Chapter 9
Journey to the Center of the Earth
“I just . . . ,” began Oliver.
“No,” said Linden. “Let me tell you why you’re here.”
Oliver acquiesced with a quick nearly imperceptible glance at the luxurious Swedish ivy over the fireplace, the principal hearth of the United States of America. Looking into Linden’s eyes, he settled down in his French provincial chair beside the fire, as Linden began to speak from his identical chair on the opposite side.
“You’re here because we’re a nation at war. The war is within, and the war is without, and it is as real as anything and maybe more real than whatever you and I think, whatever my people or your people think, whatever anyone thinks. So, here’s what your people and my people are going to do. We’re going to make a consolidated gesture.
“You are not going to march on the capitol of this nation. You are going to meet with your people, peacefully at the steps of the monument to one of my people, the predecessor of mine who first brought forth legislation specifying your people as having the same rights of citizenship in this nation as my people. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” answered Oliver, as he rose with caring grace from his chair.
The main door to the office opened, but the aide opening it remained outside. Excellent Oliver grasped the offered right hand of the also standing President of the United States, shook it briefly without further word, and walked from the office.
“Thank you,” he might have said, “for throwing me into that briar patch.”
But he was too polite to acquiesce.
From there, the toughest thing Oliver had to do was to deal with the extremists who preferred not to stand at the foot of a monument to any white-man. But those persons were few, and every person in every faction understood the value of the national attention the site would provide. Moreover, everyone understood the value of a peaceful meeting over a militant march, at such a site. Persons could speak, not just scream from the crowd. The people could speak loudly, and clearly with focus.
So the biggest question left was of whose focus. Some of the Panthers wished to stoke some explosives into the Smithsonian Institution as some sort of grand finale, since no black person named Smith had ever received his name from his ultimate ancestors, and Ian Smith was then white head of the government of Rhodesia, the African nation named for Cecil Rhodes.
Stokely had put that fact together with the fact that the preeminent symbol of international education was the Rhodes scholarship, also named for Cecil Rhodes. So, therefore, in Stokely’s mind, demolishing anything named Smith was good. He, too, for his means, was looking for a symbolic gesture. Ralph Abernathy answered that one. And he answered it personally.
“Black is beautiful,” argued Stokely, in one of the few coalescing meetings into which he made his way. “And black needs to be powerful.”
“We all know that,” said Ralph, speaking up without turn offered him, something rare for him. “But how many people know who Cecil Rhodes was?”
“That,” answered Oliver, also speaking out of turn, “is why Ralph is my best friend. He is everybody on Earth’s best friend. Let’s get on with business that can do some good. Let’s get to work at what we can best do.”
In that manner, many things coalesced. The final negotiation was for how many minutes each speaker for each faction could spend speaking from the steps. The final answer was purely democratic, ten minutes for each. But Oliver lost that concentration, got carried away. But that was his finest excellence. It had nothing to do with ego. He just opened his heart. He had to do his best. At Roncesvalles. Anywhere.
The day arrived, and everyone expected many thousands of people. All the factions had appealed as strongly as they could to their membership, and some experts were estimating that as many as forty thousand people might arrive.
“A thousand for each day Bob conversed with the devil,” said Oliver.
“A thousand for each year you wandered the wilderness, Oliver,” said Slavey, telephoning from the Holy Land.
“A thousand for each decade between my burning and this white-guy’s emancipation proclamation,” had to add Theresa.
Quiet as I am, I didn’t mention what I had called the complexity of Earth in my little Chinese book the Tao Te Ching. I might have said that the number was four for each of the ten thousand things that make up Earth, but what happened here then went far beyond symbolic numbers, and far beyond experts. More than one hundred thousand persons showed up, nearer a fourth of a million, and it was a rainbow, after so much rain. The people were of all colors, and the grass was green on their side of the hill.
Speakers spoke, and singers sang, and the people spoke with one another and sang, from their hearts for themselves, for their families, for everyone.
“We shall overcome,” they sang.
Overcome what? Overcome anything that tries to stop this rainbow singing!
“My country ‘tis of thee,” they sang.
