Yaccub's Curse (15 page)

“…And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. Genesis 25:23”

I thought of all those white power groups that used the bible to justify their prejudice and was shocked to find that again and again the Bible does just that. It blatantly stated that Christians should make slaves of the heathen races. It was absurd to me that black people, who had suffered these fates, should worship the God that engineered it all. I could not help but to lose some respect for my own race. It was like they were all blind.

Despite all the begging and praying black folks did and all the millions of dollars they dumped into collection plates, God seemed to avoid the ghetto like the plague. Children got killed every day, and every day the pious were drained of wealth yet none of that ever seemed to shake their faith one iota and not once did I see any of them rewarded with a single oxen let alone a thousand. No sheep. No camel. Nothing. Yet still they believed. It was like God had better things to do than to fuck around in the ghetto with a bunch of poor helpless niggas. He was too busy smiling and tap dancing for the white folks who lived in the nice clean neighborhoods with white picket fences and forty-thousand dollar SUVs.

In my mind, God took on the persona of every other criminal and con-man in the ghetto getting fat off the desperate hope and naivety of the under-class. Then again, the way fools were killing each other around the way he might just have been scared to come down there. His messengers and so-called “Servants on Earth” certainly seemed to be. They couldn’t wait to climb back into their big shiny Lincolns and Cadillacs and floor it back to the suburbs once all the offerings were counted and all the sheep pacified. Of course, it might not have been so hostile down in the hood if God had taken more of an interest.

I spent many restless nights after the reverend’s sermon reading what was left of my dog-eared copy of
The Brothers Karamozov
, trying to relate it to my life. I read the Book of Job and tried to accept it. I wanted my faith back but I just couldn’t accept it. I kept hearing Job’s impossible declaration: “…Though he slayed me yet will I trust him.” How? Why? Why would God persecute someone who loved him so dearly just to prove to Satan how much Job loved him? How could he merely replace all the wealth and children he’d destroyed with twice what he had before and think it excused the senseless suffering he needlessly allowed Job to endure? It seemed so cruel and insensitive to me to kill someone’s children and then say, “Oh, don’t trip. I’ll make sure you have twice as many kids to replace those.” I wondered if that’s what God thought when he saw little Black kids gunned down in the street? But when Black kids were murdered, when our wealth and our health was blown away by the wind, despite our refusal to curse his name, we didn’t get so much as forty acres and a mule.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I cried myself to sleep wondering what we had done to make God hate us so?

I envisioned God as one of those white business men looking down on the ghetto from one of those towering office buildings downtown, aloof and immune, wondering how he can suck more profit from our misery. In my mind God was white and he hated us just like all white folks did.

My Mom started dating this Muslim brother that tried to tell me that God was Black. I laughed in his face at first but he persisted. He said that we were all God’s chosen people descended from the tribe of Shabazz. He was trying to make me feel better, I know. I’m sure my Mom had told him about my little episode at the church and how I had refused to ever go back. But all he did was piss me off even more. If God was Black than why the hell wasn’t he doing anything to help Black people?

I thought about all the bourgie Blacks I knew: the doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, who talked a good game to gain Black support and achieve their positions and then promptly turned their backs on us once they achieved their desired status. They would put as much distance as they could between themselves and the people who helped to make them what they were. I thought of all the big-time players and pimps, the hustlers and gangstas who leeched off the black community and exploited their own brothers and sisters worse than any white man ever had. If God was Black then he was just another bourgie nigga who got large and forgot where he came from. Somehow the idea of a sell-out, house-nigga god, was worse than the idea of a racist white one.

