OK, let me read a little bit from this book that
is now in progress.
I'll read from the very first of it
and then a couple of pages from the middle,
and then two or three pages from the end of it,
which means that we will ignore a few hundred
pages that may not matter.
Well, I think that will be clear.
"The day didn't begin that day.
It started a very long time ago, in fact,
over half 100 years ago before Luther Calvin Knox got off
the boat and came inland to settle,
only to have to go and live with the niggers when the war came.
Before Wesley Knox took the ghost with him
from the nigger camp and went to preaching
and founded the college.
Before Francis Priapus Knox got chased by the thing
in the woods and went soft.
Before Lottie Thelma Knox got in bed and stayed there for 30,
years writing letters to congressmen.
Before Socrates Knox went to work in the steel mill
and discovered John C. Calhoun in the family tree.
Before Adolph Knox Moore killed Wick
the Frog, Victoria's new husband who
sold Bibles, with a broomstick on his grandmother's
back porch.
And before Isaiah Luther Knox rediscovered the ghost
from the nigger camp and wrote this book."
I might say that this is the first part of a trilogy,
by the way, and all of these things
don't happen in the first book.
Some of them will happen in the second, third.
"It wasn't Luther Calvin's fault--
Luther Calvin Knox's fault though,
that he had to come over right before the Civil War.
It wasn't his fault that the Knox's
had gotten run out of Scotland by Bloody Mary
and had gotten run out of Ireland by the potato blight
and had gotten at last run out of South Carolina
by Black labor competition, high prices, and Luther Calvin's
father's ghost.
And it wasn't his fault that during the war,
he had to be run off his land by Yankees
when he didn't even know what a Yankee was.
But it was his fault, his wife told him later on,
that he hadn't had enough sense not
to take his wife, an innocent child, off into the woods
to live with a tribe of haunted niggers, a thing
that could, she averred, mark a family for generations.
Luther Calvin would answer her, distant as ever,
that when he was herded off the ship at Charleston
in the November evening rain, after a voyage on which
his father had died and been buried at sea,
he knew that things weren't going to go well.
The rain was cold, the docks were gray and ugly and not
at all new looking as they should
have been in the New World, and he could see no work.
There were Black men everywhere doing all the work,
lifting things, pushing things, leading things, unloading
and loading things.
You've never seen a Black man before except in a circus that
had played Belfast, but they looked
as if they by no means needed help in whatever it was they
were doing.
Right away, he got separated from his wife, Chastity,
and his recently widowed mother and his five-year-old son
Wesley because they were all pushed in a great mob up
from the hold and down the gangplank,
and went spilling out into an even greater mob who
were waiting and milling about on the dock
where they all ran a slant into a great herd
of French [? Girard ?] pigs who were also being unloaded.
Luther Calvin's family, he would recall with mixed emotions,
along with a number of other people were thrust by the mob
into the pigs.
And amidst great squealing and confusion,
swept away not to be found until nearly Christmas.
Luther Calvin wandered all the night that first night
among the other immigrants, who were many,
searching for Chastity, Wesley, and his mother.
Lamps lit grayly, the don wooden buildings
in the faces of the Black stevedores
glistening with rain, but nowhere did they
light his family.
Others too had lost parts of their families
in the hog stampede, or though only Luther Calvin
lost all his, and there was much weeping and wandering about.
All it remained to Luther Calvin was the family King James Bible
and a book of Celtic fairy tales, both of which
he always carried by hand, and a bundle of Wesley's clothes.
Worst, he found out next morning, he had no job.
A message arrived at the customs house addressed
to the shipper's representative that the gentleman in New York,
upon whose newspaper solicitation, Luther
Calvin and the others had come to the New World to assist
and manifest destiny by stretching the railway
lines to the frontiers of civilization, had died.
The shipper's representative made this announcement
to the Irish and assembly on the docks
after they had waited all night to pass customs
and had had no tea.
It was a perfunctory lisping man who flanked by soldiers,
immediately went on to regret that their baggage had been
confused with a load of English woolens
by the illiterate stevedores and it left at dawn for Kansas.
