Sergeant James

At the the tail end of my return to social life Saturday night, after attempting to drag my visiting Danville friends from their favorite establishment to no avail and spilling beer on my pants in the process, my friend and I were walking back to the apartment when I heard a familiar growl and gruff, "MY MAN MAXXX!" echo out from the cubby hole stairs of the Advanced Video Store. Spinning around just in time to catch the screaming specter in my arms, Sergeant James quickly had me in his famous headlock, jumping up and down, screaming to anyone who happened by on the street that he'd finally found his favorite white boy. My terror-stricken friend required an explanation.

Sergeant James is a homeless man who appears in my neighborhood from time to time, travelling through looking for work on construction sites, sleeping in my laundromat and preaching to a dozen or so of his disciples every Sunday morning from the steps of the Advanced Video Store. It causes quite an uproar among the homeless whenever he appears. I once called him the "King of the Streets" when he'd been drinking too much scotch and gotten a little loud, which is the only time I think he's ever been angry with me. He said, "Max, I am the king of no man. That's what white people just don't understand. You ain't ever gonna understand me, son, but you can keep trying if you like."

I've been trying for the past couple of years, ever since I moved into my neighborhood, to piece together as much about James as I can. He normally doesn't like white people. The first time we met, he was selling bad directions to a group of white suburbanites from Maryland for $1 a street. I instantly liked him. I ended up buying him a sandwich, to which he replied, "Well, thanks for the sandwich, but you wouldn't give me the money for a loaf of bread because you think I'm gonna buy liquor-poison with it, right? Well, I probably would. But I thank you for the sandwich, Soldier." Over many a drunken conversation since, James now refers to me as his "white son" and has led to many funny stories, including the time my friend Stephanie came to visit and he tried to climb up on top of the bushes at a bar and another time when my parents were here and he kept calling me his son, to which my dad replied, "I'm sorry, but actually he's my son and he's not for sale."

James has many strange and revolutionary ideas. Not revolutionary as in the cutting-edge type, but in terms of actual revolution. Let's not misunderstand that he's sane. He is not. One night he was preaching to me about Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting MLK exactly. Needless to say, I was highly impressed at first. However, the conversation promptly turned to MLK's murder at the hands of a government capable of mind-control, which is influenced by the flight paths of various UFOs. He has his good and bad nights. Sometimes, he's completely coherent; other times, it's all UFO's and secret FBI conspiracies.

James once warned me not to think of him as safe. He sees himself as a pit bull, lightly caged, but well-tempered when treated properly and sleeps under the bleachers of the baseball field sometimes to renew this feeling. For this reason, I step very lightly around James and make sure to keep our conversations relatively short. I've tried to gather bits of his history, but like everything he says, you can't believe it 100% but I've learned to tell what's true or false over time. To hear him tell it, he has a sister and family in Pennsylvania where he goes when he gets "street tired," he was a Sergeant in the Army during Vietnam, and was born and raised in Baltimore.

This Saturday night was the first time I've seen James in about six months. I'd thought that he was either in jail, up in Pennsylvania with his sister, or something worse. My fears slackened when he said he'd been working on a construction site up in Pennsylvania at his sister's house. This time, he said that he had a present for me. Whipping out a bundle of loose leaf papers from his pocket, he made a big show of presenting me with what he called "The Knowledge," which I wasn't old enough to understand. Then we went through a series of "Hey, give that back" and "Here you are...The Knowledge is yours" before he finally let us escape. When I finally got up to leave, he stood up, clasp my foream and gave me a quick half hug, telling me that it was good to see his son again. I think at this point my friend's jaw hit the ground. Here's my favorite quote from the pages he gave me:

1. "Death has no more dominion over him... or me." for I love him as I love my God. Let his speech be always with grace: James, season him with salt.

James claims to have committed his writings to memory, but I'm sure I'll have to give him this paper back at some point. Some of them are a little more disturbing, revisionist history and faux intellectualism, written in a steadier, almost artistic hand while others fall into bad spelling and poor pensmanship. He even quotes Abraham Lincoln's parable of the shepherd, sheep and wolf. It might be the oddest collection of quotes I've ever encountered. I'm more inclined to think that some of the writing is his, but the rest are passages from Malcolm X and Nation of Islam writings given to him by some type of recruiter from the research I've done this morning, especially since much of Baraka's "Black Art" is quoted on one of the pages. My roommate and I were studying them last night and the more we look at it, the more we think it's some type of prison manifesto, which has been copied by hand and distributed among prisoners.