Faith and the Good Thing Read online

  Her accusation so angered the Swamp Woman that she spat upon the floor. The fluid, landing at Faith’s foot, burst into black flames. Dark tears fell from the werewitch’s eyes. “It was lost to Kujichagulia, girlie, not to Imani. Not to me! Did Plato lie when he told Phaedrus that love was a god, and then denied that very same thing before all those folks in the Symposium? Dialectics don’t hold to no single truth, child; it reaches out for the Good Thing, affirming and negating itself until the Good Thing’s regained.”

  Faith held her breath; her words hissed through her teeth. “Did Kujichagulia—did he or did he not find the Good Thing, and then come to ruin?”

  Sheepishly the Swamp Woman smiled. “Yes!” She cackled and danced across the room to a corner. There, as Faith simmered with rage, she rifled a box of old rags and produced a doll. “I made this mojo for ya,” she said. “Figured ya might—”

  “I don’t want it. I don’t want to see any more of your tricks and Bourbon Street shenanigans ever again!” The doll, Faith realized, was a nearly perfect likeness of Alpha Omega Jones. It even had a tattoo circling its neck. “I just want the truth about the Good Thing.”

  The Swamp Woman dropped the doll onto her bench and narrowed her eyes. Smirking. “The logical truth?”

  “Yes,” Faith said wearily.

  “Got ya ’gain!” the werewitch squealed. “There’s Aristotelian logic, transcendental logic, phenomenological logic, dialectical-materialist logic, symbolic logic, instrumentalist logic—”

  “No!” Faith screamed. She balled her fists and, with them, hit her head.

  “Then,” the Swamp Woman said craftily, “ya wants the nonlogical truth, eh?”

  Exhausted, Faith supported herself by leaning against the workbench, sick deep inside her stomach. “Why are you playing with me? Haven’t I suffered enough already?”

  “Girlie, ya ain’t suffered nothin’ until ya suffer the truth. But I reckon you’re ready for it now. You’re ’bout done with the path of the pristine young innocent, ain’t ya?”

  Faith could not answer. She wanted to sleep away the sound of all these confusing words. She looked up toward the Swamp Woman and received a shock she was not, nor could ever be, prepared for. Before her eyes the werewitch proceeded to remove her boil-ravaged skin. She snared two of her sharpest talons in a fold at the nape of her neck, lifted off her face like a cowl, and slipped from the rest as though it were long underwear.

  Faith swallowed. “God!”

  “Glad you mentioned that,” the Swamp Woman said. “’Cause, like God, the Good Thing’s governed by what’s called the Docta Ignorantia—that is, knowin’ it always implies negativity, ’cause it’s beyond, in the final analysis, everyday understanding.” Skinless, and vigorously scratching her dark liver and spleen, the Swamp Woman lurched across the room to a hook near the door. There she hung her skin and smoothed it out, removing flecks of lint, here and there, from its surface. Her naked white skull turned to Faith and laughed. “Did I tell ya that Kujichagulia left that gal Imani, left me that is, and started climbin’ Mount Kilimanjaro, the elements arisin’ to bring him down, and all that?”

  Unable to look directly at the werewitch, and still trying to swallow, Faith lowered herself onto the nearby pallet bed. Said, “Uhh, huhn. . . .”

  “Well, that’s true. Must be. That’s the way I always tell it. It seems to me that after Kujichagulia died in them mountains things got real hard for Imani. She managed to raise her kids and keep life and limb goin’ until they was all grown up, outta her hut, and married. And when that happened, she decided to climb that mountain herself, to die beside her husband (he was confused—lemme tell ya!—but I loved that fool). That night she was climbin’ was as dark as All Hallow’s Eve, child, and it took a long, long time for her to climb it, ’cause she was old, almost crippled, and just a li’l outta her mind. But she kept right on steppin’, just like we all got to do, and on a moonless winter night she got there. Under her bare feet were Kujichagulia’s dry bleached bones. In the air was thunder, and right behind that—lightning. She thought the Good Thing was gone for good, girlie, hidden by them wrathful thick-necked gods. But they took pity on this child. Her eyes were innocent, her heart—bless her soul—never once questioned the good things like Kujichagulia had (I ain’t braggin’ now, that’s why I was called Imani). So the gods dropped down a lightning bolt that lit up the whole sky like the aurora borealis, honey—it twisted around in the shape of the Sign of Solomon and spelled out the words In This Sign Conjure.

