Chapter 13
Brave New World
Slavey, while enjoying the cheer that often goes with beer, kept it out of his religion because it interferes with serious work, and Slavey was nearly always very serious. His next task was to gather in Harlem his supporters, those defected from the Nation of Islam for the reasons he had, and those wishing to join in a more peaceful organization. There they planned their new approach.
“First,” he said. “I have to make peace with Oliver.”
So he flew to Atlanta with his Earthling wife and daughters and visited Oliver and Rachel and their children in their home. Rachel welcomed them, and the meeting began a long friendship between her and Slavey’s wife, a friendship they both would greatly need before the year was over.
Back in Harlem, Slavey planned a speech at the Apollo Theater, a place Theresa thought important for its integration of African and American music. In the speech, he would announce his reconciliation with Oliver and announce the formation of his new organization, to displace the corruption of the Nation of Islam.
Meanwhile, K. Buggen Goober was using his infiltration into the Nation of Islam to instigate vengeance, under the guise of protecting the corruption from becoming widely known enough to threaten the corrupt leaders’ wealth. Slavey’s austere lifestyle and new preachings of the brotherhood of man were nothing to K. Buggen.
“Look at all those daughters,” said Buggen to someone no one knew anything about. “Don’t those people know how to do anything besides progenitate, breed? Why does he have a problem with his Nation of Islam brother being another wallowing rabbit? Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’ll buy one to kill the other.”
Of course we also had our people about whom no one knew anything, and we opened all the doors through which Buggen and the Nation of Islam fell, right down to funneling their operatives into the Apollo Theater that night. As Slavey began to speak, the Buggen-Nation operatives created confusion in the audience.
“Get your hand out of my pocket,” said one of them, leaping from his chair.
As many in the audience focused their care on that incident, other operatives pulled from their coward clothing an array of weaponry ranging from pistols to shotguns. As Slavey’s wife and daughters watched him from the front row, the assassins opened fire and put a dozen bullets through his Earthling body, and a shotgun blast through his chest. He died on the stage, covered with his blood, and his wife.
“He had come to me for reconciliation,” said Oliver next day. “He was a sweet man. The world will mourn his passing, as I will mourn him. He always did the best he knew, and no one can do better than that. He died a martyr to our cause. To freedom.”
Goober set up some defenseless people to take the fall to satisfy the public in general, and he set up a trial much like the trials of the Scottsboro boys, to be sure the fall-guys fell within the law. The Scottsboro boys had not been executed and had been released, though never acquitted. The trial of these newer victims stood forever as it ended. It stands frozen in infamy, like a tomb for justice.
A few weeks after the killing in the theatre, Oliver and his family and many of his friends were on an airplane headed for Oslo, where he would accept the Nobel Peace-prize for the work he and Slavey had done for Earth this trip, from Theresa’s beginning on that bus. At least he had all Earth’s attention, as he spoke this time.
He stood in Europe’s Viking land like a sailor home from the sea, and he spoke of whence all that conquering had come. But, more, he spoke of whence it could go, if everyone would only wish and work, stand up for what we all have in our hearts.
“I have a dream,” said Oliver, with both hands on that worldwide stand.
“I have a dream of Heaven, and it is not a large dream. It is a dream of small words and small people, but it is a dream of great spirit. It is a dream of friends of mine dead and friends of mine who shall live forever. I know that they shall live forever, for they are friends of yours as well as mine.
“I have a dream of a small woman, a small black woman sitting on a bus, sitting there in a small part of a big bus, a part of that bus set aside for small black women and small black men so that a great white whale trying to swallow that small place need not feel as small as it must feel in its paleness. Such small people in this large world are called a minority. What a large word for such small people.
“I am educated in divinity, another large word for many small dreams. But I will not speak of the expansiveness of theology to you today. I am a black member of the colorful minority of a great nation still writhing in the belly of the great white whale. And maybe that’s right for democracy, but I will not quote such grand Greek words to you today in this small snowy nation across a sea from there.
“Instead, I will quote a white-man for the smallness of his words and the grandness of his spirit and the simplicity of his soul, and I will quote two great friends I know will live forever for the smallness of their words and the grandness of their spirit and the simplicity of their souls. The white man was a rich white boy who, in the first of what we call world wars on Earth, drove an ambulance on soil foreign to him.
