“And whoever committeth an involuntary fault or crime, and then layeth it on the innocent, shall surely bear the guilt of calumny and of a manifest crime.”

-Sura 4: Women

He passed the Lexington Market, nodding respectfully to Brother Qwawi who manned the ‘newsstand’ on the corner. On the opposite corner he felt his boot heel scrape on the curb—felt his age descend upon him in an instantaneous avalanche of doubt. Akbar Qama had never made a sound when he once hunted the White Devils of California; hunted evil in the very cradle of sin itself.

With a chill of summer sweat he forced these thoughts from his mind and walked along this Avenue of Soul Soiling Sin to atone for…

A sign of the superiority of the Whiteman’s evil magic over nature’s grace was set up on the next corner before him. A slightly overweight, but still shapely, woman, with skin dark enough to indicate that her ancestors had suffered less rape than most, had a card table set up with DVDs on it. She had a baby in a carriage, a five-year-old boy selling bottled water out of a cooler; and a toddler playing with a plastic car in the gutter. The fact that The Man paid the women of The People to have children on the condition that they not marry—thereby insuring the absence of a father—was an evil stroke so diabolical that no decent man might have predicted it.

He stepped up to the table and saw a spread of pornographic DVDs before him, featuring black women being debased in a barely imaginable variety of poses. His mind was on fire and her voice was sweet enough to serve as some kerosene for the soul, “What you need, Baby. These all five. Got ten dolla’ DVDs featuring me in my purse—don’t lay them out in front of the chillren. What ‘ill it be, my mighty Shaft—don’t you look fine fo’ an olda’ gentleman.”

He had but two fifty dollar bills and some ones on him; not enough to buy her off, he supposed. He composed himself as much as he might, assured himself that his voice would flow smoothly rather than in a raged rage, and smiled. “Miss, I will give you one hundred dollars right now, to cast the lot of this in the sewer at our feet. Will you do it?”

“Well, MeeMee Does Da Crew goes fo twenty alone—this whole joint is worth one-fifty.”

He felt like black ice as he drew the two notes stamped with the likeness of a white devil-god who had at least had the decency to kill other white men, and lowered his voice as he fixed her with a penetrating stare, “I must insist, for the children. Slip MeeMee and her paramours in the bag where reside your unmentionables and have the boy push these down the drain.”

She smacked her lips and bobbled her head, but she took the bills and addressed the boy at the water cooler, “You heard Old School here Mumbatu, shove this shit off into da drain—go on, move yo lazy ass.”

The boy began to work in such a manner that Akbar suspected he had even been made to lay out the movies. Akbar bent gently to assist him and they made short work of it. He then patted the boy on his head, shook his hand, and addressed the mother, “Please consider taking this boy to The Mosque of Usef Ali. The man who sells the pies up the street will direct you. Good day.”

She said nothing, just stared like he was insane as he stepped away. As he walked down the street and heard her fussing with the table, he could not help but look back. When he did, he saw the boy standing on the curb looking at him with a kind of innocent wonder.

It was 7:47 a.m. according to his blued Timex watch, got from the old Hebrew above the Seven Mile Market, when he reached ‘The Block’ proper. The lady was there, amidst the pornographic squalor, and trash strewn street of Baltimore’s red light strip, standing dejectedly on the spit-stained sidewalk waiting for her bus to work. He wasted no time. “Miss Janine, I apologize for last night. The lapse was inexcusable. I over slept my nap. May I make things right with you and your daughter.”

She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “It was more my idea than hers—just trying to get her away from the streets. Boys were coming around…”

“I see, and I crushed your hope to bring her to the straight and narrow.”

She sniffled, “Yes you did, Mister Akbar. But don’t mind me. It was only a hope; my hope not hers. She probably would have gone anyhow…”

The woman was more deeply hurt than his absence at the gym could possibly have caused and seemed to be holding back. “Miss Janine is your daughter alright?”

She then rushed into his chest and began head butting it and clenching her hands and beating his ribs and crying hysterically. He let her at it, even let the bus pass, and then hugged her while she sobbed.

“What can I do?” he growled through clenched teeth.

She pushed away and looked up at him. “You can’t un-rape her, can you?”

He stood cold.

“You can’t get her to testify against them that used her, can you?”

He stood transfixed.

“You could not protect her—you who cannot even get out of bed and spend all morning dressing up like Richard Goddamned Roundtree—against those boys, should she testify, can you Mister Moslem! Besides, she’s just a godless girl with a struggling-with-her-faith Christian mother; nothing to you, not wearing a scarf over her face!”

He stood now in The Very Blazing Pit of Hell, the perfect hell to torment his soul if one were to craft it.

He no longer wished to live.

The sound of his voice was like the tolling of a toneless bell, “Where?”

The woman took a step back, seemingly frightened. Her tears slowed a might as she took on the look of a harsh conspirator and darted her eyes this way and that to detect any possibility that any of the police changing shifts at the precinct a block away would hear her words—for she was not in a mood to whisper.

He became confident in her, as she spoke stolidly, “In a vacant house up on…Bradford…North Bradford…she wouldn’t say what block, knowing what they do to snitches.”

The soulless bell tolled again, “When?”

She began to cry, “About midnight it was—I was so worried when she didn’t come home. She was just going to get a snowball at dark when we came back from…”

The soulless bell tolled more deeply, “Who!”

She seemed now to be terrified of something, “The Crazy Set. They spell it Kray-Z. She wouldn’t tell me, was afraid for me. Her friend told me it was them boys bringing her in—like she’s their play thing! This girl—her friend—had been through it too, I could tell.”

He could hear the boot’s clomping angrily as their borrower marched up out of The Infernal Pit of Hell. A woman stood shouting questioningly in the background, but his mind did not absorb her words.

He marched like a dead man for miles uphill, for the two hours it took to reach the funeral home, though the walk failed utterly to deliver him from The Pit of Hell.

He was first at the door, nodding respectfully to the elderly and wasted family of white mourners who had not enough strong hands among them to handle a casket. He and Mister Owen and his man took the load while some drug addicted boys whose grandmother had been the one that passed held the handles to help them feel somewhat human.

When it was all over, he stood above the gravesite with the mourning sister of the dead white woman while the rest of her desiccated family laid plans for the drinking bout that would supposedly honor their matriarch. Mister Owen approached him to ask if he needed a ride back to the funeral home. Akbar cut him off with a cutting hand sign.

The woman then noticed that he alone, the strange silent black pall bearer standing in the sweltering heat in his blacks, stood over her. She looked up at him as if to ask who he was. He cut her off by extending his hand to help her rise. He then walked her silently to Mister Owen’s car, shut her in, tipped his hat, and walked off, still marching through The Pit of Hell, his mind on fire with self-hate.