The Portable Promised Land Page 2

  Huggy Bear finally found his crew hanging out in front of Peppermint Frazier, the twenty-four-hour ice-cream and hot-wing spot, talking to a few guys from an underground Tupac cult. Mojo, Boozoo, and Groovy Lou jumped in their rides, calibrated their stereos to today’s sermon, Songs in the Key of Life, and set their cruise control to eighteen miles an hour. Then all four of them turtled down Freedom Ave parade style, a small cruising cumulus cloud of sound, boombapping the block with a quadruply quadraphonic Soul City Sunday afternoon blast of the master blaster.

  But at the corner of Freedom and Rhythm, as they got to “Sir Duke,” the Steviewondermobile slowed and the sound began to die. The gang pulled to the side of Freedom and cracked the hood. Yet another battery dead. Mojo drove off to Soul City Motors to pick up a new one. But for ten minutes the Stevie-wondermobile would be without sound. Tragedy? Huggy Bear never broke a sweat. He was prepared. He’d had Dolemite put in an emergency backup battery that was connected only to the sound system. He could boom the system even when the car wouldn’t start. Did he know that if the backup battery was connected to the electrical system instead of the sound system that he could’ve kept on driving? Sure he did. But it was Huggy Bear’s world and in Huggy Bear’s world the music could never die. So he sat in the Steviewondermobile, stuck at the corner of Freedom and Rhythm, chilling with Groovy Lou and Boozoo to the soaring sounds of Stevie’s seamless soul stew and the world he saw with his so wonderfully clear inner vision.

  A HOT TIME AT THE

  CHURCHOF KENTUCKY FRIED SOULS

  AND THE SPECTACULAR FINAL SUNDAY SERMON OF THE RIGHT REVREN DADDY LOVE

  The Right Revren Daddy Love’s funeral was jam-packed from the back of the teeming creaking balconies to the very first aisle, the family aisle, which was crowded with women half Daddy Love’s age or even a third of it, and a large, restless gaggle of children who looked stunningly like him. Daddy Love laid resting in a pair of coffins glued together, the only way to accommodate his massive form, as the hundreds and hundreds he’d preached to for three decades filed past him with the same shock and restless struggling to understand that people feel at funerals for the young. Daddy Love had not been a young person for many years, but he had made himself into a force of nature so great that people were shocked to discover that dying was something he could do.

  People flapped fans with pictures of Daddy Love on them and sang with a force that shook the foundation of the poor building, which had only brick and mortar to protect it, and danced in the aisles, dancing to fight off tears, and sat whispering to each other, gossiping, leaning across husbands to speak about Daddy Love and Sister Gayl and Lil Henny and Big Ange and Precious Jones and Tish and Babs and on and on til what everyone was really saying was Girrrl, every pair of female lips in this congregation done tasted Daddy’s sweet juice.

  The Deacon preached, “The Revren took from our wallets....Took from our wives.... Even took from some ah our daugh-ers!”

  “Wellll.. .” they called back.

  “Was he the way he was because he wanted to be or because we wanted him to be? Did the Revren take all he could get or give everythin he had? We’ll never know.”

  “Tell it.. .” they said.

  “But that’s no nevermore cuz now that he gone we all gone be a lil poorer. Yes I say, we’s all a bit poorer t’day! Cuz Black currency ain’t money. No! It’s joy! The twenty-dollar bill of our currency is theater. The dramatic theater of daily life. The ten-spot is rhythm. The fiver is hope, the deuce is freedom, and the dollar is good, hearty laughter.”

  “ Preach!!!” they yelled.

  “And, of course, the C-note is love. So by our math the Revren Daddy Love was a multi millionaire. And the Right Revren Daddy Love was a big spendah!”