Of whom is it? It is of and for all this broad rainbow singing, and from and for the many who can’t sing!
“Sweet land of liberty,” they sang, and for a moment, on one small part of Earth, landscaped flat for water standing, far away in place and time from the brambles valley Roncesvalles, one-hundred-thousand people stood their ground, together. At last, in the rainbow light, Oliver had his turn to speak.
“I have a dream,” he said, and no one complained that he spoke more than ten minutes. Not one person there could think of that. The dream was just, undeniable, plain. The dream was the rainbow.
It was from the sun. It was on Earth. It was right.
Theresa had made the beginning of the twentieth-century movement that had made that dream viable in the hearts of that rainbow that day in the District of Columbia, but she was silent at that presence. Oliver did well enough by her guidance.
She had moved to Detroit not only because of her Earth brother and Slavey but also because she loved the African American music she had watched go there from Storyville. Slavey had moved there not only to broaden the movement but also for a little peace with a Harlem woman with whom he had fallen in love, whom he had married and with whom he was having beautiful Earth daughters, one after another. But, however he loved them, that couldn’t stop what he’d started, and so at last their house was bombed and burned like Oliver’s and Rachel’s in Alabama.
Slavey’s segregationist movement had grown large and famous and feared by the white side of bigotry, and some of his Boston friends were using their public power to gain private wealth, on the black side of bigotry. One of them, the one who had led Slavey’s Islamic movement while Slavey was locked up, was using his religious professions to build himself a sort of harem.
So Slavey stepped from that rise and fall to making his final point, partly through another trip to Mecca, his earlier home here. We had to distance our just righteous movement from the egocentric greed that made men build bank-accounts and harems for their private esteem, and so Slavey’s pilgrimage to the other side of Earth was a way of literally distancing the movement from the corruption pretending to it. But Oliver was giving us more reason to get out of Dodge.
And I mean further out of Dodge quite quickly. A positive reason for getting Oliver out of here quickly was that he had done all he could legislatively, but a negative reason was that he was beginning to behave like that cohort of Slavey’s. He was screwing around on Rachel, worse than Jacob had screwed around on his Rachel. Jacob had been complying with the mores of his time. Oliver had no excuse, at least not ideally, in this time. And he was breaking hearts across the land.
More, as if that weren’t enough, the chief of police of the United States of America was on his tail. K. Buggen Goober, the founding director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was trying to jump on Linden’s kill-the-commies bandwagon by proving that Oliver was not only the negro radical that the mayor of Montgomery had called any African requesting freedom, but also a Soviet puppet. So, surveilling Oliver, tapping his telephone in hotel rooms, he learned that Oliver was sometimes not alone in bed, while Rachel was at home and he was not.
Of course Goober, who was a closet transvestite, also had more private bigotry motivating him. Heterosexuality angered him, because it was something he couldn’t do and so seemed to him a mark against his competence, his personal value.
So he hitched up his garter belt and, finding nothing communist about Oliver, other than Oliver’s wish that wealth be shared and his having a few communist supporters, tried to defame him otherwise. The only available otherwise was Oliver’s sexual promiscuity, and Goober leaped on that like a hound in heat.
As I have said, Theresa was the point-person in our operations, all of them from Hitler to Canaan. So, when Goober's’s vendetta hit the newspapers, she called a special meeting back in New Orleans. We sat on the Moonwalk like tourists from Trenton, because Theresa bade us not look into the river for excuses. She directed us, more directly than usual, to look into ourselves. And we did.
“What are you doing?” asked Theresa of Oliver. “Your screwing around is going to screw up memories of what you’ve done and screw up what more memories of you could do. It’s called legacy here, what you’re screwing up. You’re acting like Fits Jr.”
“Oh, please,” was Oliver’s first answer, looking into air without the grounding of the river, but then he glanced into himself and went on with his eyes apparently gazing across the river, but looking more like he had his tail between his legs. He went on.
“Remember Siddhartha Gautama?” he asked. “He wasn’t one of us, but he tried to be like the best of us, and he said that giving up sex was the hardest part for him. Look how beautiful these Earth women are, with all their softness and warmth, their grace. Just look at you, your onyx eyes, far-seeing.”