And the riot that followed amid the style of rifle smoke,
the cries of the Black stevedores
who had been dumped in the sea, the wails of wounded men
and the last screams of the shippers' representative,
Luther Calvin, who was inclined to quieter riots,
stepped across a white picket fence
and entered the promised land.
'Aye,' he said to himself as he crept among the warehouses
to shore, 'the fiend were in the garden before Mr. Adam were,
and he don't like neighbors.'
The Charleston morning was brilliant.
On all sides, were green things, even flowers,
although it was November.
The rain had vanished, leaving a fresh washed smell that
seemed to come from the air itself
once he had left the brimstone smell of the gunpowder
and the docks behind.
The sky was a blue that made everything whiter and the day
was neither too hot or too cold.
On both sides of the street were grand, wooden houses
fresh and white in which no one appeared to work
at all except the Black people.
That fact impressed Luther Calvin most of all.
No one seemed to be working anywhere.
There was much busyness everywhere,
but no one except the Blacks seemed
to be working hard at being busy,
and they were more busy than working.
Merchant-looking men smiled, preachers smiled, women smiled,
Blacks smiled, even the horses seemed to Luther Calvin
to be smiling.
Compared with the scene at the docks
and the long, cold night before it was truly
the Garden of Eden, his family and his dead father
slipped in and out of his thoughts
and at last threatened to slip out altogether."
By the way, I know sometimes that it gets awfully hard
sitting and listening to someone read you
a story, unless you grew up in radio days
and listened to Let's Pretend on Saturday mornings.
So if it does and you want to stand up
and say Simon says or stretch or something like that,
please feel free.
"But as Luther Calvin walked, the neighborhood
began to change in Luther Calvin's mood with it.
Brick stores and stables and blacksmith shops
began to crowd the street, and the houses became smaller
in built-in connected rows.
There were fewer green things, and the cobbles of the street
became rougher.
The Blacks were working in much heavier kinds of labor,
and the whites that oversaw them were shouting and working too.
Uneasily, Luther Calvin thought of his family
wandering lost among the same streets all night or worse
still, lying hurt and unattended in one of the dim side streets,
victims of the pig stampede in the night.
The row houses gave way to shacks
where first lived lean, white men like himself
and then more Blacks with strange headdresses
and no shoes.
The Blacks looked menacing to him,
and their strange unintelligible speech threatened him.
Wild, wailing music and smells of unnamable things cooking
swam in the air around him, and images
of his family being taken away by these alien creatures,
from Luther Calvin was convinced could be cannibals,
sent him into a true panic.
His pace quickened.
His family had all his mind again.
He thought of the stockyards.
Of course, the stockyards.
The pigs would have gone to the stockyards!
He stopped the first Black man he
found, his eyes lit with determination, 'The pigs, lad.
Where are the pigs,' he shouted.
'No sir.
No, sir.
I ain't got 'em,' the Black man said, backing up. 'Of course,
you ain't.
The stockyards, man.
The stockyards.' 'Ah, yes sir.
They be in the stockyards.
That's right,' the Black man said,
propitiating by taking another step back from Luther Calvin
and his demonic eyes.
'Where are the stockyards, quick.'
'Yonder, sir,' the Black man said,
pointing toward the sea and broke into a run.
Luther Calvin was more lost than ever.
Yonder he saw from the crest of a small hillock he climbed
lay in a direction through shacks
and savannas as desolate as the very wastes of Egypt.
It took Luther Calvin an hour to find the stockyards,
and he ran the last of the way chased by bony dogs.
'Yeah,' he thought to himself, as he caught the scent of blood
and dung, 'this was not your ordinary paradise.
At the stockyards, he found a fellow Irishman
at work who remembered that a herd of pigs
had, indeed, come in the night before,
accompanied by a number of Irish ladies and gentlemen
and a free few children.
They had left messages, all of which
the Irishman began to chant to Luther Calvin in a litany.
He had barely begun when the soldiers came.
Luther Calvin was asked if he had ID, money,
and if he were Irish.
