American Jesus
Symbolism
Before the story begins, I start it out with the words “I Am A Man.” These words were lifted off the picket signs of the 1,300 hundred or so black sanitation workers that went on strike in Memphis in 1968. The black sanitation workers, unlike their white counterparts, worked with no overtime or sick leave. They even qualified for welfare due to the fact that their wages were so low. It is this strike that brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis, where on April 4th he was shot and killed while standing outside on the balcony of the Lorraine motel. Once again, reading any farther will give most of the book away.
Book I
The early scene where the crossmaker is attacked by the three young men from Jersey is a play on the incident in Jasper, Texas where Bill King, Russell Brewer, and Shawn Berry chained James Byrd. Jr. to a pickup truck and then dragged him to his death. I only use the first names of the characters. I even had one of the them using a cigarette lighter with the word “Possum" etched into it. This little detail I was able to glean from the police report. Tommy is the man that the crossmaker meets in the subway. He is symbolic of John the Baptist. Though the character in the Bible was not an ex-addict preaching in the subways of New York. At the end of Book I, the symbolism plays out even further as Tommy is decapitated by an oncoming train.
The first miracle that the crossmaker performs occurs in the opening scene and is even unknown to him. It is where he touches a dead man on a Central Park bench and the man returns to life. It is represents the raising of Lazarus. However, on page 16, the dead man is killed once again by a figure that keeps showing up in the novel. The killing of my Lazarus I stole from “The Last Temptation of Christ” by Nikos Kazantzakis. The book is where I also got the idea to have the main character called the crossmaker throughout Book I. No shame here. It was a great fucking book.
The first half of the novel is set in Manhattan for a reason. It represents Hell. A depraved priest, the unbelievers, and decadence in abundance. During his time there, the crossmaker is always being tempted.
Page 54 starts with a scene where a woman is being thrown off the bus by a white driver because he doesn’t believe that she put her money in the box. The driver ends up pushing her out and then drives away even though she is caught in the door. The bus stops when the crossmaker falls in front of it. I didn’t hide this one too well. Although, it wasn’t my intention to do so. Her name is Zora. While taking it from Zora Neale Hurston, I was also quite aware that it you rearrange the letters you will get Roza, or Rosa Parks.
The best scene that I think I’ve ever written starts on Page 71. It is where the crossmaker is outside the Holocaust Museum and puts his hands on it. He is now able to hear the soft drumming of feet as the people move to the gas chamber. What he sees and feels here is what I imagined to be the very last death at Auschwitz. Unfortunately, it is of a little girl who takes the place of her sister in the gas chamber - the very last time that it is ever used again. After witnessing this, the crossmaker pulls his hands off the wall of the museum and finds them to be burned.
Book II
In the opening scene here, the crossmaker is disassembling his crosses. It represents his loss of faith after the death of The Preacher Man. While ripping them apart, he slices the palm of his hand—obvious I hope. In the next paragraph, he starts to remember a scene from his childhood. I mention Auburn Avenue and a few other details. Martin Luther King was born and raised for twelve years at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. Oh, in this scene he awakes in The Hotel Lorraine. This is also symbolic since King was assassinated in Memphis on the balcony of the Lorraine motel.
The den mother who runs the Hotel Lorraine is Madeleine. She/he is a transvestite and also a heroin addict. But she is this story’s Mary Magdalene. It is by no means a slight of the biblical character. And if you think it is, I was not the first to begin the libel. Nowhere in the Good Book is Mary Magdalene mentioned as a whore. It is only myth.
Page 119. The crossmaker voices the words “We’re tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. All tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” This, arguably, is one of the most famous quotes from MLK. Also, Tic Than is introduced here. He represents, to some extent, Thich Quang Duc. He was the Buddhist monk, who on June 11, 1963 committed suicide by lighting himself on fire at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon in a religious and political protest. This act will be repeated later on in the story.
Page 120. The crossmaker takes the name of Marten. He is now a man, and no longer performs any miracles.
The blind man Marten encounters on Page 122 is symbolic of Bartimaeus, who recognizes Jesus as the messiah and subsequently had his sight restored.
James, the gang member, is brought into the story on Page 123. This is my Malcolm X. Once again, this is by no means a slight on Malcolm X. He is only portrayed here as a gang member in reference to the militant views that Malcolm X once held before his trip to Mecca. The gang is called Temple Seven because Malcolm X was minister of Temple 7 for the Nation of Islam. As where this gang is based, the factual Temple Seven was also located in Harlem.
Page 133. Marten comes across a young white girl who has just thrown away her black baby into a dumpster. She keeps mentioning that the girl can’t be hers because it has black eyes, not blue like her own. This scene was conjured after reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Page 150. Marten gives the address of the Hotel Lorraine as 306 Manhattan Street. 306 was the number of the room where MLK had his last meal before he was assassinated.
In Chapter 6, the old man playing the guitar represents Langston Hughes. It is tipped off by myriad references. One of them is when the old man looks at his hands and says, “Like ancient rivers, aren’t they?” Hughes wrote a poem called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” where there is a line “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world.”
Marten is stabbed by a woman in Chapter 7 with a gold letter opener. In September of 1958, King was stabbed by a woman during a book signing at Blumstein's department store in Harlem. The next chapter finds him in the hospital talking to a Dr. Nathaniel Hale Williams. The doctor is the physician who removed the letter opener whose blade was touching his aorta. In 1893, a black doctor named Daniel Hale Williams performed what is considered the first open-heart surgery. Why in the story do I have Nathaniel instead of Daniel? To be honest, I am not certain at the moment. In addition, a little white girl comes to his bedside later in the scene and gives him a card saying that she is
so happy that he didn’t sneeze because he could have died. While MLK was hospitalized, he received a letter from a little white girl with the exact same words. Also, the girl’s name is Autumn and has leukemia. American Jesus was my second book and it followed my first, Fated. Autumn was one of the main characters in that book and she had leukemia.
Page 179. The old woman in the hospital is named Helen Virginia Brez . . .” I don’t complete the last line. But it is for my mother, Helen Virginia Brzezinski.
Chapter 9. The fire bombing that kills the 4 girls is representative of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. There are many references sprinkled throughout the scene. The first names of the girls are identical. The church is on One Hundred Sixteenth Street. The names of the men involved in the bombing are Robert and Thomas. In real life, Bobby Frank Cherry was found guilty on four counts of murder and sentenced to life on May 22, 2002. Thomas Blanton was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison on May 1, 2001. The bombings took place in 1963. Also in the novel, James’ watch stops at 10:22 a.m. After the Birmingham bombings in 1963, the church clock stopped at exactly 10:22 a.m.
Chapter 10. This is one of my all-time favorite scenes. It is where Marten is playing chess with James. Here, I juxtapose lines of MLK with Malcolm X.
In Chapter 14, James has a transformation. It is symbolic of the one that Malcolm X had before he was assassinated. And here, like in real life, James is killed at the same address.
The denouement. Chapter 18. This is a recreation of the Amadou Diallo killing by four New York policemen. With the Diallo killing, a wallet was mistaken for a gun. In American Jesus, a bible was mistaken for one.
Like everything I write, I had music playing to almost every scene. For this one, most of it came from Peter Gabriel's The Passion and the sweet yet elegiac sounds of Nina Simone.