WordUp - kalamu’s words

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

WORTH MORE THAN A DOLLAR

 

          Otis Johnson was sweating. The concrete was griddle hot. Otis' scuffed, black leather shoes were clean although unshined. The plastic, hot sausage bucket he used as a kitty had twelve coins in it: three quarters, five nickels, two dimes and two pennies. He'd been hoofing on the sidewalk a long time, too long for just a dollar and twenty-two cents, thirty cents of which he had used as startup money in the kitty.

          He stopped dancing. None of the passing tourists seemed to notice the sad stillness of Otis. People flowed around him without breaking stride and without even the slightest modulation or hesitation in their conversation. Otis could have been litter on the banquette: a candy wrapper, an empty plastic beer go-cup, anything someone no longer wanted; that's how he felt as people stepped around him.

          For a moment Otis had been so absorbed in his inner turmoil that all he heard was the replay of Hickey's effective pitch from when they had danced as a team.

          "Thank ya, thank ya, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. You are enjoying the best tap trio in the world. Him is June-boy, I'm Hickey and that's Otis. We can out dance anybody on this here street. We is called the New Orleans Flying Feet. For our next number we gon show you how good we is and we would appreciate it if you would let us know how much you like what you see. When we finish our show, just drop in a few coins before you go. All we ask, as we dance so pretty, is that you reach into yo pockets and (all three of them would join in together, execute a spin and end with their arms outstretched and their fingers pointing to the bucket Otis' mama had given them) FEED THE KITTY!"

          Then they would go into another routine Otis had choreographed for them. It was full of hesitations, hops, spins, shuffles and jumps. Since June-boy was fastest he always went in the middle. Otis went first, he'd get the people clapping. Then June-boy would have them goin' "oooohhhhh" and "aaaahhhhhh." Then Hickey would step in with his feet beating like drums. Nobody on the street could tap out rhythms as powerfully as could Hickey, whose short, stocky frame was surprisingly agile.

          When they stopped, everybody would be clapping and then would come the show-stopper. Otis' cousin Marsha had told him: always save your best stuff for last. Otis thought what would be best was a dance that didn't use no singing or hand-clapping, only the music they had inside themselves. So Otis had worked up a secondline routine that the "Flying Feet" executed flawlessly.

          They would start off dancing as a team, every move the same, right down to their finger movements, bugging the eyes and sticking out their tongues, shaking their heads and going "aaaAAAHHHHH."  Then they would go into the solo part. Two of them would break and stand back to back, except they stood about two feet away from each other and leaned back so that it was really shoulder to shoulder, and they would have their arms folded across their chests. They would be looking up like they was searching for airplanes, and of course they would be smiling. The third person would be doing a solo, any solo he wanted to do, except that it had to be short. Then after all three had done their solo, they would link arms and high kick, end with some spins and jump up clapping. Then Otis would dance with his mother's umbrella that June-boy had artistically decorated in the same way he had painted the kitty-bucket. June-boy would go through the audience with the kitty bucket silently soliciting gratuities. And, of course, Hickey worked the audience asking them to give what they could to "keep the Flying Feet flying."

          Afterwards, they would divide up the money and they would sit in the shade to rest. Hickey always said, "divide the money up on the spot and ain't nobody got nothing to say about how much they got."

          Usually they did pretty good. Ten or fifteen dollars a piece, twenty on a really good day. Once they had made twenty-seven dollars a piece with eighty some cents left over which Otis gave to June-boy and Hickey since June-boy, who was good with numbers, kept excellent count of their profits and Hickey did all the talkin' that encouraged the people to give.

 

***

 

         They had worked that way for six Saturdays and, even though it was hard work dancing for five or more hours, they had made good money. Then Hickey's old man left his mama, and his mama decided to move to Houston by her cousin.

          Otis knew how badly Hickey must have felt. Otis had never known his father. His mama said that the man who was his lil' sister Shaleeta's father and who came around all the time, frequently staying the night, wasn't Otis' father.

          Anyway, without Hickey it just wasn't the same. June-boy couldn't talk hardly at all and Otis couldn't talk like Hickey, so the money fell off drastically. Nobody could hustle the crowd like Hickey.

          "Don't be fraid to give a dollar, don't be shame to give a dime. If you can't give nuthin' but a smile and say thanks, we 'preciate that too, cause we out here dancin' just for you. Now if you could spare a quarter that sho would be right swell, and if you could give a bill instead of silver that would really ring the bell. But whatever you give we appreciate it each and all, all we ask is that you FEED THE KITTY YALL."

          When Hickey did it, it didn't sound like begging. It made people laugh and they would give. And of course it also helped a lot the way June-boy, who was real small and reed thin with big eyes and a bigger smile, carried the kitty bucket around staring up into the faces of strangers, silently pleading for their financial support. So when June-boy got sick and Otis tried going out on his own, he would be lucky to make four or five dollars a Saturday.

     Dancing on the street used to be fun when all three of them were together, but now it was neither fun nor profitable. In the middle of his dance, Otis abruptly stopped, turned away from the street, stood stone still for two whole minutes, and then brusquely snatched up the kitty bucket with the $1.22 in it and started walking away.

     He didn't know why, but today when he was dancing for tips he felt like he was doing something he shouldn't be doing. In fact he felt almost as bad as "that dollar day" which is how Otis always referred to the incident.

 

***

    

     "Look at them lil' niggers. They sho can dance." The man laughed as he jovially poked an elbow into the arm of the guy standing next to him. It was a raspy, albeit almost silent, mouth wide open laugh of amusement.

     June-boy had heard what the man said and was sheepishly walking away from him. With a familial pat on the shoulder, the laughing man stopped June-boy. In one fluid motion, the man went into his pocket and pulled out a small wad of bills held together by a gold money clip which had "R.E.T." floridly engraved on its face. Rhett, as he was affectionately known by both friend and foe, peeled off a dollar bill and dropped it in the bucket, "here you go, young fella. Yall dance real good."

     June-boy looked at Rhett's mouth. Rhett was smiling. It looked like a smirk to June-boy. June-boy looked away, first at the dollar in the bucket, then at the other people standing around.

     Otis reached into the bucket, pulled out the dollar, crumpled it in his small fist, and threw it at Rhett. The money hit Rhett in the waist and fell at his feet. "We can dance but we ain't no niggers."

     Rhett was stunned. He looked at the man he had hunched moments ago. "I didn't mean nothing by it. They kind of touchy these days, ain't they? Even the little ones." Rhett kicked the knotted dollar toward the boys and walked off chuckling.

     The small crowd that had been watching dispersed quickly and quietly. One guy dropped three quarters in the bucket and said, "Wish yall luck. Don't judge us all by the way some old redneck acts."

     Hickey was livid. At first he had looked around for something to throw at the guy: a brick, a can, a bottle, a stick, anything. The only possible missile within reach was the dollar bill. After the first flush of anger, Hickey turned from staring at the stranger's back, and refocused his attention on the money lying on the sidewalk. As Hickey moved toward the dollar, Otis stamped his foot atop it.

     "Naw, we don't need no redneck money. I ain't gon let nobody buy me like that." Otis snatched up the dollar, walked over to a nearby trash can and threw it in. "Come on yall, let's go." And they started walking home, heading out Rue Orleans. Otis was so angry, he simply half-heartedly waved and didn't even verbally respond when his friend Clarence, who was standing by the hotel door, said to him, "what's up, lil man?"

      As the frustrated trio exited the French Quarter, crossing Rampart Street and taking the shortcut through Louis Armstrong Park, they argued about the money. Hickey was still angry. "Boy, I wish I'da had me a brick. I woulda bust that sucker all up in the back a his head. I woulda kicked his ass good for true and it wasn't gon be nuthin' nice!"

     June-boy responded, "yeah and then what? The police woulda put us in jail for fuckin' with a tourist." June-boy walked over to one of the benches in the Congo Square area and sat counting their take for the day.

     "They'd had to catch me first."

     Otis ignored Hickey's verbal bravado. Silence reigned as June-boy finished the count.

     "How much we got?" Hickey demanded, obviously still agitated.

     "Twenty-six dollars and fifty cents. That's eight dollars and some change each."

     "Yeah, and if Otis wouldn't 've been so stupid and throwed that dollar away. We could of had nine dollars a piece."

     Otis spoke up, "you was mad enough to kick him but not mad enough not to let him kick you by putting a dollar in the kitty while he calling you out your name."

          Hickey quickly retorted, "way I see it, Otis, we had earned that dollar, and we shoulda kept it."

          June-boy divided up the money and gave each one his share. They rose from the bench and continued walking toward the projects. Nobody said anything for half a block. Finally June-boy broke the silence, "aw shit, it's over nah, let's forget about it."

          Otis tried not to say anything more, but the words were burning his throat. "Money don't make it right." Neither Hickey nor June-boy said a word. 

          When Otis got home, the pain his mother saw carved into her son's furrowed brow was not on account of what the White man had said but on account of how June-boy and Hickey had reacted. Otis told his mother what the White man had said but didn't tell her that Hickey and June-boy wanted to take the money.

          "Otis, you hear me. I don't want you going back out there. We don't need the money bad enough to have people mistreating you while you trying to earn honest money."

     Otis knew that it was his mother's pride speaking, but he couldn't wear pride. They couldn't eat no pride. He had bought the taps for his shoes. He had bought the jeans and some of his T-shirts. He paid his own way to the show. He even helped buy pampers and things for Shaleeta. That little money he brought home was plenty.

          "Mama, I can take care of myself. I'm allright. I got sense enough to stay out of trouble and sense enough not to let nobody misuse me." 

          Shirley Johnson looked at her son and smiled at how grown up he was acting. Just then Shaleeta had started crying. "I'll get her, mama," said Otis, glad for the opportunity to end the conversation before it got around to his mama asking what did June-boy and Hickey have to say behind what went down.

     Otis picked up Shaleeta, held her in his arms and began dancing to the music coming from the radio which was always on either B-97 if Otis was listening, or on WWOZ, the jazz and heritage station, if Shirley was listening. OZ was playing ReBirth Brass Band doing a secondline number.

 

***

 

     As the crowd flowed around him, Otis started feeling sick. He left the corner they had held down for over two months now.

     After walking two blocks in ruminative silence, he passed Lil Fred and Juggy dancing on their corner. Otis waved at them. He knew they wouldn't wave back because there were five White people standing around them.

     Suddenly it dawned on Otis what had so upset him about the dollar day. Otis stopped. He looked back at Lil Fred and Juggy. They were Black. He looked at the people they were hustling for money. They were White.

     In his mind Otis surveyed the streets as far back as he could remember. The results stung his pride. He had never seen any White kids dancing on the street for money and he had never been given money by any Black tourists, indeed most of the Black tourists would walk by quickly without even looking at the youngsters mugging, clowning, and cutting the fool on the sidewalk. Only Black boys dancing. Only White people paying money.

     Otis looked at Lil Fred and Juggy grinning at the White people as the dancing duo held out their baseball hats seeking tips. Otis shook his head, is that how he looked when he danced? While turning away from the image of his friends hustling on the sidewalk, Otis spied his own face reflected in the sheen of the brass hotel door held open by Clarence the doorman.

     A well dressed couple walked pass Otis and Clarence into the hotel. Otis was eleven years old and dressed in worn jeans and a Bourbon Street T-shirt. Clarence was forty-two years old and dressed in a white uniform which incongruously included sharply pressed short pants with a black stripe running down the side.

     "What's happenin' lil man?" Clarence genially greeted Otis.

     Otis was frightened by what he saw. He saw his young face in the door and he saw Clarence's old face beside the door. Was this his future?

     They had always told themselves they were hustling the White people. But that dollar day had started him thinking. Fred and Juggy across the street, clowning for tips had brought the thought to the surface of Otis' consciousness. And Clarence patiently opening doors, bowing, and servilely smiling a "welcome" made it clear as clear could be. Clear as that stinging, unforgettable southern drawl that constantly replayed in Otis' head: "Look at them lil' niggers. They sho can dance."

     Otis walked resolutely out of the French Quarter, vowing never to work there again.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear 

 

 

 

CRY, CRY, CRY

GO HERE FOR PART ONE: I WON'T CRY

GO HERE FOR PART TWO: A MAN AIN'T SUPPOSE TO CRY

 

PART THREE: ALL I COULD DO WAS CRY 

Even though her mouth was empty, Rita savored the crunchy flavor of animal cookies, old time animal cookies made with real vanilla. Her son laid out in a casket and here she was thinking about snacks. But that was because animal cookies were Sammy's favorite.

            When he was small, Rita would gallop the shapes up Sammy's little round stomach moving the crisply baked dough in bounding leaps. Usually the miniature animals ended up between Sammy's laughing lips.

            His fat cheeks dimpled with a grin, Sammy would squirm in Rita's lap, turn and clap his small hands in glee as he chomped down on the golden tan figures. Sometimes he'd cry out in mock pain when a bear would take a really hard jump and end up bounding over Sammy's head into Rita's mouth. Animal crackers and funerals.

            Now little Gloria, twenty-three and a half months old, sat in Rita's lap. Tyronne sat silently next to her. Gloria squirmed briefly. Without really hearing a word he said, Rita patiently endured Pastor White droning on and on. Out of the corner of her eye, Rita stole a glance at Sammy's corpse laying in the coffin. Taking in that awful stillness, Rita's instinct took over: she protectively hugged Gloria, bowed her dark face into the well oiled coiffure of her daughter's carefully cornrowed hair and planted a silent kiss deep between the black, thick, kinky rows of hair on the top of Gloria's head.

            Rita was beginning to doubt life was worth living, worth sacrificing and saving... for what, for to have children who get shot down. What sense did it make to be a mother and outlive your children?

            Two deacons moved forward and flanked the coffin. Like passing through a room where the television was on but no one was watching and the sound off, Rita was aware the men were there to lower the coffin lid but she really paid no attention to the dark suited sentinels. Rita had long ago said good-bye and there was no need to drag this out. The elder of the church appointed guardians efficiently closed the blue velvet trimmed coffin lid. Someone two rows to the rear of Rita uttered a soft but audible "Oh, my Lord." The lamentation cut clearly through the reverent silence that had settled on the small congregation. This was the end of the wake but only the beginning of a very long and sleepless night.

