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The Story of the Game Black People Play

Book Three, The Game's Heart

 

I also seriously begin looking for Eddy, I went to his grandparent’s house, but they said they did not know his address. I knew he was in town because Betty told me she would see him from time to time on Five Points.

After I had been in Denver almost a week, I saw him standing in front of the Roxy theater, and we got to talking. I told him that I had saw Betty and she told me about Joyce having a baby. Then I told him all about Elroy and us getting busted and going to Algoa, and our decision to stay in Denver and hustle. Then he told me about Pretty Willie, and how his bottom Ho put him in a trick bag, big time.

It seemed that Willie caught this young fine money making Ho, and his bottom woman thought Willie was giving the new Ho more attention than she was getting. And this caused Willie and her to get into arguments and he had to beat her ass on a regular basis.

One day she got tired getting her ass whipped, ran away, and chose another Pimp to be her man. This was fine with Willie, that is what he was trying to do, he wanted to get rid of her because he really liked the new Ho he had.

However, the old Ho was bitter, and made plans to get even with Willie. For about a week the old bottom Ho worked real hard and put lots of money in her new pimp’s pocket.

Then would she began bullshitting all night, and would come home without any money. And when her new pimp asked why, she said that Willie took all of her money and said that her new pimp was a punk—this happened three days in a row.

The new pimp confronted Willie in the bar of the Rossonian Hotel, and told him he wanted the money he had been taking from his woman. Willie told him to go fuck himself, he did not know what he was talking about, and that was true.

One thing led to another, Willie shot the new pimp between the eyes, and that is how Willie’s woman tricked him into prison doing ten years.

Then I asked him about Crazy Horse. He said that he was in the County jail waiting to be extradited to Utah for killing a guy in Salt Lake City over two years ago; and had been out in the county jail for the last six months fighting extradition. I never told Elroy or Eddy that I saw Crazy Horse kill that man in Salt Lake.

One of his old Salt Lake City friends got busted on a white slavery charge (taking a Ho across a state line to turn tricks), and he snitched on Crazy Horse to get the charge dropped.

I told him about Elroy, and we needed two forty-five-caliber pistols, and a car; I was making plans to pull a big score. This captured his attention big time, because he was not doing so well without Willie around to guide him—he wanted a piece of the action, and he had a car.

He said he was only half pimping, in fact; he was out on bond for trying to rob some trick. He had a young chick he was trying to turn out, so when she caught a trick, he would have her signal him if the trick had flashed lots of money. If he did, then he and his running buddy would rob him.

And due to a misunderstanding of the signals from his woman, he and his buddy had tried to rob an undercover cop with his hand stuck in his pocket with his finger pointed like the barrel of a pistol. When I laughed, he insisted it had worked a number of times before. Any way, he got busted, and his grandparents put up their house for his bond.

He and his running buddy pleaded guilty, and the court was waiting for their probation report before sentencing them, and the judge allowed them to remain on bond until then.

Then he told me to give him a few days, he would find out who had some guns for sale, let me know what they cost, and gave me his phone number. I told him I stayed in the same hotel I used the last time I was in Denver, gave him the room number, and told him the name of the bar where Elroy and I hung out.

But at the time Elroy and me could not afford to buy any guns, our hustling was a hit and miss affair, with us doing more misses than hits. We were making a little chump change, but in the process it seemed that we were always having hassles. It seemed something was always going wrong with the decisions we were making, because we were always almost getting busted with just about every thing we tried.

We were following the same pattern we used before we went to Algoa, with one major shift. Whereas before when we were riding freight trains all over the country, we mostly took advantage of opportunities, but now we were making opportunities.

For example, we were standing in front of the liquor store one day, we saw a man come out with a fist full of money counting it, and carrying two fifths of wine. And we followed him, and thought it was our lucky day when we saw him turn into an ally way, so we followed him.

As he came to two big dumpsters, we ran up behind him, Elroy turned him around, and knocked him down. Both of us was trying to drag him behind one of the dumpsters when we were surprised by three of his buddies sitting there waiting for him.

Being off balance, those wine heads were determined to beat us to death, we had to run for our lives, slipping and sliding on the snow; every time we slipped down one of them would kick at us. The only thing that saved us was that they were slipping and sliding as much as we were. This was only one of the close calls we had.