“But they’re Earth women,” argued Theresa. “And you’re not an Earth man, and not right, in this.”
“Look at you,” Oliver repeated. “If I had come here as a woman, I’d have to be a lesbian.”
No one answered that dilemma, and no one had to. Theresa was right, and Oliver was both right and wrong. So we let him make one more big pitch, his Nobel peace prize speech not for his race here this time, but for the whole rainbow, the whole Earth. We let him present to this world a real threat of a lot of poor people: poor yellow people like those being bombed in Vietnam, poor red people like those robbed of their land in New York, poor brown people like those begging to pick berries in Michigan, poor black people like those collecting garbage in Memphis, poor white people like those kept in the woods in Appalachia; all poor people. That is what, there on the levee, he promised to do before we let him go. That is, to let him try to leave with grace.
“It better be good,” answered Theresa.
“But I’m going first,” added Slavey.
“I know you’ll do well,” said Theresa.
Slavey’s trip to Mecca was as much a pilgrimage for him as for the rest of us. He was amazed at how much one can forget in fifteen centuries, which may seem weird for someone who doesn’t understand immortality. Most Earth-mortals hardly remember what they read in the newspaper or saw on television yesterday. If they did, they’d have to admit that most of their attention is to advertisements.
I advised Quincy of that before he ran for president, that and that most humans don’t reason much anyway, for all their pretensions to it and claim to superiority from it. Most humans are too lazy to read or to think about the pictures they see. They say they vote on the issues, but they vote a side they pick. They pick a side that someone tells them matches their feelings. But they don’t bother to feel for themselves.
Slavey went to Mecca to see for himself what had happened there since he’d left in the middle of the previous millennium. The main thing that caught his attention was the vastness of the Sahara, and he said that made him homesick in many ways. He said it reminded him of my talk about having been Pip floating alone in the Atlantic and a future president of the United States floating alone in the Pacific. But I could tell that, much more than for me, his heart felt for the vastness itself, and for his wife of then.
Like Israel, like the young man Jacob, Slavey as Muhammad had fallen in love with a beautiful daughter of a wealthy man, and served the father’s business. For Slavey the business was importing and exporting merchandise along the trade-routes across the vast sands as far as Canaan and back. That’s for what Bob sent him there then, and that’s what he did. It was an early effort at globalization, toward seeing the breadth of Earth. The goal was to make one neighborhood.
Nevertheless, as he traveled the sands on his camel in his caravan of merchandise, the thought most in his mind and the feeling most in his heart, as he viewed the vast outstretching sand, was not for the merchandise, and not for Earth. It was not for the merchant wealth of Earth or for the merchant father. It was for the lovely daughter.
Maybe it was partly because she was older than he was, and so somewhat a mother to him, as well as his wife. Maybe it was because she ran her father’s business and made most of the merchandizing decisions anyway, leaving Slavey no need to slave to her father. But, whatever the reason, his heart was mostly with the daughter.
So, when he first traveled to Jerusalem, he understood why Bob had sent him there. He found a war-torn city, factions fighting everywhere with no differences in ideas he could understand or see how anyone could understand. Israelites and Hittites and thisites and thatites, and he couldn’t tell the difference without asking stupid questions.
“Are you a thisite?”
“No, I’m a thatite?”
“What’s the difference?”
“They’re trying to kill us?”
“Why?” Slavey had to ask.
“For the land. It’s our land.”
“Isn’t there enough for both?”
“Surely, but it isn’t theirs.”
Slavey talked with many persons of all the factions he could find, and he found but one difference among the factions. He found but one consideration that made one of the factions different from all the others.
“Why can’t you all share the land?” Slavey asked the people of that faction.
“Because God promised it to us,” all members of it said without exception.
Being an immortal space-alien, Slavey cared little about the land and less about the merchandise his friends the camels carried on their backs, from Mecca to Khartoum and on to Canaan, and back across the sand he’d come to love. But he found one other thing common among the factions, that the men of each faction seemed to try to think of women as they thought of cattle. They thought of camels, cattle helping them, as their wealth. They thought of others’ lives as their own wealth.
