Gede was not worshiped in Africa. Ogoun had traveled with the other spirits to the Americas, but Gede, Master of the Dead, protector of small children, tricksters, and sexual athletes, Gede, who connects the living people with distant ancestors and forward in time to descendants yet unborn, Gede belongs to the Americas.

The signatures of the spirits are outlined in ashes and cornmeal on the ground. For Legba-Gede they paint the cardinal points, the crossroads of the universe. Sometimes the old man, Legba-Gatekeeper shows up, crippled, covered with sores and maggots. He is both male and female; he is both fire and sun. Old Gede prances like a horse in his old black overcoat, jabbering away and sipping champagne. His rites are performed during the new moon. Old crippled Gede sometimes has only one foot; then they call him Congo Zandor because a snake has only one foot, which is his belly that he crawls on, and he mashes his victims between giant stones.

Sitting across from old man Legba is Petro-Mait-Carre-four, young and strong, spirit of all points in-between, spirit of the moon, spirit who regulates all demons. Gede-Brav is Lord of the Smoking Mirror, wearing dark glasses; his words and gestures are full of constant sexual innuendo. Gede-Brav, Keeper of the Gate, is the cosmic phallus, muttering to himself and rubbing against objects.