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IT WAS a bonfire blaze stretching up into the night, the crackling so loud it sounded like cackling. Hundreds stood by in shock. Watching was so hard that only paralysis from the shock kept them watching. Their city was having a heart attack. A crucial little muscle powering the city was collapsing, bringing them all to their knees. Revren Lil’ Mo Love’s church was on fire. Revren Lil’ Mo Love and his most ardent followers stood to the side, holding hands, praying silently. Some threw buckets of water, but it was a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The fire ate all of Baby Love’s and then went out. No one was hurt that night, but the fire ended up burning all of them. Long after the flames stopped, that fire was still burning away at Soul City.
The Soulful felt Baby Love’s burning down was a death in the Soul City family, every bit as difficult to swallow as Granmama’s passing. The wood of the landmark could be replaced, but it would never be the same, wouldn’t explain who’d done this and why, wouldn’t protect them from another attack. In the weeks following the burning no evidence emerged. The Soulful began quietly pointing fingers at one another. The trust and friendship that united them began to corrode.
The underground White Music Party became a suspect. It was rumored they had terrorist leanings, though they swore they were all about peace and love. Their leader, Oreo Feelgood, told reporters, “Can’t we all just get along?” Then the spotlight turned to Jiggaboo. Despite his staggering shampoo, few in Soul City cared for him personally. But he had an airtight alibi: he’d been in the mayor’s mansion, introducing Spreadlove to absinthe. This was not some clever trick. Jiggaboo had had nothing to do with the fire. At least not directly.
The broken-window theory holds that minor signs of civic decay are a gateway to serious crime. One broken window signals civic neglect. Leave it untended long enough and you end up with all sorts of nefariousness. Well, because of the shampoo, lots of windows had been broken inside lots of minds in Soul City. The air was thick with symbols of decay and no one had even noticed. First, a few people had danced off beat and no one said anything. Slowly, the proud peacock strut you saw everywhere became a lazy shuffle. A three-card monte hustler set up shop in the city square. In Honeypot Hill someone saw a rat. But Soul City was too anesthetized by the shampoo to do anything. Then came the fire.
Who done it? Was it the White Music Party? Jiggaboo? The Devil? Maybe it was the bad karma cloud that’d descended on them and life was responding to the symbols in the air. No. It was Granmama. She was trying to get their attention.
Life’s big moments are watched over and sometimes managed by God directly, but God is not Big Brother. She is not constantly surveying every little thing. We are not under twenty-four-hour divine surveillance. (We were a few centuries back, but nowadays human civilization is at the age, and maturity level, of teenagers and She can’t be chasing after us every single moment anymore.) Thus, many Heavenly souls exercise their will over earthly moments beyond Her immediate concern. However, unlike God, with Her infinite power, souls sometimes find their abilities hard to control.
Granmama had seen the change that’d come over the city. It was a city in the midst of a quiet revolution. A devolution, really. They were slipping into blandness, which, for a place as dynamic as Soul City, was death. Heaven is teeming with Soul City fans who are always pulling supernatural strings on the city’s behalf, but Granmama was so enthusiastic about saving her favorite city that the more experienced souls agreed to stand back and let her deal with the problem.
Before the fire Granmama had been talking with Moses about the burning bush. She thought perhaps a fire like that one would send Soul City a powerful message. But her aim was off and she missed her bushy target and hit the church instead. And more than that, the burning bush that Moses witnessed did not consume its host. Creating that sort of fire is exceedingly difficult. It took three experienced angels to put out Granmama’s fire before it spread beyond Baby Love’s. (Needless to say, She was not pleased.) Thus, with Baby Love’s just a pile of ash, the city that’d been on the fence between the doldrums and the blues was shoved right into collective depression.
After the fire Soul City became a city of downturned eyes, where people were perpetually grouchy and stared off into space while meandering through the streets with a vague sense of purpose. They stopped saying hello as they passed. They stopped dancing through the day. They met the morning with a ho hum, as if they’d awoken in Albuquerque, or Cleveland, or even, God forbid, Boston. At first it was excused. It was said the city was in mourning. But two months later the city was still mourning as intensely as if the fire had happened yesterday. Their inner weeping simply would not turn into Life Must Go On. One night at the mansion, as Spreadlove and Jiggaboo sat drinking absinthe with their women, someone kicked out a power cord and the city’s music stopped. It was an hour before anyone in Soul City noticed.