And so they thought of women as their wealth. They thought of women as wealth, because they thought of life as merchandise, to be bought and sold, or stolen. All factions also thought of men that way, but the men were bigger and possessed more power to do what they could with anyone they could beat if they couldn’t bamboozle them. Women, on the other hand, mostly acquiesced as I said in the Tao Te Ching. And women held the warmth whence they had come.
When Slavey told me about that on his return from that trip, I told him about my notion of quietism and how I had tried to promote in China the understanding that women should be honored for that quiescence and inherent warmth, and that the power of it be respected as water, as water holds most power of Earth life.
“Folks,” I said, “can splash all day in vain, while rivers carve canyons.”
“I didn’t think of that,” said Slavey. “So I did something more radical.”
“I’ll bet it was a good one, too,” I said into Slavey’s bespectacled eyes.
“I hope so,” said Slavey. “I founded a new religion. On the way back home, I dropped myself off at a cave I’d used on some trips for storing some things to transport later. I told my ramrod to take the caravan on home and that I’d come on later. I told him I had to inventory my stores there. That was true. I don’t lie.”
“I know,” I said. “I wish I could say that. So tell me the inventory.”
“Well,” said Slavey, “the main piece for me was the one about treating women like merchandise, but I knew I was there to do something about all the killing, also. I don’t die, but those folks were all worried about dying, or what they think it is.
“Oliver had told me about his ten commandments, and I had a very tough time reconciling that against what any of those thisites and thatites were doing. So I figured a way might be to give a set of such to another faction, also in the name of Bob.
“I didn’t ignore the fact that that would create another faction. But I thought that, if I presented Bob to them as an authority for what they were doing, and told them that if they did well as Bob had had Oliver tell the Israelites to do well, they’d have a little pride for themselves and incentive to band together as the Israelites had.
“That way, instead of having all those dog-bites or flying-kites or whatever, they’d have two ites. There’d be the Israelites and whatever the rest of the people wished to call themselves under Bob. I was hoping that would be a consolidation of factions down to but two, and I hoped that the next step, into world unity, would be easy.
“But no. I’m so silly sometimes, maybe always. I knew what a mess Earthlings had made of what Bob told them himself a half-millennium earlier, and I saw a lot of descendents of his audience then in Jerusalem now paying about as much attention to Oliver’s commandments as any other thisite or thatite did. But people calling themselves Christians now didn’t seem a power faction there, and I thought they’d turn a cheek.
“Anyway, that’s what I did, and I got out of there, after some quality time with my wife. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I built into the religion a commandment to protect the sanctity of women, but that didn’t go well either. Bob said the meek shall inherit the earth, and Earthlings think that means stealing land. The same with men with women.
“Somehow those Earthlings, who say their ability to reason makes them superior to mosquitoes, find ways to rationalize that meekness means thinking they’re better than other people and so have a right to take anything from them they wish. They do it by saying they’re meeker to Bob than are the people whose blood they suck. Weird.”
“Weird alright,” I said. “They don’t know Bob from the beeswax their ears seem to be full of. I wonder how long Bob’s going to tolerate that crap, from any faction. I wonder what the Christians or Paulites are going to do next. They’ve come a long way in their globalization now. They’ve been in Rome for a half-millennium. That’s a big shoe waiting to drop. And it won’t drop meekly.”
Between that conversation and Slavey’s return to Mecca in this millennium, a lot of shoes dropped. Adherents to Slavey’s new religion consolidated enough factions to take control of the whole of the Holy Land. The Paulites or Christians spread across Europe and crusaded against Slavey’s new religion’s occupation of Jerusalem. Slavey had opened a huge big bucket of worms.
The military arm of Slavey’s religion tried to conquer Europe, and Slavey had to come back with Oliver to try do something about that, at Roncesvalles. The Paulists sold out to military and monetary might and sanctioned terrible torture of anyone who disagreed with them, especially in Portugal and Spain. They called what they did there inquisitions, and then they did what they did to Theresa.
