The Big Gold Dream Read online

  the big gold dream

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  1

  “FAITH IS A ROCK! It’s like a solid gold dream!”

  The voice of the Sweet Prophet Brown issued from the amplifiers atop a sound truck and reverberated from the shabby brick faces of the tenement houses flanking 117th Street.

  “Amen!” Alberta Wright said fervently.

  Her big brown cowlike eyes cast a look of adoration across the gleaming white sea of kneeling worshipers upon Sweet Prophet’s exalted black face. She felt as though he were addressing her personally, although she was only one of six hundred white-robed converts kneeling in the noonday sun on the burning hot asphalt.

  “On this dream every church in all the world is built,” Sweet Prophet continued lyrically.

  A moaning fervor passed over the kneeling figures like a cool breeze. Spectators and converts alike were gripped, in dead seriousness, as though cast under a spell.

  Black, brown and yellow people packed the sidewalks all the way from Seventh Avenue to Lenox Avenue. They crowded into the tenement windows, jammed the smelly doorways, clung to the sides of electric light poles and stood on garbage cans to watch the performance of this fabulous man.

  Sweating foot cops in wet clinging shirts and mounted cops on lathered horses surrounded Sweet Prophet’s throne to keep back the mob. The street had been closed off at both ends by a police barrier. Sweet Prophet sat on a throne of red roses on a flower-draped float at one end of the block and spoke into a microphone connected to a sound truck behind him. Over his head was a sunshade of gold tinsel made in the shape of a halo. About his feet was a circle of little black girls dressed as angels.

  He threw back his head and said, in a voice of indubitable sincerity, “Faith is so powerful it will turn this dirty black pavement into gleaming gold.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Alberta said aloud.

  Her hand closed about Sugar Stonewall’s fingers like a steel vice. Dressed in a wrinkled rayon sports ensemble, he knelt on the pavement beside her. She had insisted that he be near her in this great hour of triumphs even though he had not been converted. But she did not look at him; her eyes were closed. Tears trickled down her smooth brown skin.

  “Put your trust in The Lord,” Sweet Prophet said.

  Suddenly Alberta was on her feet. “I did!” she cried, arms upraised. “I did! I put my trust in Him and He sent me a dream because I had faith.”

  “Kneel down, honey,” Sugar pleaded. “You’re messing up the service.”

  But his plea went unheeded. Alberta was a big, muscular woman with a flat, pretty face, now contorted in ecstasy. Clad in a tight-fitting white maid’s uniform, her long-fingered hands reaching toward the sky, she drew everyone’s attention. Her ecstasy was contagious.

  “Amen!” the converts chorused.

  With the natural-born instinct of a master showman. Sweet Prophet sensed the sympathetic mood. He interrupted his dissertation and said, “Tell us your dream, sister.”

  “I dreamed I was baking three apple pies,” she said. “And when I took them out the oven and set them on the table to cool the crusts busted open like three explosions and the whole kitchen was filled with hundred dollar bills.”

  “My God!” a worshiper exclaimed.

  “Money!” another cried.

  “Money! Money! Money!” others chorused.

  Even Sweet Prophet looked impressed. “And did you have faith, sister?” he asked.

  “I had faith!” Alberta declared.

  “Hush up, honey, for Christ’s sake,” Sugar Stonewall warned.

  But she paid him no attention. “I had faith!” she repeated. “And God didn’t fail me. God has set me free.”

  “Amen!” the worshipers chorused with heartfelt earnestness.

  Upon this note Sweet Prophet stood and raised his hands for silence. His tremendous bulk was impressive in a bright purple robe lined with yellow silk and trimmed with mink. Beneath it he wore a black taffeta suit with white piping and silver buttons. His fingernails, untrimmed since he first claimed to have spoken with God, were more than three inches in length. They curled like strange talons, and were painted different colors. On each finger he wore a diamond ring. His smooth black face with its big buck teeth and popping eyes was ageless; but his long grizzly hair, on which he wore a black silk cap, was snow-white.

