Read A Chapter Excerpt Of The Extraordinary New Epic Novel

TS Aschenge — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:08:01 +0000

Woodruff Park

Chapter One

Woodruff Park is two fine acres of God’s green space, a quarter mile of jogging trail, two dozen rod iron benches, huge cascading waterfalls and tall majestic dogwood trees that hug the horizon like there is no tomorrow. It is centermost of what speaks to Creation like a small cull de sac enrobed by some of the finest architecture in the Southeast. The birds that live here know all too well that Atlanta is a magnet. This is the metropolis in the very heart of downtown. With its eclectic array of office buildings, lofts, retail shops, restaurants, barbershops, and street side kiosks, it is indeed a quaint little part of town. One could do far worse for downtown living in a major American city. If you live for a time anywhere in the Atlanta Metro Area, in search for the metropolis you will surly discover Woodruff Park. Yester-year, I spent some of the finest days of my life as a resident of one of the few loft apartment buildings that dot the area; just a stone’s throw away and directly across the street from the park. It is here that I have encountered many of the lingering multitudes of Katrina evacuees who have suddenly found themselves displaced from New Orleans. They have come here, some out of bitter and painful desperation to make Georgia their new home. This is where foreign nationals have often queried for directions at my staff along their pilgrimage to King’s Tomb. They begin right here at Peachtree and Auburn Avenue, and then make their descent deep down into the valley on a road that leads to nowhere for many, haunting a crack-zombie existence as a living part of humanity whom it would appear, have actually fallen off of the planet. For all intents and purposes, they wear the moniker of ‘disposable people’. This is where I have sought for hours and days even, to simply discover and cultivate a humble space to create. It is the place where I first encountered the eagle spirit of Seminole warrior Asi Yahola, and it is where I have come to hear The Dumbla Wedo (the Ancestors) speak to me as water spirits in mystical recall of so many bitter and painful memories of the Maafa. This is where the colossal Blue Fountain has often come to amorphous life right before my very eyes. And, it was here, that I was once again to encounter Abaika, my spirit guide, for what was then but the second time in my life. Now as an adult, he would manifest himself to me once more after so many long and loathsome years of his absence; and my often desperate however futile efforts to usher him back from out of whatever dimension had first brought him into my life. None other is more enduring in my remembrance, than that very first moment during what was a rather playful and quixotic adolescence than when this strange elder spirit quietly sprung from out of thin air to sit me at his feet. Of course, if any of you where alive at that time, today perhaps living on the bridge of generations, I am sure that you too can remember vividly just where you were and what you were doing when you and your family first heard of Dr. King’s murder. I myself was a boy but eight years old at the time, and this event was to Sheppard my very first conscious Afrikan awakening. The baby of the household, I was a young and perhaps quite an impressionable lad. The world had always been for me a rather wonderful and quite stimulating playground of aesthetic and intellectual inquiry. Nevertheless, watching the painful contortions of deep personal anguish gripping so many that I loved so dearly so close around me, forced me to seek solitary refuge and to steal away back into the cocoon of my very own recluse creative Universe. It was there that I prayed for hours on my knees with all the innocent fervor of a child’s solemn prayer, asking God, Allah, and even soliciting Buddha, to please tell me why? “Why did they have to take him away from us?” A man who would leave me with so much of what had naturally become mentored in pure admiration deep inside of me, that he had actually existed in my own tender and impressionable little world as someone who was almost like a second Papa; or better perhaps like an uncle, because no one could ever truly replace my dad. Yet, Dr. King represented a very strong powerful creative and intellectual witness in my life however distant he was to me?’ I spent several loathsome hours on my knees and in desperate prayer with my hands firmly clasped together in dire anxious submission painfully querying all about my mental Universe. I could not then even begin to understand how a world could be cruel and so violent as to take away a man who lived with such a ‘sweet butter’ love for his people? “Why was there so much racism in the world?” “What exactly was this bizarre attitude towards people of color, and where the Hell did it come from?” For all that I knew, Black people had not kidnapped nor enslaved any white people. I understood even then that we had never made a sport of roasting and mutilating white people. Well then I asked, “Why did a bullet need to violently pierce open his neck, fall down his throat, and blow up his rich, warm, and bountiful heart?” After awhile, sitting there soaked in such unremitting anguish; I sought a more sober visible target for my passionate inquiry. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere my hands fell apart open wide in front of me as if prostrate to some strange and powerful magnetic force, and they were now awash in a blinding blue light, that forced my eyes to completely close for a moment for want of sight, and then all of a sudden I heard a voice speak another witness from out of some strange and peculiar new dimension as if the voice of some strange new spirit deep down inside of me involuntarily interceding on it own behalf, and it spoke out loud in a strong conscious affirmation asking, “Who am I?” “Am I really who I am?” “Why do I have such a strange and peculiar last name?” “Was I too meant to simply quietly carry forth the name of someone who in all probability owned and most likely molested my family?” “How was I supposed to go through life with such a bizarre name that was so completely alien to whom I obviously was?” From that moment on a Sankofa bird would always seem to follow me wherever I went, covertly hovering somewhere