            Friends and acquaintances shuffled slowly, very slowly, out of the sanctuary into the small vestibule where people lined up to script their condolences in one of Sammy's school notebooks that had been set out on a podium. There was a pencil sitting in the middle of the book. A few people had signed in ball-point pen, but most signatures (some were written in large block letters, others in an indecipherable cursive script) were scripted with the pencil's soft lead and seemed to fade immediately upon writing.

            Rita looked up. "No, that couldn't be," she thought to herself. That couldn't be Paul "Snowflake" Moore darkening the sanctity of her sorrow. Rita instantly shifted the sleeping weight of Gloria from her shoulder. Wordlessly Rita handed Gloria to Tyronne. Tyronne had already seen Snowflake and knew a confrontation was in the making. In one seamless motion, as soon as Tyronne received Gloria into his large hands, he spun on his heels and handed Gloria to the first older woman he saw. By the time Tyronne turned back to Rita, Rita was already in Snowflake's face.

            "Get out of here!" Rita hissed between tightly clenched teeth. "You the..."

            "I just come to pay my respects. I ain't come to cause no trouble."

            "You don't respect nobody."

            By now the packed anteroom crackled with dread. The woman who had taken Gloria scurried back into the sanctuary, just a few months ago she had witnessed a fight break out at a funeral. Tyronne rushed behind Rita who was oblivious to her back up towering above her. With the arrogance of power, Snowflake stoically stood his ground and impassively peered at Rita and Tyronne. Suddenly the tension increased.

            "Get out," Rita screamed and pushed Snowflake hard in his chest. Snowflake glowered. She was fortunate that this was a wake, that Sammy was her son and might even be related to him, fortunate that a lot of people were standing there watching, but most all, fortunate that none of Snowflake's usual retinue was surrounding him because then Snowflake would have been bound, at the very least, to slap her down. As it was, Snowflake's hand instinctively went to his .38 derringer snug but ready  in the waist-pocket of his vest.

            The confrontation escalated so fast the onlookers barely had time to breath in and out, in fact, a few of the younger men were holding their breath. Surely Snowflake wasn't going to accept being pushed around without doing something in retaliation. Tyronne quickly stepped between the antagonists.

            "She's upset, you understand. Please, leave her be. We appreciate your concern but it would be better, man, if you would leave." Tyronne stared unflinchingly into the depths of Snowflake's emotionless eyes. Snowflake stared back and pulled an empty hand out of his vest pocket.

            Everybody, except Tyronne, Snowflake and Rita, prematurely relaxed and let out a relieved breath.

            "I said get out!" Rita screamed a second time. The deacon who had closed the coffin lid ran to the phone to dial 911. Half the people who had been standing around now quickly moved out, some exiting the front door, others retreating back into the sanctuary. Rita reached around Tyronne in another attempt to shove Snowflake toward the door.

            The rest happened so quickly only Tyronne and Snowflake saw it all. Tyronne took a swift half-step to his right to cut off Rita charging around him. He leaned backward briefly, pushing against Rita with his shoulders.

            Snowflake's left hand leapt with lizard rapidity to knock away Rita's outstretched right arm and in the process was detained by Tyronne's right hand that gripped with a viselike strength and was surprisingly unyielding. An onlooker moaned, "Oh, Lordy, no!"

            "Get out!" Rita's vehement command overpowered the onlooker's exclamation.

            Snowflake's right hand had already come up with his gun at the ready. Tyronne stepped in so close to Snowflake, if Snowflake pulled the trigger there's no telling what direction the slug would travel: upward into the ceiling, upward into Tyronne's chest, or upward into Snowflake's jaw.

            "He got a gun," some young male voice blurted at the same time Rita was reaching to get around Tyronne so she could sink her nails into Snowflake's smoothly groomed face. Snowflake pushed his right forearm against Tyronne's chest attempting to back Tyronne up and simultaneously free his left arm, which Tyronne held secure at the wrist. Not unlike is often the case in impromptu street fights, the peacemaker in the middle was the person in the most danger.

            "Young man, please. Has there not been enough shooting and death," the pastor said in a calm but insistent voice as he rushed through trying to get to where Rita, Tyronne and Snowflake were locked in an emotional tug of war.

            Rita spit at Snowflake. She missed his face but a glob stuck to the top of Snowflake's left shoulder. Some older lady fainted but no one paid her any mind because she was too far away from the focal point of the fight. The minister smothered Rita in his protective arms.

            "Can't you see this woman is grieving over her son."

            When Reverend White grabbed Rita, Tyronne bear hugged Snowflake and spoke slowly and carefully into Snowflake's ear. "I'm begging you man. Please don't shoot my wife. She's so upset she ain't got no idea what she's doing. You can understand her only son is dead and she thinks you had something to do with it. You got the gun. If you got to shoot somebody, shoot me. But please don't shoot my wife."

            Snowflake's gun was pinned between the two men.

            "Will everyone please either leave out the front door or join me in the sanctuary where we will pray for sister Rita." Reverend White physically picked up Rita in his embrace and carried her out of immediate danger. Supporting her with firm grips under her arms, two ushers grabbed the woman who had briefly fainted and spirited her out into the welcomed chill of the night air.

            The whole scene had been acted out so quickly, it seemed like a blur of simultaneous motion. Within ninety-five seconds, Snowflake and Tyronne were alone in the forlorn vestibule.

            "Thank you," Tyronne said as he stepped back half a step, reached into his lapel pocket, pulled out the white handkerchief and gently dabbed Rita's spittle off of Snowflake's cashmere jacket. "Thank you."

            It sounded so, so insane, but that was all Tyronne could think to say to the man standing in the receiving area of the church and holding a loaded gun gleaming beneath the chandelier lights. From inside the sanctuary the 23rd Psalm seeped through the swinging doors. Reverend White lead and the assembled congregation responded with a tremulous sincerity. "...Yeh, though I walk through..."

 

***

 

            "Yeah, what up?"

            Rita almost dropped the phone. It was Snowflake. She quietly hung up. So, it was just like she thought. Snowflake was behind it all.

            Here it was two weeks after the funeral and only now had Rita finally been able to summon the strength to clean out Sammy's closet.

            When Rita pulled the closet door open, Sammy's scent assaulted her. She buckled at the knees and had to grab the door sill with one hand and push hard against the door knob with the other hand just to keep from falling. It was like Sammy was hiding in the closet and came charging out when she opened it.

            Rita started to close the closet door. She couldn't stand anymore. Her intruding into Sammy's life had already gotten him killed. Rita blanked out momentarily.

            When she recovered consciousness, Rita was kneeling on one knee inside the closet door. This was as close to a breakdown as she had allowed herself to come.

            What was really fueling Rita's weakness at this moment was the indescribable mantle of guilt which refused to lift. She had taken the money out of Sammy's backpack because she wanted to talk him into stopping. He did. His death stopped everything. And the money, well, four thousand dollars barely paid for the funeral.

            Rita heard some sound behind her, turned to look over her shoulder and saw Tyronne standing in the doorway, his brow deeply furrowed in pain.

            "I'm all right. I was just going to clean out his closet and..." How do you explain to a man that a mother knows how her child smells, that you could identify his clothes blindfolded, that opening this closet door was like finding the secret place your child's death had not yet visited, the place where the child was still overpoweringly present? How does a mother tell a stepfather that the smell of dirty clothes piled on a closet floor knocked you to your knees?

            "If you want me to help, I'll be in the front room," Tyronne said quietly. Then, after waiting a few moments and hearing no response to his offer, Tyronne turned and left the room even more quietly than he had entered.

            Tyronne was trying so hard to be helpful, and patient, and considerate. But, Rita knew, the details and the ultimate impact of all of this was way beyond Tyronne's understanding. So much of this reality was based on events Rita would never reveal to Tyronne, such as the fact that Sammy's father was Silas Moore, Snowflake's oldest brother, and that Rita and Snowflake knew each other in ways hard to explain outside of the situation within which the particulars arose.

            "Stand up baby, show this boy what a woman look like."

            "Silas, I don't have any cloth... Silas, I'm naked."

            "I know you naked. This my little brother. He ain't nothing but ten years old and he ain't never even seen no pussy."

            "I done seen it before."

            "Yeah, when?"

            "Joanne showed me her thing."

            "Who you talking bout?"

            "Joanne, dat live cross the hall."

            And Silas had laughed at Paul. "Bo-Bo, that ain't no pussy. Bet she ain't even got no hair on it good yet. How old that girl is?"

            "She eight and it's still pussy, it just girl pussy."

            "Yeah, well I'm talking about real pussy. I'm talking about a woman's pussy. Rita stand up and show this boy what a woman's pussy look like."

            "Sil, I don't want to."

            "Do it for me, baby."

            "She ain't got to show me nuthin', I done seen pussy befo'."

            "Rita, I said stand up."

            As Rita remembers standing up, she turns around to see if Tyronne is still standing there looking at her, but Tyronne is gone. Rita lowers herself into a sitting position in the closet doorway and another wave of memories flood over her.

            When she was seventeen the fact that twenty-two year old Silas "Silky Sil" Moore considered her a woman filled Rita with pride. Sil was the biggest player in the courtyard. He always had money—had a big car and could have any woman he wanted, and he wanted Rita.

            "Why you like me?"

            "Look here Rita, let me give you some good advice. When you hit a streak a good luck, don't question why. Just ride it long as it last, and when the luck leave you, get up off it and be thankful you got what you did."

            "You saying you gon leave me?"

            "Naw, baby, I'm saying life is like the weather, it's always changing. Sooner or later, everything gon change."

            "I ain't gon never stop loving you."

            "Now nah, girl, you can't say that. Don't be judging tomorrow by what's happening today. Suppose, I take to liking another girl? Would you still love me?"

            "As long as it was liking and not loving, what I care. My love for you ain't got nothing to do with you liking or not liking somebody else."

            "You don't sound like no seventeen year old. That's one of the reasons I likes you."

            "Yeah, and what's another reason?"

            "Come here, I can show you better than I can tell you."          

            Rita could see her silly little seventeen year old self trying to act so womanish, and really doing nothing but being a stone fool for a man who was just using her.

            No matter how hard she tried, Rita could never forget that day. Sil pulled her close and kissed her. As her tongue flickered into his mouth, he sucked it hard almost to the point of hurting her and then released her.

            Sil unbuckled his pants and let them drop at his feet. He slid his shorts down and sat on the side of his bed. "You want a mouthful of this," he said while guiding her hand to his erect penis?

            Rita knelt quickly and started to give him head—she knew he like the way she did it. She practiced doing it, sucking on a banana sometimes for five minutes straight without stopping, strengthening her jaw muscles and other times she would chew five sticks of gum at a time, over and over, and over and over, and over, building up her stamina.

            Some of the girls said they didn't like it but they had to do it to keep a man, but Rita liked it. She liked feeling him in her mouth and liked the soft, slightly salty taste of his sperm. Like most of the girls she grew up around, Rita knew there were only two ways out for most women, one was to hitch your wagon to a man on the move and the other was to luck up and get a good job if somebody put in a good word for you, or somebody who was related to you got you on somewhere. There generally wasn't no other way out and usually finding a good job, when all you had was, at best, a public high school diploma, was harder than finding a good man. At least, every young girl had a body and most of them could attract a man for a good six to seven years after they made eighteen. There wasn't nothing they taught you in high school that lasted that long.

            "Wait a minute baby. Go close the door, this is something for just me and you."

            When Rita turned away from Sil's dick and made her first move toward the door, she saw little Paul standing there wide-eyed. She never said a word to him and just closed the door in his face.

            How could she tell Tyronne about all of that?

            By the time Rita had discovered she was pregnant, she and Sil had already broken up. Her turn was over and it was time for another high school cutie to hang on Sil. By the time Samuel was born, Sil was in prison. Rita didn't even bother trying to contact him. You ride it til it's through and when it's over you let it go.

            Rita snapped completely back to the present and began pulling clothes, boxes and whatnot out of the closet, setting them on the floor beside her in three distinct piles. One pile was clothes she would give away. One pile was stuff she would throw away, sneakers, two old pair of underwear, stuff like that, and a third pile—well, not really a pile, just a couple of things—a third stack was memorabilia she would keep. Sammy's drawing notebooks mainly and a neat stack of comic books he liked to read. Rita didn't know why she felt it important to keep the short stack of comic books but somehow these things reminded her of Sammy more than even his picture on the bedroom dresser.

            Rita lovingly looked through Sammy's notebooks. He had two that were full and one only partially complete. The partially complete one had the best drawings and also had a phone number written on the inside cover.

            She had noticed the number immediately, because, unlike everything else in the notebook, the number was written in ink and underlined.

            Maybe this number held the key to who killed Sammy? Rita believed it was Snowflake but she had no proof.

 

***

 

            "Girl, he like you. Look how he looking at you."

            "LaToya, I got a baby already. Less he ready to be a daddy and a lover, I don't even want to hear nothing."

            "Girl, he kinda cute. I wish he would look at me like that."

            "Yeah. Whatever."

            "What you mean, 'whatever.' That man got a job. He a security guard."

            "Yeah, and since he got a job, he probably got a woman."

            Rita and LaToya went up to the window together to cash their Shoney's pay checks. LaToya kept eyeing Tyronne. He was kind of build too. LaToya cashed her check first and stepped away while Rita cashed hers.

            When they got outside, LaToya burst out laughing.

            "Girl, what's so funny?"

            "You gon see."

            "No, tell me now. What up?"

            "You gon see, when he call you."

            "When who call me?"

            "Tyronne."

            "Tyronne who? What you talking about?"

            "I'm talking about that security guard in the bank who had them juicy lips."

            "Call me...what you talking about? He don't even know me."

            "Well he got your number."

            "How he got my number?"

            "Cause while you was cashing your check, I told him that you liked-ded him but you was shy and that you told me to give him your number."

            "No, you didn't."

            "586-8540. Rita Deslonde."

            "Oh, you wrong for that," Rita said and chased LaToya a quarter of the way down the block.

            Holding Tyronne's revolver in her hand, Rita had to smile as she thought back to how they had gotten together. He had called. He had asked for a date, and Rita decided he was all right when he didn't hesitate about taking her and her eleven year old son, Samuel, to the Audubon Zoo for their first date.

            What she liked most about Tyronne is he wasn't afraid to talk to her about his life—how he felt about his experiences, and not only what his dreams were but also what his fears were.

