Octavio Johnson stood beside the news kiosk reading the headlines of The Chicago Defender:
Troops Mobilized in the Nation’s Capital to Restore Order After Race Rioting
Negro Boy’s Stoning and Drowning Causes Race Riot in Chicago
Norfolk Still in Heat After Attack on Negro Veterans at Homecoming Celebration
Slain Longview Riot Ringleaders Found in Kilgore After Feral Animal Attack
“It’s messed up, my man! Our brothers risked their lives fighting in the war. Returned home expecting some respect, some long overdue rights,” the sexagenarian vendor exclaimed as if continuing a passionate dialogue with the poker-faced man before him. “Instead, the same damn whites they served with are beating and lynching them like the Klan. Hell if they ain’t the Klan! It’s East St. Louis 2.0! And, of course, Wilson and the pigs ain’t doing shit about it neither. These white folks are angry, armed to the teeth cuz we ain’t their slaves no more. But God almighty knows dark skin is a death warrant in this country, whether you in chains or not. And the uniform don’t matter neither!”
The vendor awaited an affirmative response from Octavio in earnest. In the prolonged silence, he scanned the unassuming man’s posh sack suit and gambler hat. He wondered how a Negro had afforded such smart clothing when most were consigned to low-wage jobs in the stockyards and steel mills. He wanted to inquire, but Octavio’s reticence was intimidating. “But I heard some of our boys broke into the Armory yesterday. They’re fighting back,” the vendor concluded, to break the awkwardness.
Octavio looked up emptily at the middle-aged man, reached into the pocket of his trousers for change, and overpaid for the newspaper. “This ain’t about God,” he dispassionately replied as he tipped his hat and walked away.
***
Octavio was a man of few words. He expressed himself in action, like his late father Grayson Johnson. Grayson had been a hard-working, toughened-up foundryman from the Caribbean island of Tobago. Following his older brother, Tomas, on a passenger steamer from Trinidad’s Port-of-Spain, the duo had migrated from their tropical island home to another island, the City of New York.
Grayson and Tomas had both taught Octavio that, in a society where the hard-luck Negro has no voice, their behavior and actions would speak volumes. Octavio was not fortunate enough though to glean more parental wisdom from his father and uncle, as they both became the victims of a vicious white mob during riots in the city some years later. Octavio was only six years old and left in the care of his mother who, with Grayson’s absence, quickly turned to booze, opiates, and the oldest profession in the world. Nearly fifteen years after their unjust deaths, an embittered and enraged Octavio, who had faced off against his share of bigots, sought retribution through a powerful Obeahman who’d also migrated from the West Indies.
***
In the dimly lit room of the Obeahman’s ground-floor apartment in Bed-Stuy, Octavio had spoken simply and elliptically to his desire: “Make me what Evil fears. De Lagahoo of lore.” Octavio sought the power of the Lagahoo—a shapeshifting beast of the darkness whose psionic gaze alone could lobotomize those who were unfortunate enough to encounter it.
Obeah was a dark practice of conjuration and possession conferred through suffering and rarely practiced by those who had not already been hardened by destitution, turmoil, or rage. It required a heavy personal cost, which Octavio willingly paid. He had nothing else to lose. And to his request, the Obeahman warned him that if Octavio wanted to fight the evils of hell in America, then he would first need to go through hell himself.
In shamanic fervor, the Obeahman thus craftily performed the ritual magic of stripping Octavio of his soul, infusing his corporeal form with a dark essence which burned in his blood and ached in his bones, ultimately transmogrifying him into the fearsome Lagahoo.
Octavio would never again be commanded by nor subjugated by any master other than his spiritual sire, Papa Bones—the spirit of death, the ruler of the graveyard, the cosmos skeleton. Moreover, Octavio would finally be able to let his actions speak at a volume loud enough for America to hear. He had sacrificed himself for this gift, and with it, he would quell the terror that had reigned over his people for centuries. His evolution would become the ultimate source of resistance to their collective suffering.
