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USEFULNESS. But the sun has its uses, as any fool knows,
said Seaman. From up close it's hell, but from far away you'd have to be a
vampire not to see how useful it is, how beautiful. Then he began to talk about
things that were useful back in the day, things once generally appreciated but
now distrusted instead, like smiles. In the fifties, for example, he said, a
smile opened doors for you. I don't know if it could get you places, but it
could definitely open doors. Now nobody trusts a smile. Before, if you were a
salesman and you went in somewhere, you'd better have a big smile on your face.
It was the same thing no matter whether you were a waiter or a businessman, a
secretary, a doctor, a scriptwriter, a gardener. The only folks who never
smiled were cops and prison guards. That hasn't changed. But everybody else,
they all did their best to smile. It was a golden age for dentists in
America
. Black
folks, of course, were always smiling. White folks smiled. Asian folks.
Hispanic folks. Now, as we know, our worst enemy might be hiding behind a
smile. Or to put it another way, we don't trust anybody, least of all people
who smile, since we know they want something from us. Still, American
television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these
people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they're good people,
that they'd never hurt a fly? No again. The truth is they don't want anything
from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is
all they ask for in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that's
all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if
they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of
fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be
worshipped. When I was little, said Seaman, I don't remember children wearing
braces. Today I've hardly met a child who doesn't wear them. Useless things are
forced upon us, and it isn't because they improve our quality of life but
because they're the fashion or markers of class, and fashionable people and
high-class people require admiration and worship. Naturally, fashions don't
last, one year, four at most, and then they pass through every stage of decay.
But markers of class rot only when the corpse that was tagged with them rots.
Then he began to talk about useful things the body needs. First, a balanced
diet. I see lots of fat people in this church, he said. I suspect few of you
eat green vegetables. Maybe now is the time for a recipe. The name of the
recipe is: Brussels Sprouts with Lemon. Take note, please. Four servings calls
for: two pounds of brussels sprouts, juice and zest of one lemon, one onion,
one sprig of parsley, three tablespoons of butter, black pepper, and salt. You
make it like so. One: Clean sprouts well and remove outer leaves. Finely chop
onion and parsley. Two: In a pot of salted boiling water, cook sprouts for
twenty minutes, or until tender. Then drain well and set aside. Three: Melt
butter in frying pan and lightly saute onion, add zest and juice of lemon and
salt and pepper to taste. Four: Add brussels sprouts, toss with sauce, reheat
for a few minutes, sprinkle with parsley, and serve with lemon wedges on the
side. So good you'll be licking your fingers, said Seaman. No cholesterol, good
for the liver, good for the blood pressure, very healthy. Then he dictated
recipes for Endive and Shrimp Salad and Broccoli Salad and then he said that
man couldn't live on healthy food alone. You have to read books, he said. Not
watch so much TV. The experts say TV doesn't hurt the eyes. I'm not so sure. It
won't do your eyes any good, and cell phones are still a mystery. Maybe they
cause cancer, as some scientists say. I'm not saying they do or they don't, but
there you have it. What I'm saying is, you have to read books. The preacher
knows I'm telling you the truth. Read books by black writers. But don't stop
there. This is my real contribution tonight.
Reading
is never a waste of time. I read in
jail. That's where I started to read. I read a lot. I went through books like
they were barbecue. In prison they turn the lights out early. You get in bed
and hear sounds. Footsteps. People yelling. As if instead of being in
California
, the prison was
inside the planet Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. You feel cold and hot
at the same time and that's a clear sign you're lonely or sick. You try to
think about other things, sure, nice things, but sometimes you just can't do
it. Sometimes a guard at the nearest desk turns on a lamp and light from that
lamp shines through the bars of your cell. This happened to me any number of
times. The light from
a
lamp set in the wrong place, or from the
fluorescent bulbs in the corridor above or the next corridor over. Then I would
pick up my book and hold it in the light and get to reading. It wasn't easy,
because the letters and the paragraphs seemed frenzied or spooked in that
unpredictable, underground world. But I read and read anyway, sometimes so fast
that even I was surprised, and sometimes very slowly, as if each sentence or
word were something good for my whole body, not just my brain. And I could read
like that for hours, not caring whether I was tired and not dwelling on the
inarguable fact that I was in prison because I had stood up for my brothers,
most of whom couldn't care less whether I rotted or not. I knew I was doing
something useful. That was all that counted. I was doing something useful as
the guards marched back and forth or greeted each other at the change of shift
with friendly words that sounded like obscenities to my ear and that, thinking
about it now, might actually have been obscene. I was doing something useful.
Something useful no matter how you look at it. Reading is like thinking, like
praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening
to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the
view, like taking a walk on the beach. And you, who are so kind, now you must
be asking: what did you read, Barry? I read everything. But I especially
remember a certain book I read at one of the most desperate moments of my life
and it brought me peace again. What book do I mean? What book do I mean? Well,
it was a book called
An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire,
and
I promise you that is one useful book, or at least it was of great use to me.

