Walter Mosley John Woman

Cornelius’s life fell into a routine that he maintained through

high school. Mostly it was school and working the projectors at the
Arbuckle. He did his homework while the silent movies played.
Late at night he’d read to his father from the works of various
historians. Among others, Herman enjoyed what he called the soft
historians, like the Durants and Collingwood, who talked about the
idea of history being on a par with actual events. “Nothing ever
happens in the past,” Herman was fond of saying, sitting erect
among the pillows Cornelius would prop up behind him. “The past
is gone and unobtainable. It is more removed from our lives than is
God and yet it controls us just as He purports to do.”
Cornelius also read long passages from Herodotus and
Thucydides, the Christian Bible and Tacitus. He recited obscure
Byzantine translations and Chinese and Egyptian records. The only
time father and son really talked was after a reading of some book
when Herman would ask Cornelius what he thought about it.
Cornelius began to search the library for other historians to
read with his father. He discovered Mabillon and John Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs. There was the Italian Muratori and then Gibbon’
magnificent History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There
were the historian-philosophers from Vico to Herder and Hegel to
Marx; Spengler and Toynbee. The slippery Wittgenstein fit
Herman’s passion for the lost past—not in his reporting but in his
refusal to accept the easy passage of knowledge between cultures,
or even individuals.
Much of what Cornelius read he did not understand but
Herman would explain now and then. At other times Cornelius
would wake up at night suddenly comprehending some quote that
he’d read aloud months earlier.
The years passed.
One evening Herman stopped his son in the middle of The
Confessions of Saint Augustine and said, “This is the power of the
Walter Mosley John Woman

world, boy. The memory of an unattainable paradise where

everything is predictable and outwardly controllable. It is all that we
are: history, memory. It is what happened, or what we decide on
believing has happened. It is yesterday and a million years ago. It is
today but still we cannot grasp it.”
“I don’t know what you mean, dad,” Cornelius said. He was
sixteen that day but his father, for all his interest in history, did not
remember the date. Since he was in his bed almost twenty-four
hours a day he had no need for a calendar.
“I mean that the person who controls history controls their
fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen,
is lord and master of all he surveys.”
“But if he claims something that isn’t true then he’s master
of a lie,” Cornelius reasoned.
Herman smiled and leaned forward. “But,” he said, holding
up a lecturing finger, “if everyone believes the lie then he controls a
truth that we all assent to. There is no true event, Cornelius, only a
series of occurrences open to interpretation.”
Though Cornelius did not know it for many years, this was the
moment of the birth of John Woman. Herman neither made a cake
nor lit a single candle to celebrate his son’s birth but he gave
Cornelius a great and terrible gift that would deliver him into a world
simultaneously of my own making and unmaking, as he wrote many years
later in a secret journal addressed to the goddess Posterity.