Fine cedar-colored sisters rode the elephants, straddling their gray backs with lean exposed legs. Suddenly one girl in a shiny gold dress hopped to her feet atop the elephant and the crowd let out a collective gasp. Then the girl bent forward at the waist like her muscles and bones were elastic tape; she angled her forehead down onto the elephant’s neck and brought her hands down on its back and executed a perfect handstand. Her tiny dress fell inverted over her upper half and she held the pose for a good minute, perfect as any ballerina, atop the romping elephant. The elephants arranged themselves in a tight circle at the center of the ring, the girl reassumed her straddle-spot and while the elephants roared exultantly a red, black and green flag was produced from somewhere and Carthage was conquered and Hannibal’s spirit was anointed emperor of all known worlds.
When the elephants and their riders exited, recorded music began to blast from the subwoofers perched in the high corners of the tent: hip-hop bass blending with atmospheric chords. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a male voice rang out. “Next up we got a real treat for you. All the way from BK, Double-Dutch Dynamite!”
The strange beat quickly segued into an EPMD instrumental.
“BK to LA.”
Two girls and four boys cartwheeled into the ring, waving jump ropes like nunchucks. The six split into sets of three and the girl threw two of her ropes to her opposite number. Then they slipped the jump ropes to the boys at either side of them and began to dance like over lines of fire as they quickly complicated their steps into a whirlwind of runs and walks and an incredible backflip where one boy shape-shifted in the air and reformed a beautiful blackbird only to land on his feet a boy once more. The song finally broke down, instrumental, then isolated drums, and then the sound of a record shattering rang throughout the tent and the double-dutching girls feigned exhaustion and fell to the ground. All movement stopped. The next song wailed up and the performers, save one, somersaulted from the ring, jumping into darkness, their bodies dissembling way up there in the black heights, before finding themselves feet first on the ground almost outside the light, cakewalking away.
The World’s Greatest Double-Dutcher sat down in the middle of the ring wiping pearls of sweat from his brow. The other double-dutchers ran from the stage. The spotlight trained on its only visible subject: the boy.
“Chil’.” The familiar singer’s voice issued out of a space Erycha could only call nowhere. “Chil’!” The boy’s eyes widened and he stopped wiping his brow and sat up ruler-straight. “Baby, what are you doin in those street rags? Didn’t I teach you away from all of that gutter music? I wanted you to be a bonafide drum-major, a bonafide black leader. But look at you, wildin in the streets, showin-out. I won’t stand for it!”
The boy shot to his feet, rigid as the drum major.
The spotlight beamed in with a different golden color that held the boy within it like an intimate and revealing embrace. Now the audience could see the thinness of the body and fine delicate soft lines of the face. A syrup of sweet late laughter overtook the crowd as they realized the trick. The boy who was a girl leapt to her feet and executed a couple quick step moves tilting her hatless head forward as if finding new freedom or feeling the intangible weight of sudden fame.
Then: a tiger’s piercing scream sheering through the tent like a record scratched with a machete. Bongo drums began to beat far off. The spotlight hovered idly over the ring. Then four tiger cages were wheeled mechanically into the ring. A tall, high yellow queen traipsed in after the cages. She dangled a long cat-o’-nine-tails in her long fingers. She let the whip trail along the ring floor. As she went past each tiger’s cage, the animals acknowledged her with a waving paw, a wagging tail. She cracked the whip against the bars of their cages and the tigers flinched. Having greeted each animal, she came to the middle of the ring.
“Riana Guyana Moore, people, Riana Guyana Moore: the only African-American tiger tamer!”
The tamer produced a foot-long gold key from her suit pocket and began to unlock the cages one by one. The tigers sauntered out and at the gentle suggestion of the cat-o’-nine-tails they formed a diagonal line stretching from the east end of the ring to its northwestern edge. She let them stand there for a moment, easy as the day they were born. Then she whirled the whip in the air and shouted imperatives in German: the tigers obeyed, rising to their hind legs with their mouths agape and front paws surrendered useless in the air.
She kept them in that pose for what seemed like forever before cracking the whip, dropping them to all fours. She strutted a path between them, a fifth feline, her head high, her back a half-moon arc, her heels stabbing the ground with proud cat contempt.
She glided like that all the way out of the ring, completely out of sight and by some invisible order commanded the tigers to reenter their cages and allow themselves to be borne mechanically off.
The spotlight wandered away from the ring and settled on the band, tucked in a deep corner: they eased into a funeral dirge for the departing animals. A solitary drum beat in the background. Then the band shifted into a liquid interlude, the drums washing under in the saxophone’s rush, waves in passage. A clarinet cried up out of the inchoate depths and the band began to play the accompaniment to its own funeral, its own death, field songs and swing, and rhythm and blues, in an effortlessly epic movement.
The drum major staggered back to center-stage. Hatless still, in a tattered shirt and shorts and pathetically barefooted, she collapsed in the middle of the ring. The circus stopped. Everyone stared at the spot where her band had danced and played and the animals had performed and the children, she among them, had shape-shifted; they stared where their girl lay.
Finally, the singer’s voice returned. “Girl? Daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Daughter, remember God. Remember His word. His word is love. His word is the truth and the fire.”
“Yes,” she said again.
“We dance, we sing, we speak, we breathe, we walk and live in His light and in His service alone.”
On Erycha’s birthday morning, her mother gave her a lemon cake, an entire cake all for herself. This was a unique gift. She tasted the tangy frosting first and later the candied crust and sweet bread. She was very thankful for the cake, for being one day and one year older, for the prophetic vision God had granted her.
She prayed the candle flames down and sat waiting for her father, who had left some time before the bitch from welfare visited, to come home.
The smog blew in from Los Angeles and when time turned to deep summer and then from summer to September, the pollution would collect along with the heat and be like a wicked dome closing over the valley. And it was always hot. August was supposed to be the hottest month but it always turned out that September was the killer: day laborers were liable to collapse and die out in the fruit fields. Old grandmas would get it easier, pass out in their gardens. Young single mothers were a natural temperature gauge, pushing their baby-strollers either fast or very slow or not at all depending on how high the heat waves shimmered off the ground. Actual heat indexes cost too much money so people became their own indexes; they knew hot from hot and that sufficed.
There would be fires in the mountains and fires in the valleys as the dead brush succumbed to the sun. Then the air wafted in a perpetual state of recovery, after the burn.
In those early days when Erycha was still a child, time passed but change was an imperceptible movement. Like the earth’s rotation, it went unnoticed. From day to day and year to year the same strange mother and stranger-father lived on, abiding each other, fighting each other, vexing on each other. The same small, close-quartered community of blacks went on seemingly changeless. Folks went hungry, scrounged jobs, worked, enlisted, left for the other side of the world, and came home. The schools and the courts alternately pampered and screwed them. The economy cycled up and down, pivoting upon their prone bodies fixed