high above the horizon throughout my life. At that time I though it rather strange, however many years later I would discover that one need only pose that eternal question. After awhile, I was quietly awakened to the brilliant glare of the small holographic figure of an odd looking dreaded elder cheerfully enrobed in his own sunshine, and no more than a foot in height; whom it appeared had sprung from out of nowhere. He wore a black leopard skin and locks as long as he was tall and he stood there in front of me chuckling like a complete lunatic; cowrie shells were swoon everywhere. He rocked back and forth rapt with the most hideous of laughter; his grey-white beard betraying decades of decay. Stuttering in want of a grin, I asked him why he was laughing at me. He said it was because that I looked so funny sitting there with so much bugger and tears rolling down my face. Embarrassed, I wiped my nose and crawled to the opposite corner of the room asking him to please “Just go away and leave me alone!” “O.K.!” he said, and ‘POOF!’ he was gone. After twenty-four hours of my most ardent irritating and desperate pleading had finally exhausted my Mama’s care long enough until she finally begrudgingly allowed me to simply go and play outside; granted that I would confine myself to the backyard, least the growing conflagration of angry rioting in collective anguish of King’s murder, erupting in cities throughout the country intrude a bit too close to home. Outside at last, I quickly abandoned myself to my own secret world inside the comfort of my tree house, where only those who knew the secret password were allowed to enter. Ascending the last rung of the ladder, my full face could now see into the doorway, and there he was again. His head was solemnly bowed and his right arm was dutifully outstretched mockingly in a clinched fist. The moment that he sensed my presence he yelled, “Black Power!” Now Beloved, of course you may indeed think it rather strange, but it had not yet even occurred to me at that time nor indeed since to think that this was all perhaps not so very normal. That a small holographic old man did actually exist in the world, and that he would truly bother to visit a little boy such as me. However, this was all so very normal in my life back then. Although he would be the first human visitor, I had seen trees, animals, and even buildings come to life only to converse at length with me. Until I shared this secret with Saundra, my playmate next door, I really thought that this was all so very normal. Since that time, fearing the worst, of this I have told no one. You see, Mama always just casually ignored me when I told her that the red light had cursed at me again. Nevertheless, all I wanted was for this little annoying visitor to please be gone, so that I could sulk in my anguish at Dr. King’s death alone. “Black Power!” He yelled out loud again, until I finally gave up the instinctual ghost responding, “Black Power!” back to him. “Now, go back to whatever world you came from and just leave me alone!” I said. He said nothing. He just waited until I seemed to get comfortable enough proudly sitting on my large wicker throne crossing my legs with spear in hand, and looking arrogantly away in detached abandonment. Then, he slowly took his time and quietly walked towards me, shinning like a tiny iridescent light bulb, until he had finally crawled up my body and sat himself on my right shoulder. He then offered me his right palm saying, “Boy, this is your destiny!” Whereupon, he blew a dark purple powder right into my face! When I did finally awaken, I immediately spat out to him the argument that had silently raged inside of my mind mute and restrained throughout the constraint of my dreams, “You just drugged a little boy Mister! Are you crazy or something?” Eight years old, maybe seventy-five pounds, no more than four feet tall, claiming the massive weight beneath my feet, I immediately calmed down long enough to realize that I had somehow been whisked away into another dimension of time and space. Now in human form, this strange elder spirit suddenly snatched me to my feet, and I stood there erect quietly enthralled of my new surroundings; not to mention the discipline of his apparently super-human strength. We were standing on the table of a vast mountain range in the midst of acres of sun washed yellow ochre mountainous terrain. Anxiously peering in all directions, it seemed to me as if the whole Universe had somehow been swallowed up into another dimension and was now awash in warm orange sunshine. It really felt as if we had somehow clandestinely arrived at some deeply mystical hidden enclosure back of antiquity. This is when the elder spoke to me explaining who he was. His name was Abiaka, and he was the shaman who had helped Asi Yahola (Osceola) ‘The Black Drink Singer’, baffle and elude five American generals during the Seminole Wars (1817-1858), till this day it remains longest military campaign in American history. His skill as a military strategist, his wisdom, and his ability to ‘work herbs’, along with the fact that marooned in the mountains he had outlasted everyone, made him a legend amongst his people. He was what Bookman was to the Haitian Revolution (August 1789), what Gullah Jack was to Demark Vessey in Charleston South Carolina (June 16, 1822), and what Malcolm was to us. He was the mystic, the theoretician, and the revolutionary all wrapped up in one. He was for them the Seminole Preacher Man. We walked it seemed for days, hundreds of miles, and never actually once left the mountains. During the day, Abiaka dropped science, telling me the size, weight, and the composition of the Earth. How our planet was the middle child of nine planets that signify the Womb of our Community. He said that she was the symbol of Unity, and was 7,926.2 miles in diameter, with a surface made up of seventy percent water, and that she was always being reborn. He told me how many stars there were actually in the sky, and that everyday the Sun was coming closer and closer to us. He said that we had been living here for a million years or more, and that a Groit must have total recall of ‘Ourstory’. At night, Abiaka told me allegories that spoke of the origin of Creation; some quite humorous and amazing tales, nonetheless, all containing a message of pure enlightenment. Gone was the manic trickster that I had thought had first appeared to me