Since the soldiers had blue coats, not red,
Luther Calvin's fear was not great.
He was going to report his lost family to them,
in fact, when one of them hit him in the stomach with a rifle
butt and told him to move.
Within minutes, he found himself with another group of Irishmen
being marched, again, through the aimless shacks
of the Blacks toward the edge of town, while one of the soldiers
read a proclamation to them that all unattached
Irish were being escorted from the city as a public safety
measure as a result of the morning's disturbances
on the docks.
Some miles outside of town in a desolate trail through scrubby
pine thickets, under a sky that had, again, turned slate,
they were abandoned by the soldiers who
left them with the advice to go north or west,
and told them that they now had their names.
And if they were caught again within or near the city
limits of Charleston, sterner measures would be adopted.
Luther Calvin wondered what those sterner measures
might be as he looked around him at the desolation
in the twilight.
He had eaten nothing since he left the ship.
It was turning cold again.
There was no shelter in sight.
His wife and family were, no doubt,
also in another small group of Irishmen on
a trail or highway out of Charleston
just as desolate as he, and what's
more with even less money than the few pounds he had.
That night, he and his compatriots
slept in a fire-less pine lean to in the forest,
ate raw potatoes grubbed from a nearby field,
and talked themselves to sleep with tales of poets and singers
and the little people of Ulster and Down.
Thus, began Luther Calvin's life in the New Eden,
and thus, began his six-week search for his family.
Luther Calvin had grown up a gentleman
who bore no malice against anyone except the Pope
and his hirelings.
He was a farmer with deep staring eyes
and a habit of talking to himself in the fields.
He knew as a good Irish countryman
that the Earth was shared by many other creatures
than himself and the most part, unseen ones.
The sounds that he heard in the unfamiliar woods and marshes
as he wandered in a semicircle around Charleston
those next weeks could have come from them all, or worse.
And his nights were spent sleepless,
cold, and in terror of the spirits of this new land.
But he was also a resolute man, and as he searched
for his family, learned to beg food in exchange for an odd job
here and there, to steal the late turnips in the ground,
and to bear the disappointment of not finding
a single trace of his family.
His pounds were useless to him.
He was laughed at when he tried to spend them.
He became even leaner than he had been before
and grew a beard.
At last, soon after the 1st of December
when he woke in the morning with frost
in his beard and his shoes had lost their soles,
when he had searched every village and farm
around Charleston without success,
when his nights had become living visions
from revelations, when he had read all the Bible
through again and the Book of Fairy Tales through twice,
when he had sung to the pines, all the long
ballads he knew to keep the creatures away in the night,
he felt he had begun to possess the new land
and to be possessed by it.
And he found work.
He was given a shed to sleep in and straw for a mattress
by a farmer too small to have slaves
and went to work in the fields.
He helped with the mules and the winter crops
with the three cows and the mending
of the wagon and the house and small barn and the sheds.
The walls of the shed and the smell of the cooking
kept the creatures at bay in the evenings and night,
and the loneliness of his wanderings
in search of his family were softened somewhat
by the sound of the farmer's wife singing hymns,
as she cooked breakfast at dawn.
In only a short time, he came to feel
comfortable with the smell of pine smoke
in the pre-dawn mixed with crisp odors of pork
chops and salt pork and biscuits to listen
for the chance of the field Blacks, whom he now
called niggers out of respect for farmer's feelings,
as they worked in the adjoining fields.
And there was always enough to eat
in the warmth in the evenings without the heavy smell of peat
and the warm roughness of walls of wood around him
instead of the cold dampness of Irish stone cottages
where the wind whistled at night and the pantry
was always empty.
With the same resoluteness that he had searched for his family,
he decided to settle and to wait.
Then one night he returned weary and damp from the fields
and found his father waiting for him in the dimness of the shed.
The old man was sitting cross-legged on the straw
smelling of the sea and looking gravely in front of him.
He was covered with a grayish patina,
and his hair was matted to his head
longer than Luther Calvin had remembered it.
Luther Calvin was startled, but remembered himself and said
respectfully, 'Hello, Father.'
