people in the world, black or white or you name it.
I spend my time working to preserve black culture. You have to hold on to things these days. The little details, they’re important. I don’t have any numbers to back me up, but I’ll bet way more than half the black people are dead and gone. Right here in Chicago, you see all these empty black neighborhoods. So many! Where are those people? They sure as hell didn’t retire to the country!
We were the poorest, we starved first and worst. Because we starved the worst, we were the weakest, so the flu hit us the hardest. Look, I lost my husband. I lost my children. But a lot of whites had the same thing happen. The difference is, I also lost everybody I knew, and everybody at work, and all but a few of the people who lived around me. So now my life is full of new faces, and not a lot of them are black. And that is certainly not the white experience.
Whites, you talk to them, and they lost a family member here, a friend there. I’m talking about loss on a different scale. The church I belonged to, for example—there are just thirty of us left, out of a congregation of a couple of hundred. Not to say they all died, but half of them did. The rest, they moved away, most of them looking for work or relatives or just a better color of sky.
Whites look sort of surprised nowadays when they see this big coal-tar black woman, which is me, coming along. I see it time after time when I go down to the Loop. A Negro. A black. One of
Before Warday they’d sort of close up on you. Look right through you. Like you didn’t matter, or they wished you didn’t matter. Now they just look and look. You can see that they are fascinated by your black face. I look at them, and in my heart I say, “I am looking at you with two million eyes, for my face is a million black faces, and the look I am giving you is the reproach of a million souls.”
I hear the whole world singing in my memories. You’ll never guess it, but I sing for my supper now. You’ll ask, “How can this furious woman possibly be an entertainer?” But that’s what I am.
An entertainer. You ever hear of the Cotton Club on State? Well, I am the star attraction, practically. I sing for them. I am memory for them. Blacks and whites come. They mix together more easily now, probably because the whites no longer feel so threatened.
There I stand, on that little stage in that boozy and smoky hall, and I sing out all the sorrow that is in my soul. I sing until it hangs in the air around me and I am so sad I could die because that’s the blues, but inside me where nobody can see there is God’s glory, and that’s the part of the blues they never talked about, but the part that’s most important. The blues are true music of the human heart, the truest on earth, I think. How can we give up on the people who created this, and say they have no genius? Black genius doesn’t have names attached to it. Black genius is not named Leonardo da Vinci or J. Robert Oppenheimer. Black genius flows in black blood, and has to do with pain.
I say we had a worse time than you did. Sure, why not? We were living from hand to mouth, most of us. Black meant poor. It also meant noble, and it meant good and full of joy that maybe had no business in there with the pain.
Am I angry? No, not anymore. I am working and there is food on my table. I’m singing for my supper. Every night before I go to sleep, I remember Henry. I had a picture of him, but it got lost.
My profession is to remember my people, and spread my memories among those who remain. I do it in songs. That is what they are for.
Anger
As we crossed Indiana on our way to Cleveland, the character of the passenger complement began to change. The train was still almost empty, but there was something familiar about the people.
They pushed and shoved and muttered. They were noticeably more tattered than the passengers on the run from Kansas City to Chicago had been.
I recognized an accent, the harsh nasal twang of my old home-town. Refugees from New York have settled all through Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Jim went up and down the train and found that these people were almost exclusively former citizens of the Bronx, with a scattering of Manhattanites. Most of them were laborers, a few professionals. They were traveling for many different reasons: to visit or seek relatives; to look for work; to buy things such as clothing, car parts, or furniture, in Cleveland. None of them were making long-distance journeys. Although many expressed a desire to return to New York, those who had tried said that there was no way around the Army cordon.
Why the Army would cordon off what remained of New York was a puzzling question, one we were very eager to answer. It couldn’t be radiation, not after five years. Of course, the radlevel will be higher by far than prewar, but we live with that in other places.
On the train there was a certain amount of talk about the World Series, which was being held this year at Fenway Park between the Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates. We hadn’t encountered much talk of sports on our trip. Dallas doesn’t have a baseball team and we were running too hard in California to find out about sports.
Nobody on the train was going to the Series, but a lot of people were eager to see what the
We met one woman who was of special interest to me, as she was triaged and sick. She was going to Cleveland to visit a popular alternate practitioner, a witch named Terry Burford. I had been eager to interview an alternate practitioner, especially a witch. Since Warday our concept of witchcraft has, of course, changed radically, as they have begun to make themselves public as midwives, herbalists, and healers. How effective they are I do not know, but it seemed important to meet a modern practitioner, since so many of us may eventually depend on one for medical help.
Also on the train was one individual whose dress alone marked him as unusual and therefore of definite interest to us. We first saw this tall, elegant man heading from the sleeper to the diner.
He was completely out of place on the train. Jim got out his recorder and we followed him into the dining car.
His name was Jack Harper. He was an exchange officer with the Royal Bank of Canada at Toronto. He told us: “I am working on the development of the American Automobile Industry Refinance Plan with the Barclay’s Consortium, our bank, and the New Bank of North America. We’re developing a private gold backing for a currency to be issued by the big three automakers themselves. We feel that the best way to deal with the problem of restarting the industry is to attract as many skilled workers back to the Detroit area as we can, rather than attempt to move the plants south. We are hoping that the prospect of being paid in a gold-backed currency will satisfy the concerns about nonpaid work that made them migrate in the first place, and we are guaranteeing a year’s supply of Canadian beef to every registered member of the UAW who comes back. The combination of not getting paid and then getting hit by the famine has made these men extremely suspicious of their former employers.”
The waiter came up and Mr. Harper ordered his lunch. The train had two meals available: soup and salad, or hamburger. Mr. Harper ordered one of each, only to be told that there was a consumption restriction of one to a passenger.
“I hate the bloody States! Too bad there’s no flight from Chicago to Detroit. It would have taken half an hour and I wouldn’t be facing lunch in this diner.” He smiled tightly, but there was venom in his voice.
“Why do you hate us?”
“You mean you really can’t think why? That’s not surprising. I’ll tell you, the U.S. practically caused Canada to be destroyed. We were completely cocked up by Warday. The bank—you cannot imagine the anarchy. We lost not only our main computer but all our supporting computers as well. At the moment of the electro, we had about eight million in cash just evaporate, lost in the middle of electronic transfer. Within an hour the whole banking hall was filled with people shouting and waving paper records. We didn’t know what we were doing or where we stood. It was madness, terrible madness. And it was caused by the United States and the damned missiles and the damned war. The phones were out, the lights were out, even the lockboxes were unavailable because the electronic locking mechanism was on the fritz.
“Canada had one hell of a time because of your little twenty-minute war, let me tell you. Then there was the Russian business in Alaska Territory, to add panic to the whole affair.”