in the midst of my frantic prayers. He remained for those three days always with the stern and discreet posture of a savant translating his wisdom to a deserving pupil, and I took it all in with a quiet thankful obeisance, simply amazed at this whole encounter. We ate only fruit and berries, and only during the day, and I learned to peer directly into the Sun as an extra source of nutrition. We drank lots of fresh water. After the third night, while preparing my eyes for dawn that following morning and fretfully awaiting our next adventure upon the mountain, I rose surprised to find myself back in Long Island and inside of my tree house alone. What had appeared to be the passage of three days was now reckoned as but the course of a few hours that I had actually been away. A small satchel made of mud cloth with cowries falling out of it had been put beside me; along with a tiny vial of that same dark blue powder. However, Abiaka was gone. Mama opened the back door and yelled out my name deep into the heavens, in a voice that at first seemed to indicate that I was surely in trouble. Thankfully, moments later she would return and now in a cadence of stern maternal compassion she would yell, “Child, you come down out that tree right now, you keeping everyone from dinner!” “Yes Mama”, I yelled back, now scurrying to the ground. I had dutifully prepared myself for the definite sneers and the coy remarks cast towards my latest indiscretion surly to come from my eight elder siblings, only to be immediately reminded of the somberness of this occasion. Everyone in my family now appeared to be intimately resigned to individually reconcile their own lingering sense of pain, remorse, and despair. Emotions of anger and sorrow resided universally transfixed upon the faces of all. Unusual during our evening meal, televised news replayed images of the initial assignation cleverly juxtapositioned with scenes of collective interracial remorse, and dubiously laced with intermittent incidents of increasing riot. Each station now marched to manufacture and to lubricate its own general consensus, in the midst of this tragic aftermath. Violence would solicit the will of 168 cities nationwide. Everyone, including Mom and Dad, would come to import a part of their emotions towards negotiating the morality of such mounting violence. The younger children curried a futile desire to act out in rebellion, and my eldest sister and brother both played cat and mouse with Mom and Dad constantly reinventing their latest dire appointments in order to covertly get themselves immediately street side. Layla was a Panther woman and she would eventually graduate magna cum laude from Emory University with a master’s degree in Early Childhood Development; despite a bullet that almost claimed her spine when in 1971, during a collective surge of pathological racism, local off duty police in more than a dozen cities throughout the country re-invented ‘drive-bys’ in America, by shooting up Panther offices unprovoked as if they had simply lost their minds. Raymond III did Viet Nam only to return three years later even more bitter and disillusioned. Nevertheless, he would forge ahead with a distinguished career in law. That night, while the future Al Amin hollered “Burn Baby Burn!”, and Jessie Jackson faced a backlash in denial that he had actually planted Dr. King’s blood upon his own shirt, I slept in total recall of all that had come before me. I prayed again, this time for the healthy transition of a Prince of Peace. Afterwards, with patience, I reviewed all of the science that Abiaka had bequeathed me to commit to memory. I gleefully recanted the peopling of my imagination in a multitude of Tricksters, Sun Gods, and anthropomorphic Water Falls. I smiled in solemn remembrance of The Day that the Turtle Got a Whipping, and laughed at how Zebras got their Stripes. I took in all that he had taught me, remembering that he had cautioned me to forever secret my gifts wisely, and that whatever I desired I must become. Nonetheless, he would always say as well, never to forget that I would only attract that which my soul secretly desired. He said for me to expect the Sankofa Bird to forever follow me, and to treat it with kindness if I came to earn its acquaintance; and before sentencing this all to the deeper portal of a dream, I recalled that very last hour that we sat upon the mountain. Centermost of the driest canyon in the range, two twin peaks shouldered higher than all the rest. As the evening was slowly slipping into darkness, gradually gathering to sprawl pitifully prostrate directly in front of us, were several young eagles appearing totally distraught and now in complicit submission to their own demise, as if felled by injury. Abiaka said that these were the great Harpy Eagles of South America, an ancestor of the Seminole warrior tribe, and what we were actually witnessing were a few of them who had painfully discovered the true measure of their people’s ability to suffer, and they had now simply given up in dire anguish. “Power concedes nothing without demand!” he said, and the Eagle was to the heavens what the Lion was to the jungle; a natural leader, with beaks so strong that they could actually break a man’s wrist. However, there comes a time in every young warrior’s life when he just may simply come to give up upon life itself. Moments later, a small brigade of much older powerful and magnificent eagles flew in a small circle commanding the sky overhead. They had beaks full of fresh rabbits, squirrels, and snakes, and they dropped this sustenance to the youth below. Some of whom slowly moved to nourished themselves, yet a few of them made little effort to eat or merely no effort at all and thus resigned simply to collapse to their deaths. The remainder got up and flew back to the brigade. The Eagle Commander then screamed in command for them to circle the area once again, and moments later, they all fell back sharply in chorus, yelling “Arch!”, “Arch!”, “Arch!” With a look of deep sadness in his eyes, Abiaka counseled that a few of the eagles had not made it. They just simply gave into their misery and passed away. It was then that I asked him what it was that they were actually saying. Abiaka told me that they were speaking in the Harpy dialect reminding their young warriors to always understand who they were. He said that they were yelling: “Hey you get up! You’re An Eagle!”