'Where's your family, boy?'
his father said sternly.
'I've lost them, Father,' Luther Calvin said.
'It's nice to see you here, Father.'
'Never mind, boy.
That ain't what you come over here for, was it?
Where's your family?' 'I don't know, sir.'
'Is this all your mother and I worked for, to see you live
in a shed like these Blacks the rest of your days?'
'They're called niggers here, Father,' Luther Calvin
explained.
'You know why you ain't found them,
boy?' his father said in a booming voice,
pointing his finger through the gloom at Luther Calvin's heart.
Luther Calvin was surprised at how long his father had
let his fingernails get.
'You ain't found him because you don't know where they be,
ain't it so?'
'Yes, Father.' 'I thought so.
I taught you to read and to sing and to work in the fields.
You ain't forgot that, have you?'
'No, Father.' 'I wish I had me pipe and some tobacco.
I thought there would be all the tobacco I wanted when I got
over here,' his father said peevishly.
'Well, I know where they be, boy,
and don't you forget that neither.
Sit down.' Luther Calvin sat on the stall beside his father,
who gave off cold the way a hot stove gave off heat.
His father described a street and house in Charleston
and made him repeat the description
until he was sure he had it, and made
Luther Calvin promise to leave with the dawn
to find his family.
Then the two of them sat the rest of the night side by side,
and his father told him the wonders
of the bottom of the sea and the creatures that lived there
and the men he had met and the trouble he
had had in finding him.
Luther Calvin told his father of the nights in the woods
and of his search, but his father
seemed to know it all already, though he listened
in the painfully patient way he had listened when
Luther Calvin was a boy and would tell him
a story he already knew.
His father asked him to light a candle
and read some from the book of fairy tales.
He interrupted him several times to make comparison
between the creatures in the story and those that
lived on the bottom of the sea and to assure Luther Calvin
that there were little people in the forest of the sea too.
Luther Calvin offered to read from the Bible,
but his father refused and seemed about
to get angry and told Luther Calvin never
to read his children from the Bible,
but always from the Book of Fairy Tales
and to sing them the songs of the old poets
and tell them the stories of the little people.
Because children should be led into the ways
of truth and not superstition.
Then as the cold life of the dawn
began to seep under the door, his father said to him,
'I'm the one who taught you to read and to sing and to work
in the fields, and don't you forget that, son.
It's time to go now, and don't you
stop till you find what you come here for, what you promised me
we'd find when you first started talking to me of coming here.
Though I disremember all the things you said we'd find.
There were so many of them.'
'Now, don't you stop and live like a heathen Black man
in a shed, and that's your father telling you now.'
'Niggers,' Luther Calvin reminded his father, again,
gently.
'And they're not heathens, Father.'
'So much the worse for them, boy,' his father said.
'Now, go and do what I told you.'
'Yes, sir," Luther Calvin said and got up.
He felt as if he had slept all the night, but was stiff.
'Are you coming with me, Father?'
'I can't, boy.
I'm dead.' 'Yes, sir.'
'Take care of your mother, lad,' his father said.
His face was even more gray in the new light,
and his eyes were deeper than Luther Calvin had
remembered them.
'I wish I could cry, but I can't now, you know.
I wish I had some tobacco too.'
'Goodbye, Father.' 'I'll say goodbye to mother for you.'
'Goodbye, boy.' Luther Calvin picked up the bundle
of Wesley's clothes and the book of Celtic Folk Tales.
He left the shed and closed the door.
There was smoke coming from the chimney of the farmer's house,
and he heard the hymn the farmer's wife was singing,
and he smelled the salt pork she was cooking
mixed with the smell of the pine smoke and the damp pine
woods nearby, smells he would live with the rest of his life.
There was a thin fog all around him
so that the world looked to him as if it
were hiding behind a veil.
He glanced the last time at the shed
and saw a small rivulet of water had followed him out the door
and was slowly making its way toward Charleston and the sea.
