4

THMEI

In the late forties and early fifties, Sonny lived a life confined to the South Side and the few other places where blacks could move with relative ease. It wasn’t a bad life, exactly. He was making his way as a journeyman musician, arranging and copying charts for several successful bands and individuals: the Red Saunders Orchestra, now the house band at Club DeLisa and recording regularly for Columbia and OKeh; the Dukes of Swing and their vocalists, the Dozier Boys, playing steadily at the Pershing Hotel; and LaVerne Baker, a rhythm and blues singer also known as “Little Miss Sharecropper” and appearing frequently in a variety of South Side venues.1 Sonny once played with Coleman Hawkins at an after-hours club on the North Side and wrote an arrangement of “I’ll Remember April” whose chord changes the giant of the tenor saxophone, by his own admission, couldn’t play. Sonny would also record with Hawkins in 1953, six tracks that the Savoy label later released on an LP entitled The Hawk Returns.² In general, money was tight and the hours were uneven. Sonny kept working the Calumet City strip clubs to make money for rent and expenses, arranging, copying, comping, and sleeping a little here and there. It was a living. But was it a life?

Perhaps it was. But only if you were willing to accept its limits. For a black pianist and composer, they were pretty constraining. Just two blocks from Washington Park and with easy access to the “L,” his little apartment was home, the place where he conducted the everyday activities that sustained him. He slept and ate there, read his books, wrote his poetry, and played his piano, often in the company of other musicians. He liked to record what he played, alone or in small groups of talented players, such as Jesse Miller, Stuff Smith, and Wilbur Ware. He used the latest available devices: at first, a machine called the Sound Mirror, which recorded on tape made of paper, and then other devices employing the more durable iron oxide tape.3 The 5414 South Prairie apartment provided a safe haven for his imagination. He could experiment musically in peace, sharing his ideas with players open to new possibilities. His various jobs, whether harmonizing pop melodies or orchestrating swing standards, demanded a strict temper. He was a professional, arriving promptly and arranging inventively, but he was an artist, too, taking harmonies in fresh directions whenever he could.

The circle of his activity was fairly small. Club DeLisa, where he worked almost daily for five years rehearsing and arranging material for Red Saunders, was at 5521 South Street, just a few blocks west of his apartment. The Pershing Hotel, located ten blocks farther south, at Sixty-Fourth and Cottage Grove, was still an easy walk. Studio work (as an arranger, Sonny would be in the room for last-minute changes) required a crosstown train ride. The famous Universal Recording studios were on the North Side, not far from United Broadcasting. It took a car to work Sin City, but Bugs Hunter had one for the long drive along Lake Calumet and the river of the same name. The gigs were regular and so was the money, paid in cool mobster cash. Such was the circuit of Sonny’s mobility as a black musician in Chicago during the late forties and early fifties, mapping an existence confined to the places blacks could move independently if not exactly freely. The Black Belt set life’s limits, with an occasional excursion north or south.

It was an invisible cage. Bronzeville may have offered opportunity for uplift to blacks of middling means and bourgeois aspirations, but for the working poor (and a musician of even Sonny’s caliber was usually just a step ahead of public relief), the world was an inner-city keep called the South Side. As postwar urban renewal razed old tenements to raise vertical ghettos, and as postwar industry relocated to Chicago’s suburbs and white outmigration followed, the South Side got bigger, blacker, and inevitably poorer, much to the consternation of a thoughtful man such as Sonny Blount. The heady days of the Chicago Black Renaissance were done. Its heirs inherited a segregated city without much prospect for improvement. Life on the South Side could be a death sentence. Richard Wright described it in morbid detail in Native Son, his harrowing novel about a boy named Bigger Thomas growing up black and poor on the South Side. Wright left for New York in 1937. Published in 1940, his novel advanced a searing critique of segregation in Chicago.

Wright’s angry indictment of racism so pervasive that it physically partitioned urban space remains pertinent to the Chicago that Sonny would inhabit a few years later. The mass migration of blacks after World War II only worsened social conditions that, in Wright’s novel, drive young Bigger Thomas to commit unspeakable but somehow inevitable crimes: the murders of two young women, one white and one black. Bigger doesn’t willfully plot these murders. He commits them at the dictate of motives more social than private. Wright blames the very space of the segregated metropolis for producing the forces that could drive someone like Bigger to kill, ending not only the lives of two apparently innocent victims but also his own. Native Son provides a test case for the social effects of American apartheid, summing up with grisly clarity the terminal logic of life on the South Side.

