-Crossroads, Tracy Chapman

At the edge of civilization, in the depths of the night, and at the Crossroads of the World, three men reclined, talking. They each occupied their own castoff couch, and regarded one another in a triangular way of association, glancing each to the other past or over the time-painted iron drum that smoldered and glowed with a weird spectral light, the flames unseen, but licking blue below the rim, casting their phantom lights upon the weeping tree above.

No one knew what made the weird light blue, save the dreadlock-crowned figure on the central couch, his back to the railroad tracks, his broad shoulders draped with a flowered rose-petal comforter from some rich white woman’s plush queen-sized bed, his black face so black it gave to an ashen hue in the blue light. This singular figure was Reggiemon Thom, and the secret of the blue fire was his, for this was his camp, and other bums were welcome on the basis of invitation only. Reggiemon’s skinny legs, bare, and barely visible beneath the great bedcloth seemed comic in relation to his wide sweep of shoulder. His dreadlocks were fetid looking and lumpy, hanging clear to the ground in two great twisted clumps to the outside of each knee.

These locks were famed throughout the homeless community, as the home of Reggiemon’s matchless weed. For within the matted locks of his decades unkempt hair were twisted the countless marijuana smokes which he had earned as a soothsayer for the myriad drug addicted white folks that came to him for advice when he sat upon the peer on his milk crate throne beneath the high rise condominiums of their pallid kind. Stirring his herbal tea, which the white folks do treasure, and dispensing his cryptic advice, which they sought as a charm, Reggiemon only accepting “reeferz’ as payment.

When not soothsaying for white folks, Reggiemon was to be found here, at the Crossroads of the World—the kind of lonely place where rootless men once congregated in the days of the hobo and the bum. But in these days of the pitiful “homeless,” of guilt kitchens, and of shelters in the City, and of vicious packs of thug teens sweeping such places as this in “bum stomping” rampages and homeless hunting “flash mobs,” such traditional abodes for men who had earned their shame, were no longer safe.

However, the Crossroads of the World, where homeless men came to visit the “bum to beat all bums,” the “waymaker” who had earned the respect of the police—even convincing one to cite himself rather than Reggiemon for loitering—had the reputation of a sanctuary from the law. The “Waymaker” had also established his camp as a sanctuary from the teen thugs that beat, maimed and killed homeless men in every season of the year, particularly the fair season of Autumn. He had somehow burned fear into the hearts of the hoodrats through some means unknown to the other homeless men, though thought to be related to the great collection of tooth-pick stuck black dolls hanging from the weeping branches of the willow tree that arched over his camp like a sleepy sentinel.

Reggiemon sat spread-legged and hunched on a leathery coach as black as himself, so dark one might think he squatted, his bird knees sticking up under the quilt as high as his shoulders, draped with the shroud of his long-reeking locks. His couch formed the apex of the triangle about the blue flaming drum that cast its lurid glow on the doll-hung willow above. His back was to the east, to the Park, a deep expanse of woods preserved for the recreation of sissy white folks upon their bicycles.

To his right, with his back to the north, and the Suburbs, where whites and white-identified blacks sought their leisurely promised land, reclined Simp Collier upon a red-tinted loveseat, the most decrepit of the three couches, but which Simp liked for its cozy comfort. He cuddled under a pee coat—the last thing of his that his sister threw at him after she punched him out, rolled him down the stairs, and cursed him for losing his janitorial job. This was the third time she had kicked him out in the last year, and now he was thinking it was the last, that he’d be an out-of-doors negro forever.

Simp was in his mid-sixties, with bald head, small wide-set eyes and a gap-toothed grin, a small-bodied, kindly soul who was not entirely destitute, for his sister collected his Social Security, and after taking her two thirds for having the mailing address and the bank account, let him come to the door of his former house begging once a month for his food money.

It was darned near the end of the month and Simp was dirt poor, having had to beg for this bottle of Old English 800 Malt Liquor, able to scrounge for the best drink at least. Simp was a lackey to Reggiemon, darn near worshipping him for extending the hand of hospitality at times like this. One time, this past winter, Reggie had kept him from freezing with the gift of a blanket. Another time, the summer before, Reggiemon had driven off a pack of hoodrats that were pelting Simp with stones.