“But it ain’t God doing all that. It’s that trickster, that blue-eyed devil that Dr. Yaccub created to torment the original man, the Asiatic black man. He’s the one making our lives hell, that white devil”

There was that reference to the white man as the devil again. It seems all these Muslim cats believed that shit. I just couldn’t buy it though. Just like all the other racial conspiracy theories, it gave white people too much credit. I just couldn’t see how they could be that slick and crafty to keep Black people fucked up for so long. All the dirt Scratch was doing in the hood would have been more than enough to convince most mutherfuckers that his ass was Satan. I could definitely believe that he was evil. I just still couldn’t accept that all of them were. Still, even if that shit was true, God created Dr. Yaccub, who created the white man, so it was all God’s fault anyway. Besides, he damned sure wasn’t doing shit to correct the situation.

I stopped believing in God. I was convinced that the lives of Black folks, and mine in particular, was just some cruel-ass joke. I started drinking again and getting high. I had never stopped fighting but even that got worse. More and more often I skipped school. Mrs. Greenblade kept trying to bring me back around but I had lost all interest in school or anything else. It was all pointless anyway.

“What’s going on with you, Malik? You were doing so well. Is everything all right at home? Do you need someone to talk to? You are just too bright and you’ve got too much potential to just throw it all away like this. I might have to fail you if you keep going like this,” the overweight, middle-aged schoolteacher pleaded with me. She looked like she was on the verge of tears.

“Do what you gotta do. Ain’t no thang to me.”

“Malik, please. Just tell me what’s going on?”

“Remember that last book you gave me by Jean Paul Sartre?
Being and Nothingness,
I think it was. You gave it to me after I told you my thoughts about God and Black folks.”

“Yes?” she seemed relieved that I was opening up. I guess she thought I was giving her a chance to talk me out of whatever I had gotten into my head.

“I gotta confess. I really didn’t understand much of it. But, it seemed to be saying that if there is no God and life is without meaning than there are no rules, no restrictions. That man is as free as he allows himself to be. I think that’s what he meant by the idea of an absurd freedom. If life is absurd then we are free to create meaning, define our own destinies. Anything is possible.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what he meant. I wanted you to see that your race or your economic situation need not hinder you in becoming anything you wanted to be.”

“Yeah, I got that. But if life is without meaning then there may be no restrictions on our actions, but that also means that there ain’t no motivation either. If everything is meaningless then there’s nothing holding us back, but there’s nothing to drive us either and what type of freedom is that shit? It’s like puttin’ a kid in a candy store, but first removing his taste buds. The fact that life is meaningless makes me want to do nothing, but you can’t live doing nothing and everything you do creates conflict, especially in the ’hood. Conflict creates pain, and that pain demands the question ‘What the hell am I suffering for?’ To which Sartre answers, ‘Nothing.’ That’s truly fucked up, man. As much shit as we go through it should mean something. It should be worth more.”

“Malik, you’re wrong. There’s plenty in this world that’s worth doing. That’s just one man’s perspective.”

“But he’s right. Maybe there’s something worthwhile in your world, but not in mine and despite all that bullshit about freedom my world is all I’ll ever know.”

That was pretty much my last day of school. I’m mostly self-educated. I continued to read about philosophy and only succeeded in depressing myself further. No one had anything that was worth believing in. All the philosophers were just cowards and liars, afraid to see the truth or afraid to speak it for fear of being unpopular. No one knew the truth and no one even seemed to be looking for it anymore. I gave up on everything but my friends.

Huey, Tank, and I began going downtown into Center City, to South Street, almost every night to jack white boys for their cash or even their clothes if they looked expensive enough. It was during this time that I got arrested for the first time.

We were down on South Street on a Saturday night feeling roguish and hostile. It was just three nights before Halloween and about ten minutes before midnight. There were already many people out in costume. Early Halloween parties disgorged onto the street and blended in with the gaggle of freaks and weirdos that packed the dozen blocks that led from the harbor to the Broad Street subway. South Street was Philadelphia’s version of Greenwich Village or Haight Ashbury Street. Every nationality, sexual persuasion, and alternative lifestyle the city offered paraded up and down the street in outlandish regalia. From thugs to transvestites, punk rockers to pimps, there was not a single group lacking representation in some form or another. Even the suburbanites from New Jersey and the main line jammed the sidewalks snapping pictures at the urban cultural oddities.

