Routes

By John Okas

John Okas begins a proposed series of novels investigating the ancestry of two nebulous characters, Arthur and Morning Black. Tracing their family tree, Okas takes this Alex Haley theme on a detour through the ribald pageantry of American history and culture. The result is a rich collage of characters and American icons whose stories are told in a savory and metaphorical voice ringing with social satire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504024778

John Okas

John Okas was born in Brooklyn in 1949. As well as being a novelist, he plays the saxophone, composes music, and is a master chef. He currently lives in Bridgehampton, New York.  

Book preview

Art in Heaven

A Clip from Heaven

Page i finds me back in East Cornwall with nothing to do but roll around the backyard of Black Castle Cottage and commemorate this first of November, the marching day of saints and the half year anniversary of my brother Arthur’s joining his antecedants beyond the beyond. He died May first last. In communion with him all day, in the morning I go over my outline of the story of his death.

my notes are in lower case and i’ve changed the proper nouns to something typical, parabolic, in order to protect who’s to blame for art’s passing, namely, me, morning black.

Egads, Morning, I hear my editor cry. What’s this about a parable? Your readers want big names and fabulous places, anecdotes about the famous folks you know, your affairs, the people you’ve worked with. And stop blaming yourself for what happened to Arthur. Just because you wrote ‘Art is dead’ and he died doesn’t mean you committed a crime. It was a coincidence.

in the eyes of heaven there are no coincidences. from this day forward i live as an instance of the original am who am, the self before it said ‘i’. i go with the low, using an x to brand myself as heaven’s own. i see no reason to properly noun me or any other person place or thing, i sentence the first person singular pronoun to decapitation, and just to be sure, so serendipity will not raise someone, someplace or something above the rest, the same will go for the first letter of each sentence, all cut down to the same common size. as my mother and grandmother before me, i go cloistral, ascetic, an order of one, technically virgin, learning the lost art of listening to the muse rather than the trends in the marketplace. i take leave of those things i would take leave of in death while i am still alive, my body, my mind, my possessions, my name, my memories, my friends and my family. i enjoy the bliss of the dead: to make fun of the propriety of the living, the serious way people and even places and things take themselves. i’ve come to know dead as not dead. i swear i’ve received messages from my brother since his passing. i write this even though it might cause a reader to judge me a nut, my story an ill-made fiction rather than a history of unlikely events. nothing dramatic like automatic writing, but every now and then strings of letters come to my mind from the fruited plane above. the message i receive from art in heaven today is this: what is more realistic, a right answer or a right question?

Around eleven I leave my papers and go into the garden. The day is mild and invites being out. I gather the season’s last buds from the rose bed, then drawn to the acid smell of rotting apples I clean up under the knobby old trees, saving for cider what I can of the wormy fruit that has fallen. I go on to raking leaves and bringing them to the compost heap out back of the shed. I pitch in, forking a pile of half-rotted clippings upside down on top of the new brown, yellow, red and gold load. Working in monastic silence, following the rhythms of my breath, mind and muscles for four hours without stopping, I am exhilarated. At quitting time I take a seat on the lawn by the murky, muddy lily pond, eat apples and cheddar cheese and watch the golden sun shining in and out of the woolen clouds, fleecy gray and white, and the skeins of wild geese, vee after vee of them, on the wing south.

They remind me of my brother and the circumstances that led to his leaving this earth. I get my notebook and settle in to take the afternoon sun while scratching in it.

At this time of year daylight fails early in East Cornwall. By a quarter to five the grass is damp and I can barely make out what I’m writing. I leave the notebook by the pond and take a short walk through a neighboring field to see the huntress moon rising like a pumpkin pie over the rows of dried-out cornstalks. On the way back to the cottage I stop to pick up the book I left on the lawn when my eyes catch a glimpse of something that causes me to stop dead in my tracks. Otherworldly, more than just moonlight, as if it’s coming from some far faraway place, there’s a glimmer on one of the lily pads.

What is this I see? A vision? That little spark bursts into a flame. It burns and gets bigger and brighter, until … what? I quit my mooning and go bananas. Guffaws peel from me, laughter at the grave sight of my gravest fault. I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, but yes, yes, it is, it really is! I must be delirious but I see my brother! Or a shining likeness of him, rising lighter than air, a flickering specter over the lily pond. Arthur steps out of the mire as if it were a choir of angels. His flesh is radiant and he’s wearing a robe of spotless white. I jump up and down screaming. I want to hug him. Will there be something there to touch? Does he have depth or is he flat? Yes! He’s more than just a figment of the mud in my eye, more than three dimensional, more solid than earthly flesh; he’s a metaphor come true, high, deep, wide and then some: a godlike being who’s warm, clear, dry, bright as sunshine.

