ACT ONE:

The Brunette in Grapes

 

Prelude

 

 

Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

 

 

Hold your breath. Breath smoke in if you must, you have to push yourself man, and you have to see things, make connections where you’re not totally sure they exist. You have to count down, you have to blink. To squint, break your knuckles and bleed maybe, bleed in quiet. You have to try, dig in your stuff, you don’t see it.

Pity, you can’t. You don’t have any solidarity at all. You don’t even know you’re still a slave. The chornay do. The world reminds them every day.

I don’t know if you can picture it yet comrade, the big wink. I don’t know if your mind can see the uprising as it was, how it all it went down. In a heartbeat, all was in flames. Anyone with black skin just being shot down in the street like rapid feral dogs! It didn’t have to be, no it didn’t! We could have reached some settlement the liberal elders said, I fundamentally disagree.

Black lives certainly don’t matter to anyone at all.

Were you to observe the crumble of the high grounds, the moral roads into base animal rage, I think it was enough that one in eight of their men was in prison, I think it enough that one died a week it seemed, a week, a day, every 48 hours? Statistics are all make believe. I don’t think any whites thought the chornay human anyway, so it was a real surprise that they were organizable.

 

The signal was a song, it is impossible to plan an uprising without a good sound track, that’s an old Haitian saying, and the gun fire erupted from make shift big truck alliance barricades and over turned cars, piled by the Grand Army Plaza. And the human spear thrust north, the melee of thousands, supported by millions counted on by no less than five billion souls, take over Manhattan and burn it all down. Light it all on fire.

Make them pay!

It was probably not a very good day for those marauders in the front of the flying columns, those the NYPD emptied clip after clip into, as was expected, before being torn apart and beheaded by the mob. The crush and screams of feet pounding the parkway, the blare of the signal song, the gun fire on both sides, fire bombs bursting in air.

Perhaps as many as four hundred men and women too plus died in the fire fight to conquer only one square of the board, the Grand Army Plaza was on fire and the Garveryites were killing police officers with the Kalashnikovs the Russians sold them, well anyway the Jews who sold them spoke Russian, but that’s as misleading a term as chorney.

And that eruption, that mostly black eruption lept north supported by tens of thousands of masqueraders, there was gun fire all night. You could be sure they’d ban Jeuvert this time for real, what was it really all about this annual dry run, now the streets were wet with blood.

The uprising had been about grievances, but it wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about the handful of modest reforms groups put out there on the wire. No, it was about hate and about rage and about decades of powerlessness, about the failure of non-violence and playing the game to advance. Well, anyway what really was there to write about?

Concentrated machine gun fire stopped the Negro rebel onslaught at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The corpses were piled high, no one learned anything in the popular press.