That
night, after he dropped Seaman off at home, Fate slept at the hotel where the
magazine had booked him a room from
New
York
. The receptionist told him that he'd been
expected the day before and handed him a message from his editor asking how
everything had gone. He called the magazine from his room, knowing no one would
be there, and left a message vaguely explaining his meeting with the old man.

He
showered and got in bed. He turned on the TV, looking for porn. He found a
movie in which a German woman was making love with two black men. The German
woman was speaking German and so were the black men. Were there black people in
Germany
,
too? he wondered. Then he got bored and switched to a free channel. He saw part
of a trashy show on which a hugely fat woman in her early forties had to sit
and listen to her husband, a hugely fat man in his midthirties, and her
husband's new girlfriend, a slightly less fat woman in her early thirties,
insult her. The man, he thought, was clearly a faggot. The show was shot in
Florida
. Everyone was in
short sleeves, except for the host, who was wearing a white blazer, khaki
pants, a gray-green shirt, and an ivory tie. At moments, the host looked
uncomfortable. The fat man gestured and bobbed like a rapper, egged on by his
slightly less fat girlfriend. The fat man's wife, meanwhile, was quiet, gazing
at the audience until, without a word, she started to cry.

This
must be the end, thought Fate. But the show or this segment of the show didn't
end there. At the sight of his wife in tears, the fat man stepped up his verbal
attack. Among the things he called her Fate thought he heard the word
fat.
He
also told her that he wasn't going to let her keep ruining his life. I don't
belong to you, he said. His slightly less fat girlfriend said: he doesn't
belong to you, why don't you get that through your head? After a while, the
seated woman reacted. She got up and said she'd heard enough. She didn't say it
to her husband or to her husband's girlfriend but directly to the host. He told
her to pull herself together and take her turn saying what she needed to say. I
was tricked into coming on this show, said the woman, still in tears. No one's
tricked into coming here, said the host. Don't be a coward, listen to what he
has to say to you, said the fat man's girlfriend. Listen to what I have to say
to you, said the fat man, circling her. The woman raised her hand to fend him off
and left the set. The girlfriend took a seat. After a while, the fat man sat
down, too. The host, who was sitting in the audience, asked the fat man what he
did for a living. I'm unemployed now, but I used to be a security guard, he
said. Fate changed the channel. He took a little bottle of Tennessee Bull
bourbon from the minibar. After the first swallow he felt like throwing up. He
put the cap back on the bottle and returned it to the minibar. After a while he
fell asleep with the TV on.

While Fate was sleeping, there was a report on an American
who had disappeared in Santa Teresa, in the state of
Sonora
in the north of
Mexico
.
The reporter, Dick Medina, was a Chicano, and he talked about the long list of
women killed in Santa Teresa, many of whom ended up in the common grave at the
cemetery because no one claimed their bodies.
Medina
was talking in the desert. Behind him
was a highway and off in the distance was a rise that
Medina
gestured toward at some point in the broadcast, saying it was
Arizona
. The wind ruffled the reporter's
smooth black hair. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Then came a shot of
some assembly plants and
Medina
's
voice-over saying that unemployment was almost nonexistent along that stretch
of the border. People standing in line on a narrow sidewalk. Pickup trucks
covered in a fine dust the brown color of baby shit. Hollows in the ground,
like World War I bomb craters, that gradually gave way to dumping sites. The
smiling face of some kid who couldn't have been more than twenty, thin and
dark-skinned, with prominent cheekbones, whom Medina identified in a voice-over
as a
pollero
or
coyote
or person who leads illegal immigrants
over the border.
Medina
said a name. The name of a girl. Then there was a shot of the streets of an
Arizona
town where the
girl was from. Houses with scorched yards and dirty silver-colored chicken-wire
fences. The sad face of the mother. Exhausted with crying. The face of the
father, a tall man with broad shoulders who stared into the camera saying
nothing. Behind the two of them were the shadowy figures of three teenage
girls. Our other three daughters, said the mother in accented English. The
three girls, the oldest no more than fifteen, went running into the dark of the
house.