            "So, Tyronne, I can't believe you don't have a girlfriend already."

            "Believe it or not, it's true."

            "How come?"

            "I guess cause a lot of girls think I'm kind of square or something."

            "Well, after what all I done seen, square seems kind of nice to me."

            "We'll see."

            Rita smiled thinking about just how square Tyronne actually was. He wasn't much of a lover. He would roll on top of her and be through almost as soon as they got started. But that was ok, she could teach him how to take his time.

            She also had to teach him how to get high. He said he never like smoking "that stuff" all that much. With him around, a nickel bag lasted a long time. They might smoke once a week or so. Gradually, Rita just gave it up, unless they were under a lot of stress.

            The only thing they ever fought about was keeping a gun in the house. Rita knew keeping a gun went hand in hand with being a security guard but she just didn't like the idea of a gun in the house with children who were always snooping into everything. Finally, Tyronne hit on the idea of keeping the gun in a lock box. She had a key and Tyronne had a key. Rita could live with that.

            Rita slid Tyronne's gun into her purse, closed the box, covered it back up with clothing and slid the second dresser drawer fully close. Then Rita turned around in the dim bedroom. It would soon be dusk. She had no words to tell Tyronne about Sammy, about Sammy's father—well she had told Tyronne that Sammy was the result of a brief fling when she was seventeen years old and that she had never told the man that he was Sammy's father. That was true. However, Rita hadn't told Tyronne that Silas Moore was Sammy's father or that Silas was in prison. Nor, of course, had she told Tyronne that Snowflake was Silas' baby brother and that Snowflake and Rita knew each other. New Orleans was such a small town, all the poor people knew each other, or knew somebody who knew some...

            Her past wasn't pretty and there was no way she wanted to share the foolishness of her youth with Tyronne. He wouldn't be able to deal with it. It would haunt him. He was a good man but... well, it would hurt him too much to hear the details of her life. Plus, he had no way of understanding some things. Rita remembered a conversation about a news show on Channel 4.

            "Well, Goddamn, look at that. That girl can't be no more than sixteen or seventeen and she caught up in a drug ring."

            "Tee, when it's all around you..."

            "It was all around me when I grew up. But I mean she's a girl."

            "Well the drug dealer is probably her man."

            "You mean her pimp."

            "Well sometimes it ain't about being no prostitute or nothing. Those girls just be starved for affection and those guys give them dresses and jewelry and stuff and they think they're in love."

            "Yeah, and after they get pre..."

            "You mean like I got pregnant with Sammy?"

            The question hung in the air for a long time.

            After about a minute of silence, Tyronne spoke up, "So, I guess you're telling me, you're like that girl."

            "No, I'm telling you I understand what that girl is going through and I don't think you do. I think you see the condition she's in only from the outside and me, I feel the condition she's in on the inside."

            "I guess I'm thinking of how we used to mess over them young girls in Vietnam and it's hard for me to imagine them growing up and coming out ok after all that stuff..."

            "Well, if you live, you grow up. You got no choice about that. As for it being ok, who's to say what's ok?"

            After another long pause, Tyronne looked at Rita. "Baby there's a whole lot I don't know, but I know you're ok and I love you."

            Tyronne's love was disarming and sometimes uncomfortable. He was so honest about his own shortcomings and so accepting of hers. Rita used to wish she could start her life over with Tyronne, wish she had met him when she was fourteen instead of meeting Roger, wish she had gone with him in high school instead of Sherman and Bekay, wish she had waited for Tyronne to father Sammy. But what was the use of wishing. Life was what it was, not what you wished it to be. She should just count her blessings and feel lucky she and Tyronne did eventually hook up.

            The whole time they were discussing the girl on Channel 4, Rita had been standing next to the chair where Tyronne liked to sit while watching television. She bent and kissed him lovingly. "I love you back, Tee, with everything I got. I love you too."

            Everything I got, Rita thought to herself. The rub was there were things she no longer had because they had been taken from her. Rita wished she had those missing things so she could love Tyronne with everything just like he loved her. But that was only a wish, the reality was both more complex and much more repulsive.

            Clearly Tyronne had never been molested as a child, so, he still had some innocence in his loving. Rita had no innocence left. To Rita, the fierce reality of her childhood was unsparing and unforgiving. Rita was certain if Tyronne knew all the sad and sordid things that had happened to Rita and all the silly and stupid things that she had done to herself, no matter how much he loved her, he probably would leave her. Everything in Rita's life told her, no matter what they said or how much they loved you, men didn't tolerate their women making too many mistakes and indiscretions, especially if sex was involved. Tyronne was a man and, deep down, probably was no different.

            Plus Tyronne was nice and good-hearted, the very kind of man who always has a hard time dealing with people who fuck up over and over again. Tyronne got upset if she threw a coke cup out the car window, Rita could imagine what would happen if he knew about some of the other things she had thrown out the windows of her life.

            Tyronne believed that most people were basically good and a few  people were evil minded. Rita knew that everybody could go either way, it just depended on the circumstances and what they felt their chances were of getting what they wanted versus getting caught.

            Rita paused briefly in the doorway and hoped everything would be all right for Tyronne. He deserved good things. He was a good man.

            Even though Tyronne had killed as a soldier, Rita could tell, from the way Tee talked about his Nam experiences, Tyronne could never kill anyone in cold blood nor would he be able to understand being a cold-bloodied killer, and that's why right now she couldn't share with Tyronne that she had decided she was going to kill Snowflake.

            She wasn't going to talk about it and she wasn't going to think about it. She wasn't even going to cook up no scheme about how she was going to do it. She was just going to do it.

            Some things are best never said, Rita thought to herself as she passed through the front room. It's bad enough we act on some of the evil thoughts and fucked up desires we have, we don't have to talk about them; or, at least, that's how Rita rationalized walking out the door past Tyronne without telling him anything other than, "Tee, I got to get some air. Walk around some. I'll be back."

            Tyronne looked at her. He ached to comfort her but knew her well enough to know there were areas of her life she refused to allow him to touch. All he could do was wait, helplessly wait, until she was ready to open to him. "Rita, be careful."

            "I'm just going for a little walk." If Rita stopped to say anymore to Tyronne she might not do it. She had to do it now, while the smell of Sammy was still in her nose and the fuck-ups of the past were lingering in her consciousness.

            Twelve blocks later, Rita stood in the gloaming looking at Snowflake's house across the street. Lights were on. A jeep was in the driveway and a fancy car out front. She knew he was home. He had answered the phone. Then again, maybe he left right after she called. Maybe somebody else was up in there.

            Should she go knock on the door? Should she just stand and wait? Was it safe just to stand on the sidewalk waiting? Maybe he was checking her out right now.

            Sheltered by the darkening dusk, Rita simply waited for something to happen. A light shower began. Rita had had the presence of mind to bring an umbrella and raised it above her head. She stood in the rain for twenty-eight minutes, her eyes fastened to Snowflake's house. Then she saw the door open. He was standing on the porch locking the door.

            Rita quickly dashed across the street, holding the umbrella in her left hand and reaching into her dangling purse to pull out the revolver with her right hand. She had no plan. She was just going to flat out and out kill him.

            They almost bumped into each other as Snowflake ran toward his BMW. Snowflake had seen the woman running across the street in the rain but had paid her no mine until she was right on top of him.

            "Paul Moore this is for Samuel Deslonde." Bam. The first shot caught him square in the chest. He had no time to react. The force of the bullet hurled him over the hood of his car. Bam. Bam. Rita stood over Snowflake and shot him twice more. Once in his right side and the other into the back of his right shoulder. He slid off the car, a bleeding heap of inert flesh in the street.

            The rain was steady falling. Rita froze momentarily. Not sure what to do now. She looked around. A few people near the corner were standing under a sweetshop store awning and looking at her. She put the warm pistol back into her purse and swiftly walked away. No one said anything to her as she passed.

            Rita took the long way home and did not stop until she was standing, wet and distraught but dry-eyed, in their living room. When she came in Tyronne rose slowly. He had Gloria in his arms, she was sleeping. He gently set her down in the chair and silently rushed over to Rita.

            He quickly surveyed her from head to toe, wiped her damp hair back from her face and gathered her up in a huge embrace.

            "Tee, I..."

            "Shhhh, shhhhh. Don't say nothing, baby. Whatever it is we'll deal with it. I don't care. We'll deal with it."

            "I shot Snowflake."

            There were so many questions he wanted to ask her. Had anyone seen her? Did anyone follow her? Had it been on the street or in a bar or where? She probably had used his gun, which meant he could probably take the rap if it came down to that. Say he did it. Gloria needed a mama more than a daddy. Besides, probably wasn't nothing going to happen. The cops never spent too much time looking for who shot a known drug dealer. No matter what happened, they would deal with it.

            Tyronne just hugged her tighter. "I don't care. All I care about is you back here with me. Whatever happens, we'll deal with it. Together."

            Rita buried her face into Tyronne's shoulder and did something she had not done since she was fifteen and had a train pulled on her at a party—what was worse than the physical pain was how worthless the gang rape made her feel: she cried. She cried and she cried. And she cried.

            It felt good. She cried for twelve long minutes, tears rolling out of her eyes big as Cuff. When Rita finished, Tyronne was still holding her and still whispering into her ear, "no matter what happens, we gon deal with it. We gon deal with it."

            What started out as tears of pain, were now tears of gratitude. Nobody had ever loved her like this before. Nobody. In the face of such unconditional love, all Rita could do was cry.

 

 

THE END

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

CRY, CRY, CRY

 

PART TWO: A MAN AIN'T SUPPOSE TO CRY

Go Here For Part One

 

            For only the second time in his adult life, thirty-four year old Tyronne Cornelius Johnston cried.  Damaged by heretofore unimaginable hurts, Tyronne surrendered and let the tears flow, not because he wanted to but because he no longer had the strength to hold back the crying. So he wept. Silently, quietly, and openly, he wept. 

            A portion of the weeds surrounding the twisted lump on the ground was stained a dull scarlet.  A sharp foulness stung Tyronne's nostrils.  Overhead several sparrows dirtied the air with ugly, high pitched, chirping sounds.

            Tyronne's blue, two-door Toyota Tercel stood forlorn; its right front and rear wheels hiked up on the curb, the driver's door hanging open, the engine off but the lights on.  The car looked like it was in pain.

            Tyronne stared up into the underside of the sky.  The sun was stealing away quickly, fleeing in shame after witnessing the deed. Tyronne faced but did not see the bloated gray clouds, lingering like pus filled sacs on an infected wound.

            Face upturned, Tyronne waited to see if God was looking. "Sonnabitch," Tyronne wanted to scream.  He felt an urge to spit up at whatever God there was who would allow this murder to occur.  But then Tyronne asked himself why was he angry with God for what people were doing to each other.

            God gave life.  It was not God's fault if the gift was squandered or even if one gift decided to snuff out another gift.

 

            Tyronne stood up and surveyed the scene.  Death neither frightened nor repulsed him.  He had seen a lot of death. 

            Fully regaining his composure, Tyronne went through the motions of lighting a cigarette. He reached into his left jacket pocket. Moved his keys aside.  Pulled out the Marlboro box.  Flipped it open. Took a cigarette out.  Using his right hand, he firmly knocked the filter tip against the face of the box he held securely in his left palm.  Tap, tap, tap, three times.  Replaced the box into his left pocket.  Put the cigarette between the fingers of his left hand.  Pushed the cigarette between his lips.  Dug into his right trouser pocket for his yellow plastic, disposable, generic brand lighter with the red tab that he pressed once.  Then twice.  The gas flame leapt out.  Half way up toward the cigarette's tip, Tyronne released the tab.  The lighter's flame died out quickly.

            "Shit."

            He put the lighter back into his pocket.

            He knelt slowly beside the wretched form now wrapped in the softness of dusk's last light. Not since Nam had he confronted the fossilized agony of violently murdered flesh. Is life grotesquely mimicking history, are we still at war with ourselves, Tyronne wondered as he reluctantly admitted that America had left Nam but Nam had not left America. The sight of bleeding children was becoming as commonplace here as it had been back there.

            The unlit cigarette dangled useless from his lips.

            Tyronne looked away from the dirtied ground. He looked around.

            Even though Tyronne looked at each of his friends standing there: Pauline, Justin, Shorty, and Diane, Tyronne really didn't see any of them. All he saw was an ambushed future left dead and dirt moist with life's blood oozing into it.

            Tyronne didn't hear anyone either, not Pauline who was wailing loudly, nor Justin who kept saying over and over, "man, this fucked up, this fucked up, fucked up," nor Shorty, who was holding Diane's shoulder, and who repeatedly sucked up mucus, rubbed his now reddish eyes with his shirt sleeve, harked and spat on the ground.

            Diane was the only one silent. The evening insects displayed a rare sympathy and joined Diane in respectful silence. There was an airplane in the distance, some cars passing occasionally, and even a far off police siren, but as keen as Tyronne's hearing was, he heard none of this.

            What Tyronne heard he could not believe. He knew that sound could not be real, so even though he heard it, he rejected what he heard. Look like he could clearly hear Sammy-Sam laughing, laughing like Sammy-Sam used to laugh when the food was good, or a comic book was funny, or some dance he did was well done.

            Tyronne knew the laughter he heard was just an illusion. He remembered how when his buddies were shot in Nam and would lie dying in his arms, right after those young men expired, the first sound Tyronne would consciously register inside his head would be the voices of the dead saying a phrase or two characteristic of them, and usually the voices were laughing their unique laugh. Death certainly was not funny but somehow Tyronne always associated violent death with a welcomed release. Maybe the dead were happy to escape the horrors of living in this world as man had made it.

            Tyronne looked back at the quiet, unmoving hump.

            Without realizing it, during the whole time he had been trying to light a cigarette, then kneeling, then looking at the others standing there, then looking at the space where the laughter sprung out of the ground watered by life fluids draining out of a once warm body, during all of that, without realizing it, Tyronne had been crying.

            Glistening trails of tear tracks were etched on Tyronne's sad profile like the flimsy pieces of silver tinsel Tyronne had meticulously hung across the Christmas tree what seemed like only a couple of months ago.

            The liquid tinsel trickling from Tyronne's eyes shone on his brown cheeks like silver veins running across the rock surface of a big brown mountain. Suddenly Tyronne hungered for another taste of the liquor he had drunk earlier, hungered for the burning that engulfed the back of his mouth and all down his throat, the burning that helped cool his raging insides.