  The Revren Daddy Love caused much discord, but none on two subjects: first, Daddy Love was colossal. Freckles on his high-yellow skin as large as dimes, a belly as great as a jumbo TV, a mouth that made mailboxes jealous, and a frame so titanic he would just swallow a girl up with one of his patented postservice hugs. No matter how rotund she was, Daddy Love could still hug her in surround-sound stereo because Daddy Love was supersized, as though God had intended him to be literally larger than life.

  Second thing everyone knew about Daddy Love was that in every crevice and crack of his giant body Daddy Love did love women. All women. Daddy Love’s love was as blind as faith and as democratic as the sun. Any woman, regardless of shape or style, could come to Daddy Love and find herself ecstatically baptized by those eyes, eyes the color of pure honey, eyes that shot an electric current through a girl’s body and loved her better than most men could with their hands. It was all the affirmation a female needed to know she was magnificently woman. Women saw how seriously Daddy Love appreciated them, and, wildly appreciating his appreciation, they rewarded him and rewarded him with no regard for vows or jealousies or the horde of rewards he was getting from a horde of rewarders. But was it really Daddy Love getting the reward? For a week or two afterward her husband would feel happier having her around, her family would eat better, and her entire house, no matter how small and drab, would seem a touch brighter, as though someone had installed a window that moved throughout the day to capture as much sunlight as possible.

  Was his flock particularly lost or uniquely found? The center of those conversations was the church choir, Love’s Angels. Those twenty-one women joined not for the singing, which was third-rate on a good day, but for the special confession ritual.

  Daddy Love always said his choir had to be held to a higher standard and when they sinned they had to receive special attention. On Sundays just before service an Angel who had sinned would go to Daddy Love’s office and confess. They would talk about what she’d done and why she’d done it. Then, the Angel would raise her skirt until her bottom was bare and free. Daddy Love would remove his belt and apply a slow battery of stiff thwacks to those bare, free cheeks with a sharp, stinging force that was said to make her brown skin wiggle hotly and then, for a fraction of a moment, sing out in torrid pain, a sound like high tortured notes from a muted trumpet. Angels confessed almost as often as their singing cheeks allowed. And on those rare occasions there was space for a new member, women waged war to get in.

  That’s how things were at St. Valentine’s Blessed Temple of Godly Love, Sanctified Ascension, and the Holy Glissando, located in Brooklyn, at the corner of Grace Street and Divine Avenue, in an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  Now it may be easier to believe we could have a Black president, a nigger boycott on Cadillacs, and an all-white NBA all at once than to believe in a single abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken in Brooklyn, U.S.A., but it’s true. What happened is someone at headquarters gave some franchisee the green light to build a three-floor KFC palace even though there were, within reasonable walking distance of the corner of Grace and Divine, three KFCs, two Church’s Chickens, one Roy Rogers, one Kennedy Fried Chicken, one General Tso’s Fried Chicken, and two Miss Mannie Mack’s Fried Chickens (one of which shared space with Al’s Fried Chicken Shack). Guess someone upstairs just couldn’t stand that franchisee’s ass.

  Only three days after the KFC palace opened, corporate paid a visit to their new pride and joy and quickly realized their geographical error. In a panic they commanded the ill-fated franchisee to make up the competitive difference by frying his chicken in a heavier, thicker oil and three and a half times as much of it. Years later, the star-crossed franchisee would crumble during cross-examination in his trial on federal civil rights violations and admit that corporate had indeed hollered, “ Deep-deep-fry those Niggers!” He was all but thrown underneath the penitentiary when, through pathetic tears, he conceded that yes, he’d noticed the vile smell of his toilets, and yes, he’d heard about the jolt in sales of Pepto-Bismol, and — yes, yes, oh God, yes!— eye-witnessed three men, on the very same day, crashing to the floor from heart failure right inside the store, and yet he continued to deep-deep-fry even though he said to himself, “Ah thi
nks the chickens is comin out a lil too greazy.”