  Silence descended over the multitude like night.

  “I now baptize you, who have seen the glory and harkened to the call, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” he said.

  Sugar Stonewall picked up the basket of lunch Alberta had prepared for the celebration afterward and beat it for the sidelines. And not a moment too soon.

  At the completion of Sweet Prophet’s words, fire hoses at each end of the block manned by stalwart deacons, were turned on simultaneously. Stream of water shot high into the air and came down upon white-clad figures in a veritable deluge.

  Drenched by the cold holy water pouring from heaven, the converts, most of whom were women, were seized by uncontrollable ecstasy. They danced and screamed and shouted and moaned, carried away with emotion, caught up in a mass delirium. They sang and prayed, gasped and strangled in a frenzy of exultation.

  A buxom woman cried, “My skin may be black, but my soul ain’t got no color.”

  “Wash me as white as snow,” another screamed, tearing off her dress so that the purifying water could wash her naked skin.

  “I had faith, didn’t I, God?” Alberta chanted, caught up in the mass hysteria, her transfigured face turned toward heaven. Water flowed unnoticed into her nostrils, almost strangling her. “I had faith!” she continued, sputtering. “And you didn’t fail me God.”

  Finally the hoses were turned off, and Sweet Prophet’s church band, arranged about the sound truck, began to play hymns in rock and roll time.

  The drenched, half-drowned converts crowded about the throne of Sweet Prophet to buy bread crumbs, which he took from the pockets of his robe. They paid from one to twenty dollars per crumb.

  Waving the sheafs of greenbacks he held between his long twisted varicolored fingernails, he crooned ardently, “Faith will reduce the Pacific Ocean to a drop of water; it will change the Rocky Mountains into a grain of sand.”

  Other persons from among the multitudes of spectators had come to have their infirmities cured by the touch of Sweet Prophet’s hand. Hands lifted a crippled child. A paralysed woman was wheeled forward on a stretcher. A worried-looking man extended an eviction notice. Numbers slips for that day’s play were brushed against the throne; a pair of dice were surreptitiously rubbed against the hem of Sweet Prophet’s robe.

  Alberta Wright found Sugar Stonewall sitting in a crowded doorway. He gave her the bottle of drinking water from the lunch basket and told her to go and have the prophet bless it.

  She fought her way to the side of the float and held the bottle aloft. Sweet Prophet recognized her, and a look passed between them. He reached forth a long-nailed hand and touched the lip of the bottle.

  “Out of this water will come miracles” he intoned.

  “Amen,” a woman said.

  Alberta looked dazed. As though stunned by the magnitude of her good fortune, she dug a wet $50 bill from her brassiere and thrust it toward Sweet Pro
phet. In return she received a bread crumb the size of a garden pea. She put the crumb into her mouth, looking heavenward, and washed it down with water from the blessed bottle, drinking long and heartily.

  Everyone who looked on the scene was convinced the water had been imbued with healing powers.

  Suddenly Alberta began to leap and dance in a frenzy of exultation. Her big-boned body shook like a nautch dancer. Her face shone with religious fervor.

  “I got Him inside of me!” she cried. “I got God inside of me. I can feel Him inside of my stomach.”

  The spectators were caught between amusement and awe.

  “I can feel Him in my bones!” Alberta screamed. “He’s in my blood.”

  She was shaking in a very delirium of passion.

  “Oh, where is my Sugar?” she cried. “Sugar Stonewall!” she called. “Where are you, Sugar?”

  Suddenly the faces blurred in her vision. The sky took on the colors of the spectrum, as though the world had turned into a rainbow. Her eyes protruded from her head, and sweat beaded all over her face. She began to moan and whimper, as though the ecstasy was more than she could bear; then she staggered and reeled, fell on to the street and lay twitching on the wet pavement, from which steam had begun to rise.