“People that Harvard boy’s nation told him were friends caught him driving that ambulance trying to save lives, and they put him into a prison. I’ve been imprisoned, jailed many times though never for driving an ambulance, and I find striking that Harvard poet’s description of his prison. His jailers did not throw him into a small box of steel bars and concrete, but into a large room full of many kinds of people. If you like big words, you might call it a microcosm. The poet called it an enormous room.
“And that white-boy Harvard poet did not complain. He mentioned the stink and the sickness, and the rottenness and paucity of the food, but he did not complain. Instead, in a little book he wrote about that large room, he wrote about the people there and not about how poor they were. He wrote about the grandness of their spirit and the simplicity of their souls. And later he wrote only poems of love, never a discouraging word. In one, to my soul, he says the most important thing. And so I quote this line of his to you:
“’Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.’
“The poem is not a song of war, or politics or stuff like that. It is the same song as the song of the wise king Solomon, who for all the grandeur of his temple found most beautiful the small roe breast of his lover which he wished to feed among the lilies, and nothing has changed in the hearts of men and women, in the land of Solomon or anywhere else. For all the war in the Holy Land still, Tel Aviv has more bridal-gown shops per capita than has any other city on Earth.
“So, when I think of that small woman black but comely on that bus in Alabama, I do not think of how much larger the bus was than she or how much larger the white whale was than she or how much larger the world where that bus might carry her was than she or how much larger the world of the white whale was than the world she might have traveled then and might travel now. Instead, I think that she was black, but comely. Then I forget that she was black.
“That is why we’re here on earth, to find each other comely. We are not here to kill each other or covet each other’s land, but to find each other comely and to propagate that comeliness in simple homes of honor for those homes and the homes of our neighbors. As I said, I won’t argue complexities or rationalities of theology here today, but I will say that both the Bible and the Koran have enough words large and small to excuse anything we wish to do. So, why not look into our own hearts first, and carry forth in our own small hands what we find best there?
“I, for one, suspect that what each, every one of us humans on Earth, will find there is the Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments and the first and second great commandments of Jesus Christ, without our having ever read the Bible. Call it inherent conscience, or some bigger set of words, if you wish. Or just call it love.
“Grand spirit, simple soul, small words. Here is my second quotation.
“When that white-whale bus-driver threatened to have that small and black and comely woman imprisoned for simply refraining from giving up that small evening space on Earth to the white whale, she held in her small and black and comely hands her purse nearly depleted from buying Christmas gifts that first day of December that year now lo those many years ago, and she said: ‘You may do that.’
“Grand spirit, simple soul, small words! You may do what?
“You may arrest me. You may push us around. You may set your dogs on our children. You may send your cavalry to trample us as we peacefully try to cross a bridge to freedom. You may imprison us by the thousands and keep our voices out of the law. But there is one thing you may not do, and cannot do. One thing.
“You cannot diminish the grandness of our spirit, the simplicity of our souls, our love. So, with those small words, with her small hands lightly clutching that nearly empty purse, that black and comely woman lit a light for all humanity, maybe even gave a bit of a tan to the white whale, to help him be a little normal.
“Third quotation. I cannot imagine our movement without the peace of Mrs. Parks or the war of the Panthers. Both have been necessary, Mrs. Parks to show us the comeliness of her small hands, and the Panthers to show us the bloodiness of the alternative, the freezing rain spring showers should wash away. Another person black and comely preached the war much of his life, and late in that life of his on Earth was reconciled to the peace, and was killed at once thereafter. Was he killed for reconciling, for seeking final peace? If not, for what?
“I suggest that he was killed, blown down and off this earth by bullets and shotgun blasts in Harlem, the capital of African America, for small words. Mr. Shabazz, after returning from a trip to Africa, during which he discovered that Islam in its homeland also had more room for brotherhood and sisterhood than what he’d been calling the Nation of Islam did in the United States of America, said so. So what did he say that was so bad, so unforgivable that he passed all seven-times-seven chances of redemption, of Christian forgiveness?
“‘By any means necessary,’ is what he said.
