The Chariot/ The Cadillac
“If you are addicted to history, try a blindfold of razors or buy a Cadillac.” —Terrance Hayes “Lighthead’s Guide to Addiction”
A sharply dressed man standing by a pink Cadillac with a crowd looking on.
My grandfather came north from Savannah, Georgia some year no one has bothered to recount to me.
He is, as he exists in my memory, the essence of the later period of the Great Migration, one of the largest mass internal relocations in history. My grandfather is a large man, tall and broad. As a kid, I imagined him riding a train north, though I now presume he simply drove.
Whatever chariot took him to Philadelphia, I can be certain about his preference for Cadillacs. From decade to decade, his vehicle was so similar as to be the same car: boxy, cream body; navy blue canvas top. The symbolism was a nod to my grandmother’s family colors, blue and white.
She was a Hairston, which means if you are reading this and you are a Hairston of the Cooleemee Plantation Hairstons, you are my cousin. All the Hairstons I met from North Carolina to New York had skin like cream, like the Cadillac. It eased their motions from South to North, and set them up for power in Camden, where some of them settled. The power bestowed by white supremacy and colorism cannot be approximated. Its fixedness is settled in the marble seams of the Capitol building, and on paper bags fixed to doorframes.
However, I have never seen a man more victorious than my grandfather driving back home to Savannah for Christmas in his excessively leathered, cream Cadillac. His burly arm hung out the window of his personal chariot, contrasting against the painted steel like a lightning strike.
Ruled by Cancer and, as such, the inscrutable pull of the moon, The Chariot is the most aggressive side of the crab. In pop-astrology, Cancer holds the archetype of the sweet, weepy mom friend. But every crab has claws and The Chariot is an archetypical manifestation of the weapons Cancer can wield. After all, Alexander the Great & Julius Caesar boast this sun sign. Speaking personally, the Cancers in my life are the quickest to fight somebody out of the group (sorry y’all!).
The domesticity of Cancer is present in The Chariot, if somewhat more hidden. In some ways that’s where the need to attain comes from in this archetype. The Chariot emerges from The Lovers. It sets off to war having found something worth protecting and acquiring laurels. If The Lovers is merging, harmony and, sometimes, partnership—the building blocks community—then The Chariot sets off to protect that community from external threats through shows of force and acquisitiveness.
Estrangement will not allow me to know the shows of force it took for my grandfather to earn the first iteration of his Cadillac, only that it was earned. Only that sometime between migration and my birth, enough accumulation and manifestation created the conditions for my grandfather to ride around in an object of desire and envy.
This is The Chariot. The physical manifestation of success. A commanding method of transportation from the past through the present toward a gleaming future.
A display of pure internal power, aggression even, rewarded for its timeliness for its unquestionable righteousness. The spirit of a journey for which one has spent a lifetime preparing. The reward for work well spent.
The Cadillac is a function of The Chariot in Black culture. Chuck Berry owned “a fleet” of Cadillacs while he was working to define Rock ‘n’ Roll, as NPR called it in 2011. He forwent drivers and limousines to shuttle himself to meetings and concerts in pink and red, immaculately maintained Coup de Villes & Eldorodos. Rihanna had “class like a ‘57 Cadillac” on “Shut Up & Drive” and Curtis Mayfield assured people they could be grateful for the fullness of their lives even without one.
You can drive the prize, or you can be the prize. You can embody and realize the level of ambition that draws the envy of others, or you can strive to feel accomplished without those markers of achievement. More than just the end point of a hard won goal, The Chariot is the tenacity and will required to stick out the task even with the sun scolding the back of your neck.
Such a performance can be exhausting. Such a reward will come with a lengthy price tag. The costs of Blackness in the United States is not a single charge, but a set of daily taxes rendered across the whole life. We all know somebody who went broke trying to keep up with the demands of Black glamour. Or someone whose “has” turned to “had.” Whose pursuit of comfort was so singular as to drown out any other want. Who would rid themselves of any noun that no longer matched their home furnishings, no matter how dear. This is also The Chariot.
The Chariot is closer to the leap of fate indicated by The Wheel of Fortune than the Magician. It will eventually encounter, after some transformations, the question of The Hermit: what is all this desiring and working and hoarding and showing off for? Does it improve the spirit, or is it a distraction from deeper work?
Still, the celebration of The Chariot and the attainable opulence of The Cadillac are necessary in black life. It’s a symbol of the potential for stable Black life, with enough in the bank to show out and show off from time to time. It’s the sweetness that makes the struggle worth it, even for a moment, and for me, right now, that knowledge and memory is enough.
TEMPERANCE QUEER TAROT IS A BLACK DISABLED TRANS OPERATED SERVICE. IF YOU LIKED THIS POST OR FOUND IT HELPFUL, SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER OR DONATE VIA PAYPAL TO SUPPORT CARTOMANCY AND CONJURE IN OUR COMMUNITY. FOLLOW TEMPERANCE QUEER TAROT ON INSTAGRAM AND TIKTOK!