  It ain’t take long for Daddy Love and his followers to turn that mountainous grease pit into a church. There was already a tall red steeple, lots of seats, tons of parking, and plenty of private office space. In the beginning most felt it wasn’t too bad using bits of left-over chicken in communion to signify the body of Christ. And after a while people came to like using the drive-thru window for confession. But Daddy Love never did have that greazy kitchen cleaned out properly. He just slapped some thick wooden boards on top of it and built his pulpit over that. Bet he’d like that decision to do over.

  You may have never known the building had been a KFC if not for the sixty-foot sign that displayed the KFC logo and a portrait of Colonel Sanders. The pole that held up that sign withstood every sort of abuse they subjected it to until they were convinced that the pole and the portrait had been constructed to outlast that KFC palace, America, and maybe even Earth. So every Sunday they filed into service under the unchanging half-smile of that good ol’ neo-massa Colonel Sanders. That’s just one of the reasons why only Daddy Love and his most loyal devotees ever called the church by its real name. To everyone else it was the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls.

  After ten years at Kentucky Fried Souls Daddy Love had become a ghetto celebrity. He was known for his curious congregation, his unique vision of the Bible, and his way of riding slowly through the neighborhood in his white 1969 convertible Bentley, chauffeured by one of his Angels, passing out fives to the little boys and tens to the little girls. But first and foremost, Daddy Love was known for his preaching. He preached with a dynamism that hypnotized and a spiritual velocity that gave his sermons wings and dipped his words in a magic that let him say things no other preacher could say.

  There was no place you could go in New York where they ain’t know about Daddy Love. But he’d grown tired of being a local legend. He wanted to float in the rare air. He’d stepped up to the plate and seen the fence separating those who were legends for a certain generation from those who’d crossed over into history, and he wanted to smack a home run. He wanted to ascend the Black imagination and fly at the altitude of C. L. Franklin and Adam Powell and Martin King, those spiritual pilots who rest atop the Black imagination like nighttime stars — brilliant patches of light with a sort of everlasting life that we can look up to for direction any time we lose our way. He planned to get there with one magnificent, never-to-be-forgotten performance, an extraordinarily epic manifesto-sermon punctuated with an impossibly dramatic flourish that would come together to form a story passed down from generation to generation and lift him into that rare air. On the last Sunday of his life Daddy Love arrived at Kentucky Fried Souls two hours early.

  As the congregation filed in, the warm clack and click of fine Sunday shoes could be heard over the light sounds of the choir quietly singing “Love Me in a Special Way,” backed by the organist, drummer, electric guitarist, and three-man horn section. Once they were seated a hush came over them. There was a long, silent moment that neither a nervous cough nor a baby’s cries dared break, then Daddy Love emerged from his office on the third floor, escorted by two busty and freshly-absolved Angels. He raised his large chin slightly, pursed his giant lips delicately, and, with a voice smooth and bassy like jazzy tuba riffs, said simply, “Love is here.”

  His slippers were thick, plush, and fire-engine red with a busy logo across the front. The robe, made of rare silk, was a matching fire-engine red with a thick black trim and long ends that draped on the floor. A black belt knotted tightly about Daddy Love’s giant stomach pulled it all together. The combined worth of every single item worn by any family in attendance was not as great as that one robe.

  Daddy Love made his way down the stairs with an Angel on each arm and a walk that combined a bull’s brute, a rooster’s righteousness, and a pimp’s peacock. When he finally came to the lip of the pulpit, Daddy Love reached down and snatched a bit of his billowing robe off the floor, sucked in his great stomach, and squoze himself through the doorway of the pulpit. He then faced the podium and placed his hands on its far edges, giving him the appearance of total authority over that spiritual cockpit. He looked out at his flock and said with bottomless earnest, “Praise the Love.”

  They cheered and Daddy Love eased into his sermon. “Back in the day Love knew a man who’d died and gone to Heaven. This man had been married for decades and loved his wife dearly. But in matters of love he was something of... a microwaver. He liked that quickfast heat, that fast food, that slam-bang dunk. He took more time in choosing his words when he spoke than in pleasing his wife when the conversation ended!”