The exposition of that logic is disarmingly simple: live in a cage, die in a prison. The physical space of the South Side sentences poor blacks to a life of confinement, which judicial incarceration only literalizes. In Wright’s book, Bigger lives out what most urban blacks of the time only intuited: the lethal force of segregation. The novel opens in the small, single room that Bigger shares with his mother, sister, and brother in a tenement at 3721 Indiana Avenue. The family awakens beset by an intruder: “There he is again, Bigger!”4 It’s a huge rat. The ensuing chase ends in violence as Bigger smashes the rat with a skillet and crushes its head beneath his heel. The scene plays as an overture to the tragedy to come: Bigger’s trespass into an inimical space, with all the resulting violence. At the behest of his betters (an offer of employment), Bigger crosses the line that divides his black world from the surrounding white one. That line defines him as a young black man. That line confines him to the South Side. “Bigger could not live in a building across the ‘line.’”⁵ He can work there, perhaps, but not live: Bigger inhabits a contradiction between the physical conditions of his life and the aspirations (as simple as working) that bring him into contact with people who draw the line, enforce constraint.

And they mean business:

As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force. But whether they feared it or not, each and every day of their lives they lived with it; even when words did not sound its name, they acknowledged its reality. As long as they lived here in this prescribed corner of the city, they paid mute tribute to it.⁶

Life on the South Side wasn’t simple confinement. It was a form of bondage that required acknowledging the superiority of white force with the words and deeds of everyday life, living on the condition that you walk only these particular streets, talk only these sanctioned words, feel only these permissible feelings. That’s what it meant to be poor and black on Chicago’s South Side in the forties and fifties. Bigger sums it all up in conversation with his friend Gus: “Goddammit look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. [. . .] I reckon we the only things in this city that can’t go where we want to go and do what we want to do.”⁷ Bigger feels his way to a terrible truth: the South Side is a jail. Being black and poor in Chicago is somehow a crime that justifies a life sentence to the South Side, where identity arises by negation (“we ain’t,” “we can’t”) and desire occurs to no avail. Such is the cunning of white force: blacks sustain it simply by living.

When the killing comes, it seems more like something that happens to Bigger than like something he does. Circumstances conspire to put him on the wrong side of the line separating black from white. He finds himself in the bedroom of his rich white employer’s daughter at a delicate moment when silencing her and killing her take the same touch: “he pushed downward upon the pillow with all of his weight, determined that she must not move or make any sound that would betray him.” A poor black youth in the bedroom of a rich white heiress is a formula for disaster, which is exactly Wright’s point: forces beyond Bigger’s control maneuver him into the position of murdering a white girl. Space itself is culpable, the urban space of American apartheid that turns black agency into transgression. An abyss separates the single room of Bigger’s family from the bedroom of an heiress, and death connects them: “As he took his hands from the pillow he heard a long slow sigh go up from the bed into the air of the darkened room, a sigh which afterwards, when he remembered it, seemed final, irrevocable.”8 Securing his safety is the same as killing. Bigger confronts a horrible truth: survival is a crime when you live in confinement.

Rather than resist the baleful circumstances that determine his fate, Bigger accepts them, even glories in them. If to live is to kill, then so be it. His second murder simply follows from the first, collateral damage of his will to live. That this time it’s a black woman makes no difference: Bigger kills again to stay—and to feel—alive. That’s the hard fact of inhabiting a cage. The act of living exceeds it, even unto death: “‘What I killed for must’ve been good!’ Bigger’s voice was full of frenzied anguish. ‘It must have been good! When a man kills, it’s for something. . . . I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.’”⁹ The South Side criminalizes life to the point that killing offers its richest satisfaction, not as a voluntary act, but as the imperative of social circumstances.

Bigger affirms the fate that ultimately destroys him, celebrating murder as his only real means of moving beyond the color line that confines him. At his trial, a ritual application of white force, Bigger’s lawyer at least defends the feeling of life and possibility that come with killing: “It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight.” But something is wrong when freedom coincides with killing. The South Side turns black agency against itself. And yet Bigger takes the destiny he has been handed and creates life in his own image, however fatal the results. As his lawyer says: “He was living, only as he knew how, and as we have forced him to live. The actions that resulted in the death of those two women were as instinctive and inevitable as breathing or blinking one’s eyes. It was an act of creation!”10 Bigger’s lawyer gets him slightly wrong; not instinct alone but also Bigger’s astonishing capacity to affirm it are what transform killing another into an act of self-creation. Feeling alive, Bigger looms above the segregated world that confined him.