Marvelous! Amazing! Arthur King’s shining spirit looks at me in the orange silver moonlight, dead pan as any sick comic on a talk show, and says, I just flew in from heaven, and, girl, are my arms tired.

The old Art was always one for corny jokes and funny papers, the new one would not be improved were he otherwise. Is it really you, Artie, or is it my mind?

Yes, he says in the same plain, droll way he had in life. Then he says, in a stern, deep tone I never heard him use, Sister, everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.

I guess you’re an angel come to take me away for what I’ve done, eh? I know I have it coming. I’ve already given myself up for dead so I’m ready to go without protest. I look forward to it. Turn up your love light and take me whenever you want.

Just ribbing you, sis, the little King says with his wry smile. You were slated for capital punishment, but you have me to thank me for getting your sentence commuted. Actually I’m moving the mountain to you. I brought a clip from heaven for you to see how light a story can be.

A clip from heaven! But isn’t one moment of infinity the same as the whole thing? That’s the problem. Since I started receiving your messages I wouldn’t even think of telling a story unless it swallowed its own tale. Even if we’re willing to live without answers, we have a time limit here. How on earth do we manage to present something that never begins or ends?

By ‘clip’ I mean this glorious body. It was never supposed to leave paradise but I took off with it anyway. In the City of God they call it a Golden Figure, Model Eight. True, reality is without limits, but by the same token a symbol of infinity and the thing itself are one. That’s where this body comes in. A Model Eight is a piece but it’s the whole thing too. It adapts to any situation which threatens its survival. Right now it looks like me but it might just as well be you, a bull frog, a full moon, an apple, a cornstalk or a notebook.

I take my brother’s hand. Indeed I’ve never felt anything like it, natural or synthetic, in this world. Art’s made of some rich and smooth super stuff which when I scratch its surface reveals lines of signs, a letter map, a generic genetic code.

You can make it anything you like, Morning. Your seven rough drafts had us lost at sea, but the shine on Model Eight can show us home again.

I don’t doubt it. The glow of his body is no myth. And the substance of it looks and feels as if he will stay young and fresh forever. I touch the hem of his garment. How now! And this robe is too divine, Artie! Did you clip it as well?

My jerky little brother nods his head. It’s the standard issue where I’ve been. I’m here to see you finish what you started … He picks up the notebook still lying in the damp ground, opens it, begins to read

what is real? what is fundamental? as there are religious teachers who cast the shadow of fear over people’s souls to gain influence over them, there are artistic people who, for the same reasons, distort the beauty in their audience’s inner eyes. i was one of the latter, glittery but not gold. what good is art if it does not renew the vision of beauty in this world? what good is religion without connections to earth? what good is science if it does not help us feel a natural part of this universe of wonders?

He closes it. Goodness, Morning, he laughs, you really did do some decomposition here.

Then he fixes his eyes on me, opens them wide and invites me into his gaze. His irises are as radiant as the sun. I look closely into the black holes in the center, expecting to see my own miniature reflections. But hold on! The blacks of his eyes are not empty but lit like a pair of televisions, tuned to higher wavelengths. Practically on top of him, I see from a hereafter eyeview the stories of all that breathes, a rolling scroll of pictures on which each and every of one us are sung as heroes and heroines. Then Art’s eyes roll back in his head and I see every singular thing as passing, all individuals die, but ones like themselves come to take their places. Indeed all names are correct but the correct ones.

Who come before their own antecedents are the relative clauses of heaven, Art says, his white eyeballs shining with clear light. If you really want to mean what you say about wanting to keep your conceit out of it, capitalize on the bit of forever in my eyes and get into a body of narrative you’re not in at all. You might as well leave our lives out of it for the time being, and go back to our roots. His eyes come down, bringing the pageant with them reeling back to the days before our mother met our father. Perhaps you would like to lead our audience into the clip?

Would I ever!

Newcomer, I invite you to step out of proper persons, places and things and join me in my brother’s omniscient eyes, define yourself as we do, in references from the public domain and discover what your face looked like before your mother met your father. If you are a lover of once and future books, you might recognize us as a brother and sister who need no introduction. Arthur King is the symbol of knighthood when it was in flower, and I, his sister, his counterpart, Morning Black, the princess of darkness. Now let’s all bear witness to the light Artie boy has clipped and start as we want to end, present, together, in our place in heavenly books, reading his divine comedy in the mother of mother tongues; and let’s give a hand to the ingenious monkey who harrowed heaven and came back with something valuable, this treasure we all can share, an abiding general resurrection body that shows no difference between the audience and the art.