This is what they did to Theresa, in the words of an Earthling there, watching the fire that time: “She was soon dead and her clothes all burned. Then the fire was raked back and her naked body shown to all the people and all the secrets that could or should belong to a woman, to take away any doubts from the people’s minds. When they had stared long enough at her dead body bound to the stake, the executioner got a big fire going again around her poor carcass, which was soon burned, both flesh and bone reduced to ashes.”
Remarkable also is that the raconteur of this was for the prosecution. Notable also is this, which the executioner said after: “Once in the fire she cried out more than six times ‘Jesus!’ and especially in her last breath she cried with a strong voice ‘Jesus!’ so that everyone present could hear it. Almost all wept with pity.”
And the end of that life of hers on Earth was slow. The fire-tenders had been told to keep the fire distant enough to make her death as difficult as possible. We must understand that the distance between Christianity and Paulism is much more vast than water and sand. We must understand that, to keep coming back.
When Slavey toured the Holy Land and the Arab nations in the nineteen-sixties time of trial in the United States, he was surprised at what the religion he had founded had become. He had founded a religion of pride, which the people there had channeled into revenge, and on into greed. But now it seemed turning back the other way.
All the people Muslims were calling the people of the Book had ignored Bob’s commandment to keep their alters simple, to use no tools to build them and not to raise them higher than the level of the land on which they ordinarily walked. The Paulists were the worst offenders, vying throughout Europe to see who could build the tallest cathedral and tooling alter icons more gaudy than any golden calf. But the Muslims also tooled temples with pride and, while carefully complying with the commandment not to develop images of anything Bob had already created, they placed priests in high minarets to pray to Bob and the people. And Joshuites, while never raising another golden calf, plainly worshiped the gold of it and curdled the milk of kindness in self-pity.
Jews and Christians worshipped mammon so intensely that they often pointed to Islamic poverty as though it indicated unworthiness. So, Slavey was happy to find Islamic commerce very basic, a system of exchange hardly different from the times of his traveling in his camels’ caravans across the sands to the Holy Land. But, more, he found lovely that the vindictiveness and greed he’d combated with Oliver at Roncesvalles was now here hardly visible, even in poems and myth. It was largely gone.
There was, of course, the oil. But the nations’ governments sold those dead bugs as a commodity at the best price they could get. If political manipulation entered the negotiation, it wasn’t with a plan to spread Islam around the world as the Saracens had tried to do through Spain to France, but simply to get the best price. How the non-Islamic nations vied against each other for oil or power or anything else was not the business of the Islamic nations. They were simply merchants, like Muhammad.
“But democracy gives you more right than the Israelis,” said Slavey now to a man selling Coca Cola in the old city of Jerusalem. “I mean to all this land, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and back across the Jordan. I mean democracy, the right of the majority to rule. Muslims are the majority here, all across the land.”
“What about you?” asked the Coca Cola salesman. “Your swarthy color is not the majority in your land. Do you think that all those people of your color, who are fighting and dying and being imprisoned as criminals in your country, merely for requesting the same rights as the majority, have no right to complain?”
Possibly the most beautiful thing about Jerusalem is how brightly the sun shines there, on the brown bleached stones of the city’s streets and walls and on the twisting black branches of the olive trees outside, and setting their dark shiny fruit aglow. And Slavey’s reason was stopped now there, stopped deader than Lev looking into the river reconsidering his preachings in War and Peace. The old Coca Cola salesman sold a few more Coca Colas. Slavey aroused himself, but weakly.
“Then you’re saying,” he asked, “that the Israelis have a right to take your land?”
“I’m saying,” said the Coca Cola salesman, “that I am in Jerusalem selling Coca Cola, and my family needs no more than it gets from my selling this stuff your country likes to drink to rot its teeth. I could tell these American tourists with their children what this stuff will do to their teeth and their children’s teeth, but I’m sure they already know it, and it’s not my job.
“So, with the permission I beg you to honor, I shall return to doing my job, to keep my family happy. However, I wish everyone well, and so I’ll offer you a way to better answer. I’ll tell you how to find my brother.
“He tends a garden, on the hill across the way.”