Native Son offers a scathing diagnosis of segregation in Chicago and its effects on blacks and whites alike. For all its intensity, however, Bigger’s story offers little in the way of compensation for social contradictions. Bigger dies alone as the South Side lives on, a space of perpetual apartheid in a racist democracy. Blacks haunt that “complex civilization like wailing ghosts.” They wander “like fiery planets lost from their orbits.” If they love, it’s with the diffuse passion of “disembodied spirits.”¹¹ Wright’s vision for the revitalization of Chicago’s segregated space fades into a pallid dream of the hapless leftist who may understand Bigger but can’t do much to help him. Confined in a prison cell, however, Bigger discovers for himself a bolder, more visionary prospect, one that chimes strangely with developments to come:

Another impulse rose in him, born of desperate need, and his mind clothed it in an image of a strong blinding sun sending hot rays down and he was standing in the midst of a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men, and the sun’s rays melted away the many differences, the colors, the clothes, and drew what was common and good upward toward the sun. . . .¹²

Solicit the sun. Perhaps there is a force counter to the white one, a vitalizing power from above that might blind blank eyes and burn away difference. One whose rays might raise people above race. A force to transform the space of segregation. A new dawn for the South Side.

Sonny would pursue that impossibility. Where Native Son diagnoses black suffering as a morbid effect of segregation, he would seek a healing treatment—but not alone. Solo insurgency ends in death: that is one lesson of Bigger’s ordeal. And Sonny’s feelings of intense solitude living a musician’s life on the South Side are the message of several early compositions, recorded in his apartment, with such telling titles as “I’ve Got Some New Blues,” “The Darkness Within,” “All Alone,” and “If They Only Knew,” a brooding poem that reveals a glimpse of the suffering he kept mostly to himself.13 He would later say of this period that he “wasn’t even really here,” that he “was busy with spirit things.”¹⁴ He was figuring out how to respond to a world inimical to blacks: “You look out at the world and you say ‘Something’s wrong with this stuff.’ [. . .] If you’re not mad at the world you don’t have what it takes. [. . .] This planet is like a prison.”¹⁵ Such a planet is doomed.

To his good fortune and ours, in 1951 Sonny fell into the company of Alton Abraham, a man with similar feelings who would become his close friend, business partner, and fellow architect of better worlds. Together they would build what Bigger never has, a black activist collective to create and sustain a dream of better living. For all his extraordinary importance to the history of jazz and black activism, though, Abraham remains a misty figure. He was born in Chicago during the late twenties and, as did some of the musicians Sonny would soon be recruiting, graduated from DuSable High School. Perhaps they came to know each other through such mutual acquaintances. Unlike Sonny, Abraham volunteered for military service, shipping out with the army to the Philippines soon after World War II ended. He eventually came to share something of his friend’s disdain for the military, joining several others in signing a letter sent to the Chicago Defender comparing the army’s racial policies with those of “the old sunny South.”¹⁶ Abraham served as a regimental clerk in Manila and upon his return enrolled at Wilson Junior College to study electrical engineering and radiology, fields that would sustain his professional and musical pursuits. He eventually found employment as a radiology technician at Mount Sinai Hospital.

A passion for music inspired him to join a serious vocal ensemble called the Knights of Music in 1951. Before long, he was serving as its treasurer. E. Virgil Abner directed the group then, with Elnora Carter accompanying on piano. A printed statement describes the ensemble’s aims: “The title ‘The Knights of Music’ is indicative of the groups [sic] desire to champion the advent of good music as well as to achieve technical and interpretive skills in the translation of various types of compositions.”17 The Knights performed a wide range of songs, from Bach, Handel, and Wagner to Rodgers and Hammerstein to spirituals and pop tunes. One program lists as “guest accompanist” a young Ramsey E. Lewis Jr., soon to rise to distinction on the Chicago scene. The first page of another bears a testimonial under the heading “I am Music” that sets an agenda surprisingly compatible with what lay ahead for Sonny and Alton: “Through me spirits immortal speak the message that makes the world weep and laugh, and wonder and worship.”¹⁸ Abraham’s involvement with the Knights of Music prepared him well for his association with Sonny.