He turned in the same direction and sat out briskly
thinking that the road to Charleston
would be long, though he did not know until a sun shadowed day
in the woods years later, as he saw the flash
and heard the trumpet of a shotgun,
just how long the journey he was beginning that day would be
and how much wider the wilderness is and denser
the forest would be than those on the road to Charleston."
Well, I think I'll cut some of this
since we're running a little short on time.
Let's see.
"No one stopped Luther Calvin to ask him for identification
or if he were Irish when he got to Charleston.
The dark riots seemed to have been forgotten
in the continuing business of ships and slaves and commerce
and the fraternal glow of Christmas that lit the city.
As he entered the edge of town, the houses of the Blacks
and of the poor whites looked mostly
the same as when he had left only colder.
But when he came to the row houses,
he found that holly wreaths had sprouted from their doors
and mistletoe from their stone arches,
and the trees were growing inside the house
before the windows.
The white houses on the broader streets toward the docks
were even more splendid with wreaths and all the windows
and trees inside as tall as two men.
Tears came to Luther Calvin's eyes
as he remembered Christmases in Belfast
when his father was alive and when he was with his family.
Strangers wished him a Merry Christmas,
and some of the Blacks tipped their hats to him as he passed.
The street his father had described,
he found at last in none of the sections he had seen before,
but in an area of small squares and neat shops
with ladies and gentlemen's clothing displayed
in their tastefully dressed windows.
Tall beaver hats and frock coats and some wide-brimmed hats
and white suits and others all sprinkled among other windows
with long, flowing gowns, knit shawls, gloves, lace, bags,
and bolts of silk and crinoline.
It was a busy time with ladies and gentlemen,
coming and going among the shops in the same clothing that
was displayed in the shop windows and carriages
with Black footman and attendants waiting
alongside the small squares, all as he remembered it
from the English illustrated magazines.
His problem was that the houses all looked like the one
his father had described.
Peering in at doors and windows, he wandered more and more
downcast from shop to shop, house
to house, jostled by the crowds, accosted by match girls,
splashed by carriages."
One thing that I'm doing, by the way,
and here he's playing with a number
of various styles, a number of periods in literature.
And it might be of some side interest to you
to try to find some of those.
"At last, as he wandered spiritless
near the end of the street all in a jumble,
a brougham and pair of grays thundered
from one of the small squares and sent him leaping out
of its way onto the curb.
A beaver hat shouted with a laugh from the brougham,
'Back to the woods, Father Christmas,' and Luther Calvin
had lost the spirit even to throw a rock.
He took shelter from the jostling by a small knit goods
shop he had found himself in front of.
I see, one that displayed knit goods no different
from others on the street.
Dejected and muddy, he stared vacantly
into the window, his mind lost on the piece of the farmer's
shack, and his eyes wandering among the fancy knitting.
He'd never felt sorry for himself
before, not even when he was sleeping
under the dripping trees.
He began to now.
Father Christmas.
And what would he do with his family
if he found them, buy them a carriage
and a parcel of Blacks?
He began to hum 'The Last Rose of Summer' under his breath,
and then he saw it, the stitch, he recognized the stitch.
There in the window in one white shawl was unmistakably
the broad stitch he remembered from his childhood,
his mother's.
And then a pair of fine ladies' gloves trimmed with lace
was the smaller, more crabbed stitch his wife used.
Self-pity flew.
He had found his family.
He rushed into the shop, as he burst
in the tiny bell over the door tinkled, resurrection,
and the gray, little proprietress
threw her hands to her breast and flattened against the wall.
'Chastity,' he demanded and made for a door in the back
of the shop, finding at a glance that the woman was the only
person besides himself in the shop. 'Chastity.'
'Oh, yes, please.' the little woman squeaked,'
As he flung the door open and flung himself in with it
into the room, the two women who had been knitting on wicker
chairs in the room both leapt up and froze.
'Sweet Lord in heaven.' his mother shrieked,
'Back,' Chastity screamed almost simultaneously.
'Back where you belong," and made the hex sign at him while
her knitting fell in a heap at her feet burying Wesley.
'Chastity,' he said again.
'Back,' Chastity demanded.