  “She’s having a fit,” someone cried.

  The crowd surged forward. Faces were distorted with excitement. People struggled frantically to get a look.

  Sweet Prophet realized something unusual was happening. With quick presence of mind, he signaled his band to begin playing When The Saints Come Marching In, then beckoned to his top elder, Reverend Jones.

  Elder Jones was on the alert, as always. Dressed In a gold-braided white uniform with colored tassels sprouting from the shoulders, like a rear admiral in the Cuban navy, he ascended the dais and bent toward the throne, cupping a hand to his ear.

  “See what is happening to that woman down there,” Sweet Prophet directed.

  Elder Jones descended to the street and knelt beside Alberta. His expression became grave. The spectators hemmed him in, leaning over his shoulders, and bombarded him with questions.

  “Get back,” he ordered sharply. “Give the sister air. She’s had a trance. She’s gone to talk with God.”

  The spectators backed away with awed expressions. But still he had to conduct his examination with the utmost circumspection. He held Alberta’s hand while furtively seeking her pulse - he didn’t find any. He looked at her nostrils, and there was no movement. Her eyes had rolled back into her head so that only the whites showed. He stroked her face, feeling for the vein in the temple, but her skin was like cooling wax. He would have liked to put a mirror over her mouth, but couldn’t risk alarming the spectators. He was so terrified he could hardly breathe, but he kept repeating, “Glory be to Jesus,” to camouflage his fears. He requested the police to keep back the crowd, then climbed slowly to the throne dais.

  Sweet Prophet gave one look at Elder Jones’ black face, which had dried to the texture of wood ashes, and expected the worst. “Well?” he asked fearfully.

  “She looks dead to me,” Elder Jones reported.

  Sweet Prophet’s already protruding eyes bulged perilously from their sockets. “Great God Almighty!” he whispered in a tone of consternation. “How in God’s name could that happen?”

  Elder Jones’ mouth felt cotton-dry, and the hot air burned inside of his nostrils. “The only way I figure it could have happened is the water you blessed was poisoned,” he said.

  “Lord in Heaven help us,” Sweet Prophet moaned. “How could it be poisoned?”

  “Only God knows,” Elder Jones said.

  Sweet Prophet drew a bottle of smelling salts from somewhere beneath his robe and held it to his nose. He couldn’t afford to faint in this emergency, but his head whirled in a blind panic.

  He pulled a yellow silk handkerchief from his pocket and patted his forehead.

  “Are you certain she’s dead, Elder?” he asked with a faint remnant of hope.

  “I couldn’t find any pulse, and she sure looks dead,” the other affirmed.

  As luck would have it, one of the little angels encircling the prophet’s throne overheard the elder. Her eyes stretched, and her mouth dropped open.

  “Daid? Is she really and truly daid?”

  “Hush, child,” Sweet Prophet said anxiously, but it was too late.

  A spectator had heard her - a big bull-voiced man wearing purple suspenders over a yellow shirt.

  “Great jumping jehoshaphat, she ain’t in no trance!” he shouted in a voice that carried above the marching brass of the band. “She is plumb dead!”

  “Shut up, fool!” Elder Jones shouted. “Do you want to panic everybody?”

  But the damage was done. Word ran through the crowd like quicksilver that the converted woman who had drunk of the holy water had dropped dead.

  Pandemonium broke loose. Emotions already ignited by religious fervor skyrocketed in terror. The excitable people began milling and screaming and fighting one another in animal panic.

  Sweet Prophet knew he had to do something quick to avert catastrophe. It was the most desperate situation he had ever faced in his long and checkered career as a revivalist. It was worse even than the time he had been accused of raping three twelve-year-old girls.