“Grand spirit, simple soul, small words. Did anyone ask what he meant by that? Did anyone ask him what he meant by that? Did anyone look up in a dictionary what he meant by that? Did anyone consider, carefully in their hearts and minds, what might be necessary? My dear departed friend Mr. Shabazz did, all his short and happy life on Earth! He always asked, for all of us.
“How many humans know that that friend of ours, whether or not we recognize what a friend he was to all of us, spent more than half of a decade of his young life in the prison where Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for being called anarchists, charges as trumped up as the charges against them of crimes against the law, as trumped up as the charges against the Scottsboro boys?
“How many humans, for all their claims to identify humanity with compassion and reason, know who Sacco and Vanzetti were or who the Scottsboro boys were? How many recognize the name Shabazz or know that he left behind a wife and daughters? How many honor those daughters’ small roe breasts, in that falling freezing rain? How many honor their own breasts?
“What means are necessary? The peace of Ghandi in India before the internal strife that ended his life on this earth? The creation of a homeland for the survivors of Hitler’s holocaust, the oppression of those whose homes were on that land before, the suicidal terror of their retaliation? The peace of Mrs. Parks or the war of the Panthers? What means are necessary?
“Well, call me a romantic, but I wonder how the tyrannical imperialism of Rome before or after being called holy got mixed up in that small word ‘holy’. The means necessary is that all of us admit what we find in our hearts, and so carry it forth in each of our small hands through any rain hard or cold that falls on us, across the sands of Arabia and the mountains of America, from sea to shining sea, all over Earth, to Heaven.
“I have a dream, a dream of grand spirit and simple souls, a dream of small hands carrying water, like Rachel’s at the well. I have a dream of spring rain raising lilies in the fields of battle, quenching the thirst for the silliness humanity calls things like glory and superiority. I have a dream of righteousness, clear and quenching as a mountain stream, humanity’s first and last fair thirst.
“And when that dream comes true, and I say when, not if. When that small and simple dream comes true on Earth, justice. I am saying the two syllables of that simple word ‘justice’. Freedom, justice for all, shall roll down like water.”
With that last phrase, Oliver leaned close to the microphone and fairly shouted. The feedback from that sixties Earth sound-system screamed throughout the hall, maybe damaging some of the Nobel committee’s hearing aids. But Nobel speeches are records for history, and anyone who didn’t understand can look it up and try again.
So Oliver had done what he could do this trip and said what he had to say, and so it was time for him to go on with Slavey to some other Roncesvalles, or whatever. And he finished this trip up symbolically, in the Mississippi delta helping garbage collectors of the race he’d adopted for himself this time on Earth. There we let one of those poor white people blow Oliver’s Earthly brains out.
We set Goober up to do that too, or I did. My connections through Skull and Bones to the CIA extended to the FBI. So we easily opened the doors for Goober’s operatives to find that Ku Klux Klan lunatic James Earl Ray and see how he’d fit the task. Buggen had infiltrated the KKK, as he had infiltrated anything he thought important or threatening to him. So Ray had only to accept some casual suggestions.
He sniped Oliver on a motel balcony in Memphis. It worked out well, except that that fop Jesse Jackson was there and carried that proximity to prominence in the movement. Jackson later became an embarrassment, by following Oliver’s example of adultery. But he also proved our timing, as his hypocrisy killed his career.
Jackson’s legacy would end with one statement: “I coulda been a contender.”
Pertinently, that statement is in a James Dean movie filmed the year before Theresa’s bus ride, and the film’s title is On the Waterfront. That’s where Jackson wished to be, on the front line of justice rolling down like water, rich and famous.
Anyway, Slavey and Oliver went on, and Theresa and I went on, lonely. But, then, neither of us was entirely lonely, with Theresa living with her Earth family in Detroit and me with mine in Houston. Both of us fell back on that awhile, Theresa taking care of her mother and Raymond, and I trying to be a father for a while, although a little late. Lev helped me a little with the lateness, although not quite enough.
Years had passed, and Quincy was now at Harvard. I had had many heart-to-heart talks with him and had told him I had great expectations for him, but I’d never been specific beyond telling him Earth needed broad leadership. He chose Harvard rather than Yale because of its business school, figuring business administration was more practical than economics and Harvard more reputable for business administration than Yale.