  “’Cause that’s about the best way there is for callin’ up the Good Thing: conjurin’. Imani took only one path, child. She became a midwife to mystery, y’see? Her hair was as white as hoarfrost, and she started conjurin’ day and night, invokin’ spirits from sweet-gum trees, dredgin’ up demons from the most common things of all. You was like Kujichagulia, girlie, the kind of child who’d forgotten how to play, to sing, and trembled in the darkness instead of enterin’ into it; you clung desperately with both arms to the belief in certainty, and screamed at the wind, the shadows—you were the child whose throat is dry when everyone else’s is filled with song. Y’see, the worst part of restlessness and questionin’ is not insecurity and fear, but just this: insensitivity; the worst part of insensitivity is not torpidity, but loneliness; and the worst part of loneliness is not the lack of friends, but the lack of intimacy with the world, the lack of unity. You was born in the winter of the Age of Reason—an ugly age (or so it is and seems to me), filled with disillusion, rife with conflictin’ theories that bend and fold and mutilate men like a computer card to explain them completely and, through all that, deny their freedom to create. To conjure. You started out as close to the world as the baby is to its momma’s tit, you were it, you felt oceanic feelings so deep they sometimes made you want to cry but, by and by, you got smart. Sho! The tit wasn’t you, after all. Was it, girlie?”

  “I guess not.” Faith shook her head to clear it. “But—”

  “Quiet! I’m conjurin’!” the Swamp Woman shouted. “And you looked a li’l bit further, and saw that nothin’ in the inner or outer world was you; it was all outside of you, separated by space and time and primary qualities and Ding-an-sichs and—hah! It made you wonder what you were, didn’t it? Don’t answer! Yes! Instead of bein’ one with every object, every object became a thing apart from ya—ya even became a thing to y’self! So ya broke your bonds with the world when ya got smart. That’s part of bein’smart, ain’t it? Object-ivity: standin’back away from the world to check it out. Don’t answer! It’s true: ya broke ’em, sweetheart, ’n ya couldn’t live a good life no more until ya found out what the universe was doing. Sho! That made sense—find out what the universe was doin’, then get in harmony with it. Yes, yes! But how? A pineal gland? The negation of the negation? Faith? Christ on the Cross? Back to Nature? How, girlie?”

  Faith cringed. The Swamp Woman was making it appear hopeless. “I don’t know! You’re right, you do have to know what the Good Thing is before you can get right with it—”

  “Nonsense!” The werewitch cackled. “Ya think too damned much!” She sneered, poking her pointed tongue through the left side of her skull. “The Good Thing. What’s that? Hee hee. I’ll tell ya: when the struggle with synthetic systems has been fought out and the battle seemin’ly won, when the mind has categorized animals, vegetables, minerals, and all the rest, when the levels of reality have all been systematized, taxonimized, and bled dry in the antiseptic laboratories of a reason loosed from all restraint, then and only then does the mind grow weary of system—it grows blank and cool and clear and capable of conjurin’ not only what the categories and tables of judgment can’t contain, but also that in which the heart of men, beasts, and birds revel: love.”

  “The Good Things’s love?” Faith cried.

  “Don’t pin me down!” the werewitch wailed. “If you ask me ’gain, I’ll say it’s hate. Ask me thrice, and I’ll say it’s neither, ’cause the Good Thing’s spontane
ous; it’s absolutely nothin’, but particularly it’s everythin’.”

  Faith did not take her gaze from the wooden floor. “So all I did was for nothing?”

  “Nothin’?” The Swamp Woman roared. “You mean I’ve been wastin’ my breath? Wasn’t that story ’bout Kujichagulia good?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And wasn’t it—well, you know the rest, girlie. I see I can’t explain nothin’ to ya when ya wants demonstration.” She snickered, “Damn fool empiricist,” and pointed behind Faith to the window. “Just look outside.”

  Confused, Faith pulled back the thin curtain to the window (it was, she realized, made of skin—great strips sewn together with human hair). Light burst in thin blue beams that caused her to blink, opening and closing her eyes quickly until she could see. It was dawn, a time that had always taken hold of something in her blood; dawn, a new beginning; dawn, a moment both still and serene, suggesting that her long night of questioning had been quite unreal. Around the shanty, coming in waves from the swamp, was the sustained orchestration of songbirds: hooting, cooing, chirping, squawking, and crying on the unseen undercurrent of the wind. There rang out a melody from a wren, and somewhere in the wild bush a bullfrog answered; and with each call another came, louder, competitively as if the birds and bullfrogs, wise as philosophers in their own way, were in a contest to celebrate the coming of day when dull mankind slept and only the sensuous, long-suffering trees could hear. She saw an elm towering over the other trees in the distance, waving its highest branches in the breeze. Todd Cross. She was certain. Certain of everything. Certain the air was cool and scented with the clean smell of dew. Certain the wind pushed on, and the birds swung into the empty sky like sleek arrows, no destination, no duty, no destiny in mind. Daylight came, their sweet lays drifted away. . . .

  “Hee hee! Systematize that!” The Swamp Woman laughed. “It makes ya feel stupid, don’t it?” Then she was dead serious. “Who says ya gotta understand the universe to love, to conjure it, girlie?” As ghastly as a corpse freshly unearthed from its crypt, the werewitch returned to the box from which she’d taken the mojo of Alpha Omega Jones. Grumbled: “On every path you take you’ll find a li’l bit of the Good Thing and vexations as well. Try my path, why don’t ya?”

  Faith, for the first time, understood.

  The Swamp Woman removed a fresh suit of skin from the box. She slipped it on, tugging at its loose seams, then zipped up the back. Faith held her breath: the hair on the suit was formed around its head in a full mushrooming natural; the skin was creamy and the color of caramel, the eyes in the head were slightly asymmetrical, and the breasts—small.