  His whole career hung in the balance. The next twenty minutes would determine the fate of his cult, which had taken him twenty years to build up. Not only his career as an evangelist, but his personal fortune was at stake. He didn’t know what he was worth, but his followers, along with the press, insisted on calling him a multimillionaire. And it had been to his advantage to nurture this legend. His followers referred to his millions with personal pride. They boasted that he was richer than Father Divine, richer than Daddy Grace. Religious people love a winner, he had learned. By that they knew that God had blessed him. He rode around in a royal purple Rolls Royce with a gold plated radiator; in the winter he wore an overcoat made of ranch mink; he wore a diamond ring on each finger and diamonds in his shoes; he maintained a French-type wine cellar stocked with vintage wines and champagnes that he paraded for effect, although he never drank himself. All this might go by the board if it was discovered that the water he had blessed had poisoned one of his converts.

  But he had not gotten where he was by means of a chicken heart. He had the nimble wits of a confidence man and the nerve of a bank robber. His brain worked best under pressure. “Get the bottle, Elder, get the bottle for God’s sake and hide it,” he said, then silenced the brass band with a gesture and spoke fervently into the microphone.

  “Be calm! Be happy! Rejoice! Praise be to God! Let us all kneel in prayer. God is calling the holy ones.”

  The face of a big black man turned ashy gray. “I is getting the hell out of here,” he muttered.

  He pushed through the crowd and started running. Others followed. Terror spread through the assemblage.

  “Stay and pray!” Sweet Prophet warned. “You can’t run away from God.”

  He signaled for the band to begin playing again and raised his big bass voice in song: “Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home … All sing,” he commanded. “I looked over Jordan and what did I see, coming for to carry me home …”

  Hundreds of people broke in wild flight, knocking down women and children and trampling them in the street. But the converts and the religious remained. With their drenched white dresses clinging to oversized bodies, they turned their entranced black faces toward the sky and began to sing their own individual songs.

  “Oh, Jesus, I is coming …”

  “I hear you calling me …”

  “Call me, Jesus, I is ready …”

  A big powerful woman clung to her husband, who was trying desperately to get away. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to go to heaven?” she was screaming.

  Tears streamed down a toothless old woman’s stoic face. “Hurry, God, and take me while I is pure,” she prayed.
r />   “Let us all kneel in prayer,” the voice of Sweet Prophet boomed.

  Automatically, as though under the influence of mass hypnotism, the multitude knelt in the street.

  Sweet prophet began praying over the loud-speakers with a steady, moving fervor:

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; if God doesn’t get you the devil must …”

  No one noticed Sugar Stonewall turn the corner into Seventh Avenue and begin to run. He was a long-limbed, double-jointed man with fallen arches and flat feet. He ran as though his feet were made of beef filets and the streets were paved with broken glass, using his arms, like a windmill to keep him afloat. But he was putting his heart into it. He didn’t know how much he would have to do, nor how much time he would have to do it in.

  2

  THE COLORED CORPORAL IN charge of the street detail rushed to the nearest police telephone box and telephoned the Homicide Bureau.

  Elder Jones, at Sweet Prophet’s direction, dashed to the nearest drugstore and telephoned the police precinct station for an ambulance.

  Some well-meaning person telephoned the fire department.

  Someone else telephoned Harlem’s great undertaker, H. Exodus Clay.

  It was Sunday, and all of them were delayed; but the undertaker’s hearse got there first. The regular driver, Jackson, was attending the First Baptist church with his wife, Imabelle, when the call came in, so the relief driver took it.

  He was a young man without much experience, but eager to make good. Mr. Clay told him to get a death certificate before bringing the body in. When he got to the scene there was no one present to give him the necessary death certificate, and he didn’t have time to wait.

  He grabbed the body, loaded it into the wicker basket, shoved the basket into the hearse and took off with the siren wide open before the police realized what was happening. He gripped the steering wheel in a death grip and stared at the onrushing street with a fanatical look.

  The first place he went to was Harlem Hospital. They told him they couldn’t give him a death certificate, but they would examine the body in the emergency receiving room and telephone the police for him.