Shared intellectual interests drew them together most strongly. Both were inveterate readers, tenacious researchers, and deep scholars of occult wisdom. Sonny lined his little apartment with books, and Abraham hunted them ravenously, compiling by some accounts a collection of 15,000 volumes at 4115 South Drexel, his mother’s three-story walk-up. The drummer Robert Barry recalls it with awe: “In the basement, it was like going into a library, lots and lots of books, but dusty and dank. Maybe more like a catacomb. These books were old, you wondered who read them.”¹⁹ They weren’t just old; they were arcane—counterculture tomes for conjuring an alternative destiny. An undated mailer from “The Saturn Research Foundation” and bearing the South Drexel address offers 427 used books for sale beneath a spirited admonition: “What you don’t know . . . Hurts! Be well informed . . . It Pays!”²⁰ Their titles bear pondering: The Negro in Our History, by C. G. Woodson; Manual of Historical Literature, by Charles Kendall Adams; Asiatic Elements of Greek Civilization, by William M. Ramsay; The Racial Myth, by P. Radin; The Legacy of Egypt, by S. R. K. Granville; The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith; Ceremonies of Judaism, by Abrahamz Idelsohn; Thelyphthora; or, A Treatise on Female Ruin, by Martin Madan; Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, by P. A. Kropotkin; The Political Future of India, by L. Lajpat Rai; Cavalcade of the American Negro, produced by the WPA; Judas, by J. Sturge Moore; Fingerprints Can Be Forged, by Albert Wehde and John Nicholas Beffel; Histopathology of the Teeth and Their Surrounding Structures, by R. Kronfeld; and Democratic Education in Practice, by R. Schneideman.

Unlikely to appear on many college syllabi even in the fifties (and certainly not today), titles such as these map a territory beyond the pale of majority culture and its secular pieties. From them, Sonny and Abraham would cobble together an intellectual countertradition for the South Side, a forgotten legacy of wisdom to invigorate a people caged without a key. In seeking release, Bigger Thomas could appeal only to a bankrupt Christianity. Sonny and Abraham would invent an alternative tradition of greater force and promise gleaned from the combined mystical traditions of Egyptology, theosophy, numerology, and others among the occult. They would forge weapons for political resistance from a slagheap of beliefs deemed irrational, obsolete, or just plain crackpot by Western religion, philosophy, and science. They would create an intellectual heritage for the thing that Bigger lives and dies without: a community of support for blacks aspiring to transcend the social confines of Chicago’s South Side. Deep, continuing research would be required, and a scholar’s devotion to study and reflection—but not in solitude. An activist collective would do this work, a band of like-minded street intellectuals devoted to changing the world from the bottom up, a secret society of black radicals armed with the obscure wisdom of things occult.21

The society would have a suitably mysterious name: “Thmei.” The two men probably found it in one of Abraham’s old books, possibly J. G. Wilkinson’s five-volume Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (3rd ed., 1847). Thmei fit the character and agenda of the collective perfectly. The Egyptian goddess of truth and justice, she was a double deity, often represented by two female figures standing side by side or by one figure wearing two matched ostrich feathers on her head. As goddess of the “two truths,” Thmei combines the inner perception of what is (truth) with its outer manifestation (justice).22 Pharaohs held her image in their hands, and judges wore it while hearing cases. Breastplates depicted her with Ra, god of the sun, and in a development that surely interested Sonny, similar images came to adorn the breastplate of the high priest of Israel. “Thmei” also survives in the Hebrew word “thummim,” a plural form for “truth.” The Egyptian goddess lived on surreptitiously among the Israelites. Wilkinson claims Thmei to possess a special status, that of “the great cardinal virtue,” for “the Ancients considered that [. . .] Truth or Justice influenced men’s conduct toward their neighbours, and tended to maintain that harmony and good will which were most essential for the welfare of society.”²³ Such would become the function of the secret society called Thmei Research: to advance the welfare of society through promoting harmony and goodwill.

