Blind Man With a Pistol by Chester Himes Page A

her thick lips shining like a red fire engine. Time to catch whitey as he slunk around the Lagoon looking to change his luck.
          Eleven black nuns came out of a crumbling, dilapidated private house which had a sign in the window reading: FUNERALS PERFORMED. They were carrying a brass four-poster bed as though it were a coffin. The bed had a mattress. On the mattress was a nappy, unkempt head of an old man, sticking from beneath a dirty sheet. He lay so still he might have been dead. No one asked.
          In the Silver Moon greasy-spoon restaurant a whiskey-happy joker yelled at the short-order cook behind the counter, "Gimme a cup of coffee as strong as Muhammed Ali and a Mittenburger."
          "What kind of burger is that?" the cook asked, grinning.
          "Baby, that's burger mit kraut."
          To one side of the entrance to the movie theater an old man had a portable barbecue pit made out of a perforated washtub attached to the chassis of a baby carriage. The grill was covered with sizzling pork ribs. The scent of scorching meat rose from the greasy smoke, filled the hot thick air, made mouths water. Half-naked black people crowded about, buying red-hot slabs on pale white bread, crunching the half-cooked bones.
          Another old man, clad in his undershirt, had crawled onto the marquee of the movie, equipped with a fishing pole, line, sinker and hook and was fishing for ribs as though they were fish. When the barbecue man's head was turned he would hook a slab of barbecue and haul it up out of sight. Everyone except the barbecue man saw what was happening, but no one gave him away. They grinned at one another, but when the barbecue man looked their way, the grins disappeared.
          The barbecue man felt something was wrong. He became suspicious. Then he noticed some of his ribs were missing. He reached underneath his pit and took Out a long iron poker.
          "What one of you mother-rapers stole my ribs?" he asked, looking mean and dangerous.
          No one replied.
          "If I catch a mother-raper stealing my ribs, I'll knock out his brains," he threatened.
          They were happy people. They liked a good joke. They believed in a Prophet named Ham. They welcomed the Black Jesus to their neighborhood. The white Jesus hadn't done anything for them.
          When Prophet Ham entered the chapel, he found it filled with black preachers as he'd expected. Faces gleamed with sweat in the sweltering heat like black painted masks. The air was thick with the odors of bad breath, body sweat and deodorants. But no one smoked.
          Prophet Ham took the empty seat on the rostrum and looked at the sea of black faces. His own face assumed as benign an expression as the harelip would permit. An expectant hush fell over the assemblage. The speaker, a portly black man in a black suit, turned off his harangue like a tap and bowed toward Prophet Ham obsequiously.
          "And now our Prophet has arrived," he said with his eyes popping expressively. "Our latterday Moses, who shall lead us out of the wilderness. I give you Prophet Ham."
          The assembled preachers allowed themselves a lapse of dignity and shouted and amened like paid shills at a revival meeting. Prophet Ham received this acclaim with a frown of displeasure. He stepped to the dais and glared at his audience. He looked indignant.
          "Don't call me a Prophet," he said. He had a sort of rumbling lisp and a tendency to slobber when angry. He was angry now. "Do you know what a Prophet is? A Prophet is a misfit that has visions. All the Prophets in history were either epileptics, syphilitics, schizophrenics, sadists or just plain monsters. I just got this harelip. That doesn't make me eligible."
          His red eyes glowed, his silk suit glinted, his black face glistened, his split red gums bared from his big yellow teeth.
          No one disputed him.
          "Neither am I a latterday