The Slave Drivers’ God

With her Daddy-o dead, Uncle Sam at war, her Mummy locked up in the bedroom doing her mumbo-jumbo, and her baby-sitter muttering to herself, Gloria sticks to her music guns and takes refuge in them. She practices diligently and improves, not fast enough to be any sort of prodigy, yet Mrs Melanzano seems pleased. Were only her Daddy-o alive to hear it! Yet Gloria finds that the sound of the piano sweetens the grief she feels from losing her stepfather.

On Friday, the nineteenth night after Harry’s stroke, the day after Xmas, the tension is so thick in the air between Laudette and Sarah nothing can cut it. The sitter asks Gloria if she’d like to take a trip uptown for some jazz. Would she ever!

Once more Apollo Cotton and his Orchestra are on stage at the Cootie Club, and tonight Laudette is in no hurry to get Gloria home. After the first set they go backstage. Apollo breaks open a bottle of gin and wishes Merry Xmas to all and to all a good night. Everyone toasts one another and says a prayer for world peace. Gloria makes herself comfortable on a case of gin and sips a soda. She is delighted when her Uncle Early plunks down on the carton next to her. Earl, usually gleeful, in the holiday spirit tonight, is a little more so. The cat’s high on reefer, sailing, but he still can keep a lid on his head for proper respects.

“I’m truly sorry to hear about your stepfather, Mademoiselle.”

“Oh, Uncle, I’m very sad about it,” Gloria says plaintively, with a sigh. “But, well, what’s done is done. And Mrs Melanzano says that it’s not the length of someone’s life that matters as much as what he or she accomplishes. She’s always pointing to Kreuszer, who died in his mid-thirties, you know, and wrote over six hundred full-length musical works. Mrs Melanzano worships him as if he were Emanual X himself …”

“Who’s this Melanzano?”

“She’s my music teacher. After I heard you all on my birthday, I was so lifted up I decided to take lessons myself. Just to see if I could do it.” Tan, multiracial Gloria, concerned about where her allegiance should lie, hesitates for a moment, then says, “I can’t for the life of me understand why Melanzano says that white people’s music is better than black’s.”

“Ha ha ho ho. Oh my good gosh, Mademoiselle, yes, I’m hip. Hee hee. No need to explain any further. Your Melanzano is race prejudiced, nothing less.”

“She says discipline is what’s most important, that freedom without discipline is slavery.”

“Uh, oh. I’ll give her that. You need discipline to play music of any kind. Music lessons are a short cut. I wish I had taken more myself. Like my brother Bonesy I learned to play in church. Now, ho ho ho, no doubt Kreuszer and his buddies were geniuses and well worth your while studying—our jazz wouldn’t have half the harmony without them—but, I always get to thinking, at the same time white folks made this music the kings and queens who commissioned it for were sending out ships doing what they call ‘colonizing’, and you can bet your boots they assumed they knew it all. Like, if they saw a black man beating a drum for hours on end, and they were real connoisseurs, they’d say, ‘Jolly good! Let’s sit here and dig this chap, he’s got these polyrhythms down to a science.’ But no, instead they said, ‘I guess the poor savage must not have much to do; let’s put his idle hands to use picking our cotton, cutting our cane, shining our shoes.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s about the sorry size of it, Mademoiselle.”

“All right, Uncle Early, now excuse me for saying so, but just because black people suffered that doesn’t make them all pure and perfect either. At least there’s something that makes me think they may not be very smart.”

“And what’s that?”

“It’s one thing to be led off into slavery but another for slaves to follow the slave drivers’ god. Why on earth, on Sundays, when work is done, do so many Jujuban-Freewayfarers get on the Xist bandwagon, and how can they celebrate Xmas the same as whites, even though, from what I can see on every greeting card and store display, Father Xmas, the jolly old elf, is white as the Great White Father in Heaven.”

“Ooh la la, Mademoiselle, you’re a smart one, aren’t you! Nobody’s going to slant you in the wrong direction. Tee, hee, ha ha, ho, ho! I’ve wondered about why slaves would worship their master’s god myself. The best answer I can think of is that they just get honestly mixed-up, being treated like property and all. You see, back home, they worshipped the earth, but a year of picking cotton for The Man, you lose track of your mind. After a generation, you lose track of your roots.”

“Since my stepfather’s death, Laudette has been trying to put the fear of God in me. She says someday as his child I’ll have to stand naked and alone, judged in his all-knowing eyes for whether I’ve been naughty or nice. Imagine! What kind of Supreme Being is that? If that’s heaven, I’m sure it’s not where I want to go.”

“Yes, dust my broom, it sounds like The Man to me. Just the kind of lick some old cracker might cotton to. I’ll meet you down there, Mademoiselle. And if Emanual is really worth his salt, he’ll be in that number too!”

“Early McCoy!” Ever-vigilant of what her baby might be picking up by hanging around musicians, Laudette’s voice snaps like thunder from behind a stack of beer cases.

“Oops!”

“Don’t you think, in front of Baby, you ought to be having more respect when you speak the name of God? Emanual said it would be better if you were tossed into the sea with a milestone tied to your neck than if you sandalized little ones. Color doesn’t matter to God, only stupid people think about it. Black sheep, brown sheep, white sheep, the Good Shepherd tends us all. Emanual preached salvation for all people. If some don’t live up to it, don’t want to be saved, that’s their problem. In death all men are created equal.”

“Why, Laudette, since when are you a preacher woman? But hey, I can dig it. It’s beautiful, ha ha,” says Earl. “Your babysitter is probably dead right, Mademoiselle, listen to her. She’s the smartest white women I ever met. In fact when I think of her, I never even think of her as white.”

The Glory Bee knows she knows better about God than Laudette. (“Well, Lawdy,” she says,) “tell me what color you think the Father in Heaven is?”

“It says in the Good Book that God made the first man and woman, that handsome couple in the garden of paradise, in his image and likeness. Now I figure if people are in paradise, that’s like a vacation, and if people have a good vacation they must be tan, tan, like you, Baby, so Our Father must be tan too.”

“And his Only Begotten Son?”

“Tan, I guess, probably.”

Earl wants to point out to Gloria that most non-whites don’t go on vacations to get tan—in fact, by and large, they don’t get to go on vacations at all—but he reasons it wise not to get in the way of her sitter’s explanations, or for that matter, her music teacher’s. It’s plain to him that Gloria can tell the difference between shit and shoe polish.