Even though it was a spiritual, it wasn’t a song about Jesus direct, which suited Vern because she hated music about the Christ. It was one of the few items on which she and her husband, Sherman, agreed. She nodded along to every sermon he gave about the ways the white man plundered the world under the direction of this so-called savior.
Whole continents reek of the suffering that man has caused. Can you smell it? he would ask. The congregation would shout, Amen, Reverend Sherman, we smell it! And then he’d ask, Don’t it stink? And they’d say, Yes, Reverend! It sure does. And he’d ask, But does it stink here, on the Blessed Acres of Cain, where we live lives removed from that white devil god of Abel and his followers? The people would cry out, No!
According to Mam, there was a time when Cainites were less ardent about Reverend Sherman’s teachings. His predecessor and father, Eamon Fields, was the congregation’s true beacon. An early settler of the compound, arriving in the first wave, Eamon rose quickly from secretary to accountant to deacon to reverend. He was a stern man, violent, but for Cainites who’d been traumatized by the disorder inherent to Black American life, puritanical strictness held a dazzling, charismatic appeal. Sherman was not so hard as his father before him, which disoriented the brothers and sisters of the compound. In the end, he won them over on the pulpit, entrancing all with his passionate sermons.
And do we dare abandon the compound and mingle our fate with those devilish outsiders? Sherman asked.
No, Reverend!
That’s right, my beautiful brothers and sisters, kings and queens, sons and daughters of Cain. We stay here, where there is bounty. Free from the white devil dogs who would tear us limb from limb. Their world is one of filth and contradiction, poison and lies! Rich folks in homes that could house fifty, one hundred, two hundred, while the poorest and sickest among them rot on the street! Would we allow that here?
No!
Sherman could make lies out of the truth—Vern had learned that much as his wife—but she full-believed her husband’s fiery sermons about the Nazarene. She’d witnessed the curious hold Jesus had on people from her trips off the compound. Every other billboard and bumper sticker preached his gospel. Christ-talk made up the few words Vern could read by sight because they were everywhere in large print.
JESUS.
HELL.
SALVATION.
JOHN 3:16.
He was on T-shirts, bracelets, anklets, mugs. And that damn cross everywhere. The whole world outside the Blessed Acres of Cain seemed an endless elegy to Christ and his dying, his bleeding, his suffering. How come white folks were always telling Black people to get over slavery because it was 150 or so years ago but they couldn’t get over their Christ who died 1,830 years before that?
Who cared if he rose up from the dead? Weeds did that, too. It wasn’t in Vern’s nature to trust a man with that much power. For how did he come to have it?
Her new babe would never have to hear a thing about him. Vern would sing only the God-spirituals. She didn’t believe in him, either, but at least there was an ineffability to him, a silence that could be filled with a person’s own projection of the divine. Not so with Christ, who was a person, a particular person.
“God made man and he made him out of clay. Put him on earth, but not to stay. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded. Oh, Mary, don’t weep!” sang Vern.
Sherman didn’t abide music about Jesus at the Blessed Acres of Cain, but he let Vern’s mother listen to it in the wee hours when no one else on the compound could hear.
“One of these days bout twelve o’clock, this old world gonna reel and rock. Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded! Oh, Mary, don’t weep.”
Vern’s words slurred as she succumbed to fatigue, though she was not so tired as she might have been. The last stages of labor had come on with the quickness of a man in want of a fuck, and with the same order of operations, too. A sudden demand, a vague series of movements, a driving push toward the finish, followed by Vern’s immense relief when it was all over. Birthing had been no more trying than anything else in her life, and this time, at least, she had a baby boy to show for her trouble.
Or baby girl. Vern’s mam had predicted a son based on the way Vern carried her belly, but now that the child was here, Vern didn’t bother checking what was between its legs. The faintest impression of what could’ve been a penis pushed against her belly, but then it could’ve been a twisted piece of umbilical cord, too, or a clitoris, enlarged from birth much as Vern’s own had been. Perhaps this child, like her, transgressed bodily notions of male and female.