  “Oooooh chile!” the women called back.

  “When he arrived at the pearly gates and got through the line to see St. Peter, the good saint told him, ‘You’ve led a good, clean life and been an upstanding member of human society. But you are not yet ready. God has made it clear. There will be no microwavers in His Heaven!’”

  “No microwavers up there!” the women said.

  “The man knew there was no appealing God’s will, so he came back to Earth and came to see Love. He said, ‘Daddy Love, I have been turned away from the gates of Heaven! What did I do?’ Love sat down beside him and said, ‘It’s not what you did do. It’s what you did not do. But Love’s got a plan to bust you into Heaven so don’t worry. We’ll talk about loving in a Gawdly way and you’ll go out and practice loving in a Gawdly way and when Heaven summons you again you’ll stroll right in.’” Daddy Love gingerly opened his heart-red Bible. “We started in the Song of Songs, chapter three, verse five. It is written, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.’”

  Daddy Love gazed out over his flock and those honey eyes began narrowing slightly and everyone knew that the Word was about to take him over. “Do not...a rouse...or a waken... love...until it... so desires. Brothers and dearly beloved sisters, what’s that mean?”

  “Tell us what it mean, Daddy!” someone called out.

  “It means you can’t hurry love,” he said tenderly. “It means we must let love grow naturally. To surrender — yes, surrender, my brothers — to love’s pace. For that is the only way to truly love our sisters in a Gawdly way.”

  The women let out a tremendous mmm-hmmm.

  “So Love told his friend that the only way God would want us to love is in a slow, tender — that’s right! — tender way that surrenders to love, that doth not arouse love until it so desires....”

  “So, SO tender!”

  “. . . And Love told his brother, ‘While you’re in the kitchen, stirring up love, adding spices, you got to let that love cook at its own pace. Cuz that’s the only way to get some tender food, ya got to let the slow heat have at it for a good, long while!’ Can Love get just one witness?”

  “Bring us through, Daddy!”

  “So you’re laying there in your... kitchen,” he said, winning laughs. “And you’re there, stripped of society’s shields and you’re admiring some of God’s sublime handiwork....”

  “OH YES!” a man cried out from the back.

  “. . . And you’re letting things simmer and bubble and it’s getting hot but love’s still not done cooking and you’re trying to keep from arousing love until it so desires....So what you gon do?”

  “Teach em how to cook, Daddy!”

  “Follow me, now....”

  “We right behind ya!”

  “. . . Love knows the way!”

  “Oh Lord, Love does!”

  “. . . Patience...my brothers and beloved sisters, patience... is Gawdly!” Daddy Love cried out. “So, watch Love now: linger,” he said softly, “before you love.” The women murmured their assent. “The Good Book tell us, ‘For love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.’ Now that’s true, but love won’t burn like blazing fire if you don’t handle it properly.
Linger before you love!” And then, his mammoth form shaking like a riot, Daddy Love thundered, “BE NOT MICROWAVERS, MY SONS, BE OPEN-FLAME GRILLERS! Linger before you love! My God wants his Heaven filled with the sort of love barbequers who LET THE COALS ROAST AND THE FLAMES LICK and wait until the sweetest and highest and most uncon troll able of feminine moans has been extracted and then say unto themselves, I HAVE JUST... GOTTEN... STARTED!” Love shot his arms above his head as though he had scored a miraculous touchdown and the women broke into ecstatic screams and hysterical dances because they knew the coming week would be a good one and they began celebrating right away, halting the sermon for ten long, loud minutes.

  “I can feel the dungeon shaking!” Daddy Love said with a broad smile as they finally quieted. A man in the third row smiled sweetly at his wife and relocked his fingers within hers. “I can feel them chains a-falling clean off!” Laughter sprinkled through. “But Love’s got more. Stay with me!”