I didn’t argue that he’d be missing out on Skull and Bones, because he wouldn’t be. I could pass on to him my connections, and he would make many connections of his own at Harvard, and that’s what I told him:
“What makes a school’s reputation and power is not academic, Quincy. It’s the people the school attracts, and so be sure your activities are often extracurricular. At least that’s how such things seem to me.”
So Quincy joined the cheerleading squad and drank a lot of beer. The cheerleading made sense to me for a career in politics, and I figured he’d get over the beer, sooner or later. So I didn’t complain.
Besides, he joined the Air National Guard and went to flight school before he went to college, and we had to argue with him to keep him from going to Vietnam. Or rather we supported one side of his argument with himself.
“I love to fly, and I love this great nation,” he said. “But using planes to kill people isn’t quite my cup of tea.”
Ben agreed with that deciding factor, but he was very different from his brother, and I didn’t see the difference developing. Academically, Ben performed better than Quincy, and he beat him at learning to ride a bicycle, although Quincy was three years older. He had more friends than Quincy did, and he seldom argued with me or with Beatrice, while Quincy often did.
He worked part-time jobs, while Quincy preferred to stay in his room and listen to music. Sometimes Beatrice and I worried about Quincy, but we both loved music also and so thought he couldn’t be all bad. Sometimes his arguments seemed a little idealistic, impractical in the face of Earth behavior. But we had no problem with that, Beatrice being theological and I being alien.
And maybe that was part of the problem with Ben. Beatrice and I loved each other because we faced the world from different perspectives but with the same desire to make it a better place for all the creatures here. So we sympathized with Quincy’s idealism and will to find perfection, and we never found a way to talk with Ben.
So the first inkling I had of Ben’s dissatisfaction was on a visit to Quincy in Cambridge. Quincy had decided to stay in Cambridge that summer, because he had met a girl he said was making him recite Petrarchan sonnets. So Beatrice and I decided to go to see him, if he wouldn’t come see us that summer, and of course to meet the girl.
The girl was lovely, and her name was Laura. I guess that’s where the Petrarchan part comes in, if not from other things. And we learned when we met her, not from Quincy with his sometimes taciturn ways, that he’d known her in school in Midland. Now she was at Vassar and majoring in elementary education, to go back to teach.
In the spirit of the things involved there and then, Quincy recruited his mother and the future mother of his children, although we didn’t know that then, to go get some ice-cream. So, Quincy and the women wandered off to Harvard Square and left Ben and me in Harvard Yard, sitting on the steps of the Widener library, trying to widen ourselves.
“Decide on a school yet?” I asked. “This Vietnam thing’s going to get you, if you don’t. Well, I know I don’t have to tell you that.”
“I’d go to Canada,” said Ben. “Screw this country. But yes I have.”
I had never heard him say anything so vehemently, and I had no idea he held any animosity to anything, much less his country. But I tried to stay cool, and I tried not to drop my jaw as I stared at him briefly, and I didn’t address the question of screwing his country, hoping knowing his choice of schools might give me a hint.
“Where?” I asked.
“UCLA,” he answered. “I want nothing to do with this preppy crap and this pseudo-intellectualism and all these hypocrites up here in New England pretending they want something more than the wampum those Puritans came here to get. You think I don’t know what you and Mom do, her teaching Sunday school while you go around destroying the environment sucking up oil for money so you can send your sons to these fancy hypocrite schools and be proud of yourself. UCLA is my ticket.”
Well, now that was a reply, but it raised more questions for me than answers.
“I had no idea you felt that way,” I said, with another effort at a placid look.
“That’s because you don’t pay any attention to anything,” said Ben. “You’re so stupid, you think I’m stupid. I know you told Quincy you have great expectations for him. And he’s so stupid, he thinks your expectations are high. I’m glad you never said anything like that to me. My expectations are higher.”
“What are your expectations?” I asked, with another failing glance.
“Higher than yours,” said Ben. “I’m highly intelligent, and so I know that most people are stupid. I bet you don’t know I failed the entrance-examination to Yale because it’s a stupid culture-biased test for New England preppies.”