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A View Behind the Veil of Black Life in America

TS Aschenge — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:48:38 +0000

‘Numerous characters inhabit the extraordinary Universe that is the epic narrative world of Woodruff Park. There are creatures large and small, both mortal and supernatural, human and anthropomorphic, ancient and legendary, gods and goddesses, Black leaders, and common folk, some righteous and others not so righteous; and then there are those who only live in ‘blackface’. Nevertheless, all help to curry an original mythos with a distinctly African American Cultural Worldview. Here lies the painful residue that betrays the living witness of mute human discourse hiding inconspicuously behind the veil of Black life in America.

Read and witness the agonizing and dualistic, seemingly ‘flick-ted’ and schizophrenic Negro personality painfully attempting to negotiate its “two warring minds in one dark body!” ———with its human host hoping only at best to “dodge the spit of ‘their Fellows!’ Nevertheless, this is a world where there exist little dichotomy between the human experience and that of the supernatural world. Through both triumph and tragedy, in both word and deed, these are the passions uttered only in the hush houses of American life. It is an enchanted journey through the sparse foliage of a myriad of uniquely American ‘rituals of deception’. A world born of ‘The Maafa’, and viewed back of the psychopathology and the ‘tricknology’ that appears to hover ever-present upon the illusionary surface of everyday life within the legendary colonial-settler state. This is a place where passions live sheltered lives, like bizarre bitter secrets left perpetually untold; like some deformed twin left hidden in the basement. Of course, we all know that she is there but, ‘we really not supposed to talk about it!’

Woodruff Park eludes all of those fears and engages the reader on a truly enchanted sojourn through a spectacular epic of time and space; and into an authentic world of infinite possibilities. We encounter Auyurashia, the beautiful and seductive water-spirit, Queen of the Dammed and over-seerer of the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It is she who is the comforter to one hundred million tortured souls once carelessly cast into the sea. “I alone control the weather!” she declares. Then, there is Asi Yahola, The Black Drink Singer, come back to the South as a maniacal trickster in the satirical guise of a Harpy Eagle; still forever mocking the U.S. Government. We meet a large family of Live Oak trees (The Crying Trees) that actually do cry real tears in deep never-ending angst towards their complicity in so many senseless lynchings. And, who could ever forget the endearing Little Hannibal; the boy who would slay a Goliath and became a legend overnight. There are mortals, some of which are just so inconceivably cruel, and others possessing humanity so deeply profound that it will simply take your breath away.

This is the world that engulfs you in a Universe unapologetically set in Afrikan Time. Here is Truth spoken to Power with undaunted clarity, self-determination, and Sweet Butter Love; over a vast range of (his-) storical issues, events, and ideas. When viewed through the lens of Black life in America, this is Ourstory, reclaimed for ourselves through the inherently pure and indigenous ethos of a voice that actually looks like us! Yet, this is a vision that actually speaks to all humanity. That’s What’s Up!’

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