'Back among the demons you come from.'
She looked to the sky still making hex signs.
'Oh, sweet Christ, child, in heaven,
I call upon you in all your mercy
to send this thing back among the shades it's come up from
and to protect two innocent women and an innocent child.
Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.'
Luther Calvin was stunned.
'It's me, Chastity, your own husband.
'Aye, so you think you are?' his mother said,
snatching Wesley and knitting from the floor and clutching
them to her bosom ready to flee into Egypt.
'If you were, you'd have pity on this child of your mortal self
and go back to the shades.'
'But I am me mortal self, Mother."
'Aye, so you think you are, you poor creature dead
and dumped into the sea these six weeks,
resting in the arms of your dear father.
So you think you are, me poor, dead boy?'
'Mrs. Knox, what in the world is going on back there?'
came the timid voice of the proprietress in the front room.
'Oh, Mrs. Carlisle,' his mother answered,
'there's not a soul here but ourselves and a poor sad thing
that thinks it's here among us, but it's not,
so there's not a thing to concern ourselves about.'
Mrs. Carlisle stepped into the room behind Luther Calvin.
'Why, I should say there is something to concern ourselves
about if you two ladies don't know this gentleman,' she said
sternly, though squeakily.
'Sir, she said to Luther Calvin and put her hand
on his arm to turn him around.
'Oh, Mrs. Carlisle, don't touch it,' Chastity begged.
'Please ma'am, your soul.
It's solid,' his mother said as Mrs.
Carlisle touched Luther Calvin.
'Oh, me Jesus, it's solid.
Me boy.
Me poor boy.'
Wesley had uttered not a sound, nor turned his eyes
away from his father while he was
battling to disengage himself from his net of knitting.
At his grandmother's astonishment,
she loosed her hold on him, and he and the knitting
slithered down into a heap on the floor.
Once down, he wriggled from his net and stumble to his father.
Luther Calvin tried to take him, but Mrs. Carlisle
held fast to his arm.
'Hands off me bloody ghostly arm,
ma'am,' he said and pulled away from her.
Wesley clutched his father's leg.
The fire in Luther Calvin's eyes damped
as he squatted and put his hands on Wesley's shoulders.
'Hello, lad,' he said, 'not to feared.'
Wesley's eyes were serene as they always
were until 60 years later when he preached
the sermon to the fiend.
One of them was blue and the other brown
and they crossed when he was perplexed or meditative.
They were crossed now.
'Hello, Father,' he said gravely.
Grandfather found you.'
'Ah,' Luther Calvin said and took Wesley up into his arms,
then turned back to his mother and Chastity.
I'm neither shade nor demon, nor have wished myself
both in the past six weeks, and I've come for you at last.
And I'll take a bit of decency and a greeting from all of you
and an apology to this poor lady who it seems
has been kind enough to take you in and give you sustenance
these last long weeks.
And Lord knows what I would have wanted
to come back to this for if I was a peaceful demon down
amongst the shades.
Seeing Wesley in his father's arms and no harm coming to him,
Chastity took a tentative step toward Luther Calvin,
as did his mother.
In the next moment, they were all
clutching and weeping except for Wesley, who never wept.
Luther Calvin was placated.
For years afterward, however, Chastity
would awaken in the middle of the night
and touch her husband to make certain he was himself.
And for the rest of her life, the impression
would come to her at times that he was not solid."
OK, I think that time is running a little bit short.
I'll read one more short section,
and we'll let it go at that.
You see, what happens is that they finally
make their way inland through various tribulations,
and Luther Calvin gets some land and so forth.
And then the war comes, and Luther Calvin
can't see fighting for either side,
really, since he really has nothing to do with either side.
And Northern foragers come, and he winds up
with a number of other men, hanging a bunch of them.
They have to go in the woods and live with some freed Blacks who
have been living on the land, who have gone back
to earlier ways of life.
They live in a [? craw, ?] in a kind of African compound.
Excuse me.
They have reverted somewhat to their religion
and various other things.
And eventually, the Northerners come, again.