On three occasions we had to run away from the police to get away. One of those times was, when it was early evening, we were walking around in the Five Points area and saw about five black women standing in front of a church house.

For some reason Elroy snatched one of their pocket books, but one of them caught hold of his shirt and would not let go. Meanwhile the other women also grabbed him and started beating him.

Those women were making so much noise, howling and going on; out of nowhere two beat walking policemen came running up the street, while I was busy trying to get Elroy free from those women.

And by the time he broke free, the police was about twenty five feet away from us, we took off running, and they were right behind us; we could run faster than them and got away.

We thought all of these close calls were funny, and proved how slick we were, and kept on pushing it to the limits.

A little over a week after I saw Eddy about the guns, Elroy and I had just came out of the movies on Curtis Street, and decided we would go to Five Points. It was about time for school to be letting out, and we wanted to check out the girls going home.

We walked up Sixteenth Street to Welton St., and while waiting for the light to change we checked out the display in a jewelry store window on the corner, and started talking about when we get some money, which ring and watch we would buy.

I don’t know how it got started, but we begin talking about which one of us could come with the best idea of robbing the store, and what it would take to pull it off—just joking around.

And one of the ideas we thought about was “snatch and grab” we had heard about in Algoa. For one thing we would not need any pistols, the whole thing would only take a minute at the most, and all we needed was a car; we figured there were at least two thousand dollars worth of jewelry in that window.

Right away Eddy came to my mind; he had a car, was a good driver, and knew where we could sell what we get. We kept playing back and forth with the idea of a snatch and grab robbery as we walked up Welton St. Street, on our way to Five Points. Then we met and started talking to some girls.

 

Soulview (Hip)

Third Major Historical Event

1740, and again in 1800

I opened my eyes, and there was Priest Sowa standing in the doorway of my cell saying, “That is a very interesting subject you are thinking about, getting in tune with the American Society. It is the same question Black people asked themselves a little over two hundred years ago, in 1740.

Lets travel up the Soul Stream and see what the Sacred Seven have to say on how they did it, and that will give you some understanding of what you have to deal with.”

Before I could say anything, off we went to the Kingdom of our Ancestors, where the Sacred Seven were gathered on the Big Rock, and the Seven African Couples were standing around them listening to what they were talking about. Little Ben, Bertha and the African Couple’s children were playing with the Black Panther and Red Hawk.

The King was saying, “Our War Chief told us about the police-army, the body of laws created between 1619 and 1712, and the additional body of laws between 1712 and 1740. All created by White Society to control every aspect of our new Black Society, in an attempt to repress any hint of resistance to slavery.

This meant we had reached a point in time that we needed to figure out a way to get some kind of control of this thing attacking us. And to accomplish this act of salvation, we needed a way to get inside of White Society, and redefine its values.

With the thousands of African Priest being thrown into slavery every year, we have the knowledge and skills to accomplish this goal, all we need to know is how White Society is spiritually governed, and that will tell us what it is we have to deal with. To find that answer, we will start with England and the English Royal Government.

At the heart of the Government is the King or Queen, who set up a government to govern the people by making laws, and appointing people to see that these rules are enacted and followed, they are called Ministers.

The English Government also picks a group of personal councilors, called his privy council; the King also picks a Chief priest, called the Archbishop; then too, the King appoints a legal counselor called the Chief Justice; plus the King is the Pope of the Church of England.

The people have what is called a parliament (like a Congress) divided into two groups, one made up of Common people called the House of Commons, and the other group is made up of upper class people called the house of Lords (like the American House of Representatives and the Senate), who made and passed laws, mostly the laws the King wanted. Although, after 1688, and the English revolution, the real power to make laws fell on parliament, and not the King, but he still had lots of power.

Now we come to the matter of the Royal Colonies. In this case the King appointed a Royal Governor to rule the colonies in his name. The people in the Colony formed what is called, in most cases, a General Assemble (like a small Congress) to make laws to govern their community, but before enacting these laws, they had to send them to England to see if the King and his Parliament agreed with them, if not the law could not pass.

The same was true in religious matters, the King’s Chief Priest, the Archbishop, sent Preachers to preach to the people in the Colonies. But in New England, especially Massachusetts and the Puritans, things were a little different.