Routes

generic genesis:

who’s who

and

who’s brand x

in the sources of art’s broadcast

Mary Goes With It

The roots of the family tree dig themselves in deeply with the characteristics of the present. We trace our mystical madness through our mother’s side. Something indomitable in the women causes us to fall for strangers, foreign types seem familiar to us. Our forefathers have all been strangers in strange lands.

The Southland gives birth to the blues. The seed of the tree that grows today is planted in the Magnolia State on the banks of old man Muddy River on the day that the body of the secessionists is broken and the union of the states is restored.

Our great-great-grandmother is Mary Eaton, the young yellow buttercup belle, queen of Delta plantation, largest spread in all of Zero Parish. She is just twenty-two that Sunday in April when she goes to church and hears the news from the Reverend Pipps in the pulpit. At this very moment in the Old Dominion the north and south are signing a truce. Let us remember the teaching of the Good Book: there is a time for resistance and a time for surrender. The Reverend then passes out palm fronds. These leaves are here to remind us of the re-entry of Emanual into the Holy City, his surrender and the sacrifice he made by living a life here on earth.

The Sunday that US is whole again, and the way is made free for all men, is balmy and palmy in the Magnolia State. Mary walks, under a parasol, dainty as a porcelain doll, carrying her little piece of frond. She must walk because her coachman has been what they call emancipated. So it is with all her maids and cotton pickers, over one hundred in all, all gone free.

She makes a point of passing by the Freedom Church. There, Jimmy Elbert, formerly a garden variety slave of Eatons’ Delta plantation, leads a congregation. Jimmy has a gift for getting folks jumping. He leads lively spiritual songs and everybody is free to splash around in the big sin-washing tub in the back, chime in if they know the words, clap their hands, or just shout amen whenever they want. She wishes that the Lord would come through her like that. She thinks about Emanual’s surrender and the irresistible power in her flesh.

When Mary gets home the big house is empty. She sits in the rocking chair on the porch and pours herself a tall glass of bourbon. She rocks and drinks and fans herself with the palm the Reverend gave her. The April sun is warm, the day humid. She looks through the great oaks from whose hospitable arms long gatherings of moss hang, and the magnolias which drop their white blossoms in the clean, wet spring breeze. From where she sits she can see the big black river, hear the slow sad song that the muddy waters sing, and smell the sweet fertile decay deposits on its rich banks. Her husband, Major Jack Eaton, the king of cotton and a dandy daddy who made her his bride and the queen of Delta just before he went off to fight for States’ Rights, is late, not home from the war, never coming home. He is dead and she has the problem of reconstruction bearing down on her shoulders like a cross.

You don’t know anything about growing cotton, She tells herself, and I hear tell that it was hard enough to keep up a plantation in style in the old days. What will happen now in this new age when we have to pay for labor?

What capital she has left is hardly enough to keep up the large house in the manner of plantations. The green green grass of home, the lawn which runs down to the banks of the Big Muddy River, has not been mowed all spring; her flower garden, a source of pride and joy, without slaves to tend it, has gone to seed; and surely the old house could use a fresh coat of paint.

She scolds herself for being helpless. You still have the land, the house. But what good is Delta when you are worthless?

By midafternoon, her Sunday best, those skirts all flounce and pleats have lost their starch, and Mary goes for the second bottle. When she comes back to the porch the sun is in her eyes. Who’s that she sees down on the banks of the Big Muddy River fussing with a raft and a sail? It’s Jimmy Elbert, that spiritual singer. Jimmy is wearing pants and a shirt recycled from old gunny sacks that once held chicken feed. He has an X of palm pinned to his shirt and he sings,

Allelujah, Glory, Allelujah!

I’m going to go with the wind and the tide,

going to go down the river,

oh Lord, free to ride.

I cannot let him leave without at least shaking his hand, Mary says to herself as she stumbles down the porch steps, holding the fresh bottle of bourbon in one hand and the palm leaf the Reverend Pipps gave her in the other.

Ragged Jim is just about to shove off when Mary gets to the bank. Boy, she slurs, I know you’re free but there’s one more thing I’m going to ask you to do for me.

What’s that, Mrs Eaton, Ma’am?

Sit down in the grass here, have a drink with me for old times’ sake and teach me to sing one of those songs you people sing in church.

