Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

“Folks said Kujichagulia should never have been born, because right from the start, only ten minutes out of the womb, he started screaming: ‘Who am I? What can I know ? Where am I going ? Where have I been ?’ and worse, much worse, ‘ What am I?’ People were embarrassed by his questions; they had no answers. And soon, after Kujichagulia’s cloudy infant eyes began to focus, he started criticizing the modes of the Good Thing. ‘Shallow,’ he called the thrice-daily worship of the forest gods; ‘Quaint,’ he said of the people’s fireside dances, their ceremony of the harvest and fear of the night. Deliberately he absented himself during the rites of passage for the young men of the village; thus, he remained a child forever, with many, many questions. Not only did his questions disturb the village elders, but within time certain gods began to wax hot with rage. Faraway, over the hilltops and trees, you could see thick thunderclouds swirling like frightened fish around Mount Kilimanjaro, home of the gods; torrents of rain, drought, and locust came, but still Kujichagulia questioned.”

The Swamp Woman stopped and squinted at Faith. “You follow all this?”

“I guess,” Faith said.

“Is it entertaining?”

“Uhh, huhn.”

The Swamp Woman grinned. “All right. So Kujichagulia was spoiling everything. The gods — Amon-Ra, Isis, Osiris, and Shango — were checking out Kujichagulia all along, wondering if he would eventually set out after the source of the Good Thing, abandoning its modular reflections to seize the Good Thing itself. Some wagered that he would, but others, enraged by his restlessness, vowed to punish him and his tribe severely if he found it. For it was not only for Kujichagulia, but for everyone. On the night Kujichagulia finally realized the Good Thing could only be in the mountains where the gods were, all nature rose against him. Beneath his feet, as he traveled, the ground turned to mud under a terrible rain and the earth split from tremors that uprooted trees. But Kujichagulia pressed on. For sport, Amon-Ra sent many-limbed behemoths to stop Kujichagulia before he reached the mountains; these Kujichagulia avoided, being swift. From the depths of the sea, Osiris called forth slithering things with shining eyes to devour Kujichagulia. But the village boy scaled a tree and they died of thirst with upturned bellies beneath him on the ground. All these obstacles he overcame. Except one: at the base of the mountains he rested with an old tribe long respected for its magic and conjuring. His trials had weakened Kujichagulia; his tongue swelled in his mouth and he walked on burning, blistered feet. A girl named Imani wove her love magic around him; she took him to her dwelling, fed him, clothed him, and sat with Kujichagulia until he again was well. She loved him, girlie, and Kujichagulia returned her affections, soon forgetting his hunt for the Good Thing. For many years he stayed with Imani and filled her with children. Shango and Amon-Ra began to think they had won their wager, that the village boy had abandoned the Good Thing. But, as the years passed, Kujichagulia again became restless. Thoughts would burn his brain with longing; deep within he felt incomplete. At night he would stare from his hut at the clouded peaks of the mountains. Imani begged him to stay, to love and work and die in the way all did without question, but in the night, seven harvests before his seventieth birthday, Kujichagulia rose from their bed, tightened his loincloth, and began ascending the dark mountain. He climbed hand over hand for many days, bleeding from his feet and palms, thirsting now, hungering to glimpse just once before death the fabled Good Thing.

“Near the top Kujichagulia knew he was mad, driven so from his suffering. Through the peals of thunder and the strong cry of wind he could hear the gods swearing at him. Far below he saw the village — tiny mud huts scattered among rocks and trees. Yet still he climbed, still he questioned, ‘What can I know ?’ And there, in the cemetery stillness of the cool gray mountains, Kujichagulia beheld the Good Thing. Like a light it bathed him, like fire it warmed him. Killed him. For he was old and could not bear the strain. The gods Osiris and Isis raged, girlie. So furious were they that Kujichagulia had seen the forbidden, they put their heads together and decided to torment all men with the curse of restlessness and questioning. They hid the Good Thing, child, and the world darkened like a room deprived of its only light. But even the gods could not destroy it. It is a wish, a possibility that can only be deferred; and so, even today, it remains hidden.

“Now,” the Swamp Woman said, “just how’s a li’l fox like you gonna find what ain’t been seen since the beginnin’ of our bondage?”

“I don’t know,” Faith said. “But I will.” Somewhere in her chest she felt the warmth, the terror of dreams on the brink of fulfillment. “And when I do, everybody’s bondage will end.”

But was it real? Her heart said yes; her mind — no.

“Are you sure?” Faith asked. “Is that the way it really happened?”

The Swamp Woman scowled. “What difference does it make? I could have told you that the Good Thing escaped from Pandora’s box, or that it lies waitin’ for man in the middle of Eden. But none of that tickles me as much as what I just told you.” She wiggled a crooked finger at Faith. “Before you ask if anythin’s true, first ask y’self if it’s good, and if it’s beautiful! Was the story good?”

Faith nodded. “Yes. ”

“And was it beautiful?”

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

“All right!” The werewitch snorted. She moved away from Faith to her strange machine in the corner. The Gila monster, exhausted, had fallen asleep with its legs dangling over the treadmill. The Swamp Woman yelled, “Haaa!” and the startled lizard began racing again. Lights flickered on the machine, and from a phonograph by its side there came music.

“Hear it?” the Swamp Woman cried. “That’s the earth’s music as it revolves. Ya hear it? It’s smigin’ ‘mi, fa, mi’ ’cause life on the earth without the Good Thing is marked by famine and misery.”

Closing her eyes, the Swamp Woman started patting her foot to the earth’s mournful music. And while she was distracted, Faith inched backward toward the door, slipped out, and hurried across the bridge.

Listen.

Faith Cross, gambling on the legendary Good Thing, buried her mother and quit the South. Walking toward the quiet train station in town, her eyes on the overhead golden glow of the moon, she heard, like a refrain pounding in repeated rhythms through her brain, the inscription on her mother’s tombstone:

LAVIDIA CROSS

She Was Given 400,000,000

Breaths and Took

Them All

Time and again, Faith recalled the eerie job of restitution Oscar Lee Jackson had performed on Lavidia’s bloodless body. He obeyed the Laws — removed any reflective surfaces from the parlor (spirits, therein, are easily ensnared), positioned Lavidia on her left side as she slumbered when alive, and — most important — relieved Faith of the sundry purification rites by doing these himself. They can, for the bereaved, be a vexation. In her cherrywood casket at the rear of the funeral parlor, Lavidia had looked like a waxy deflated balloon. Something had abandoned her, though what that was remained unclear: breath, perhaps. Shriveled she had been in her nineteen-year-old wedding gown, the Lord’s unwilling bride. Dehydrated. In her lifetime she’d been a derisive, vindictive woman who criticized everything without distinction, yet looked for nothing better, which is sin — it breaks the Twelfth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Criticize before Questing. She made, in her lifetime, few friends, thus none came to pay respects. Faith sat alone in the empty, echoing funeral home as an unperturbed Reverend Brown delivered his prepared speech on her mother’s virtues. It was an old eulogy. He used it for every death in Hatten County, changing proper names, adverbial modifiers, and pronouns, yet always injecting a deep sorrow and promised glory into his words. Faith, therefore, didn’t mind.