The city was named New Prospect two centuries ago, for the grand view from the heights above the falls but also for its enthusiastically envisioned future. The river pouring through it, with its picturesque falls and churning rapids, would attract industry, it was thought when the nation was young, and so, eventually, after many false starts and bankruptcies, it did-knitting mills, silk-dyeing plants, leather-works, factories that produced locomotives and horseless carriages and cables to sustain the great bridges that were spanning the rivers and harbors of the Mid-Atlantic region. As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, there were prolonged and bloody strikes; the economy never recovered the optimism that helped emigrants from Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East endure fourteen-hour days of strenuous, poisonous, deafening, monotonous labor. The factories drifted south and west, where labor was cheaper and easier to cow, and where iron ore and coke were closer to transport.
Those who occupy the inner city now are brown, by and large, in its many shades. A remnant of fair-skinned but rarely Anglo-Saxon merchants finds some small profit in selling pizzas and chili and brightly packaged junk food and cigarettes and state-lottery tickets downtown, but they are giving way to recently immigrant Indians and Koreans who feel less compelled, as darkness falls, to flee to the still-mixed outskirts of the city and its suburbs. White faces downtown look furtive and dingy. At night, after a few choice ethnic restaurants have discharged their suburban clientele, a police car will stop and question white pedestrians, on the assumption that they are looking for a drug deal or else need to be advised on the dangers of this environment. Ahmad himself is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by ancestry, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the muddy rice and flax fields of the overflowing Nile. The complexion of the offspring of this mixed marriage could be described as dun, a low-luster shade lighter than beige; that of his surrogate father, Shaikh Rashid, is a waxy white shared with generations of heavily swathed Yemeni warriors.
Where six-story department stores and the closely stacked offices of Jewish and Protestant exploiters once formed a continuous fagade of glass, brick, and granite, there are bulldozed gaps and former display windows covered by plywood crawling with spray-painted graffiti. To Ahmad's eyes, the bulbous letters of the graffiti, their bloated boasts of gang affiliation, assert an importance to which the perpetrators have pathetically little other claim. Sinking into the morass of Godlessness, lost young men proclaim, by means of property defacement, an identity. Some few new boxes of aluminum and blue glass have been erected amid the ruins, sops from the lords of Western capitalism-branches of banks headquartered in California or North Carolina, and outposts of the Zionist-dominated federal government, attempting with welfare enrollment and army recruitment to prevent the impoverished from rioting and looting.
And yet the downtown of an afternoon gives a festive, busy impression: East Main Street in the blocks around Tilden is a carnival of idleness, thronged by an onrolling mass of dark citizens in flashy clothes, a Mardi Gras parade of costumes lovingly assembled by those whose lawful domain extends scarcely an inch beyond their skins, and whose paltry assets are all on view. Their joy amounts to defiance. Their cackling, whooping voices are loud with the village fellowship, the luxuriant mutual attention, of those with little to do and nowhere to go.
After the Civil War, a conspicuous gaudiness entered New Prospect with the erection of an elaborate City Hall, a sprawling, turreted aggregation, Moorish in feeling, of rounded arches and rococo ironwork capped by a great tower in mansard style. Its sloped sides are covered in multicolored fish-scale shingles and contain four white clock faces the size, if they were to be brought down to Earth, of wading pools. The broad copper gutters and downspouts, monuments to the skilled metalworkers of their time, have turned mint-green witJi age. This civic pile, whose principal bureaucratic operations were long ago relegated to less lofty, more modern, less spectacular, but air-conditioned and easier-to-heat structures behind it, has been recendy awarded, after much lobbying, the status of a national architectural treasure. It stands within sight of Central High School, a block to the west, the school's once-generous grounds much nibbled by widened streets and real-estate encroachments permitted by bribed officials.
On the eastern edge of the lake of rubble, where becalmed parking lots alternate with choppy waves of knocked-down brick, a thick-walled ironstone church supports a heavy steeple and advertises, on a cracked signboard, its award-winning gospel choir. The windows of this church, blasphemously assigning God a face, and gesturing hands, sandalled feet, and tinted robes-in short, a human body with all that is unclean and encumbering about it-are blackened by decades of industrial soot and made further indecipherable by their protective grids of wire. Religion's images now attract hatred, as in the wars of the Reformation. The church's decorous glory days of pious white burghers in the hierarchically assigned pews also belong to die past. Now African-American congregants bring their dishevelled, shouting religion, their award-winning choir dissolving their brains in a rhydimical rapture as illusory as (Shaikh Rashid sardonically puts forward the analogy) the shuffling, mumbling trance of Brazilian candomble. It is here that Joryleen sings.
The day after she invited Ahmad to come hear her sing in the choir, her boyfriend, Tylenol Jones, comes up to Ahmad in the hall. His mother, having delivered a ten-pound infant, saw the name in a television commercial for painkiller and liked the sound of it. "Hey, Arab," he says. "Hear you been dissing Joryleen."
Ahmad tries to talk the other's language. "No way, dissing. We talked a little. It was she come up to me."
Reaching carefully, Tylenol takes the more slender boy's shoulder in his hand and digs his thumb into that sensitive place below the shoulder ball. "She say you disrespect her religion." His thumb works deeper, into nerves that have been asleep all of Ahmad's life. Tylenol has a square face the color of walnut furniture-stain while it's still sitting up wet on the wood. He is a tackle on the Central High football team and a gymnast on the rings in the winter, so his hands are iron-strong. His thumb is gouging wrinkles into Ahmad's crisp white shirt; the taller boy makes an impatient motion to shrug off the hostile grip.
"Her religion is the wrong one," Ahmad informs Tylenol, "and anyway she said she had no use for it but to sing in that foolish choir." The iron thumb keeps digging, but with a surge of adrenaline Ahmad swats it away, the edge of his hand chopping at the thick branch of muscle.
Tylenol's face darkens and comes closer with a jerk. "Don't you talk to me of foolish-you so foolish nobody give you shit, Arab."
" 'Cept Joryleen," comes the quick response, riding the same adrenaline. Ahmad feels watery inside and suspects his face is shamefully stiff with fear, but there is a holy bliss in confronting even a superior enemy, allowing rage to increase your mass. He dares go on, "And I wouldn't exactly call it shit, what she gave me. It was simple friendliness your type wouldn't understand."
"My type, what is that? My type has no use for your type, that's the truth, you dumb fuck. You weird queer. You faggot."
His face is so close Ahmad smells cheese from the cafeteria macaroni. He gives Tylenol a push on his chest to make some distance. Other Central High students are crowding around, there in the hall, the cheerleader types and computer nerds, the Rastas and Goths, the wallflowers and do-nothings, waiting for something entertaining to happen. Tylenol likes the audience; he announces, "Black Muslims I don't diss, but you not black, you not anything but a poor shithead. You no raghead, you a shithead."