***
Octavio had moved silently across the country that Red Summer, changing form day and night, from beast to man, feasting on white supremacists for sustenance, and claiming reparations for all they had taken. The bitter stench of blood that stained the summer winds had carried him from Longview to Charleston to Washington, D.C.—cities that had been inundated with the ‘white terror.’ Now, Octavio had reached Chicago; and the newspaper he held in his hand led him further to the “Black Belt,” Chicago’s chocolate enclave.
As the moon appeared in the fading daylight of the sky, Octavio transformed into an inconspicuous black dog and roamed the darkening streets of the Black Belt, swerving in and out of fleeing and fighting locals. The neighborhood resembled an active battlefield. He passed Negro sharpshooters on rooftops; groups of young Negro men and white sailors brawling in the blood-orange light of the burning city; the body of a white man pummeled to death in an alleyway; a mulatta housekeeper tossed to the road, strangled by her own clothes; a brown-skin boy crying over the unconscious body of his older sibling.
As he traveled further into the Black Belt, a pungent cloud of manure and industrial fumes wafted from the stockyards on the wind. It converged with the sulfuric smoking of the burning torches white marauders held as they incinerated Negro properties and tenements.
Octavio soon came upon an isolated throng of Irish gangsters inside a slaughterhouse. Four brutally beaten Negro men were hoisted in the air above the ‘killing floor’ from the steel rings of a Hurford Wheel. The men were shackled at the ankles as if cattle for slaughter.
The leader of the mob stood pompously on a makeshift platform near the killing floor, dressed less like a working-class man and more like a well-to-do gangster. He turned to the hanging men and, in a slight Irish accent, bombastically proclaimed: “This is Colts’ territory! We don’t want youse here, and we plan on running all youse niggers outta our town, whether we got the help of the facking Polaks and Lugans, or not! Lads, we could’ve just drowned these darkies in Bubbly Creek!” He brushed the heavy sweat from his forehead, “But on a night as bloody hot as this, why give these bucks the pleasure of a swim! If they gonna drown, then it’s gonna be in their OWN blood and entrails!” The leader pulled a butcher’s knife from his pants. “Select your weapon of choice fellas: sledgehammer or blade!” Several hoodlums hastily picked up their weapons with sociopathic glee and adjusted themselves under each hoisted man.
“You hear that? Sounds like chains dragging,” a spooked mobster inquired loudly over the excitement of his companions.
Before any of them could respond, the monstrous shadow of the Lagahoo stretched from the entryway. Its terrifying eight-foot lycanthropic form quickly supplanted its shadow as it stormed into the room. A debilitating darkness seeped from the deep abyss of its eye sockets; serrated fangs protruded from its skeletal canine face. It whipped the tail of the heavy iron chain noosed around its torso, knocking out the closest mobsters. One man rushed at it, taking a forceful swing with the sledgehammer, but the Lagahoo caught the man’s trouser suspenders, pulled him forward, and ripped the trachea from his neck.
“Devil, unholy beast,” a terrified mobster shouted before his organs were lacerated by its raptor-like claws. Several desperate men on the sidelines tightly clasped their sweating hands as if in front of a church pew. Some trembled silently in the pious position, while others recited an overlay of prayers vehemently as they saw their brothers’ fall. “Defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil… Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me…” None asked for forgiveness of their sins.
The Lagahoo would have no mercy on these devils incarnates. It was, in fact, the guardian angel Americans had long needed. The Lagahoo was justice, and it would leave the killing floor of the slaughterhouse saturated in the blood of all the gangsters.
The Lagahoo concluded its rampage and ravenously feasted on the organs of the head mobster before shifting back to its human form. All were dead except for the barely conscious Negroes still hanging from the wheel.
Octavio unchained the men and lowered them to the platform. One of the men stirred, half opening his eye to the naked, dark-skin man assisting him. He struggled to push words through his lips before passing out once more. Octavio said nothing as the other men slowly came to and realized the scene of horrific carnage before them in the slaughterhouse. They were none the wiser that Octavio had been responsible for the blood bath. His actions had spoken louder than any words he could’ve said to those terrorists.
Octavio casually walked from the slaughterhouse to the stockyards and halted. The call of Papa Bones burned in his blood. There was more work to do. He transformed back to his mongrel form, sniffed the metallic air, and ran off into the night to continue cleansing the Black Belt and the rest of America of its monsters.
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