I walked quickly out into the quiet street, the snow now gone to slush
as dingy as the morning sky. Fortunately, the day was neither windy nor
cold and I walked to a Times Square automat for an early breakfast.
I was reassured by anonymity. All around me sleepy men and women
clutching newspapers, briefcases and lunch pails sat sullenly chewing
their breakfast, sleep not yet departed.
I bought a roll, more coffee, hominy grits which I detested in the
North but occasionally tried in the hope that, by accident, I might
stumble upon the real thing. These were not the real thing and I left
them untouched while I read my paper.
Cave was on the front page. Not prominent, but still he was there.
The now-standard photograph looked darkly from the page. The headline
announced that: “Prophet Flays Churches as Millions Listen.” There
followed a paraphrase of the telecast which began with those fateful
and soon to be famous words: “Our quarrel is not with Christ but with
his keepers.” I wondered, as I read, if anyone had ever taken one
of the telecasts down in shorthand and made a transcript of it. I,
for one, should have been curious to see in cold print one of those
sermons. Cave himself knew that without his presence they would not
stand up and, consequently, he allowed none of then to be transcribed;
the result was that whenever there was a report of one of his talks
it was, necessarily, paraphrased which gave a curious protean flavor
to his doctrine, since the recorded style was never consistent,
changing always with each paraphraser just as the original meaning
was invariably altered by each separate listener as he adapted the
incantation to his private needs.
A fat yellow-faced woman sat down with a groan beside me and began to
ravish a plate of assorted cakes. Her jaws grinding, the only visible
sign of life, for her eyes were glazed from sleep and her body,
incorrectly buttoned into a cigarette-ash-dusted dress, was as still as
a mountain, even the work of lungs was obscured by the torpid flesh.
I watched her above the newspaper, fascinated by the regularity with
which her jaws ground the bits of cake. Her eyes looked past me into
some invisible world of pastry.
Then, having finished the report on Cave’s telecast, I put the
newspaper down and ate with deliberate finesse my own biscuit. The
rustling of the newspaper as it was folded and placed on the table
disturbed my companion and, beneath the fat, her will slowly sent out
instructions to the extremities. She cleared her throat. Her head
lowered. Her chewing stopped; a bit of cake was temporarily lodged in
one cheek, held firmly in place by a gaudy plate. Her eyes squinted at
the newspaper. She spoke: “Something about that preacher fellow last
night?”
“Yes. Would you like to see it?” I pushed the paper toward her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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