 

***

 

            Earlier that day, much earlier, Tyronne Johnston ("Tyronne with two N's and Johns-TON not John-son") had stood in the food commodities line waiting to get a box of handouts to feed his family.

            Tyronne Cornelius Johnston. High school basketball captain. Three times decorated, four times wounded Vietnam vet. Thirteen year veteran security guard recently laid-off.

            Never asked nobody for nothing in his life. Not even Grandma Mary for that second piece of chocolate cake he desperately wanted when he was eight years-old, nor Lisa Andrews for them drawers he also desperately wanted when he was fifteen and one half years old, which drawers he probably would have gotten, if he had begged for them or had bogarted, but he never needed no pussy that badly, no matter how badly he might have wanted it.

            That Tyronne Johnston. The same. He never begged. Never. Not even cried to God for mercy the time he was all shot up in Nam, laying in the bush all night, firing his piece until he was out of bullets and then laying for dead inside a trench, hunched up next to two fellows who were dead. That long, long night. Too shot up to move or even holler for help—who could have heard him with all the foulness of ritualized murder blanketing the area—that long night, hours and hours in that hole, with only two corpses to keep him and his thoughts company. He had not begged then.

            Never.

            Not even for the security guard job that seemed to be his last option after applying in person to fifty-eight different places.

            Naw. Tyronne Johnston never asked nobody to give him anything.

            So why was he standing on this line, sweating in the cold sunshine on this chilly hot April day?

            Why had he gone down to the community center and sat for six hours to register so somebody could give him dry milk ("Baby, this is some bullshit. I ain't never knowed no such thing like dry milk in a box.") and powdered eggs which you added water to  ("This shit ain't food, we had better chow than this in the Nam," he had thought to himself fighting back the urge to spit the shit out as he almost gagged on his first commodities meal.")?

            That girl in the registration office what told him he had spelt Benefit Street wrong ("It's E-N-E-FIT not E-N-I-FIT.") could not have been more than 22.

            "Yeah. I guess I'm a lil nervous."

            "Ain't nuthin' to be nervous about long as you telling the truth."

            "Why you think I'm here going through this shit if'n I wasn't in need for my family?"

            The girl had looked at Tyronne without answering his question.

            Tyronne searched his left jacket pocket for his cigarettes, waiting for the line to move, thinking about how that girl had looked at him like he was so pitiful or something.

            He had started to walk out.

            She didn't know him like that.

            Tyronne hadn't ever done anything shameful in his life. Always dressed clean. Never took anything that wasn't his. Never cheated on Rita. Once he was married, he was married.

            When he waited tables at the hotel he wouldn't even steal any food or a bottle of liquor. When he was a security guard he wouldn't take anything and wouldn't allow any one else to take anything on his shift.

            "Man, you trying to be too good. For what?"

            "Ain't no wrong in being right."

            Damn, this line sho moves some slow, Tyronne thought to himself as his mind snapped back to the sidewalk where he stood, embarrassed and angry with himself because he had to be there. The Marlboro box in his left hand was empty. He crumpled it in his fist and put the crushed box back in his left jacket pocket. He would throw the trash away later.

            Throwing trash in a trash can and not on the ground was a habit with him now, so much so, he didn't even recall how it had been drilled into him by his mother who had worked a second job for many years cleaning up office buildings after hours.

            "Tyronne don't you know somebody got to pick it up if you throw it on the ground. Honey don't do that. Put it in the trash. And if you can't understand it no other way then think about me having to pick it up, cause that's what I do, I pick up trash behind grown people who too lazy and triflin' to put trash where it belong."

            Nor did he think about the time he and his mother had gone on Canal Street and she had bought him a candy bar. He wanted to get at that candy so bad he just tore the wrapper off and let it drop to the floor. She had slapped him. Hard. In front of everybody. "Boy, pick that trash up."  That was the day he learned candy wetted with tears didn't taste too good. He cried, but he remembered, and since that day, though he never thought about it much, just like he wasn't thinking about it now, since that day he didn't litter.

            Tyronne needed something to do with his hands. He wished he had brought the morning paper with him so he could read it while waiting like some of the others on the line were doing. Some people obviously were regulars and knew each other because they chatted and talked family talk, but because Tyronne didn't want to talk to anybody, he simply folded his hands one on top of the other in front of him, took an "at ease" stance and waited.

            Standing in a slow moving line like this commodities line gave Tyronne a lot of time to think even though he didn't want to think about anything. He just wanted to get food for his family and be gone. Nevertheless, welcomed or not, the thoughts poured over him in waves, like the drenching, wind driven rain of a thunderstorm in hurricane season.

            Tyronne thought about the day he had been laid off, he and about four other men. How the company told them they had two weeks pay, and annual leave coming, and how they could go apply for unemployment, and all of them would get good recommendations for other jobs. Or at least that's what the letter, which was in their last pay envelope, said.

            Tyronne's supervisor had given him a number to call on Monday and he promised somebody would help Tyronne and answer any questions. When Tyronne called the number he got a recording that basically told him to file for unemployment and gave him another telephone number prospective employers could call for references.

            Tyronne did as he was instructed to do, but he really didn't like getting unemployment because it reminded him he wasn't working. Ever since Tyronne wore long pants he had worked. He had always worked. This not working was driving him crazy.

            Though he was deeply disturbed and sometimes discouraged, Tyronne never stopped looking. He knew he would be back on his feet again soon. People were always looking for a good, trustworthy security guard, especially with the way niggers was stealing shit nowadays; was just a matter of finding the right people who were looking for a good, trustworthy, experienced security guard. Tyronne believed that. He just had to keep looking.

            Two weeks before his unemployment ran out Rita was sure she was pregnant.

            Tyronne remembered how he couldn't believe that shit. Seem like it was some kind of television shit. Old man loses his job. Old lady gets pregnant.

            Tyronne looked down. The line inched ahead a few feet.

            "Baby, this the wrong time to be having a baby."

            "Tee, don't you think I know that?"

            "You sho?  I mean. Yaknow. I mean you sho you knocked up?"

            "No. I ain't sho, but I'm pretty sho."

            "I guess ain't never gon be no good times for us to..."

            "Tee, it's gon work out."

            "I ain't working. You pregnant. Told you not to quit no pill."

            "My body tolt me to quit."

            "What yo body tellin' you nah?"

            "Tellin' me we should'a been mo careful."

            "Rita, how careful a man gotta be with his woman?"

            "Tee, I ain't blaming you."

            "It was me what did it."

            "We did it. Me and you. Wasn't no just you."

            "I know that but if I had a been using a rubber, it would'a been cool."

            "Tee, it's cool nah."

            "Naw, shit no. Ain't nothin' cool 'bout me not workin' and you pregnant."

            Tyronne hadn't known Sammy-Sam was sitting on the back steps playing like he was reading a comic book but was really listening to every word Tyronne was saying to his mama.

            Sammy-Sam knew he had to do something now. Tyronne wasn't working. His mama was pregnant. And his lil sister Gloria was only a year-and-something old. Besides Tyronne wasn't his real daddy so if they had to get rid of somebody it might be Sammy-Sam.

            Sammy-Sam stayed on the same page for seven minutes. When Shorty had moved in with Diane, Shorty had made Eddie run away until Eddie ended up in Youth Study Center cause he kept getting picked up for shoplifting.

            Course Tyronne didn't beat Sammy-Sam like Shorty used to beat Eddie. But, shit, now that Tyronne didn't have a job, if somebody had to suffer Sammy-Sam knew it was going to be himself.

            Sammy-Sam knew Tyronne liked Gloria cause he was her father. And Tyronne liked Rita, his mama, cause they was sleeping together. But Tyronne didn't have no reason to like Sammy-Sam all that much.

            Tyronne was cool and all but if there was too many mouths and not enough food, Tyronne might make Sammy-Sam go away. That's just the way it was. Sammy-Sam knew how it was.

            Sammy-Sam jumped up, leaped off the steps, hopped on his purple bike Tyronne had bought him when Tyronne had a job. That was it. Sammy-Sam had to get a job. He rode off and went looking for Snowflake.

            Snowflake liked Sammy-Sam. Maybe Snowflake would help him.

            Sammy-Sam decided he would work for Snowflake but he wouldn't take none of that shit cause that shit made you act stupid like the time Myrtle was walking down the courtyard buck naked singing "You Are My Sunshine" at the top of her lungs and wouldn't stop for nothing, not even when Justin had run out there and tried to wrap her in a blanket and carry her inside. It finally took Shorty, Justin and Tyronne to get her back inside.

            Sammy-Sam was thinking so hard he didn't even wave at his boy Brian who was standing on the corner, leaning on the mailbox, savoring the last seconds of a marijuana buzz.

            Brian saw the plastic streamer threaded wheels on Sammy-Sam's purple bike blurring into a multicolored circle. Brian saw Sammy-Sam's red Michael Jackson T-shirt. But Brian didn't see Sammy-Sam.

            Sammy-Sam was standing up, pumping hard and remembering hearing Tyronne say how he ought to kick Snowflake ass behind selling Myrtle that shit but Justin had said if anybody ass ought'a be kicked then it should'a ought'a been Myrtle's black ass for taking that crazy shit.

            When he was standing there watching the shit go down, Sammy-Sam agreed with Justin on account of Snowflake ain't made Myrtle take that shit. In fact Myrtle had asked Snowflake for the shit and was fucking Snowflake behind getting a steady supply. Course, Sammy-Sam didn't find out 'bout Myrtle fucking Snowflake til after he started working for Snowflake, but anyway, Sammy-Sam knew Justin was right. If a person voluntary smoked some shit that made them act stupid, it was they own fault.

            By the time Sammy-Sam pulled into the courtyard on Snowflake's turf, he had vowed seven times he wouldn't never take no shit that made him act stupid.

            Tyronne had not been aware of Sammy-Sam's resolution. Entwined in his own troubles, Tyronne had begun to virtually ignore Sammy-Sam.

            "I know how you feel, brer."

            It took a few moments for Tyronne to realize the guy behind him in line was talking to him.

            The guy needed a shave.

            "Here, take a swig."  The guy held up a partially used half pint of Old Granddad.

            Tyronne had said he wasn't gon let nothing drive him to drink or to drugs. Tyronne might drink a beer or two, but not no serious drinking. And smoking a joint every now and then to cool out wasn't really doing no drugs. God, it was like ten something in the morning. Tyronne didn't want no drink. But he needed a drink.

            "Man, the first time I come down here I near 'bout died. But what you gon do?  It's either this, or stick somebody up or sell some dope. Me I'm too scary to heist nobody and if I was to get my hands on a whole bag a dope I would do it all up myself 'fo I could make some profit."

            Then the guy laughed.

            "My name is Joseph. Joseph LaCabe. And you?"

            "Tyronne Johnston."

            "They calls me Jojo. What they call you?"

            "Tee."

            "Well Tee, welcome to the 'grind a nigger's ass down' line-up to show you you ain't shit."  Jojo took a nip. "I used to be a plasterer. Now I'm a professional line waitin', form fillin' out, hand-out takin' fool. You ever made a Bloody Mary with that tomato paste crap that they hand out here?"

            Jojo didn't wait for Tyronne's answer.

            "Take it from me, don't."  Jojo chuckled, coughed hard (Tyronne could hear fluid moving about inside Jojo's chest), chuckled again. Took another nip. "Look here home, if you don't catch a nip soon, ain't gon be nuth'n left. You don't holla, you don't swallar. I don't offer but once and the offer stand as long as the liquor lasts, which I don't think gon be all that long."

            The line moved.

            "Tee, I got four crumb crushers and a walking mouth they call a wife. Jojo do this. Jojo do that. Jojo go get the commodities. Jojo take the kids for a hair cut. Jojo clean the hallway. Jojo mop the flo. Jojo clean the toilet. Sometimes I feel like you might as well put a dress on Jojo ass. How many kids you got?"

            "Two."  Tyronne started to say "Two and a used to be."  Tyronne remembered how the deal went down.

            Rita decided and they drove out there. In silence. About a block or so away, before they pulled into the parking lot, before they saw the three men and two women standing outside handing out leaflets talking about why people shouldn't be getting abortions, Tyronne forced himself to speak.

            "Rita we ain't got to."

            "If you was pregnant and didn't want to be, and if I was out of work and you decided to get a abortion, would you let me talk you outta it?"

            "If is a mighty big word that can change a bunch of things. Right nah I'm talking about what is, not what if."

            "Well, the baby in my stomach, and I'm saying no. And that ain't no what if, that's a what is."

            Rita got out the car. Earlier they had had the money argument.

            "Rita, we can't afford to spend no two hundred dollars right nah."

            "Yes we can, 'cause spending two hundred nah for a abortion is way less than what we would have to spend to have it, much less raise it."

            They had had the moral argument.

            "You think a abortion is the right thing to do?"

            "Tee, don't be no fool. This ain't bout no right or wrong. This bout whether its better for the four of us to make it or the five of us to fail. We ain't in no position to deal with no baby. I don't want it. You don't really want it. It's better to stop it now then to have it and not want it and treat it like it ain't wanted. I ain't bout to fool myself. I know I don't want no mo children. I done gave you Gloria. So, what you saying? Do you really want another baby?"

            "No, not really but I mean, yaknow, abortion..."

            "Bullshit, Tee. This just somethin' you thinkin' bout in yo head. For me this somethin' I'm gon have to live with. I ain't bout to have no mo babies. Period."

            There really wasn't nothing more to be said.

            When they got out the car in front the clinic, one of the white guys who was wearing brown shoes, white socks, black pants, a plain white polo pullover, and a "Try Jesus" button, came over toward him while the two women approached Rita.

            Tyronne heard the shorter woman, the one with the freckled face and her brown hair pulled back tight off her head, lecture Rita, "Don't deny a child a chance to enjoy the life the Lord gave him through you. Don't just think about how you feel now. Think about the baby's feelings. I'm not trying to tell you what to do. I can see you two are some intelligent people. I'm just asking you to think about what you're doing. Pray on it. Instead of going in there today, why don't you think about it, talk to your minister, talk to God. Wait a few days before you do something that nobody can undo."

            Tyronne had started to say something non-offensive, but Rita spoke before he did.

