Knowhere You Are, Knowhere You Have Been

He was eighteen, black, fearless, and in possession of a great-unformed intelligence. In addition, he had been born with a gift of creativity that was divine in its degree. Moreover, he was uneducated, destitute, Southern born, and devoid of that ability that allows us to see ourselves as others see us. These attributes, in their turn, would grow, change, and some would disappear, giving rise to new traits. Within a month he would lose and forget that moment of beauty he had witnessed. Instead, and decades later, he would remember only the meaning of that vision and his myopia. Even later, near the end of his days, through a tranfigurative act of spiritual alchemy, it would become his life's metaphor.

He had arrived in New York. To his mind, and defined by its limits, this city was his Promised Land, Mecca, and The Emerald City. There in Times Square, his eyes, and mind filled with its sad gaudiness, he even whispered the three place names. Each euphemism was drawn from the few experiences of his young life and appropriate choices for his emerging personality. Born in and having taken flight from Jackson, Mississippi, the teachings of southern black Baptist Churches had seeded his consciousness in early childhood. Old Testament stories of the Chosen People's persecution, enslavement, and flight, had been the symbols of choice for generations of American blacks, accurately suggesting their historical experience in the New World. In small contrast, for James Cole, the biblical stories were personal cautionary tales. In a manner that was balanced between knowledge and ignorance, he believed those ancient writings symbolized the events and circumstances of his world.

Farrish Street was Jackson Mississippi's Negro commercial strip. It was four blocks of shabby storefronts. Behind which, those blacks blessed by the mysteries of fate and the persistence of dreams struggled to create a semblance of econ ..omic independence. Of the ten thousand blacks that were residents of Jackson, twenty of them were business owners. Those shop keepers managed to instill a kind of distorted American normalcy to their lives and provided powerless, but significant role models, that at the very least, suggested denials of the insanity that was racism. The black business strip of Jackson, Mississippi was but one small social pustule, the ignored symptom of the country's chronic psychic and social illness.

Mr. and Mrs. Gomes, were Farrish Street's oldest tenants. Oldest in both age and length of tenancy. Their hand built wooden shack, with its roof of corrugated tin, anchored the southern end of the district. Both in their late sixties, they had sold barbecued ribs, fried chicken, and pickled pig feet on that spot since 1950.

At the northern end of the strip was a store that had been built the year James Cole turned fifteen. Constructed upon what had previously been a plot of land overgrown with pecan trees, mulberry bushes, and weeds, the stores appearance and wares were as incongruous in the environment that was Farrish Street, as the expenditure of money to build it, had been foolish. A one-story building structured of good red Mississippi brick. A black awning with the words, "Liberty House" across its front, spanned the width of the building. The words were printed in uncompromising red and enclosed by a thin green border. The wide, gleaming display windows were split by the glassed entrance, the door framed in polished pine. The windows of the shop brimmed with stacks and shelves of hand made black dolls, packs of foil wrapped incense labeled "Nubia," and "Black rose". There were carved wooden Afro picks, scented candles, and buttons with the slogans of the Civil Rights movement printed upon them. Fighting for shelf spaces were diluted wooden versions of Bambara antelopes, and plaster imitations of the Yoruba's Shango, Yemenya, and Elegba. From the top of the windows hung rows of dashikis made of printed cotton, emblazoned with imaged African design patterns.

There were piles of books by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks. The books caught and held his attention. With their shiny paper jackets, bearing the photographs of black men and women, they suggested to him, mysterious possibilities could and did exist. Those books lured him. For this reason and the growing suspicion there was much he did not know, James Cole would enter that store. There he would learn of a Muslim minister, self-named Malcolm X and of his transformational journey to the holy city Mecca.
The barbecue shack and its owners, the Gomes, would also acquire a special meaning and significance to James' life. That would happen long after the place and its proprietors had disappeared from the earth and faded from his recollections of that time.

Born black and into a poverty that dammed and dammed the availability of activities and amenities accessible to the larger world, James was fourteen when he first saw a television. How he had come to be in the house where the television sat was forgotten or perhaps repressed a month later. Recalled forever were the images he had seen upon that screen. Like living a dream while dreaming it, he had watched "The Wizard of Oz." Already inclined to grasp and understand the divine lessons hidden in fantastic myths, he had known intuitively that Judy Garlands' Dorothy and her traveling champions had received their gifts in the act of journeying to the Emerald City. James knew, with an intelligence of the heart, there was nothing the Wizard could give them that they did not already have.

There in New York, in Times Square, the cold March wind blew newly forming snowflakes and the city's dust into James tearing eyes. Mind enchanted, and with dry and chafed lips he whispered, "Promised Land, Emerald City, Mecca". Dirt and grit immediately filled his mouth .