The group’s membership remains murky, and its reach is hard to measure, but Thmei clearly aspired to improving the lot of blacks living on the South Side. Abraham was a prime mover, but other members included his brother Artis; a friend from the Knights of Music named Lawrence M. Allen; another friend from his army days, Luis T. Clarin; and James Bryant, who would remain a close associate for many years.²⁴ Abraham took the group seriously enough to print letterhead and cover sheets for a journal to disseminate scholarly research. Along the journal’s left margin, in red ink, appear words that define the work of its editors: “RESEARCHERS IN SUBJECTS COSMIC, SPIRITUAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, RELIGIOUS, HISTORICAL, SCIENTIFIC, ECONOMICAL, ETC.” Immediately below and in quotation marks runs the hieratic imperative “SEEK YE WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE, AND UNDERSTANDING.” A double-ruled border sets off a brief description of the journal—“INFORMATIVE FACTUAL SERIES ISSUED BI-MONTHLY”—which is followed by the recommendation that “SUBSCRIBERS SEND MONTHLY DONATION” to a post office box in Chicago.²⁵ One such cover sheet contains a lengthy typed description of the “religion of Sokagakkai,” a Japanese variant of Buddhism capable of securing happiness during (not after) life for “all color and races of people in this world.”26 The Thmei collective dedicated much of its energy to producing and distributing research to promote countercultural spirituality.

Theirs was a black radicalism from beyond, wisdom politics for a segregated people. In this, it resembles similar initiatives undertaken to better the lives of blacks in Chicago and elsewhere. Thmei’s agenda chimes with that of an emerging black nationalism, the activism on behalf of all African Americans that Wright describes in Native Son: “Taken collectively, they are not simply twelve million people; in reality they constitute a separate nation, stunted, stripped, and held captive within this nation, devoid of political, social, economic, and property rights.”²⁷ These are the people Thmei Research served, most immediately those living on Chicago’s South Side. Its activism aligns with the Pan-Africanism of the writer and physician Martin R. Delany (1812–1885) and Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), whose Universal Negro Improvement Association and Black Star Line steamships pursued a black nationalist dream of African repatriation. By the twenties, as William Sites observes, “nationalist conceptions [ . . . had] attracted a newly growing constituency in Chicago’s black community.”²⁸ Black activist groups would appear with increasing frequency and vigor, the most notable among them being two rival organizations founded in Detroit: the Moorish Science Temple, led by Noble Drew Ali (1886–1929), and the Nation of Islam, founded by the obscure Wallace Fard Muhammad (1893–1934?) and nurtured by his close disciple Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975).

Both orders flourished on the South Side of Chicago, preaching black self-determination and uplift, the former drawing together traditions as diverse as Islam, Freemasonry, Buddhism, and Christianity, and the latter relying largely on teachings derived from Islam. Both fought social degradation with spiritual weaponry, beating sectarian plowshares into swords. Wallace Fard Muhammad began as a member of the Moorish Science Temple but left to found the Nation of Islam, disappearing soon thereafter.²⁹ Elijah Muhammad, a conscientious objector, like Sonny, but imprisoned for it for four years, came to Chicago after World War II and built the Nation of Islam into the most visible black nationalist organization on the South Side and perhaps in all of America. The existence of such orders shows Thmei to have been a little less eccentric than it might otherwise seem. Szwed draws an interesting contrast between its tenets and those of the Nation of Islam.30 Both reject history as white history and challenge blacks to live according to another kind of wisdom. They part company, however, on the question of race. The Nation of Islam asserts an irremediable difference between blacks and whites. Thmei takes a more meliorist position, answering racial difference and its urban horrors with the prospect, however abstract, of universal truth and justice.

Hence Thmei’s interest in occult wisdom. Orders appealing to Islam for an alternative to Western rationality nevertheless accept Abrahamic scriptural tradition (the Torah, New Testament, or Qur’an) as the trunk on which to graft a new branch of black wisdom. Thmei sought something more radical: a deeper antiquity, older and more authoritative than Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. It rejected those later, paler pieties for the solemn wisdom of Egypt—the blank gaze of the sacred sun, the soul’s posthumous passage to immortality. The People of the Book (Muslims, Christians, and Jews) all take scripture for the word of God, the source of truth in a tinsel world. But what if their scripture were inspired not by the Creator but by a lesser god? What if the Good Book were a bad translation? What if it were written in a secret code? Thmei’s turn to Egypt for an alternative source of wisdom achieves two important rhetorical effects: it recovers a tradition whose sheer antiquity makes Western culture look jejune, and it repositions scripture as text that, however sacred, might profitably be reexamined in that ancient light. Thmei would make bold use of both effects, countering conventional religiosity with Egyptian wisdom and subjecting scripture to radical critique.