            "If you so worried bout giving the living a chance why don't you go feed the hungry or shelter the homeless instead standin' here tryin' to tell me how to run my life. You want to be like Jesus, do some Christian work. Tryin' to make people feel shame bout what they doin' ain't Christian. That's cheeky. Now get out my fuckin' way."

            That night Tyronne and Rita had smoked a joint together and Tyronne had slept with his arms around Rita. He had felt worse than she did.

            The line was moving again.

            "Two kids huh. You lucky. Wish I would'a had sense enough to stop when I had two."

            The line moved again. Jojo kept talking.

            "It's hard to feel like a man when you can't put enough food on the table to feed yo family."

            Tyronne thought about the money on the table. Six hundred and fifty dollars sitting on the table. When Sammy-Sam told some off the wall story about working for it, Rita had gently questioned him.

            "Samuel, ..." Rita always called Sammy-Sam "Samuel" when she was serious about something, "... working for who?"

            Tyronne remembered how he had stood on the periphery of the discussion, transfixed by the stack of money. They needed that money. Bad. But Tyronne knew where the money was coming from. Rita knew too. Rita wasn't no dummy.

            "Samuel, I want you to stop. This ain't no good..."

            "Mama, what I'm suppose to do, stand around while we starve."

            "Ain't nobody starving."

            At that moment Sammy-Sam had wanted to cry, Rita successfully fought off the temptation to get sentimentally teary-eyed, and Tyronne had wanted not to cry.

            Tyronne had not been able to think of anything to say. Everybody had been trying not to say "drugs."

            "Mama, I ain't stupid. I know what you thinking. You thinkin' I'm dealin'  But I ain't dealin'. I ain't usin'. All I do to make my money is ride around the block on my bike when I see the cops comin'. S..."  Sammy-Sam stopped abruptly, catching himself before he revealed his employer's identity. "I gets $25 dollars a day just to ride my bike when I see the cops coming. Mama, I ain't doin' no drugs. I ain't dealin' no drugs. I ain't stupid."

            "Baby, I don't think you stupid. I just don't think it's safe for you. I want to see you grow up to be a grown man. I want you to live a long time. I don't want you in no jail. I don't want you dead 'fo yo time."

            The object of the discussion, the six hundred fifty dollars had sat mutely on the table while mother and son tried to resolve their differences.

            Finally, Sammy-Sam had blurted out, "Mama, the money fo' you" and had rushed out the house. His body had been visibly shaking from the super heavy effort he was making to fight back the tears. He had had to blink real fast a couple of times, but he hadn't cried.

            "Thank you, Samuel," was all Rita had had time to get out as her son had hurried away from the painful scrutiny of her gaze. She had softly said "thank you" because she could see Sammy-Sam had wanted her love and admiration. She had seen it in his eyes. But when she had looked back down to the money, she really wasn't thankful. She was sad.

            Less than a hour later, Tyronne and Rita was arguing about that money.

            "I say we should make him stop."

            "Why cause he making money and you ain't?"

            That was the end of the argument.

            At that point Tyronne had briskly walked out the bedroom.

            Rita immediately had followed him.

            "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."

            "You said it, you ain't got to take it back."

            "Tee."

            "Rita, I don't know what to do. That's yo boy. He come in this house and put mo money on that table than I done put on that table in two months. All I know is we need the money and if he get caught up in that dope shit he gon die. But if I say he gotta stop you gon think it's cause I'm thinkin' Sammy mo man than me. I want the boy to live. I wanted the baby to live. You aborted the baby. Nah you letting Sammy kill hisself. Or something. I don't know. What I know?  I'm just a security guard with nothing to guard."

            Rita had then walked back into the bedroom and shortly returned with the six hundred fifty dollars. Tyronne was sitting stiffly in his easy chair. With the solemnity of a true believer making a difficult sacrifice, Rita had placed the money in Tyronne's lap.

            "You decide what to do with the money. Whatever you decide, I'll go 'long with that. You decide what to tell Sammy. Whatever you decide, I'll go 'long. I can't deal with this shit no mo. My head hurt. I dealt with the abortion. You deal with this. What difference do it make. We all gon die anyway."

            Looking into Rita's clear brown eyes, which were without even a hint of tears, Tyronne had both wanted to cry and not cry. Although a faintly perceptible tremble remained in her voice, Rita's hand was steady as a rock.

            Just like when he had been pinned down by the corpses of his two fellow squad members, Tyronne had sat there weighted down by the money in his lap, silently accepting the burden he was forced to bear.

            After Tyronne forced his eyes to focus on the money, and after he looked up at Rita retreating into the bedroom, and after Tyronne just stared blankly into space for a few minutes, he gingerly touched the money. Then he gripped the stack of bills decisively and actually picked up the money and held it in his hands. When he couldn't think of anything else to do, he counted it. Tyronne would never forget the feel of that money, the crumpled texture of those two fifties and a bunch of twenties and one ten. Six hundred and fifty dollars.

            Tyronne had never thought he would be in a situation where he would have six hundred fifty dollars in his hand and not know what to do with it.

            The line moved again.

            "Hey, brer ain't much left, you look like you need a shot."

            Jojo could have told Tyronne he was crying but Jojo felt a man ain't suppose to cry so you don't be telling a man he crying, you just give him a drink and help him deal with it.

            When the tears had started, Tyronne had been thinking about when he was trying to talk to Sammy-Sam. He didn't hardly know the boy. The boy was going on fourteen and he had only knowed him three years.

            It was funny, Tyronne remembered thinking, he had known Rita and Sammy the same number of years but he knew Rita and he didn't know Sammy. He could talk to Rita, he couldn't say anything, not one word, to Sammy.

            "Sammy..."  Tyronne started to say "I want you to stop working for Snowflake," but where did Tyronne get off telling Sammy what to do?  Besides, Rita had already said that, and what good would it do to repeat it. If Sammy won't listen to Rita, why should he listen to me, Tyronne had concluded as that phrase repeated itself, over and over inside Tyronne's head: "Why should he listen to me?"

            Why should a young kid like Sammy-Sam listen to a middle aged, unemployed, public high school educated, Black man whose only real expertise was in using a gun and protecting property?

            Unlike a lot of men his age whom he knew, Tyronne's burden was that he had no illusions about himself, he knew he wasn't shit. That's just the way it was. He didn't amount to nothin'. Well really the other men like him knew it too, deep down they all knew it, they just didn't think about it, wouldn't allow themselves to think about being nothing.

            But how could you not think about your own smallness when a child who was ready to be a man stood in front of you waiting for you to show him how to be a man?

            Tyronne had never really talked to Sammy-Sam about anything important, had never given him advice, had never even known how to approach Sammy-Sam. He couldn't call him "son."  Well, he wanted to but he just couldn't get it out.

            Not only didn't Tyronne feel like Sammy was his son, worse yet Tyronne didn't feel like he really could ever be a father. Caught in the vertiginous swirl of his own deepest feelings of impotence, Tyronne had felt ashamed of himself.

            Tyronne felt so little at that moment. He hadn't wanted to feel little, but he had been unable to think of anything to make himself bigger.

            Tyronne had started to say "son," and it would have been sincerely said if he had been able to utter it. That simple word, spoken by Tyronne and received by Sammy-Sam, would have enabled Tyronne to carry the weight of all his own developing years long ago when Tyronne had been a mother's child but never a father's son.

            Tyronne had not been afraid to say "son," rather he had been afraid to say it and not be able to live up to being Sammy-Sam's father, and if the full truth be known, Tyronne was afraid he could not be the kind of father for Sammy-Sam he had always wanted for himself.

            Sammy-Sam, a man to be, sensing the weight of the moment, had waited with a palpable anxiousness as Tyronne struggled to be a father. Oh that had been such a lonely moment for Tyronne when he realized not only was he lost in the wilderness, but, indeed he could not reach out and help this boy who was just beginning his own journey through this America which was, for men like Tyronne and millions of others, literally "no man's" land.

            "God," Tyronne had though to himself, "this is not fair. Life is not fair."

            Looking the future full in the face, Tyronne had no idea what to say, where to go, what to do. Nobody had ever shown him.

            After a minute had passed, the opportunity was gone. What had been but a thin wisp of anxiousness keeping them apart now calcified into a heavy veil of male inadequacy that separated them beyond not only reach, but also beyond hope. The veil was so weighty, that even though both Tyronne and Sammy wanted to lift it, neither separately nor together, could they find the handle to lift the veil.

            Tyronne's mouth opened but no words came out. Sammy-Sam listened intently, he was alert to Tyronne's body language, to the thick emotions shimmering in a blue aura around Tyronne's chest, Sammy-Sam had actually seen a faint blue color all around Tyronne's body. But there were no words.

            Tyronne had not been able to say anything. His eyes pleaded for understanding. Sammy-Sam saw that and waited. But no words had come forth. The more nothing Tyronne said, the worse Tyronne had felt.

            Tyronne cursed himself. Tyronne was a man, he should have been able to say something. He had wanted to say something even if it wasn't "son" like he wanted to be able to say. There should have been something, but there had been nothing he could say. Nothing. He couldn't.

            As premature as it was, at that moment, by default, another young manchild had become a man without ever being a father's son.

            The moment of manhood came when Sammy-Sam closed the door behind him, forever stepping out of the shelter of being anyone's son to be reared.

            The moment was almost imperceptible. Sammy-Sam leaned back slightly, lifted his head slightly, squinted his eyes slightly, and without the barest flicker of regret, slightly raised his shoulders. From that point on, Sammy-Sam was sure he no longer needed anyone to tell him what to do with his life.

            If Rita or any other female had been looking, they might have missed the meaning of the moment. The two men had been facing each other for only 132 seconds, a little over two minutes, but when they had started staring at each other it had been a man and a boy, now as their eyes unlocked, deformed as it was, Sammy-Sam's passage was complete, and Tyronne and Sammy-Sam separated one man from another, no longer man and boy, and never ever father and son.

            Tyronne had thought to himself, "I can't tell him what to do."

            Sammy-Sam had thought to himself, "he can't say a thing to me."

            After their thoughts had been completed, they shared one final look at each other across the abyss.

            Finally, as Sammy-Sam slipped further and further away from him, the only sharing Tyronne could think to do was to reveal his nakedness to Sammy-Sam.

            "Sammy, man, I don't know what to say. Me and yo mama we scared for you. We know you smart and all, but I don't know, I just kind'a want to tell you to be careful. Be real careful. You messin' with people what don't care bout people. What don't act like people. You messin with killers."

            "I know. I know. I know what I'm doing. I ain't stupid."

            The "I ain't stupid" reply hurled back across the divide was like a condemnation. Sammy-Sam had always known he was dealing with killers, hence he had been unable to understand why Tyronne had even so much as thought Sammy didn't know that, why Tyronne had even felt it necessary to say that.

            The echo of Sammy-Sam's last three words sealed any further conversation. It had hurt Tyronne not to be able to say anything else, but what could he have done?  His good intentions lay shattered at his feet. Finally, as a last resort, Tyronne physically reached out his hand to Sammy, like to shake or something. Tyronne sort of felt like hugging Sammy-Sam but that was too much, so Tyronne had just reached out his hand.

            Sammy-Sam briefly shook Tyronne's hand.

            It had been an awkward moment when their hands had touched. Although it had been brief, the moment of touching ached with embarrassment.

            As their hands dropped apart from each other, Sammy-Sam looked quickly away.

            "I'ma be all right."  Then Sammy-Sam walked out the house.

            Tyronne stood for three solid minutes and when he did turn around he saw Rita standing in the bedroom doorway looking at him. He had started to go to her. But he did not. He had simply walked out the house without saying a word.

            Tyronne had stood on the porch.

            Tyronne had walked off the porch.

            Tyronne had stood on the sidewalk.

            Sammy-Sam had gone out the back door.

            Tyronne had gone out the front door.

            Rita had stayed inside with Gloria.

            Tyronne was remembering all of that and was not aware of the tears that flowed as he stood on the sidewalk in the commodities line transfixed by the awful pain he had felt when he had stood on the sidewalk after confronting Sammy-Sam.

            At first vaguely, and then with growing clarity, Tyronne recognized the bottle, with the brownish liquid at the bottom of it, that was being held a few inches in front of his nose. Tyronne now knew the reason he could not see clearly was because he was crying, without saying a single word, Tyronne received the bottle and drank the liquor in two quick gulps.

            The second gulp of Jojo's liquor was longer than the first.

            A dude Tyronne used to know drove pass the commodities line while Tyronne was drinking. The man didn't know Jojo. Didn't know it was Jojo's bottle. Didn't know Tyronne was crying. All he knew was it was so sad to see his old high school buddy, T. C. Johnston, standing in the handout line drinking liquor before twelve in the daytime.

            Tyronne's friend witnessed Tyronne's falling but he didn't know Tyronne's wrestling.

            That was the first time Tyronne had cried.

 

***

           

            Death stinks.

            Tyronne stood up over the body of Sammy-Sam. Tyronne heard the siren growing closer. He pulled the unused cigarette from his lips and pushed it deep into his right jacket pocket. A slight nausea fouled his mouth; he wasn't going to throw up, he could handle this, but this death was not like the death of somebody he hardly knew.

            As he stood looking down, Tyronne realized, although it was true he hardly knew Sammy-Sam, the difference between this death and even many of his Nam buddies was Tyronne had really wanted to know Sammy-Sam, was supposed to know Sammy-Sam, indeed, actually needed to know Sammy-Sam because knowing Sammy-Sam and really being a father to Sammy-Sam would have salvaged a core element of Tyronne's manhood.

            In a moment of blinding and helpless honesty, Tyronne realized he was not crying just for Sammy-Sam, he was also crying for himself. All his life he had vowed he was going to be the father to his son, the father he himself had never had, and now, with Sammy-Sam's death, the deadly circle had run its full course.

            Tyronne cried because he knew not only was he never going to be any man's son, he cried because he also realized his own opportunity to be a young man's father lay dead at his feet.

            Suddenly a painful revelation flashed through to Tyronne, suddenly Tyronne knew the full extent of how slavery had destroyed Black men.

            "If we cannot be fathers and sons...," Tyronne let the whispered thought trail off.

            It was dark now. Except for the path carved out by his car's front lights, there was not much Tyronne could see on the ground before him. The back of Sammy-Sam's T-shirt, his tennis shoes, some blood on the grass. It was dark.