That’s three things, Ma’am.

A breeze comes and Mary goes with it, unsteady on her feet, backwards. But unlike a magnolia petal in the wind, before she drops she reaches out for the dark hand to break her fall. The strong arms hold her up, and she, bourbon blind, presses herself against Jimmy Elbert’s torso, with its coal black shine, iron from slavery, so unlike her big cotton candy daddy’s soft belly. She draws the string on his feedbag pants and pulls him down with her into the overgrown grass. There she lifts the skirts of civilization which have lace such as he never saw all over and under them and surrenders to him the fertile crescent where fairy tales begin and end.

When it’s over she passes out from shame and alcohol.

Jimmy Elbert, all too awake, says, No good’s going to come from this.

A fog rolls in off the river. Our great-great-grandfather slips into it quietly, and disappears downstream into the post-war melodrama of relocation like a footprint in an incoming tide.

‘What Will People Say?’

Mary Eaton lives in the ruins of the old cotton south and wants no other company but her bottle, yet she cannot drink enough bourbon to make her forget that she is pregnant.

What will people say? she asks herself. My big Jack has been gone for two years now.

She carries and labors and gives birth in private, praying the Lord that the baby will take after her and not its father. At least she does not succumb to the temptation to scream rape!, an accusation that so often leads to mistaken identities, and where a black man is involved, more than a fair share of possible assailants hanged. Her prayers go unanswered. Her son, Jimmy Elbert Junior, looks like a baby buffalo.

She does, for a day, put the boy to breast, no doubt her milk is twenty proof, but then in a moment of weakness, of which she has so many, she makes up her mind that the best thing for all would be to sell Junior Jimmy down the river before anyone sees him. The next morning, Mary sees a middle-aged couple, freed slaves, misplaced and displaced, moving down the mainstream of the river. Once more she runs down to the bank, this time with the baby and some thirty odd dollars in silver coins, some of the hundreds that Major Jack left her.

Hello there, she calls. If I give you these pieces of silver will you take custody of this baby, no questions asked?

Bess and Porky Priest know the money is dirty, that it was made by slaves for their masters, but they say, Done! and not another word until they are out of earshot. Bessie once had a baby sold out from under her. She takes to the bundle as if her arms were made of glue, the answer to her prayers, plus thirty dollars. Porky, at the tiller, jingles the bag of silver coins. Justus Priest! Mama, that’s what we’ll call the boy.

Thus is Jimmy Elbert Junior, son of a belle, the shady landed lady of Delta plantation, transformed into Justus Priest, son of a pair of dirt poor but proud and sober sharecroppers.

They use the money to rent themselves some land. Porky knows a thing or two about cotton and Bessie is an old hand with the chickens. Justus continues to be a blessing to his adoptive parents. He is a born cotton picker and a chicken plucker. When work is through, young Justus, with his manchild hands already a coat of callus, hits the wire fence behind the shack, amusing himself with all the different twangs he can make.

Porky understands art. When the boy is six, he invests ten dollars in a real guitar for him. Justus takes it to the back porch to pick out and pluck in a system higher than that of fiber and fowl. Songs come naturally to him. He sits out there every night playing for hours. He can play a lively country blues music with both his hands going a mile a minute, his right sliding across the frets as if it were made of glass, his left fingering rhythm on the body, his mouth blowing on a mouth harp, and his feet stamping on the wood board step. You’d think it was a freight train coming down the track. The son of the spiritual singer can sing too. His music can be slow as the river and his voice as blue and deep and wide, like his father’s, naturally seasoned with hope and despair, and as satisfying as pork and beans and rice.

Sweating It Out in Bullets

Justus Priest is devoted to his adoptive parents and lives at home picking and plucking until he is well near thirty years old. What else is a poor boy to do but try to scratch a living from the land?

I’m too young to marry too old to masturbate,

I’m too young to marry too old to masturbate,

ain’t had no hen from the barnyard,

since this morning quarter past eight.

Then a flu comes and flies away with the souls of the Priests, Porky, first and, forty-nine days later, Bess. The last thing that Bess does before she goes is tell Justus about the white woman at the bank with the dirty silver dollars.

The truth is, honey, you could be just about anybody.

This revelation is eclipsed by Bessie’s passing. Justus, in a world of blues, mourns at Bessie’s funeral.

Seven weeks of blue, Mama,

and one day be moving on.

Seven weeks of blue-hoo-hoo,

and one day and one day be moving on.