While the Preachers still had the power to whip and kill, they were not controlled by the Archbishop. In fact they were in a state of rebellion against the Archbishop, while at the same time, living in the same pattern of behavior as the Archbishop as far as cruelty is concerned.

In this way, the New England Preachers were involved with civil law as well as religious ones. They were enforcing both with physical punishment or economic fines, or locking them up, or whip them, and some times all four.

For instance, a Preacher could have a person whipped, fined or lock-up for not coming to church on Sunday, or for doing anything he thought not holy on Sunday, the Lords day. In other words, it was a sin as well as a crime, and they are not the same thing.

But this was not the case with the Baptist, they believed that people should be free to do what they wanted from a spiritual as well as a civil point of view; this was what the Baptist were fighting for.

From far back as 1525, when they first came into existence, they didn’t believe that civil law had anything to do with religious laws as they interpreted it. In fact they thought justice of the peace was evil to some extent.

In other words, White Baptist were fighting for total freedom of religion, and was heavily persecuted. And this is why Black Slaves, Indentured servants (peasants), and the Baptist were, and do, identify with each other from a spiritual point of view; Blacks saw the Baptist as a path way to spiritual freedom.

And from a legal point of view, as we saw, it was not the laws that they expect to control us, but the psychological effects of enforcing those laws. Nor, do we really expect our rebelling resistance to control them, but the psychological effects of our resistance.

This shows that both of us are using a form of behavior modification, One started with the physical and worked up to the spiritual, and the other, started with the spiritual and worked down to the physical, just like Papa SEVEN told CHRIST.

This means that their approach, after 1740, had become more psychological in nature. For example, threat of sale from family and friends, rewards and punishment, divide and rule, selling our children, etc.; trying with every ounce of their energy to psychologically make us into willing slaves.

But you see, the plantation owner had two big problems, protecting us as his personal valuable property and controlling us as human beings. Between these two lies, our psychological social space, because they definitely can’t afford to kill all of us, nor can they cruelly hurt us, except as examples, means we have a safety zone.

We are the foundation of their livelihood, money, prestige, and leadership in White Society. Almost everything we do affects their world in one way or another. We are its foundation. If we get inside, every move we make will affect them positively or negatively to the point of driving them crazy, and still be protected between their need of protecting and controlling us.

But most importantly, they know that they need us and we don’t need them. This puts us in a strong position to fight a psychological war; and this war is not only for resistance, but also for control of them and us. However, to accomplish any parts of this control, we have to deal with the highest valued beliefs in White Society.

When dealing with the beginning of a history of two new Societies, Black and White, by following their development along two parallel lines in stages of Major Historical Events, the first thing you notice is that these Events flow one into the other without a break in the Logic line of their history. This is what happened in 1740, when the Colonies experienced its first Great Spiritual Revival on a national level, known in history as the First Great Awakening.

For example, the event of establishing Black Society automatically flowed into the Event of establishing a spiritual war zone and the meeting of the two sets of warriors engaging in spiritual battle. The method of dealing with the problems was answered in the Event before it.

All Societies are controlled by the spiritual beliefs of its members, whether they are religious or not. Between 1619 and 1740 Black Society had only indirect ways of having any influence on White Society.

The questions became, how do you get in tune with a Society that is in power and hates you? How do you deal with it? How do you get some kind of control over it? And more important, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being in tune with it? The chance to find answers to those questions came in 1740.

This bring me to the first Great American Spiritual Awakening, which was the future America’s first steps in becoming spiritually and politically independent of England, and begin to set up a spiritual base in America.

At our last meeting, in 1740, I showed that everybody is born into, and lives in, a zone of harmony between individualism and collectivism in a well balanced Society.

And that, if by chance the individualist or collectivist aspect of a person is oppressed, he or she compensates by moving fully into only one side of his or her nature; becoming super individualistic or super collectivistic: The point being is that Societies also operate in the zone between individualism and collectivism, and react in the same way.

This means that the oppressed group must look deep inside of themselves for answers to living in their situation, which pushes them deeper into the world of individualism, creativity, and spirituality of their self and their environment.

But the individual is also pushed deep into a state of independence, with the effects of giving the individual almost total personal spiritual freedom. And the more they are oppressed the more spiritual freedom they acquired; hint, it is the reason the Baptist Church is something we could use.