            This time, unlike much earlier this ugly day while standing in the commodities hand-out line, this time no one saw this man's tears. 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear 

 

 

 

CRY, CRY, CRY

 

 

PART ONE: I WON'T CRY

 

 

"No matter what happens, I won't cry,"  Sammy-Sam resolved. 

            Just turned fourteen, wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt, well chewed bubble gum in his mouth, and the heavy black rubber coverings on his purple bike's handlebars slippery with the sweat oozing uncontrollably out of his palm, Sammy-Sam, stammering to himself, repeated his vow, "I won't cry."

            Swerving only slightly to avoid a dead pigeon, Sammy-Sam skillfully negotiated around the feathered carcass without going too far towards the middle of the street.

            He didn't need to look over his shoulder. He knew a car was just behind him. He could hear with the finely tuned ear experienced bicycle riders develop.

            Although conscious of where he was and what he was doing, Sammy-Sam's main attention was focused inside himself. The approaching car's noise was mere background to what Sammy-Sam was hearing in his head: Snowflake screaming at him.

            Screaming like he screamed on Jay when Jay had threw away six rocks cause he thought the police was going to bust him.

            "Stoopid moth-ther FUCK-er, you fuckin' went and threw away six motherfuckin' rocks just cause some doofus ass cops happen to look yo motherfuckin' way. Is you motherfuckin' crazy. You OWE ME. You owe me. And yo fuckin' ass is going to pay today. One Goddamn way or another within the next twenty-four hours. By the time the sun set and rise on yo triflin' ass you best be done put fifty motherfuckin' dollars in my hand and a whole bunch of 'I'm sorries' in yo mouth beggin' my motherfuckin' pardon. I don't play no shit like dis. Fifty motherfuckin' dollars by sunrise tomorrow or else tomorrow will be the last time the sun shine on yo stoopid ass, stoopid moth-ther fucker."

            Jay had just stood there in his multicolored, knee length shorts with matching shirt, an outfit he had proudly bought for himself with his earnings. His bottom lip trembling uncontrollably, Jay instinctively licked at the semicircular scab that covered a small gash blighting the left side of his mouth. Jay was fifteen and bewildered.

            The danger had appeared imminently real to him. Ditching those rocks had seemed the most prudent action. Afterwards, even Ronnie had told him it was better to eat the cost of some rocks than to get busted. Besides he intended to pay Snowflake back out of what he sold next time round.

            Although Jay felt wronged by Snowflake's refusal to appreciate Jay's predicament, he didn't feel angry at Snowflake. Jay was confused. He just did not know how to handle dilemmas. Spinning like a rear tire mired in a mud hole, Jay's mind was working furiously but going nowhere.

            "And til you pay me my fifty, you ain't gettin' shit mo from me to deal wit. You got that?"

            Jay nodded in muddled agony. What was he going to do?

            Their insides churning worse than the time they had eaten a desert concoction of pickles and hog lips right after wolfing down milkshakes and Big Macs at Rudy's birthday party two years ago, Jay and Sammy-Sam began to feel nauseous as Snowflake curtly left the room.

             Snowflake's melodramatic display of anger had achieved his desired effect. The two youth stood straight and silent, not unlike the never used, expensive burnished brass reading lamps in Snowflake's front room, which languished beside a matching pair of seldom sat in, blue leather easy chairs. The two teenagers were scared of what was going to happen if Jay couldn't pay Snowflake the fifty dollars.

            Sammy-Sam hesitantly tugged the checkered back of Jay's loose shirt tail. "Come on, man," Sammy-Sam suggested, "let's go."  But they stood there until Snowflake came back in the room and literally kicked Jay out.

            Outside Sammy-Sam silently motioned for Jay to climb on his bike's gleaming handlebars. Jay wordlessly obeyed. As they pushed off, Sammy-Sam decided to give Jay the thirty dollars he had set aside to buy his little sister Gloria a birthday present for when she made two in a few weeks. That would leave them with twenty to get. Sammy-Sam felt as equally involved in this mess as was his good friend Jay.

            They rode the twelve blocks to Sammy-Sam's house in embarrassed silence.

            With the casualness that comes from frequent repetition, Jay hopped off before Sammy-Sam came to a full stop by Sammy-Sam's back door.

            After hurriedly tossing directions to Jay, "Watch my bike. Be right back,"  Sammy-Sam rushed up the steps.

            Jay studied Sammy-Sam's bike for what seemed like six hours before the idea struck him to wonder how much the bike was worth and to whom he could sell it. Busting through the back door, two and a half minutes after he had run inside, Sammy-Sam interrupted Jay's self-wrestling about whether to ask or just take the bike and pay Sammy-Sam back later.

            "Here man, it's all I got right now."  Sammy-Sam shoved thirty dollars—two tens and two fives carefully folded over twice—into Jay's right palm. If Sammy-Sam hadn't given the 650 dollars to his mother just last week, giving fifty dollars to Jay would have been a snap.

            Jay incredulously looked down at the money in his hand.

            "It's thirty. Now all we got to do is figure out how to get the other twenty right quick."

            Jay hadn't figured out anything. He wasn't sure what was happening. Stymied by this unexpected display of unusual generosity, Jay wondered what the deal was; was Sammy-Sam giving him the money?  Naw, couldn't be. Didn't nobody give nobody no money for nothing. Jay knew that.

            "How much I got to pay you back?"  Jay was almost afraid to ask. He knew the interest rate was often tied to need, the more a lendee needed the money, the more the lender charged.

            "Man, you got to pay Snowflake fifty dollars fo sundown tomorrow. You can pay me back whenever you get it. I'm yo homey. Snowflake, shit, ..." Sammy-Sam was at a lost for words to explain Snowflake's strangeness.

            Although he never said "thanks," and instead kept staring at the money, Jay was truly grateful.

            "Hey, man I just don't want to see nuthin' happen to you like what Snowflake did to Ronnie," confided Sammy-Sam putting a hand on Jay's shoulder.

            Both Jay and Sammy-Sam's memory reeled backward recalling the menacing scene of Snowflake pistol whipping Ronnie the time Ronnie tried to hold back on Snowflake.

            WHOP. Dead upside the head. The pistol seemed to appear like magic. One minute Snowflake had his hands in his pocket not saying nothing, next second a gun was arcing through the air. Look like a gash instantly opened up cross the left side of Ronnie's head. Blood came shooting out like squirts of sticky juice when you whack a super cold watermelon with a butcher knife.

            WHOP. Snowflake hit Ronnie again while he was down on one knee trying to recover from the first blow. When the second blow hit, Ronnie fell like a fighter collapsing on his ass after taking the full force of a looping right hand from a 225 pound, well conditioned heavyweight.

            Crumpling to the floor in slow motion, Ronnie moaned with a hurt that sounded like some kind of badly wounded animal. Crying and bleeding all over the place, the lanky youngster rolled over on the floor and curled up. Scared Snowflake was gon hit him again, Ronnie was trying to protect his head with his little adolescent hands.

            Snowflake's eyes pierced into the cringing form occupying the middle of the floor, desperately clinging to the short, burgundy colored carpet fibers for lack of any other hiding place.

            Snowflake squatted down beside Ronnie. He put the gun barrel in Ronnie's nose.

            Jay looked at Ronnie's nose with the gun sticking in it. Then Jay looked at Snowflake's hand; it wasn't trembling or nothing. Then Jay looked at Sammy-Sam's face. Sammy-Sam was looking without blinking. Then Jay felt his own hand twitching involuntarily.

            "Don't nobody double cross me."  Snowflake was almost whispering but each word he said was clearly heard by all present. "Boy, I could shoot yo ass right now and wouldn't nobody blame me or do nothin about it. You know that?"

            Ronnie didn't answer. He was cowering and trembling and whimpering. It sounded more like small squeals than like crying.

            Jay was also silently crying. Jay didn't know he was crying, nevertheless tears freely flowed down Jay's cheeks. Ronnie and Jay used to be best friends before Sammy-Sam and Jay hooked up.

            "What make you think you can cheat me?  What make you think you smart enough to cheat me or anybody else?  What make you think you can even think?  ANSWER ME, NIGGAH?"

            Ronnie just sniveled louder.

            The entire room was holding its breath, praying Snowflake would decide to spare Ronnie's life. Even Snowflake's pet goldfish was looking at the scene in pop-eyed amazement. The fish wasn't smart enough to understand English, but it had enough sense to sense danger.

            "Nah you wants to be puttin' on some kinda baby act. You steal from a man, you best be prepared to deal with gettin' caught. Ronnie, son, and I calls you son cause I likes you, son, please don't never steal from me no mo."

            Snowflake turned his head toward Sammy-Sam and Jay, but he didn't take the pistol out of Ronnie's nose. "Ordinarily I would kill somebody who stole from me."

            Sammy-Sam nodded his head yes. He didn't mean for Snowflake to kill Ronnie. He meant, yes, I understand you would kill somebody if you was mad enough or if you thought they done you wrong. And clearly Ronnie was wrong.

            Snowflake, returned his attention to Ronnie. Using the leverage of the gun in Ronnie's left nostril, Snowflake forced Ronnie's head to turn until Ronnie was looking at Snowflake through eyes blurry with tears. Without saying a word, Ronnie begged Snowflake to spare his life.

            Ronnie knew he was wrong. His passive acceptance of the pistol whipping said 'I know I'm guilty.'  The quietness and absence of anything resembling anger acknowledged Ronnie knew that by the laws of the game, Snowflake had the right to take Ronnie's head.

            Now Ronnie's head, held in place by the cold steel rod in his nose, was completely off the floor, suspended two inches above the carpet.

            "Ordinarily I'd whip yo ass til I was tired and then I would pay one of them boys standin' there to whip you somemo'. But, Ronnie, I like you."

            Snowflake slowly eased the gun out of Ronnie's nose.

            "I like you. So, I'm gon give you another chance."

            Snowflake stood up. Snowflake put the gun back in his pocket. It was just a little snub nose thirty-eight, but it looked so big. Snowflake straightened the crease on his trousers.

            "Yaknow, crime pays but stealin' is a sin," Snowflake said to the ceiling. "Ronnie, get up and go wash yo face and then come back here. I got somethin' I want to tell you."

 

***

 

            "And get me two pounds a pickle meat for the beans. And boy hurry up!"  Myrtle's hollering out the second story window at her son, Pete, who was dallying cross the courtyard, broke the silence of Sammy-Sam and Jay remembering how Snowflake had treated Ronnie.

            Sammy-Sam was thinking about how Snowflake didn't play. He remembered Snowflake's opening lecture given to everybody who worked for him. Snowflake always ended with "if you play crooked with me, I'ma straighten yo ass out."

            Jay was thinking about jacking Pete. He needed twenty dollars. Although he doubted Pete had that much, maybe he had five or even a ten dollar bill; that would be a start. Jay tried to assess the odds: Pete didn't really know Jay cause Pete was only seven and went to a different school and Jay lived a good ways off, and, maybe it would work.

            "I'ma see you later, man," Jay half said. When Jay was concentrating, he characteristically lowered his voice. Naw, Myrtle might of seen him and Sammy-Sam standing there, so if he jacked Pete, then Pete would tell Myrtle. Naw. Not Pete. But somebody. Somebody else. Not Pete. Jay shoved it into his pocket. But who else?  Standing around the store waiting for somebody was too dangerous. Too easy to get caught.

            "Yeah. Later, man." Sammy-Sam responded with a clasp of Jay's right hand and a brief embrace. "Call me later, Jay. Let me know what's happenin'."

            "Yeah," Jay walked away deep in thought.

            Jay never told Sammy-Sam how he got the rest of the money and Sammy-Sam never asked. He knew Jay had probably stolen it from some unfortunate person who just happened to cross Jay's path when Jay was in desperate need.

            Sammy-Sam started off thinking about Jay's predicament and then began to think about how all of them were like Jay. Everybody had to have money and you got it the best way you could. If you weren't smart, you had to be strong or sneaky.

            Everybody Sammy-Sam knew never had enough money, not even Snowflake. Everybody was just trying to make it. Sammy-Sam wished there was something else his friend Jay could do to make money. But all the things Jay was able to do well was stuff some authority figure said you wasn't suppose to do.

            Damn, why even think about it. When there was a need, like what Jay had, what could you do?

            While Sammy-Sam was sitting silently on the steps thinking and using a weed stalk to play with a string of ants, Pete passed by in a playful mood. He tossed a pebble at Sammy-Sam and quickly ducked into the next dooor stairwell.

            Sammy-Sam looked up, "Hey, Pickle."  All the kids called Pete "Pickle," which was short for "Pickle-Head," on account of Pete's elongated skull.

            The giggling child peeked around the open door to see if Sammy-Sam was going to pitch something back at him. Sammy-Sam wasn't thinking about Pete. he was engrossed in studying the ants. No matter how many times Sammy-Sam disrupted their line, the ants reformed. Sammy-Sam thought about that. He thought about how all the ants did the same thing. That was all right for ants but he didn't want to do the same thing all his life.

            Sammy-Sam stood up, threw the weed to the ground, dusted off his butt and went inside to his comic books. When he read those comic books he was in a different world.

            That had been two months ago, now he had a more pressing problem. As he rode down the street, toward his rendezvous with Snowflake, Sammy-Sam's memory strayed far afield to avoid thinking about his problem. Sammy-Sam rode pass Ronnie's house. Ronnie.

            Sammy-Sam remembered it clearly.

            After they had left Snowflake and Ronnie, Sammy-Sam pedaled five blocks with Jay perched on the handlebars before pulling into the park so he and Jay could talk about what they had just seen.

            They plopped down beside the new swimming pool, the same pool that hadn't been full since the last time it rained all day.

            Although the pool was less than three years old, nobody who lived around there could accurately recall the last time the pool was open. It was 458 days ago, and that was right after they had a big rally in the park for the mayor's reelection.

            Sammy-Sam had leaned his bike against the concrete side of the pool, the same side on which Jay had sprayed "RONNIE & TINY IS TIGHT LIKE THAT."

            Neither one of them said anything.

            Jay was thinking about how Ronnie had took the pistol whipping like a man. He never once broke down and begged for his life.

            Sammy-Sam was thinking about how scared Ronnie was and wondering who Snowflake was trying to scare more, Ronnie or Jay and himself.