  “Ya feed the manticore out back for me,” the Swamp Woman said, “and don’t let the cockatrice outta its cage.” A devilish glint exploded in her dark eyes. “I ain’t never been a foolish young girl, ain’t never tasted the Good Thing in quite that way.” She started toward the door, young again, smiling, and emerged into the glare and promise of day.

  “Watch out for Arnold Tippis,” Faith called. But the werewitch was gone. Faith almost knew what she would encounter, could predict it, because she’d been there herself. That awareness made her feel like an oracle. It convinced her that prescience was not so much a gift of magic as it was the product of experience. Flipping a dry toadstone over in her palm, she wondered if other magical feats were also at her command. The only way to know would be to start a new path. To step into the Swamp Woman’s abandoned skin. Faith left the toadstone on the workbench and walked to the boil-marked skin by the door; she examined the manufacturer’s label sewn on the inside of the collar (Elysium) and, finally, slipped it on.

  Nothing immediately came of that.

  The skin fit perfectly around her body, but was slack at her fingers like an oversized glove. The fingertips swung empty at her sides; the rest was as tight as hosiery. And creeping through her mind were the most marvelous thoughts: formulas for elixirs and potions flashed before her single eye, and faraway she heard the moaning of dead spirits on the wind, the chilling mi, fa, mi of the earth. She knew, in an intuitive, immediate way freighted with love and hate and, somehow, neither, whether Plato was really Socrates; how to concoct love potions from lion powder; how the pineal gland linked res extensae and res cogitantes but left the problem of mind-body dualism unresolved; the cryptic runes for raising the dead and parting waves; and the meaning of pre- and pronormative ethics on the methodeutic measure of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Her mouth pushed forward with glee:

  “Hee hee!”

  She’d suffered several roles: the innocent, the whore, the housewife. And now, the werewitch herself. There would be others. There had to be. She was more than any one path, or the total of them all. She would glean from each its store of the Good Thing, would conjure it up: the enthusiasm and naïveté of youth, the self-sacrifice of the streetwalker, and the love that even the most miserable housewife received—exhausting them, moving on to another path, and another. That was life, children. And when she’d traveled the existing paths, she would create a new, untrodden one. That was progress. If she discovered X number of paths and traveled them all, then she, before she died, would leave X-plus-1. That was responsibility: factoring the possible number of paths to the Good Thing, but not becoming fixed, or held to those paths in her history, or the history of the race. Moving always on . . .

  Faith stopped, still as a mummy, her ears straining at a slushing sound from the swamps. Snorting, she yanked back the tarpaulin to a window and saw two timorous barefoot children crossing the bridge. She giggled, rushed to the machine in the corner, and shouted, “Faugh!” The Gila monster awoke running in place on its treadmill (what good things lie in a serpent’s way of being-in-the-world? Someday she would have to try that one, too). The shanty filled with mournful music. Quickly she reshaped her nose into a sharp cone and seated herself cross-legged on the floor. She decided to tell them first about Aristotle’s Illusion (cross your first and second fingers on one hand, then rub a pencil between them; it’ll feel like two pencils, not one, scraping your skin), and then the tale about Stackalee’s great battle with Lucifer in West Hell. It made her laugh:

  “Hee hee!”

  But she was ready, children, because there always was and always will be an old Swamp Woman cackling and conjuring in the bogs (someday it might just be you), just like there’ll always be the Good Thing for folks willing to hear and hunt for it. But you’ve got to believe in it. Don’t be interrupting to ask if the tale is true.

  Was it Good?

  Was it Beautiful?

  All right.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHARLES JOHNSON was the first black American male since Ralph Ellison to win the National Book Award for fiction, which he received for Middle Passage. His fiction has been much anthologized, and he was named in a survey conducted by the University of Southern California as one of the ten best short-story writers in America. A widely published literary critic, philosopher, cartoonist, essayist, screenwriter, and lecturer, he is one of twelve African American authors honored in an international stamp series celebrating great writers of the twentieth century. Johnson’s alma mater, Southern Illinois University, administers the Charles Johnson Award for Fiction and Poetry, a nationwide competition inaugurated in 1994 for college students. He is currently the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle.

  ALSO BY CHARLES JOHNSON

  FICTION

  Soulcatcher and Other Stories

  Dreamer

  Middle Passage

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Oxherding Tale

  Faith and the Good Thing

  NONFICTION

  Black Men Speaking

  (coedited with John McCluskey, Jr.)

  Africans in America

  (coauthored with Patricia Smith)

  King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

  (coauthored with Bob Adelman)

  I Call
Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson

  (edited by Dr. Rudolph Byrd)

  PHILOSOPHY

  Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970

  DRAWINGS

  Half-Past Nation Time

  Black Humor

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1974 by Charles Johnson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner Paperback Fiction Edition 2001

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-7432-1250-9

  0-7432-1254-1 (Pbk)

  ISBN: 978-0-7432-1534-3 (eBook)