“This Man is going down, Howard,” he would announce with conviction.

“Why?” I would ask.

“Because it’s the Black Man’s time to rule again. They had five thousand years, now we get five thousand years.”

“What if I don’t want to rule?” I asked. “What happens if I don’t want to take over?”

He looked at me with pity in his face. “You go down with the rest of the country.”

“I guess I wouldn’t mind much anyway,” I said. “It would be a hell of a place with nobody to hate.”

But I could never get him to smile about it the way I tried to smile about it. He was always serious. And, once, when I questioned the mysticism in the teachings of the Brotherhood, Claude almost attacked me. “Another man might kill you for saying that,” he had said. “Another man might not let you get away with saying something like that.” He was quite deadly and he stood over me with an air of patient superiority. And because he could afford to be generous and forgiving, being one of the saved, he sat down at the table with me under the single light bulb and began to teach me. He told me the stories about how it was in the beginning before the whites took over, and about all the little secret significances of black, and about the subtle infiltration of white superiority into everyday objects.

“You’ve never seen me eat white bread or white sugar, have you?”

“No,” I said. He used brown bread and brown sugar.

“Or use bleached flour or white rice?”

“No.”

“You know why, don’t you?” He waited expectantly.

“No,” I finally said. “I don’t know why.”

He was visibly shocked, so much so that he dropped that line of instruction and began to draw on a pad before him on the living room table. He moved his big shoulders over the yellow pad to conceal his drawings and looked across the table at me. “Now I’m going to tell you something that white men have paid thousands of dollars to learn,” he said. “Men have been killed for telling this but I’m telling you for nothing. I’m warning you not to repeat it because if the whites find out you know, you could be killed too.”

“You know me,” I said. “I wouldn’t repeat any secrets.”

He gave me a long thoughtful look.

I gave him back a long, eager, honest look.

Then he leaned across the table and whispered: “Kennedy isn’t buried in this country. He was the only President who never had his coffin opened during the funeral. The body was in state all that time and they never opened the coffin once. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because he’s not in it! They buried an empty coffin. Kennedy was a Thirty-third Degree Mason. His body is in Jerusalem right now.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“If I told you it would put your life in danger.”