            "I though Snowflake was gon blow Ronnie away, man," Jay stated, still shook up from witnessing the drama.

            "Yeah," Sammy-Sam was uncomfortable about the whole way the deal went down. "Except, maybe he meant it to teach us a lesson."

            "What chu mean?"

            Sammy-Sam was sitting on the ground pulling at the grass between his legs. "I mean, maybe Snowflake wanted to make sure that the rest of us didn't ever try to steal nuthin' from him."

            "Man, I wouldn't never try to steal nuthin' from Snowflake."

            "That's the point."

            "What's the point?"

            "That you wouldn't never try to steal nuthin'."

            "Oh..."

            They fell silent.

            "Sammy-Sam, you think Ronnie is all right."

            "Yeah."

            "Why?"

            "Cause the nigger got a hard head."  They both laughed. Jay knew what Sammy-Sam meant. Who could forget the time Rudy had hit Ronnie in the head with a stick and the stick broke. Everybody had laughed so hard, both Rudy and Ronnie had forgot about the fight they were having.

            "Ronnie, knew better'n to try to hold back that money on Snowflake in the first place. What he think, Snowflake was just goin' to let him go?"

            "Maybe Ronnie did lose it."

            "Man, don't nobody be losin' no two hundred dollars like that. Here he come with fo fifty when he suppose to have six fifty, talkin' bout he don't know what happen to the other two hundred. You believe that shit?"  Sammy-Sam continued without waiting for Jay to answer, "You know Ronnie better'n than anybody. You know good and well, Ronnie ain't lost no two hundred dollars."

            "What cha think he did wit it then?"

            "I don't know. Gave it to his momma. I don't know."

            "You think he gon give it back?"

            "He can't."

            "Why he can't?"

            "First, cause he got to live out his lie. He done told Snowflake he lost it. He done took the ass whippin' Snowflake put on him for losin' it. Now if he go back and give Snowflake the money, then Snowflake gon know he stole it, then Ronnie gon have to take another ass whippin' or maybe even a killin' behind stealin' from Snowflake. He know like I know, his best out is to go straight from here on in."

            "We some lucky, huh?"

            "Lucky how?"

            "Lucky we workin' for Snowflake. He pay us good. If you fuck up, he give you a break. Where else we gon do this good?"

            Sammy-Sam remembered how Jay had felt behind Snowflake literally kickin' Jay in the ass when Jay threw them rocks away.

            "Get outta my face. Go get my fuckin' fifty dollars."  While Jay was slowly retreating from the room, his head hangin' in shame, before anybody knew what was happening, Snowflake spun around and put a karate kick up Jay's rectum.

            Everybody knew Snowflake knew karate. Most of the time he didn't demonstrate his martial prowress but this was one of the times when he put on a show.

            Snowflake's pointed alligator-skin loafer moved with such swift accuracy that by the time Jay felt the sharp pain, Snowflake was standin' unsmiling on two feet. "Fifty fuckin' dollars, moth-her FUCKER!"

            "You really think we lucky, Jay?"

            "Yeah. Yeah, man. We lucky."

            "Man, this ain't lucky. This is bullshit. We ain't lucky. We just ain't got much of a choice. Thas all man. We just ain't got much a choice."

            After that pistol whipping, Jay had thought Ronnie was going to quit. But Sammy-Sam knew better. "Quit for what?  Ronnie used to getting a whippin'. His crazy ass old man be beatin' on that boy even when he right sometimes."

            Sammy-Sam was saying that but he shuddered just to think about how much pain Ronnie must have felt. Well, at least the money was good. "Besides, Jay, who else you think Ronnie could work for?"

 

***

 

            "Hey Sammy-Sam!"  Darlene's cheerful greeting snapped Sammy-Sam's attention back to the street. He didn't have time to stop and entertain no long conversation with Darlene but Darlene was sweet on him and he liked Darlene a little, so it made sense to at least stop.

            "Hey," Sammy-Sam responded as he pulled up to the curb. Sammy-Sam stayed on his bike, twirling the pedal backwards with his left foot while bracing himself with his right foot on the curb. "I'm in a hurry right now. Got some business, but later Darlene, me and you."

            "Yeah. Later like when Sammy-Sam?"

            "Later like when I call you round five."

            Darlene grinned, hunched her shoulders, and grinned some more.

            Damn, that girl got some deep dimples, Sammy-Sam thought to himself admiring her smile as a slight smile flickered briefly across his own face. Darlene, for her part, enjoyed the little gap between Sammy-Sam's two front teeth.

            "I gotta blow."  Sammy-Sam pushed off. Looking back over his shoulder he hollered, "I'ma call, hear?  Five o'clock. Hear?"

            Darlene just laughed while watching the up and down, piston like motion of Sammy-Sam's lithe buttocks. Darlene liked Sammy-Sam's butt.

            Sammy-Sam hoped Snowflake would give him a second chance the way he did for Ronnie. Ronnie was proof somebody could straighten up after making a mistake. Shit, Ronnie was even driving for Snowflake now.

            "Now you see, Ronnie here. Ronnie is an example of achievement. I hope that the rest of you lil youngsters will learn from Ronnie. I believe in rewardin' achievement. Don't I Ronnie."

            "Yes sir, Mr. Moore."

            "Ronnie, what did I do when you made a mistake."

            "You gave me a second chance."

            "And what did you do?"

            "I learned from my mistake and took advantage of the second chance."

            There were about five or six of them in the room for Ronnie's promotion. At the end of his speech, Snowflake threw a set of keys to Ronnie. "Ronnie, these are the keys to our car. You are in charge of the car. You drive the car. You wash the car. You keep the car serviced."

            When everybody else left that day, they rode away on their bikes or else they walked back home. Sixteen year old Ronnie and twenty-four year old Snowflake left in the brown BMW with genuine leather interior. Ronnie was driving (and grinning) and Snowflake was on the phone. Ronnie didn't even look at Sammy-Sam as they drove by. Snowflake waved with a barely perceptible flick of his fingers while he held the car phone receiver to his ear.

            Maybe. Maybe not. Sammy-Sam stopped thinking about a pardon as he passed the park and watched Rudy chase down a short fly ball. Rudy was some fast. No sooner Rudy caught the ball, he had fired off a pitch to second trying to catch who ever that was what was diving back to the bag. He looked like he was safe but Sammy-Sam wasn't sure. Sammy-Sam didn't see the call and wasn't interested enough to circle back or even to stop to look back.

            Rudy sure loved to play center field but Sammy-Sam couldn't see the challenge in playing baseball. Basketball. That was the game. Except Sammy-Sam wasn't all that tall, wasn't all that fast, and wasn't no great shooter. I'm good, Sammy-Sam thought to himself, but a whole lots of people is better.

            Still, Sammy-Sam knew he would go out for the team, just like most of his buddies was going to try out too. Some of them didn't really care about winning as much as they cared about getting one of them gold shiny jackets Snowflake had bought for the baseball team and had said he was going to buy for the basketball team and the karate team.

            Snowflake.

            Sammy-Sam started pumping harder. Let's get it over with.

            To everybody that saw him whizzing by, Sammy-Sam looked normal enough, but Sammy-Sam's hands were sweating heavily as he got closer to Snowflake's house.

            Sammy-Sam's hands weren't sweating because it was hot and humid, although the temperature in New Orleans was in the low 90s and the humidity was running neck and neck with the temperature, like two sprinters trying to nose out each other at the tape.

            Sammy-Sam's hands were sweating because he was missing four thousand dollars in brand new hundred dollar bills wrapped in a big white envelope with a red rubber band around the envelope, all inside a plastic A&P grocery bag, stuffed into the bottom of his school bag he kept under his bed. The bag was a blue canvas knapsack with light blue trim that Tyronne had bought for Sammy-Sam.

            The bag had been under the bed where Sammy-Sam had stashed it. The money was missing and it was time to go meet Snowflake.

            Sammy-Sam looked under the bed twice, just in case the money had fallen out. But he knew the money hadn't fallen out cause he had zipped the bag tightly and checked it last night when he went to sleep, and checked it in the morning when he woke up. He had only gone to the corner store and when he got back he had lay on his bed and read two comic books. And then it was almost time to go meet Snowflake and he had reached under his bed and pulled his bag out. And, because he was systematic in the way he did everything, Sammy-Sam opened his bag to count his money to make sure everything was still in order. And that's when Sammy-Sam had discovered the money was gone.

            Maybe Tyronne took it. No. Tyronne never so much as even went in his room without asking. Maybe Gloria had got to it. No, she couldn't have opened it. Maybe... It had to have been his momma. She must have taken the money.

            Sammy-Sam had immediately run into the living room and looked at the clock. He was supposed to meet Snowflake at twelve noon. It was then ten fifty-eight.

            Nobody was home.

            Sammy-Sam looked under the bed for a third time.

            He looked in the refrigerator.

            He looked behind the sofa.

            He looked in the closet.

            He looked under the sink.

            He looked in the bathroom closet by the towels.

            He looked underneath his mama's bed. He looked under the mattress. He looked in all the drawers in the chest of drawers. He looked everywhere he could think to look in his momma's room.

            He looked through a lot of her personal items he had never ever touched before. He looked in every purse he could find. He looked in a pink cloth bag that had his momma's diaphragm. He even looked inside the big box of Tampax.

            No money.

            It was ten minutes to twelve. Still, nobody was home.

            He had to go.

            Sammy-Sam never thought about not going.

            He had to go. That was his responsibility. A man stands up and takes his medicine. He was a man. He would take the medicine.

            "I guess he gon kill me,"  Sammy-Sam whispered to himself. Am I ready to die, Sammy-Sam wondered.

            It didn't have to be all of this. Sammy-Sam was angry with himself for not figuring out a way to bring the money to Snowflake on Friday evening like he was suppose to.

            Suddenly it hit him. "Momma," Sammy-Sam was talking out loud to himself. He hit his brakes, pulled up to a complete stop, leaned back, twisted around and looked back toward home, "momma knew somethin', that's why she made me go make groceries with her. It wasn't about watching no Gloria."

 

***

 

            "Sammy. Sammy."  Rita opened the door and looked at her son laying on his back reading a comic book. He had a stack of comic books resting beside him. Rita liked to see her son reading even though she wished he would read his school books more. "Sammy why don't you read your school books like that."

            "Huh?  What?"  Sammy-Sam put the book down and gave his mother his full attention.

            "Ain't you got some homework?"

            "It's Friday."

            "So, it's Friday."

            "They don't give us no homework on Fridays."

            "Since when?  When I was in school we used to have plenty homework on Friday, more'n on the other days."

            Sammy-Sam had heard that speech many, many times before. He had already returned to reading his comic book.

            "Where your school books?"

            "Huh?"  With his mouth gapping open, Sammy-Sam looked away from the monster scientist who was threatening to blow up galaxy five. He had developed a habit of reading with his mouth open, not mouthing the words or moving his lips, he just read with his mouth hanging open. "What momma?"

            "Where your school books?"

            "In my bag."

            He went back to reading.

            "Where your bag?"

            "Under my bed."

            "Why you slinging that good bag up under that dirty bed?"

            "Cause."

            "Cause what, Sammy?"

            "Cause."

            "Sammy, me and Tee bought you a desk with a draw in it so you would have some place to keep you school books and stuff. Tee bought you that bag to carry yo books in. You carry yo books in yo bag. You keep yo books in yo desk."

            "Ok."

            "Well?"

            "Well, what?"

            "Nothing."  And before he could react, Rita had stooped to one knee, reached under the bed and was pulling the bag out. "Look, let me show you how easy it is."

            "How easy what is?"

            "How easy it is to put yo books away."

            When Sammy-Sam heard the zipper shriek as Rita opened the bag, he jumped up and grabbed the bag so fast, he almost knocked Rita over. The money was in the bag.

            "Boy, what is wrong with you?  You near bout knocked me down."  At that moment Rita realized something was wrong. Sammy was hiding something. Had Sammy-Sam been looking into his mother's eyes, he would have seen it, but instead he had turned his back and was pulling the books out, quickly throwing them on the bed and then firmly rezipping the bag. He held the bag in his hands.

            "I can put my own books away."

            "I know you can, but you didn't," Rita replied.

            Sammy-Sam had felt her glaring at his back, but he remained silent.

            "Excuse me."

            "What?"

            "Excuse me. Say, 'excuse me.'  You nearly knocked me down."

            "Excuse me."

            Rita walked out of the room. This was not like Sammy.

            Ten minutes later when Sammy-Sam had come bouncing out of the bedroom, his blue bag on his back, Rita immediately noticed it.

            "Sammy, where you going?"

            "Round to Jay. Me and him gon watch Eddie Murphy on the video. He said his daddy was gon rent a Eddie Murphy movie."

            Rita hadn't asked him why he was taking his bag and she didn't believe he was going to watch Eddie Murphy. Something was wrong and, until he would tell her what was going on, all she could think to do was keep him close to her.

            "Sammy, you call Jay and tell him you can't come. I need you to go to the store with me. I need you to watch Gloria."

            Sammy-Sam should have realized his momma was suspicious, instead he misread her concern and thought she was just punishing him for almost knocking her down.

            "And, Sammy, you can leave your bag here."

            He hadn't really heard that last remark. His mind was already figuring out how to let Snowflake know he had the money but he couldn't bring it at the time he was supposed to.

            Sammy-Sam turned around, went straight to the phone, called Jay. "Tell Snowflake, I'ma call him when I get back and I'll come by later."

 

***

 

            One block from Snowflake's house, reviewing the scene in his mind, the mystery was beginning to clear up. Yeah. She knew something.

            As he stood there, astride his purple bike, Sammy-Sam was sure his mother had taken the money out of his bag. Now the question was should he go back and wait for her or should he meet Snowflake at twelve like he had called Snowflake earlier that morning and told Snowflake he would.

            Sammy-Sam weighted the pros and cons of his options and decided it was best to go to Snowflake first since he was only a block away. Besides, ain't no telling who Snowflake had checking him out and it wouldn't look good for Sammy-Sam to be seen riding up to Snowflake's house and then turning around. As for his momma, Sammy-Sam figured he could tell her the truth. She knew something anyway. He wasn't street dealing and he wasn't using. All he was doing was carrying dope and money back and forth. He had kept his promise to her. Maybe she would understand. Maybe not.