Thmei aimed less to revive that wisdom per se than to direct it toward the social end of black uplift on the South Side. Nor was Thmei a particularly scrupulous interpreter of Egyptian tradition. It slid easily into other esoteric systems of thought, especially those associated with theosophy and oriented toward direct knowledge of the divine. Whether understood as a broad esoteric tradition running back to Jakob Boehme and (the possibly fictional) Christian Rosenkreuz or more specifically as the occult science of Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, theosophy presented Western thought with a correlative to the wisdom of ancient Egypt. Abraham and Sonny immersed themselves in its works, and Thmei absorbed them, too: works by Emanuel Swedenborg, Mary Baker Eddy, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, and P. D. Ouspensky—the whole legacy of counter-rational writing current in the West.31 Thmei conjured from such sources a spiritual imperative for radical social critique that bypassed both Christian quietism and Muslim militancy. Its unique contribution to black nationalism could be called “political theosophy,” a radicalism combining the spiritual imperative of esoteric wisdom with a social agenda of black advancement.³² Not Jesus, not Muhammad, neither Marx nor Mao, but Ra: Thmei practiced political activism inspired by a wisdom as inhuman as the sun.

Thmei responded to crass consumerism and oppressive poverty alike with a message of spiritual awakening, aesthetic transcendence, and social transformation designed specifically for blacks. Political theosophy arose as a race-based response to racial oppression, open perhaps to everyone at the eschatological level but tailored to the social needs of blacks in a particular place at a particular time—namely, the South Side in the fifties. Sonny would later explain why: “Because of segregation I have only a vague knowledge of the white world, and that knowledge is superficial.”³³ Political theosophy answered black segregation with black wisdom, a deeper knowledge for darker aspirations. A touching handwritten note addressed to “Brother Thmei Research” from one “Sister Jones” nicely illustrates the group’s racial agenda: “Because Some of our Leaders is Wrong an I want to [know] the tru fact I Diden [know] that the New testament Was the White Race Book So You Know I am interest in Learn[ing] the true Salvation.”³⁴

Thmei fought political ignorance with occult wisdom deriving from esoteric traditions and inspiring unorthodox biblical critique, always with an eye on real-world social uplift and black advancement. Witness in this regard a prayer James Bryant recorded sometime in the midsixties on a large, loose page of yellow paper. He prays for things worldly and divine:

Better money and business for research and all necessity of better living. For a better self and a better galaxy and universe. We will be on forever progressing and building. May God grant to me to speak properly and to have thoughts worthy of what and all he has given, for it is you that guides wisdom and directs the wise.35

Bryant’s prayer nicely encapsulates the Thmei agenda: better living on Earth and throughout the universe through wisdom guided by the Creator. This is no Christian petition. It beseeches an abstract, impersonal deity for practical advantage and spiritual growth. Thmei Research interrogates the world to create a better life that leads beyond it. Bryant (who often signed his names backward, “Semaj Tnayrb”) prays to align himself with the larger and interminable task of “forever progressing and building.”

That Alton Abraham himself nurtured such sentiments is the lesson of a prayer of his own dated July 20, 1958, and recorded in a large, store-bought record book:

I, Alton Abraham, petition that the Better Spirits and Vibrations, that have been, still are and that may, in my part of the future come near me, be commanded to bring more Wisdom, knowledge and understanding and to bring better happiness, to work with the live better vibrations in my favor instead of against me.

Alton Abraham.³⁶

In a manner resembling Bryant’s invocation, Abraham petitions “Better Spirits” for the kind of wisdom that might foster happiness now, “better vibrations” to work practically in this world on his behalf. Thmei’s radical social vision arises from this devotion to better living here and now. Its racial register comes in part from a revisionist reading of Christian scripture, as Abraham indicates in a strange but revealing document typed on Mount Sinai Hospital letterhead and parenthetically entitled, “A TREATISE ON REBIRTH AND THE LAW OF CONSEQUENCE.” Mixing biblical critique with theosophical pronouncement, it offers a new interpretation of the crucifixion that revives the event’s forgotten racial import: Jesus “was not killed just Because of what He taught, but they wanted to get rid of Him Because He was not A white man, and they wanted a white Jesus And now they have one, He was not a white man, but A member of the Black, Brown, and Red skin peoples of the world.”37 Abraham recasts the crucifixion as the result of a supremacist show trial that served up a black martyr to consolidate white authority.

