October 31. The seasons have come full cycle and the creatures have returned to Court Street. The madness is mild for the night is still young. As it ages the pagans will rage on the paved street. Many of them are still in the process of transforming themselves, stealing identities from American cultural and fictional icons. Fueling their bodies with the spirits that will give them pluck to be as free-spirited as the occasion warrants.
Quite a few of the pagans are here already. Grown men in diapers are strutting about. They mingle with cowgirls and pirate wenches in miniskirts. Giant spoons dance with giant forks. The uninspired superheroes are obviously the staple of the parade. They were here in great numbers last year — Superman, Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, Batman and the rest. They are here again this year — the last resort for a lazy pagan who can’t think of original ideas for the night.
This is a day of saints, although the pagans don’t recognize the fact. None of the saints with whom I aspired to socialize at the Durham Cathedral will be seen here tonight. No Venerable Bede. No St. Cuthbert. This is also the day of the disembodied spirits of those who died last year. They come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. That is their only chance of an afterlife. The Court Street creatures, of course, do not have in their minds the Celtic roots of the feast as they prance around, even though their ghoulishness is reminiscent of the original Celts. It was a look that was meant to frighten the disembodied spirits away so that they fail to take possession of any living man, woman or child.
I follow Orpah. We elbow our way through the crowds. She looks sensual in a nun’s habit — black flowing gown, white collar, black veil with white headpiece, rubber sandals, a rosary for a belt. She bought it especially for the occasion at an East State Street mall. I, on the other hand, am in my regular mourning costume.
We stop to watch a man frying on the street. His whole body is made of rashers of bacon. He is squirming as a girl made of deep yellow yolk and white albumen is dancing around him. She has red horns on her head; she is deviled egg. Orpah is enjoying this bacon and egg show and she is laughing like there is no tomorrow. I have never seen Orpah so carefree.
As we move on I am struck by the absence of politicians this year. No Dick Cheney. No Donald Rumsfeld. No George W. Bush. No Jimmy Carter. Unless they will invade the parade later in the night. But the usual enemies in Arab garb are here. And an odd renegade with an unpalatable statement about Guantánamo Bay: Charge or Release Detainees. The slogan sounds very familiar. It takes me back to years ago. Protesters used to chant it during the apartheid years of detention-without-trial in South Africa. During those sad times in the history of that country politicians said their normal laws of due process could not deal with terrorism. It was therefore necessary to do away with the niceties of habeas corpus. Exactly as they are saying here. The state was under threat, the apartheid government said, the country was at war. Civil liberties were undermined, and white citizens accepted that it was for their protection. Until they woke up one day and found that they had been living a lie. Even their own liberties as citizens had been eroded. Not only the enemy’s. I have gone back in time. Things have come full cycle. Lessons have been learned well.
Besides the Guantánamo Bay man I do not see as many political statements as I saw at the last parade, which was in an election year — except for the bejeweled Billionaires for Bush whose messages on their placards are Bring the Troops Back Home and No Billionaire Left Behind.
Instead of hard-core politics we are entertained by a fight between a white cock and a yellow chicken, Milli Vanilli dancing down the street, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz cuddling with Raggedy Ann and a bluegrass band at the corner of Court and Washington Streets.
We stop here for a while. I wish Orpah had brought her sitar with her. She would liven up things with this very dull band. She doesn’t seem to think it is dull though. She is giggling and softly singing along. She has been giggling a lot today. Since we left Kilvert this morning. She is excited like a little girl. The journey we are about to undertake fills her with joy. It fills me with joy too. Especially because she is part of the journey.
Days of blissful mourning await us.
We spent the better part of September perfecting our lamentations — our plan was to leave early in October in search of the Virginia mourners. I did not know who they were, nor where in Virginia they were located. The sciolist didn’t know either. All he had were rumors of their existence. Orpah and I talked about them. We imagined what they did and romanticized them. We were rehearsing for Virginia. After that we would go where the mourning wind blew us.
On a typical day we woke up at dawn and Orpah went back to her house for her ablutions. I took a shower in our RV. I call it “our RV” because Orpah had practically moved in with me. But she preferred a bath so she went to her house for that. After about two hours or so she came back all spruced up, bejeweled in her colorful plastic and smelling of some cheap perfume. After a quick breakfast of cereal we set off to Niall Quigley’s grave for our daily dose of mourning.
Orpah took charge and choreographed our routine. She decreed that we should have tattoos of teardrops on our cheeks. One drop for me would suffice, but for her she needed two drops on each cheek since she had not mastered the art of shedding floods of tears at will. We went to a tattoo parlor in Athens especially for this.
Orpah saw herself as the manager and artistic director of this whole enterprise. She went through the opening sequences of our mourning many times over. As part of the opening routine she appropriated Obed’s speech — the one he made at the funeral of Sister Naomi’s boy about the ineptness of human beings in handling grief and the necessity of professional mourning in bringing back aplomb and dignity to the art of grieving.
I was well aware that in our itinerant mourning people would resist at first. But soon they would be taken in by the novelty of it all, and by the swooping performances that Orpah was choreographing. After all, I was able to mourn professionally in South Africa where the philosophy of ubuntu, which espoused the universal bond of sharing that connected all humanity, would have looked askance at anyone who was demanding payment for mourning. I made a good living from the bountiful deaths of South Africa because of that novelty factor. None of the ethnic groups there ever had professional mourners in their culture, for that would have been against the very notions of ubuntu, where in its practice you hoe your neighbor’s field for no pay because next time the neighbor will hoe your field for no pay. It is like that in death as welclass="underline" I mourn for my neighbor because when I die my neighbor will mourn for me. Yet when I came and introduced professional mourning some people took it up with gusto. My presence at a funeral became a status symbol. Of course there were those who saw me as a nuisance and drove me away from their funerals and pelted me out of the cemeteries with dead wreaths from neighboring graves. This happened a lot with funerals of the wealthy. The poor often welcomed me, shared their mourning and their food and paid me generously at the end.
It will be the same when we tour the country with Orpah mourning the deaths of Americans.
Although Orpah was eager to test our routine at live funerals right away, I thought it was important for us to search for other mourners and learn a few tricks that we could incorporate into our own mourning. Hooking up with other mourners would also give us legitimacy in the communities.
“Where you gonna find other mourners?” Orpah asked. “There ain’t no professional mourners in America.”