“…please blame it on the Son of the Morning”
– Jay-Z
Afonso was furious when he made it back to his tent. Everything inside was ransacked, and his clothes were splayed all over the ground. He immediately checked the tin box where he kept his savings, kicking through all of his belongings to the post of the cott where he had taped it. He cursed loudly when he saw the tin box open and empty and he continued to destroy his things for a solid ten minutes before he sat on the cott to calm himself.
As he sat, the wind gently blew the flap of the tent entrance, making it sway slowly back and forth. As it moved, the light in the tent intensified and then ebbed slightly, over and over, but Afonso was always in the light. He turned his whole face into the light when he noticed it dancing and he closed his eyes into it. He took a deep breath like he was inhaling the rays.
“The fuck happened in here?” Afonso heard Rusty ask and opened his eyes.
“Somebody begging to be sent back to they maker, as near as I can guess anyway,” Afonso said.
He sounded exhausted, like that moment typified all of the abuse that he had suffered in the world as a black man.
“You ok?” Rusty asked with genuine concern. He and Afonso were real friends, closer than Rusty had ever been to any black man. They had more in common than Rusty had thought possible, and over the long months of their travels, the two shared their stories that had brought them to the odd job of traveling with the circus.
“Nah, man,” Afonso stood and his solid frame eclipsed the entrance of the tent where Rusty was standing just outside. “But I will be. I been shucking and jiving for y’all white folks for almost ten years now, no sir yes ma’am, the whole nine, and don’t none of it matter. I ain’t nothing to y’all…”
“Hold up now,” Rusty said gently, hoping to calm Afonso and understand what had upset him. “Tell me whats going on.”
“You know I was hoping to buy that motorcycle off Flying Jim, I been saving for a long time for it. But all my shit gone, somebody came in here and robbed me and it had to be somebody that work here. Somebody that knew I had that money. They wouldn’t come throwing shit around if they didn’t know what they was looking for.”
“That’s messed up, we should tell the boss man.” Rusty offered sympathetically.
Afonso shook his head slowly and chuckled. “What you think he gone do? You really think I’m ever gone see that money again?”
Rusty hung his head sadly.
“This is goodbye, friend,” Afonso said. “I been busting my ass and ain’t got nothing to show for it. I’m going home, I need to figure out what I’m doing now.”
Eventually Rusty left Afonso alone and he cleaned up his stuff and packed his bag. The sun still shone through the tent entrance when he was done and he sat on the edge of the cott, basking in the light. The light brown of his skin shined as a thin layer of sweat beaded on his limbs and face and he looked resplendent. He was conscious of his image, like he stood outside of his body just next to the cott and admired his good looks that even white women, and honestly all people of all colors, stopped him to compliment him on. He was beautiful, and despite the poor conditions of his youth, Afonso believed that he was destined for more than a slow life in his hometown of Ladoga. He could be a movie star and he’d hoped that the circus would be his entrance into Hollywood, but when they had traveled to a town on the outskirts of Los Angeles, California, he wasn’t able to make any meaningful connections. He’d hoped to travel with the circle until they traveled there again, but that was more than a year off and he was ready to take his revenge on the whole operation that had demeaned him with grunt labor like shoveling the dung of various animals, stripped him of his identity and forced him to be a king from a place he couldn’t point out on a map, and he couldn’t count on two hands how many black men he had led to Rusty to maim or kill. All of it for nothing.
“Everything is for something,” Afonso heard a voice that he swore issued from the light through the tent entrance. He stared at the light with two pairs of eyes, one from his body glistening on the cott and the other from his body admiring himself basking in the light, and Afonso saw a being of light form as the sun burned into both sets of his irises.
“My son, you are here to be my righteous hand. And this is a wicked place. Shine your light on them, evil cannot dwell long in the light.”
Afonso smiled two smiles and closed his eyes as the two became one. He had heard those words before and he knew what to do, for Afonso was a special man.
First, Afonso went to Rusty’s truck and dragged the body of the man, Darren, covered in the tarp back to his tent. The two were roughly the same size, any white authority figure would be easily fooled into thinking he was Afonso. Then, Afonso waited for the sun to set, and for the wee hours of the morning when he was sure that everyone would be asleep or passed out from drinking or other things. He slipped into Flying Jim’s tent and rolled the motorcycle with two gas cans and helmet on the seat quietly out and far away from the circus grounds. He leaned the motorcycle against a tree in some nearby woods, then crept back to the circus with one of the gas cans. He spilled the gas onto the grass where most of the performers and operators of the circus slept, and wetted the tents with it gently to avoid making too much noise. He was sure to soak his tent thoroughly, and the body of Darren wrapped in the tarp. Then he grabbed a lantern that hung from the outhouse and was used to illuminate the inside at night, and he lit it as he walked out of the camping grounds. He lit a cigarette as well, and dashed the lantern onto the gas-soaked ground that caught fire in an instant. The flames spread as fast as Afonso made his way back to the motorcycle in the nearby woods, and he was off as the blaze raged high into the night. It had caught the big circus tent and in the rearview of his motorcycle, Afonso was sure that the whole circus was engulfed in flames.
“You is the light! The brightest son this family ever gave birth to.”
Before he took the name Afonso when he traveled with the circus in his late teens and early twenties, he was just Timarius and he was cared for by a single, childless uncle after both his parents died. His uncle was a man called Porky because he had a round belly to match his round cheeks. Porky was almost a pastor, he was a very religious man and he often gave sermons to anyone who would listen, but he didn’t have a church. In fact, he hadn’t been inside of a church in more than a decade. But when Timarius came to live with him as a baby, he read the bible to the little boy and he filled his head with prophecies of the blessed life he would lead if he followed the light.
“All us Barneses is dark, but you golden. You the sun of the morning, as bright as the sun and walking on two legs.”
Porky did his best by Timarius and even though he couldn’t afford nice things, Timarius never wanted for anything. When Timarius was just ten years old, Porky showed him how he spoke to Jesus. They sat in the grass of the backyard while Porky smoked a joint. Timarius enjoyed it with him, he was a seasoned smoker by that point having taken up smoking tobacco at seven.
“Stare in the light,” Porky coached him, “not right at the sun, just in the light. You hear it?”
Timarius would get lost in that light as his uncle Porky changed his voice, lowering it to sound more authoritative, and he spoke the biblical English he often read to Timarius.
“You know what is right, my son. We are the light, we shine into darkness and wipe it away. You are my righteous hand.”
PRL Serials 