Fuzzy Finds a Bible: For Clarence Haskins
- Fuzzy Finds a BibleFor Clarence Haskins
For years they monitored his growth— the move from Potter’s Crossing to living with cousins in Plainfield, getting his hair processed, doowopping with George, Calvin, Grady & Ray.
It didn’t surprise them when he broke his neck, straddling and gyrating with the microphone— People, what you doing?
Somehow they knew he’d be the first one on the P-Funk Earth Tour bus, down from the high of rehearsal, exhausted and delirious, a bearded buccaneer, knew body memory would send him to the back, top left bunk, where it lay, leather-bound, radioactive, a hit single, red hot, momma, knew he’d climb in bed with it, enter its holiness— that he’d confuse, not only his role onstage with his role on earth, but its words with his own. [End Page 73]
It became a part of his nappy, his permanent stash, Chocolate City-to-city, dressing room-to-dressing room, stage.
They even knew he’d quit the band on a June night in the City of Angels far from his mother’s call, far from home.
The extraterrestrial brothers who put it there, put it there for a reason.
The fear of God, like Funk, is its own reward.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, an associate editor of Callaloo, is an instructor of African American literature and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He recently received the MFA in creative writing at Brown University, a few years after he co-founded the Dark Room Writers Collective. He is a co-editor of On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists and one of the emerging poets collected in Take Three. His work has also been published in Agni, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, The Harvard Review, and Ploughshares.