The way the camp was set up, Simp could only see Reggiemon on his throne couch, the view of the big brown couch across the way obscured by the iron burn barrel. This was just fine with Simp, for the couch was too big for his taste, and its occupant was someone he cared not to look upon. The man on the far couch, stretched out like a great cat on the other side of the fire, had, once upon a time, robbed Simp. It was sometime back in the day, and the man had not hurt Simp, who had been powerless in his strong-armed grip. But the memory rankled his soul, and the fact that the man did not even recognize Simp, was a testament to his unsavory nature. Simp understood though, that Reggiemon, who must be in his eighties, though he looked to be a mere sixty, would value the presence of such a thug, for the hoodrats had been rampaging more violently as of late, and to have a fighting man like this, a criminal with seven stints in the big house under his belt, leant a certain security.

To Reggiemon’s left, with his back to the City, where the high and mighty whites and their government cооns stacked their air-made money and bedded their money-bought brides, reclined Otis Jackson, a towering, muscleman in his late fifties, a one-time boxer who was a known murderer of men on the street and rapist of them in prison. Simp had taken one look at Otis as he sauntered up into camp, uninvited, and knew in an instant why he had never committed a crime, so that he would never meet up with such a man behind bars!

Otis Jackson was the mythical boogie man if ever there was one, and Simp had counted himself fortunate that Otis had sated his lust upon some tiny teenage ho—or so he had boasted—on his way to camp, the directions of which he had gotten by busting the head of Grease Man Jones, who had been invited. Upon hearing this announcement Simp feared for Reggiemon, that the righteous Black Muslim Rastaman—a dervish so he said—would castigate Otis and get his tangled head knocked off his shoulders. But Reggiemon had merely motioned to the big brown couch and had said cryptically, “No matterz. Grease Man had his invite on the strength of his fistz. Since you, friend, be the stronger, his invite fall to youz.”

With that the arrogant black man with the wide square head and short shaped cut, with the tacky artificial part and all, made himself at home, and said sneeringly to Reggiemon, even as he eyed with envy the black leather throne couch, “So you the mart boss nigga up in here?”

Reggiemon merely looked ahead toward the western point of the compass, into the Hood, that sprawling grey tumbledown expanse of urban blight, that black and brown soul-extinguishing ghetto, from which they had all escaped at some point prior to this night. The eyes of both men followed the gaze of Reggiemon’s magnetic black eyes as the blue fire played on the widely dilated pupils and he declared, sleepy-voiced and without malice, “There is not a nigga herez. Not a wretch crawled up out of the Zoo of the Whitemanz; but three menz. We be three men talking, for now brotherz, for nowz.”

To that, Otis Jackson popped the top on a can of raspberry Steel Reserve, and knocked the entire thing back. Tossing the can over his shoulder, and grabbing another from the voluminous folds of his tent-like coat, he cracked open another as Reggiemon raised a cryptic eyebrow and began to brew his famous farseeing tea.

So, as they all three busied themselves with their nourishment, not a one of them spoke of that which was gnawing at them, that it was past nine at night, and, for the first time this season, they noticed not a cricket singing, the chorus of summer long gone, replaced only by the whip of the willow in the wind and the rustle of fallen leaves rattling below, like the bones of plant kind suffering under Death’s sting.

The feet of a black wrestling action figure with two toothpicks sticking out of his eyes, smacked into the head of a Bill Cosby doll, with toothpicks sticking in brutal profusion from his groin, as various rapper action figures and a black GI Joe seemed to look on disapprovingly—the rusty nails pinning their plastic mouths shut permitting no commentary. Simp thought this an unwelcome sign. Reggiemon, however, was immersed in his tea-making, and Otis was simply eying the best couch in camp and its older, smaller occupant with the reprobate avarice of his taking kind.

At the Crossroads of the World, three men sat, and then, when the distant moaning whistle of a train accompanied by its clattering echo snaked like a serpent of sound through the guts of Man’s creation, three men talked, and not of many things.