Luther Calvin escapes in a balloon because, you see,
a balloon from a traveling roadshow
has come down in the woods, and the Blacks have gotten it.
And they're dressed in the costumes
they found in the balloon, which were Shakespearean costumes,
since it was a Shakespearean troupe, with armor and breast
plates and this sort of thing.
The Blacks are named Pocahontas and Uncus and Pelotan,
and there's an Indian who lives with them named Washington.
So that will explain part of it.
Luther Calvin then walks back 150 miles after the balloon
comes down in a pig pen near Chattanooga
and goes back to the woods and builds
him a little lean to there because his house has
been burnt and so forth.
And this is the first winter he was there.
"The only visitors he had the first winter
were his father and mother."
His mother, by the way, drowned shortly after that too
in a stream.
It was swept--
Oh, well, they have gone into a town nearby.
You see, there's a gentleman named Mr. Mooney, Mr. Plutus
Mooney, who is another Irishman, who had met them in Charleston.
And they ran into him because he was head of the Freedman's
Bureau, and he has been using the freed Blacks in order
to build him a nice, little business
thing, which he has gotten, and he's becoming a capitalist.
You see, the book is really, in many ways,
about the vanishing of the consciousness that
dominated the world for all of history, up until the past--
well, in England, I suppose, the past 200 years, and the States,
the past 100 years.
It's about the triumph of the visible in some
ways over the invisible, since we live in a very visible world
nowadays.
And so I chose this period because it's
the very transition.
I chose an Irishman because of his kinds of consciousness,
and the Black people with African backgrounds
for their kinds of consciousness and show
what happened when these people get caught up after the Civil
War in the New South, which is, for me,
a metaphor for the new world nowadays, that we live in.
So he's in a lean-to.
"The only visitors he had that first winter
where his father and mother, who were waiting for him when
he got up Christmas morning.
His father's gray patina had settled
in since Luther Calvin had seen him last,
and his mother wore only the slip she had disappeared in."
She had taken off her clothes to go bathing.
Well, this caused Chastity great concern
because she was certain that his mother had
gone to judgment naked, which is an improper thing to do.
"'Well,' his father said, back where you started, eh, boy?'
'Hey, you're looking well,' said Luther Calvin.'" This is about
15 years later.
"'Can't say the same for you, boy.'
'Father,' his mother said, 'it's Christmas.
Wish Luther Calvin a Merry Christmas.'
'Merry Christmas, boy.
Don't expect a present.
Are you not going to greet your mother?'
'Hello, Mother.
Merry Christmas, Mother.
I've missed you.' 'Oh, we've missed you too, son.
It's not that I didn't want to see you, you know,
it's that your father don't like Blacks.'
'Where's your family, boy?'
His father said.
'It seems I've lost him again, Father.'
'Damnest man I've ever seen for not keeping up with his family.
Still no tobacco around, I reckon.
Eh, never mind.
I couldn't smoke it if there was.
You got to breathe to smoke.
What do you plan on doing now, boy?'
I've not give it much thought, Father.'
'You should love that woman you married, lad.
On principle, you should.'
He paused to pick a barnacle from his beard.
'It'll be coming for you.
You know that?' 'So I fear, Father.'
'You wouldn't like that, would you?
Well, you've not to do with it.
There's no getting away.'
'Will you be staying a spell, Father?'
'I can't, boy.
I told you once, I'm dead.
Got me own business to attend to now.
Aye.
Are you not going to say goodbye to your mother?'
'Aye, Father.
Goodbye, Mother.
'Oh, son,' his mother said, 'have you no more to say than
that?'
'Do your sign before we go,' his father said.
'And how should I sitting here in me shift.
Oh, Luther, don't go to judgment in your skivvies
whatever you do.
They don't give you nothing else.'
'We're going, lad,' his father said. 'You'll see us again.'
'I hope so, Father.'
'Don't hope for it too soon, boy.
Now, go get you some breakfast, and remember your father that's
not had a bite of bacon for 12 years
or a bite of anything for that matter.
And don't forget a man's a man for all that, the poet says.
You hear me?'"