“I didn’t know you took the test,” I answered, now unable to turn my head.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Ben. “You don’t have any of your great expectations for me. You’re like that phony jerk Alex Trebeck, pretending he knows everything while the producers give him the answers. Everybody on that show is smarter than he is and better-qualified for his job than he is, and that’s how you are. You think you know everything, but you’re too ignorant to know anything. You and Mom, the queen of denial, run our family like Jeopardy. It’s the lunatics in charge of the asylum.”
I was at a total loss in this. For now at least, I could muster nothing intelligent to say. So, groping and grasping, I said something stupid.
“Why UCLA?” I asked. “Isn’t Alex Trebeck from out there.”
“That shows what you know,” said Ben. “He’s from Canada, but yes he lives out there, corrupting Hollywood with his hypocrisy. I’m going to California to get as far away from New England as I can, and I hope you and Mom and Quincy go to D.C. I guess that’s where you’re headed anyway, with your Republican politics and your token black friends. I’d rather be governor of California than president of the United States. You think I’m stupid, but I’m a problem-solver.
“If Fits Jr. hadn’t been assassinated, he might have gotten his brother Rudy to do something about how the home of Harvard and MIT is also the home of one of the worst public school debacles in this nation. In California, the best schools are public, from universities down to educating prepubescent illegal aliens.”
The problem I was trying to solve was how my son and I had become so at odds without my knowing it, while we agreed so much on fundamental points of reason. I could not but think of Slavey’s and Norma’s mothers dying in loony bins, and I could not but consider where this craziness, this disagreement that seemed agreeable to me, might go. By now, my Earth mother was living in a nursing home because she’d had a stroke, and I considered the possibility that Ben might be having some sort of stroke. He’d had some seizures early in his life, but doctors had said he’d outgrown the disorder. But, whatever was happening, I knew I couldn’t stop it in a minute. For now, I’d have to ride along and watch, I guessed. I could hardly think.
“Have you been accepted?” I asked. “How are you going to get there?”
“Of course, I’ll be accepted,” he answered. “They don’t have preppy tests out there. And, if you won’t pay for it, I’ll get a job or scholarships or something. I’m a problem-solver. I’ll figure it out.”
“I’ll support you,” I said. “But not to blow up parliament or congress.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “Your sarcasm is sickening!”
In that weird note, Laura and Quincy and Beatrice reentered the yard.
“They’ll fulfill your expectations,” said Ben. “Like sheep marching to the sea. Buy them a Mercedes. I’ll settle for an MG. I love open air.”
He acquiesced in his mother’s presence, but I nearly could see smoke blowing from his ears. The rest of the afternoon, he did not speak beyond terse answers to questions straight to him. I also tried not to smile, except to keep the others happy. I tried to figure how to speak to Beatrice of this.
“Ben says he wants to go to UCLA,” I said, back at the hotel.
“I know,” she said. “He’ll be alright. Just give him time.”
I had never loved her more, telling me of time that time.
So I took some time, to ask Lev what he thought, the next time I had occasion to be in New Orleans. Lev, despite our little tête-à-tête about beer, was still hanging out in the bars of the French Quarter, and we met at his favorite, Molly’s at the Market. We sat on high stools, at one of the high wooden tables opposite the bar, and talked.
“My son Ben’s driving me crazy,” I said.
“What’s his problem?” asked Lev.
So I told him the story and added a little.
“Beatrice and I named our firstborn Quincy, because I knew he would follow me into the presidency of the United States, you know as John Quincy Adams followed his father John Adams, and Beatrice hoped so. And we named our lastborn son Benjamin, from Hebrew for son of the right hand because we would sort our responsibilities somewhat, with me mainly raising Quincy, and Beatrice mainly Ben. But we hoped each hand would know very well what the other was doing. And we hoped and waited to find how we would hand the handing on. That’s what’s most important, at least as far as I can see. What do you think?”
“That’s as far as I can see?” said Lev. “Is that what you’re asking?”
“No,” I said. “I’m asking you maybe to help me see a little further.”
“Oh,” said Lev. “Good, because I’ve been studying psychology.”
“Do you mean in Russia with Pavlov when you were alive?”
“No, I mean in Vienna with Freud, since I’ve been dead.”
“You ghosts really get around,” I said.
“Nevermind that,” Lev said. “Listen.”