The closer it got to Halloween the weirder South Street became. Between Seventh Street and Front Street cops occupied every corner looking nervous and tense, clearly aware that they were outnumbered and probably outgunned as well. Riots on South Street were almost a Philadelphia tradition. They were so common they hardly even made the news anymore unless someone got killed or something. From Eighth Street to Broad Street however, a short mile that took you within a few blocks of the Martin Luther King projects, there was not a police officer in sight. There the streets were dark with shattered street lights and abandoned tenements. Each alleyway you passed was a potential death trap. And if you were dumb enough to leave South Street anywhere along it’s length, even as far down as Front Street, you were just asking for pain.

The three of us stood outside the pharmacy at Fifth and South watching the hoes, hookers, and naïve young suburban bitches stroll by. The suburban girls were even easier to pick up than the hoodrat hoes. You could almost hear the rap lyrics playing in their heads when they looked at us, wide-eyed and expectant. There was a six-foot red-headed girl grinning at me from inside the store and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was fucking gorgeous! I knew Huey would have some shit to say about me fucking with some gray bitch, but all I was thinking about was getting my dick wet. Fuck all the politics. It’s all pink on the inside.

My eyes traveled up and down her body and I shook with want. Her breasts were tremendous. I would have put her bra-size somewhere in the middle of the alphabet. Her ass was thick and full, but with as much muscle as fat and her hips were wide as well. Her waist however was small and narrow with just the slightest hint of a tummy.

“Yo, Tank.”

“Wa’sup, dog?”

“See that red-headed snowflake in the store? I bet you I can pull that before the end of the night.”

“Aw, bro, she’s fine. You think you could pull that?”

“Shit, all a Black man needs to pull a white bitch is a big dick and an attitude.”

“Yeah, and a little self hate.” Huey interrupted, scowling in disgust.

“Dog, don’t even start trippin’. Pussy is Pussy. Some just got flatter asses and straighter hair than others, but when you up in it, it all feels the same.”

“How the fuck would you know? You ain’t never been up in nothin’ except Yolanda’s fat ass!”

“Fuck you, man. I gets plenty pussy. Just watch me pull this snowflake bitch.”

Huey was right though. I’d never been with a White girl before and White people still scared me a little. That’s why I liked kickin’ their asses so much. It helped me get over my fear of windin’ up in their freezer like one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s butt buddies. But this bitch was too fine to let a little thing like getting hacked up and stored away as leftovers scare me off.

I strolled into the pharmacy and cut off any reply Huey may have wanted to make. The snowflake looked up as I walked in and smiled. She was definitely about to get fucked.

“You look like you need a thug in your life.” I said, lowering my already husky voice to a deep rumble as I stepped behind her; purposely leaning close enough to her ear so that my hot breath could be felt on her neck.

I knew that what white girls liked most about black men was our overt sexuality and straightforwardness. At least, that’s what I thought it was they liked about us. It might have just been that datin’ niggas was in fashion.

“Oh yeah? And just what makes you think that?”

“Cause here it is midnight on a Saturday night and instead of being made love to by someone who would kill or die for the treasures between your thighs, you here buying Snapple and shit.”

She laughed.

“Yeah, and what could a thug do for me that any man couldn’t?”

She was laying it on the line and since I had been so bold with her so far and it had been working I decided to play it like a pimp the whole way.

“Well, a player like myself would treat you like you need to be treated. Like a queen or a goddess,” and now for the trump card, “…and a whore.”

She stared at me disbelieving for a second like she was trying to decide if I was for real or not; waiting for me to laugh and say I was only kidding, but I stared back into her eyes like I was perfectly serious and then to further emphasize my point, I slowly looked her over from head to toe like I wanted to tear her apart right there in the store. Finally, she smiled and seemed to make up her mind.