Jesus belonged to a dark-skinned race, as in strict biblical terms was true for all the patriarchs and prophets: “The Pale-skin man was a Black man Before he turned pale. We do not have any scripture any where that will Say that man was created from white Dust.” Biblically speaking, white skin is a recent development, rendering racial difference a historical aberration better abandoned than accepted as fate: “there is always, in each Race, a danger that the soul may become too much attached to the Race; that it may become so enmeshed in Race characteristics it cannot Rise above the Race Idea and will therefore Fail to advance.”³⁸ Abraham’s ruminations on race, while not amounting to formal Thmei doctrine, sketch a racial theory that concedes historical difference to imagine the possibility of its ultimate transcendence. This is black activism beyond difference; the radicalism of political theosophy pushes social transformation past its historical prospects into the higher reaches of better living.

That meliorist program was its ultimate social aim, but Thmei’s more immediate cultural agenda involved encouraging black creativity as a source of collective identity and pride. Reflecting later on these goals, Abraham admits they might not have been universally appealing:

The main purpose of this organization was to do some things to prove to the world that black people could do something worthwhile, that they could create things, they could do things that other nations would take notice of. It was not for everyone, but for those who know why they’re here, not just living blindly and routinely. . . . It was for those who “know” (not those who say “no”).39

Black uplift in this formulation comes through creativity fueled by an almost gnostic awareness that life involves more than routine living. Abraham’s homonym (know/no) has large implications for Thmei’s political activism. In preferring knowledge to negation, Abraham advances a politics of informed response to injustice, and in emphasizing creativity over antagonism, he makes culture the engine of social reform.

Thmei’s activism offered an alternative to either passive resistance or open violence as a way of challenging the killing effects of segregation. Sonny, Abraham, and their fellow researchers responded to the limits of life on the South Side with a form of creative resistance, working culturally to build a better world for blacks. “Sonny wanted to do things not the right way, but another way, a better way”; Abraham thus testifies to Sonny’s commitment to improving things without regard to the kind of moral precepts that would guide social reformers as different as Martin Luther King Jr. and Elijah Muhammad.⁴⁰ The better way is creative, a commitment to improving the lives of a segregated people by advancing their culture. Sonny, Abraham, and Thmei Research focused on blacks because white Chicago drew a line around their lives and left them to fend for themselves, perhaps to pursue consumerist dreams, perhaps to die trying to escape. Creative resistance thus meant racial resistance, as Sonny would say bluntly much later: “I was trying to uplift black people out of this condition they in and I only played for them. I [did not] play for white people.”⁴¹ For Sonny, only black culture could uplift black people. Music could build a better, blacker world.

Thmei provided collective support and intellectual inspiration to sustain this prospect. Its social agenda and spiritual impetus brought a new depth to Sonny’s life and a new vitality to his music. He no longer needed to survive musically at the behest of others, comping at strip clubs or arranging for floorshows. His music might do something more than paper the walls of South Side ballrooms and lounges. It might lift their patrons toward a higher life. To mark this transformation, as deeply personal as it was musical, Sonny took steps. With Abraham’s encouragement and the likely guidance of Thmei, he changed his name. He had been fiddling with the possibility for a while, as Szwed notes. “Sonny” was a nickname, after all, and in his early years he often played under the name “Sonny Lee.” Soon after arriving in Chicago, he quietly queered his last name, adding a superfluous letter by spelling it “Bhlount.”42

But the enrichment of his musical vocation required something more, a thorough reinvention in line with other African Americans who, renaming themselves, shed a collective history of subjugation and suffering to assert a promising future. In October 1952, Herman Poole Blount legally changed his name to “Le Sony’r Ra,” trading his slave name for something more profound and dignified: not the title of a European aristocrat, as with Duke Ellington or Count Basie, or an American political official, as with Lester Young (“Prez”), but the name of a god, the Egyptian god of the sun, Ra. Sun Ra would be his patronymic, a cross-cultural self-synonym (Sun = Ra) connoting light, life, and divinity. Audacious! “‘Ra’ is older than history itself,” he told one interviewer; “‘Ra’ is my spirit name,” he told another.⁴³ In Sun Ra Sonny found a cognomen beyond human ken and reference, a sacred name out of black antiquity to inspire belief in a better tomorrow. Sun Ra would become widely recognized as a musician, poet, and sage. The precise significance of “Le Sony’r Ra,” however, remains a mystery—as does much about Thmei’s work as a secret society. Abraham and his posse of street intellectuals nevertheless provided emotional and intellectual support for creative resistance to segregation in Chicago. Thmei Research evolved a form of black radicalism that made culture its means of engagement and Sun Ra its presiding deity.