It’s one day you’re tired of living,

The next day you’re dead and gone.

I count seven times seven, Mama,

every hour seems like a year to me.

I count seven times seven, Mama,

every hour seems like a year to me.

It’s not just the days of the week now,

it’s the nights I cry myself to sleep.

That train’s going to come,

and take us all way up to heaven.

That train’s going to come,

and take us all way up to heaven.

All the money’s gone now,

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Hear that whistle blow!

Justus cries into his wheezy harmonica and all the people say, Amen, amen, brother Justus, you ought to take yourself down to Louisport.

Life is short and impossible to understand. Not so the art of Justus Priest. The form of his lament is an idea whose time has been a long time coming in the work songs and lullabies of slavery. And like many an idea whose time has come it is thought of by several different people in several different places, simultaneously, independently. In from the cotton fields and out of range of the master’s voice the music runs on a spiritual track both ways on the Big Muddy backbone river of the Land of the Free, up north to the Windy City, down south to nearby Louisport.

The southern states also give birth to jazz. By the time the new century takes its turn there are several new things brewing under the stars and stripes. In Louisport Justus finds his first cousins in ragtime and in the unruly dirges of bands of second generation freemen. While the blues are nursed in every bar, rehearsed on every street corner there, those groups of second-hand brass, infused with the friendly spirit of the blues, start spreading joy over the whole Freeway.

Orphaned Justus arrives in Louisport, carrying his guitar in a feed bag, looking like one poor farmer boy. He dives into the romantic corner of the city and finds work at a gin joint named Bullets’, named after its owners, the brothers Pierre and Roger Bullet. Changing names runs in our family, and Justus Priest, considering his too plain to shine on stage, takes the name Liberty Star to perform under. The pine plank stage at Bullets creaks as the country boy does his freight train imitations and sings sleepy blues about how his mama did tell him he had the drifting blues before he was born. When the people hear Liberty sing they cry in their gin in a way that makes them feel better about bad things.

Here a happy ending takes a turn for the worse. While Liberty Star has inherited his unknown father’s musical gift, he also has within him his unknown mother’s penchant for alcohol and self-pity. A sucker for the bottle, while he’s at it he develops the habit of narcotics. And, like any country boy in the big city, he is taken advantage of. He helps the Bullet brothers to help themselves to the gate he brings in by continuing to work, year after year, for peanuts, gin and morphine.

When Liberty is forty, man can fly and the construction of the new southland is well under way, but his own life is in the toilet. The star of the show is shooting up between sets, a fixture on a dead end street, a landmark still sweating it out in Bullets. He looks back on his sharecropping days with the jaundiced eye of romanticism. Because of these bad habits, he cries, a life that was once full of promise is now a-fixing to die. Somehow, from where he sits, those eleven-foot cotton sacks and the hundred-pound bales of hay don’t seem so heavy.

Then one night a woozy white woman with gray hair, cracked red lips, peeling paint, and skin that looks like brown spotted porcelain comes into the bar.

Liberty Star, formerly Justus Priest?

Who wants to know? asks old yellow eyes.

Son, behold your mother. Let me buy you a drink.

The two sit on opposite sides of a bottle and Mary confesses. I felt guilty as hell for giving you away like I did, my own flesh and blood, with only thirty dollars in your trust fund. It made my drinking worse to think about it. Now the doctors have given me a year to live and I’ve used up eleven months of it tracking you down. I want to make it up to you by giving you the land you were conceived on.

By the sad shape Mary is in Liberty does not imagine her bequeathal will amount to much, but finding out he is half white, even though he doesn’t look it, changes his thinking. Fair enough, it softens some of his despair back into hope. He thinks, why shouldn’t I take a crack at living with the privileged folks? Meeting my real mother must be a good omen, having some land, this plantation, put in my lap like this, unexpectedly, and seeing what drinking has done to my own mother, are three good reasons to go straight and sober myself.

Mother, he says, spilling out his drink on the sawdust floor, living here gives me the worst old headache I ever had. At heart I’m just a simple country boy with a bad case of the big city blues. If I remember right, farming’s not bad. Earth clods under your feet are the same as rhythm and soul in the music.

He takes his guitar and goes on a three-day wagon ride back to Delta plantation with Mary. He can hardly believe his eyes when he sees Delta plantation, a full five hundred fertile acres, and the gardens of Mary Eaton, overgrown though they be, give him a thrill, and the house, rundown as it is, is a mansion like those in his dreams of heaven. With such a turn of fortune Liberty hangs up his guitar and gets busy with a mule and