As this report was showing on TV, Fate dreamed of a man
he'd written a story about, the first story he'd had published in
Black
Dawn,
after three other pieces were rejected. He was an old black man, much
older than Seaman, who lived in
Brooklyn
and
was a member of the Communist Party. When Fate met him there wasn't a single
Communist left in
Brooklyn
, but the man was
keeping his cell operative. What was his name? Antonio Ulises Jones, although
the kids in the neighborhood called him Scottsboro Boy. They also called him
Old Freak or Bones or Skin, but they usually called him Scottsboro Boy, among
other reasons because Antonio Jones often talked about what had happened in
Scottsboro, about the Scottsboro trials, about the blacks who were almost
lynched in Scottsboro, people no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood remembered.

When
Fate met him, purely by chance, Antonio Jones must have been eighty years old
and he lived in a two-room apartment in one of the poorest parts of
Brooklyn
. In the living room there were a table and more
than fifteen chairs, those old folding wooden bar stools with long legs and low
backs. On the wall there was a photograph of a huge man, well over six feet
tall, dressed like a worker of the period, receiving a diploma from a boy who
looked straight into the camera and smiled, showing perfect, gleaming white
teeth. The face of the giant worker, in its way, also resembled a child's face.

"That's
me," Antonio Jones told Fate the first time Fate visited him, "and
the big man is Robert Martillo Smith, a
Brooklyn
city maintenance worker, a specialist at going down into the sewers and
wrestling with thirty-foot alligators."

In
the three conversations they had, Fate asked Jones many questions, some
intended to prick the old man's conscience. He asked about Stalin, and Antonio
Jones answered that Stalin was a son of a bitch. He asked about Lenin, and
Antonio Jones answered that Lenin was a son of a bitch. He asked about Marx,
and Antonio Jones said now he was talking, that was where he should have
started: Marx was a wonderful man. After that, Antonio Jones began to speak of
Marx in glowing terms. There was only one thing he didn't like about Marx: his
temper. This he blamed on poverty, because according to Jones, poverty didn't
cause only illness and resentment, it caused bad temper. Fate's next question
was what he thought about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resulting
collapse of the real-world Socialist regimes. It was foreseeable, I predicted
it ten years before it happened, was Antonio Jones's response. Then, out of the
blue, he began to sing the "Internationale." He opened the window and
in a deep voice that took Fate by surprise, he intoned the first few lines:
Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise, you wretched of the earth! When he
had finished singing he asked Fate whether it didn't strike him as an anthem
made especially for black people. I don't know, said Fate, I never thought of
it that way. Later, Jones gave him an off-the-cuff accounting of the Communists
of Brooklyn. During World War II, there were more than a thousand. After the
war, the number rose to thirteen hundred. At the start of McCarthyism, there
were only about seven hundred, and when it ended there were scarcely two
hundred Communists in
Brooklyn
. In the sixties
there were just half as many and by the seventies there were no more than
thirty Communists scattered in five hardy cells. At the end of the seventies,
there were ten left. By the beginning of the eighties, there were only four.
During the eighties, two of the four who were left died of cancer and one
vanished without saying anything to anyone. Maybe he just went on a trip and
died on the way there or the way back, mused Antonio Jones. Whatever it was, he
never showed up again, not at headquarters or at his apartment or at the bars
where he was a regular. Maybe he went to live with his daughter in
Florida
. He was Jewish
and he had a daughter there. The fact of the matter is that by 1987 there was
only one left. And here I still am, he said. Why? asked Fate. Antonio Jones
hesitated for a few seconds, considering his answer. Then he looked Fate in the
eye and said: