Dear Sir,
I entered the army because I come from a patriotic and Catholic family. Imagine, a black patriot and Catholic. Nevertheless, I wanted to be a career soldier. Reality changed many of my views, although I’m still a God-fearing Christian. Your work has helped me and many of the other brothers. We have hardened into one flame. We hold monthly discussions of your books and, in your honor, have started the General Black-Veteran Business Association. We also sell certificates of honorary African American citizenship to white soldiers. We’ve gotten some opposition from a few fire-eating racists who would put a black eye into our efforts. But we endure. After our release from active duty, we plan to start a guerrilla marketing firm. On behalf of the association, I thank you. Find here a picture of me and my beautiful wife, Frieda. It’s our wedding picture. My Frieda and I love your books. We have read every one cover to cover and more than once.
P.S. Keep writing.
Lincoln studied the photograph, a glossy print showing a happy couple in a tropical setting. Emmanuel Lead stood tall and proud in his uniform, his forehead vast over deep-set and smoldering eyes, his black hair back-combed into a thick pomaded wave, his wife calmly beside him, the crown of her head level with his shoulder. Her features were blurred under a hard core of sunshine, her raised white veil the perfect setting for a rare jewel of a face — but empty, revealing nothing. A woman of substantial flesh and skin — wide-hipped and round-busted, enticing him to seize the moment by the throat and wonder if she might fit smoothly into his Monday slot and complete his life: six women for the six days of the week. (Sunday was his day of rest.)
Monday. The first of his last two mornings on earth. (Countdown: four, three—) He read the Daily Observer. (He had a subscription.) The usual number of rapes, stabbings, and bodies bludgeoned beyond recognition. No other events caught his attention.
Tuesday. (—two, one. Change count.) And his thirtieth birthday. In the Daily Observer he read about a suicide of a former FBI informant who had infiltrated AAMM, the African American Men’s Movement, a black nationalist and quasi-paramilitary organization, at the bureau’s urging and with its support. He was survived by no one, and, though the article included no photograph, Lincoln had experienced nothing in his thirty years like the jolt he received from the man’s name. Lincoln Jefferson Lincoln. His twin brother.
But before that, on that first last morning, the elevator doors wrapped him in steel gray and swept him down to the granite lobby. He stepped out of the building into a noisy collision of speech, shouts, and whistles: the sounds of the city. The sky was clear, the sun hot. Nothing but people, concrete, and steel in every direction. The wind shoved his back as he walked, but his pace grew slower with every step, metal-heavy sun burning down on his head. He touched his face and felt hot rubber. Melting.
Glory’s stories and visions had spread like hot dirt over everything in his life. In his childhood, he would sit before the fireplace while Glory was in the kitchen, reading the Bible forward and backward through the red hate of his blood. She would enter the room and smile a broad glow of contentment. Seat herself before the fireplace. He would retire to his room, where he spent long hours of contemplation, jotting down ideas in a diary. Going there to know there, he started to write at length about everything that stabbed at him, recording every microscopic detail, for he wanted to expand the possible and unravel Glory’s mystery. Steal the sacred fire and see inside his own life.
He had spent his adult years trying to verify the facts of Glory’s crime but found no newspaper articles, no police reports, no witnesses. What was his father’s name? — his birth certificate listed J. Christ—and where was his twin, Lincoln Jefferson Lincoln? A nameless father and a brother who existed only in name. Death was the starting point, but dead niggers tell no tales.
The day after Glory killed Lincoln’s father, she discovered that she was several weeks pregnant with twins. She also learned that she had money in the bank, and plenty of it. (Insurance?) I was blessed with a triple miracle, she said. I wanted to share my good fortune with other colored folks. I put yo brother up for adoption. Then I moved from the third floor of that ole rundown building where we was living and into this good house in this good black neighborhood.
Glory was clean and neat and kept her low brick house and even concrete walkway clean and neat. Trees stretched their branches over a grassy lawn. Lincoln would walk in the yard, wind whipping the branches, and touch rough bark or the dry twigs of a hedge. He mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes. This fine yard was fronted by a tall black wrought-iron fence. Here, Lincoln never allowed the images of the world to reach his heart. Forever vexed by questions he held in the full lens of his mind, burning, a clarifying hate swelling inside him that fueled new ideas and questions.
Though he hoped to shape his twenty-year diary of ponderings and reflections into a memoir, The Autobiography of Black Life, the last nine years had seen him produce nine novels about Henry “Hard Rock” Henson, the H-Man, a renegade black grunt in Vietnam. Hard Rock, Hard for short, lived a creed of illimitable ferocity. Hard knew the jungle like a private estate he had drafted and constructed. He would kill an officer (usually white) just as quickly as he would a gook. He greased his bullets with spit and spit with bullet force.
Though Lincoln had never seen the war, he had read dozens of books and articles about Vietnam. He wrote under the nom de plume the General, and his publishers marketed and promoted the novels as the fictionalized memoirs of a former high-ranking officer of the war who had to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons, offering in place of an author’s dust-jacket portrait a stylized print showing a military uniform sprawled upon and crumpled across a bed like cast-off skin. Controversial and sure to sell in these times. And sell it did, the fire of Lincoln’s words spreading throughout all of the major book clubs and finding an equally broad audience with servicemen and servicewomen in all branches of the military, who saw the General as a soldier’s Ann Landers, Oprah Winfrey, or Miss Lonelyhearts. They wrote him volumes of letters about their most intimate problems. Once a week, Lincoln’s publishers would forward him a sack or two of mail, and he would read each letter slowly and carefully, notepad and pen at the ready, logging important names, details, and events, compiling rap sheets and packets of data for future reference.
The previous week, Lincoln had received an anonymous letter informing him of Emmanuel’s death. According to the letter, several white MPs had not taken kindly to the honorary certificates and demanded a stop. Emmanuel told them to kiss where the sun don’t shine. The following day, the association found him floating in the swimming pool. His eyes had popped out of their sockets, but someone had bleached them clean of blood and tried to force them back in.
Lincoln had penned two chapters of his tenth novel, but a deep feeling told him that he would never complete it. He had in the back of his head a sense of impending punishment. Lately, he sensed something coming together in strangeness, something that only increased the hopeless gulf he felt between his past and his future. There was a stone on his chest and an even heavier stone deep inside him, weighing him down. And now, as he walked, he could hear the stones knock, could feel himself sinking, despite his strong body. Tomorrow he would be thirty, but his power to save himself had already faded from his muscles.