The River Jericho

Abstract

remember this river, the old man began most of his stories. His hand, blackened by the Jericho sun, would be raised above his brow to shield his eyes. cuts through these hills like the smooth strokes of a swimmer and splinters off like them tiny veins on the back of your hand. Lord, I remember this river. He'd lower his hand and look down at me to see if I was paying attention. At ten, I was much too young to comprehend the significance of anything my grandfather said, but I liked to hear him talk. His stories, his voice, gave me a sense of security in an otherwise confusing world. In the summer of 1950, my father sent me down to Jericho from Philadelphia to stay with my grandfolks. He, too, believed that we would overcome one day. He was old then, nearly sixty-five. And while he never thought that he would live to see the day, he knew that I would. He figured that, in order for me to one day understand how far I had come, I needed to know where we had started. In his mind, Jericho was as good a starting place as any. At the time, I didn't know why my father would send me to such a God-forsaken place. What I did know was that, when me and the old man went into Woolworth's to have a hotdog, we had to eat it way back by the kitchen, not at the counter like everybody else. Our rootbeer didn't come in the big frosty mugs I had seen on the counter, but in paper cups. Our hotdogs were served on napkins instead of plates. I didn't mind because the old man didn't seem to mind. He just wanted me to have anything this world had to offer and would have endured both hell and high water to see that I got it. Me, I thought that we must have done something pretty bad to deserve that kind of treatment. The old man took me down by the riverside almost every day. It was the only place where he was truly happy. We would fish and swim until the sun went down. Then we would walk the mile or so along the dirt road back to the house. The old man owned his own land. He couldn't vote, but he was a land-holding citizen. Anybody who tried to take that away from him would have had better luck someplace else. He didn't play when it came to his inalienable rights, especially the right to bear arms. Gramma may not have liked having a gun in her house, her being a Christian woman and all, but somewhere she understood that all the praying in the world could not change the world. So, she let him be. Gramma would have our plates waiting for us on the big, black potbelly stove when we got home. She went to her meetings almost every night around sundown. The old man would kid her by saying something like, Don't you think Jesus has more to do than sit up and listen to you wailin' every night? She wouldn't pay him any mind. She thought that if she asked, she would receive. She knew she wouldn't always receive, only when she prayed just right. What she didn't know, and what my grandfather didn't tell her, was that praying really didn't have anything to do with it. All she had to do was believe that the Spirit being called upon was the Spirit within her own breast. Had she known that, her prayers would never have gone unanswered. My grandfather never said a word of that to Gramma. He thought that she would never believe him because her religion kept her from true understanding. As long as she's b'lievin' in another man's book, the old man would say, she'll never learn to b'lieve in herself. That wasn't the only reason he wouldn't tell her. The real reason was Mose. She never believed in Mose. Mose was my grandfather's grandfather, as well as the subject of his favorite story. He, like the old man, lived in Jericho all of his life, but he wasn't from there. He was born in a small town one hundred miles north of Jericho called Logos. The old man seemed to think that was why Mose was so special. He would tell me the story of Mose each time we were down by the riverside. And though I knew the words to the story by heart at the end of the summer, I never could tell it like the old man. …