This resulted in a Black Individualist Society and a White Collectivist Society, so what we have is Organized Power on one side and Creative Power on the other.

 This meant that Blacks and Whites had different kinds of Societies, and that brings up the spiritual wall separating them, racism or race-hate. And this too, was related to each side’s goal. We are operating on the conclusion that it is human nature to hate anybody that stands in a negative relationship to his or her ultimate goal, in this case, profit (Whites) and freedom (Blacks). So we can see that racism is on the center stage in this spiritual war zone between these two Societies.

The seeds of this kind of racism were planted and began to grow in the period of 1619 to1671, when Black’s position was legally changed from indentured servant, to that of perpetual servitude.

White Society is divided into two forms of racism; one I will call Virginian racism, which originated in the Virginia Colony, was of an emotional nature, and spread throughout-out the South.

The second, I will call Bostonian racism, originating in the Massachusetts Colony, was intellectual in nature, and spread through-out the Northern Colonies.

After 1740, American White Society began to come into reality in two forms, northern and southern. We will have to break through this racism before we can break into White Society. As I see it, the Great Awakening is the pathway to breaking through this racism.

But what is this thing history called the Great Awakening? It was like everyone in the Colonies at that time were involved in a Great Religious Revival; as they would call it “down south,” a majority of the people got religion at large camp meetings.

A camp meeting is when thousands of people would camp out in a field or something, listen to lots of preaching, and sing and pray for weeks. This was a semi-spontaneous spiritual experience on a grand scale, indicating the spiritual birth and puberty of a nation in 1740, and the second Great Awakening in 1800, is the nation’s passage into adulthood.

The first Great Awakening was beginning to come into reality at the end of our last meeting in 1740, and was the beginning of the Colony’s spiritual break with England. And the Second Great Awakening, 1800, was the completion of that break, which gave birth to America’s spirituality, i.e., the spirituality of White Society. Meanwhile, in between these two major spiritual events, the colonies broke away from England politically, 1770-1790, and established their own political Society.

Anyway, this new American spirituality established between 1740 and 1800, became the battleground for the great spiritual fight between Black and White spiritual warriors; the Black and White Preachers.

The question became, who was going to be the one to define what this new American Spirit meant in the sociology of White Society, and especially the values and standards of their new Government. Thus the need for Blacks to get in tune with it.

About half of the Players in Black Society saw this as our Great Opportunity to have a big influence on White Society and the direction we wanted it to go.

And this is where the Black Preacher comes into the picture to play a leadership role, and become a dynamic social and economic force in Black Society.

Whites began paying Black Preachers to try to maintain some kind of control over the Society of Blacks, which gave Black Society two economic centers.

Up to this point the Player Pimps were the pillars of economic strength of Black Society, but with the arrival of the Player Preacher, Black’s Jazz Band Social leadership became divided between the Pimp and the Preachers.

However to speak of leadership in a society of individuals is a contradiction in terms, because by definition, Black’s jazz band society is individualistic by nature, and cannot have leaders in the usual sense of the word; the spirit of our Ancestors is our leaders.

On the other hand, the Great Awakening, and the Evangelical Preachers making a big attempt to sell the Christian religion to Americans, (Black, White and Red men), gives us insight into the spiritual side of the White Society, especially Southern White Society. The Slave owners making attempts to make social laws to control us, gives us some insight into the legal-socialist side of White Society. How can we handle these two aspects?

To bridge the gap, in our minds, between Evangelicalism and legalism, as a whole, we have evangelical socialism; thus we have the nature of the White Society as a whole, as far as Blacks are concerned.

It is clear, under Evangelical Socialism, that White people see our humanity as their greatest enemy and hate us for it, especially the plantation owner and the white preacher. And although they are community leaders, this hate reaches the white population in general; the preacher hates our African Soul and the Slave owner hates our African humanity. But soul produces humanity and humanity proves the existence of a soul, therefore together, they hate the totality of our being.

Therefore it is safe to say they hate us as a people with humanity and a soul, but on the other hand, they promise to love us very much as a non-human soul-less brute-being; it is human to resist, and our resistance frustrates their world.

This hatred, fear, need, and frustration, if we keep the pressure on, and controlled, will transform them into a very strange people that only we will understand; in other words, we can have a hand in creating what they are destine to become, a peculiar people. The Great Awakenings are the key.

 

 

 
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