            "I shouldda knowed something was wrong. Maybe I shouldda left a note for momma."  As he pushed off, Sammy-Sam looked around to see if anybody had heard him talking to himself. He continued his conversation with himself inside his head: But then again, maybe not. He didn't want her blaming herself if something happened. If something happened. Shit. Something definitely was gon happen.

            Maybe Snowflake would let him bring the money back later. Naw, that didn't even make no sense. On top all that, suppose his momma didn't have the money.

            This was the hardest thing Sammy-Sam ever remembered having to do. It never occurred to him to go to the police, besides they were dealing too. He could have stayed home and waited for his momma and then if she had the money he might have been able to talk her into giving it back to him so he could bring it round to Snowflake. It also never occurred to Sammy-Sam to tell Tyronne and ask him for help, besides he hadn't even seen Tyronne except for a few minutes late Friday night.

            This was Sammy-Sam's responsibility and he would take care of it himself. Sammy-Sam's fourteen-year-old ghetto logic didn't allow him to even think about running away. Besides Snowflake liked Sammy-Sam.

            "Where you get two first names from boy?"

            "Well my momma named me Samuel and sometimes she call me Sammy and sometimes she call me..."

            "Sam."

            "No, uh-uh. She either call me Samuel or Sammy. The kids at school would all the time be callin' me Sam. And so I would tell them to call me Sammy like my momma call me. And one day, Jay caps on me, Jay hollers, 'hey, yall this nigger sho is some kind a confused. Boy what's yo name, Sammy or Sam.'  I said, 'my name is Sammy.'  Jay said, 'kiss my ass, yo name Sam.'  I said, 'Nigger, I'll kick yo ass, my name Sammy.'  And so we started to fight."

            "Who won?"

            "Nobody. It was a tie. On account of that they started calling me Sammy-Sam."  Snowflake had laughed loudly, his mouth wide open, his eyes closed, his head thrown back.

            "Thas all right. Thas all right. I likes that."

            Then there was the time Snowflake made that woman suck Sammy-Sam's dick. Sammy-Sam couldn't believe it at first.

            "Sammy-Sam I likes you. You the first cat I don hired that ain't never fucked up. When I moved you up to carryin' my shit, we ain't never had a problem. You ain't never lost nothin' and you ain't never tried to take nothin'. You just do damn good work. I likes that. I  likes that. I'ma do somethin' for you to show you my appreciation for the fine job you doin'. Come here."

            Snowflake had put his arm around Sammy-Sam's shoulders. Snowflake hollered at Jay and Ronnie, "what the fuck yall lookin' at. Beat it. Yall been paid. Make like a tree and leave."

            Snowflake had winked at Sammy-Sam. It was a conspiratorial wink between men. A shared joke at the expense of the boys.

            "Sammy-Sam you ever had a blow job?  Hmmm?"

            Sammy-Sam remembered how he hadn't been able to believe Snowflake's offer and had just shook his head from side to side. Snowflake had winked again. "Well I got a bitch in the back room who gon fix you up."

            Maybe, Snowflake would spare Sammy-Sam's life.

            Sammy-Sam pulled his bike up on the porch.

            Naw.

            Sammy-Sam put the kick stand down. He stooped to open the combination lock on the chain that was...

            "Hey, man. Come on in."  Snowflake was looking for Sammy-Sam's blue booksack. It wasn't on his back like it usually was. Something was wrong, radically wrong. Sammy-Sam looked nervous. "Bring your bike inside, don't leave it out here. Somethin' might happen."

            Something was wrong, mighty wrong, Sammy-Sam thought. Wouldn't nobody around here take nothing off of Snowflake porch and Snowflake had never before invited him to bring his bike inside. Damn, how was he gon say this to Snowflake.

            Sometimes you just say stuff. Cause the more you think about it, the more confused you get. It was at that moment Sammy-Sam truly understood, "study long, you study wrong."  Sammy-Sam smiled as he comprehended the futility of explaining what had happened. Sammy-Sam couldn't explain it because he didn't know what had happened.

            Snowflake saw Sammy-Sam smile. Something was wrong don't nobody grin like that less you catch them wrong.

            Snowflake had a steel mind. He was used to people trying to beat him out of his shit. He was used to people plotting on catching him wrong. He was used to the police sending stoolies, spies and plants trying to bust his ass. He was used to bitches trying to figure out how to get money out of him. He was used to being shot at and shot. Snowflake was nobody's fool and though he sometimes made mistakes, he never made the same mistake twice.

            You could punch the silence with your fist it was so solid.

            The only thing Snowflake couldn't figure was why Sammy-Sam was fucking up. Sammy-Sam was the last one Snowflake would a figured would fuck up. Snowflake was disappointed.

            Softly, and with a sound that was almost hiss like, Snowflake expelled air through his nose, then gently cleared his throat.

            Snowflake scratched his chin.

            Snowflake stood in a slight crouch with his legs shoulder length apart, assuming a martial arts, modified horse stance, which was Snowflake's most comfortable position when he had to confront a problem.

            Snowflake folded his hands low over his groin, the right hand on top of the left hand, the left hand on top his joint.

            "You got my money, man?" he asked even though he was already certain Sammy-Sam didn't have the money. Still, Snowflake couldn't figure out why Sammy-Sam was holding out on him.

            While waiting for Sammy-Sam's reply, Snowflake gave up trying to figure it out any further. He learned long ago not to ask people to lie to him by asking them for explanations of why they were doing wrong when Snowflake caught them doing something wrong to him.

            Whys and wherefores was for philosophers to figure out. Snowflake was not a philosopher. Snowflake was a dealer, and a dealer always got his money. One way or another, always get your money.

            Snowflake had an iron law: never suffer a wrong without giving out a punishment.

            Snowflake was not sadistic. He never punished for the pleasure of punishing, but he never let a wrong go unpunished. That was Snowflake's law and this was Snowflake's turf. And anybody broke Snowflake's law, don't care what the reason was—they mama coulda had a heart attack and they needed the money for surgery—fuck with Snowflake and you will suffer. Snowflake's law was like gravity; it applied to everybody.

            Snowflake was tired waiting for Sammy-Sam's answer.

            At that moment, while Snowflake was looking through him with murderously cold but calm eyes, Sammy-Sam remembered his vow. He looked up at Snowflake.

            "I ain't got it."

            “So where my money at?”

            “I.. I don’t know.” Sammy-Sam steeled himself. All he could do was tell the truth and suffer the consequences. Snowflake was more disappointed than upset.

            Sammy-Sam couldn't think of anything else to do so he kinda folded his arms. He wasn't being defiant or anything. He was scared, but he was a man and he wasn't going to cry.

            Snowflake raised his hand, extended his index finger and pushed against the bridge of his glasses. Then covering his mouth with his hand, Snowflake curled his index finger beneath his nose and across his mustache. Snowflake was calculating.

            Snowflake's eyes betrayed nothing. Sammy-Sam could not tell what Snowflake was thinking.

            Sammy-Sam started to look away, to look down, but then he held his head up and looked into Snowflake's eyes.

            Snowflake might as well have been wearing a Mardi Gras mask. Not one muscle in his smooth, deep ebony face had moved. Snowflake stood still as a statue.

            Sammy-Sam shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, waiting for Snowflake to ask him "why, what happened?". Sammy-Sam wasn't going to lie, he was going to tell the truth. He didn't know what had happened.

            As he finished thinking through the situation, the only unanswered question Snowflake had was what to do with Sammy-Sam's purple bike.

            Snowflake didn't want Ronnie or any of the others to touch it, and certainly he couldn't be seen carrying the boy's bike. Snowflake tapped the bridge of his glasses again. Suddenly it came to him: get Brenda to take care of the bike. Call her on the way back from the dump. She could even go get it while he wasn't there.

            Satisfied he had found the solution, Snowflake thought it through to make sure there were no holes: I'll go in my other car. Then maybe I'll drive up to Baton Rouge, be seen up there, buy some shit on my credit card. Establish an alibi. Brenda'll take care the bike. Yeah.

            Snowflake touched his back pocket to make sure he had his wallet, which contained his Mastercard with his name embossed on it: Paul Moore.

            "Sammy-Sam, we got to talk. Come on."

            Sammy-Sam went for his bike.

            "That's ok, leave it. Ride with me."

            Snowflake decisively strode to his front door, opened it and motioned with his hand for Sammy-Sam to exit.

            Sammy-Sam had dreaded the confrontation with Snowflake. The focus of Sammy-Sam's fear had been Snowflake's house, that front room where punishment was meted out with a swiftness and certainty that made the courts downtown seem just like the inefficient and ineffective anachronisms they actually were.

            Sammy-Sam remembered Jay and Ronnie, as well as numerous stories of other unfortunates who had, in one way or another, messed up, and who resultantly got kicked in the ass, pistol whipped or otherwise corporeally disciplined by Snowflake.

            Now that Sammy-Sam had survived his meeting in the front room, this room seemed like a haven. Sammy-Sam knew what a pistol whipping in the front room was about but Sammy-Sam could not even imagine what type of punishment Snowflake had in mind to take place outside, unless it was Sammy-Sam's execution.

            Sammy-Sam's legs felt tight like after a hard basketball game early in the season. The first tremors of a muscle spasm were bothering Sammy-Sam's left hamstring. Nervously Sammy-Sam wanted to take a leak but could not summon up the courage to ask Snowflake for any favor at that moment, so he walked through the door and stood motionless on the front porch.

            Sammy-Sam was mentally bewildered and emotionally overwhelmed. When Sammy-Sam heard the door slam behind him and heard Snowflake's keys jingle as he took them out of his pocket, Sammy-Sam flinched. It had sounded like a shot to Sammy-Sam but he was both relieved and further frightened when he realized he was not shot. He was still alive. For now, but what next?

            Reacting to the door's slam much, much slower than a runner springing from the blocks at the sound of the starter's pistol, Sammy-Sam just started walking: off the porch down the steps. Through the gate onto the sidewalk. Sammy-Sam didn't know where he was going, and every step was hard.

            Sammy-Sam was afraid to look around. He was also afraid to ask Snowflake any questions. Willing his legs not to tremble, Sammy-Sam decided his best bet was to go up to Snowflake's BMW parked at the curb in front of Snowflake's house. Without looking around, Sammy-Sam stood waiting for Snowflake to unlock the door.

            Snowflake had walked past the BMW, unlocked and slid into the metallic red Datsun Z, closed the door softly, locked on his seat belt and impatiently honked the horn. Sammy-Sam looked up with a start, confused. He was disoriented. The horn sounded again. Sammy-Sam couldn't figure out who was blowing or whether they were blowing at him. Where was Snowflake? Impatiently, the horn sounded a third time.

            Snowflake reached over and pushed the passenger's door open. Sammy-Sam trotted over to the Z. From the outside, all Sammy-Sam could see was dark tinted windows mutely blank, but the front door was open so Sammy-Sam leaned over and looked inside to make sure it was Snowflake.

            Snowflake turned the key to start the engine before Sammy-Sam got in the car.

            Snowflake looked straight ahead.

            As Sammy-Sam was closing the door behind him, Snowflake's right hand flicked to the dash, hit a button and the soothing sounds of Anita Baker leapt from the rear speakers.

            Snowflake pulled smoothly into the traffic.

            Snowflake had put on a pair of Kool Moe Dee type, wrap-around sunglasses he kept in his Z.

            Sammy-Sam couldn't see Snowflake's eyes. The music was so loud Sammy-Sam could barely hear his own thoughts. Outside of the car, barely perceived sights took on the aura of a silent movie.

            The muscles in Sammy-Sam's face started minute movements and eventually coagulated into a mask of anguish. Even though buffeted by the blast of cool air from the car's air conditioning system, small beads of perspiration began to form on Sammy-Sam's young crinkled brow.

            Sammy-Sam heard this pounding. It seemed so close to him. At first he thought it was something in the car, but then Sammy-Sam understood he was listening to his own heart beat. Without warning, Sammy-Sam suddenly felt nauseous. He stifled the urge and swallowed hard twice even though his mouth was dry. Sammy-Sam was trying to think of something intelligent to say.

            "You gon kill me, huh?"

            Snowflake looked over at the young boy and briefly hallucinated that the young boy sitting beside him was Paul Moore at thirteen being driven to the park by his Uncle Henry, the same Uncle who pulled his pants down, the same Uncle who... How could Snowflake answer the question?

            Snowflake remembered his own questioning: "Uncle Henry what you doing to me?  Uncle Henry why?"  Snowflake remembered he had known, even without ever being told by anyone, he had known what his Uncle Henry did to him was wrong. Snowflake also remembered how his uncle's cigar fouled breath had repeated slowly over and over, "Paul, I wouldn't hurt you. I love you boy. I wouldn't hurt you. I wouldn't hurt you."

            But it had hurt when Uncle Henry had stuck his stiff penis up Paul Moore's rectum. Snowflake shifted uncomfortably in the seat thinking about it. Gradually, Snowflake realized Sammy-Sam reminded Snowflake of himself.

            Uncomfortably, Snowflake also realized this car ride reminded him of the car ride to the park he and Uncle Henry had taken years ago.

            Sammy-Sam's question reverberated inside of Snowflake's skull. After that car ride, Snowflake had cried and between the tears promised himself he would never be used like that again and his Uncle Henry would never catch him alone again in this life time, never.

            Actually, Snowflake had not cried; Paul Moore had cried. The transmutation from Paul Moore to Snowflake at that time had not yet taken place.

            No one now alive (not even his older brother Silas whom he idolized), no one except Snowflake knew this story—and Snowflake intended to keep it that way.

            That's what it was, the way Sammy-Sam was sitting all hunched up, his small hands shoved between his knees, that's exactly how Snowflake had sat on the way back from the park, his butt aching, shame and humiliation dripping from every pore of his body.

            I can't kill this boy, he reminds me of me too much, Snowflake involuntarily thought to himself.

            Sammy-Sam saw Snowflake squirm in his seat and took it as confirmation that Snowflake did indeed intend to kill him.

            "No, I'm not going to kill you."  Snowflake cursed himself. He couldn't believe he was being sentimental.

            The atmosphere was tainted by the stilted silence of Sammy-Sam waiting to find out what Snowflake was going to do to him and Snowflake trying to figure out how to handle a simple situation that had unexpectedly turned into emotional quicksand. Clearly Snowflake could not afford to let a fourteen year old boy beat him out of four thousand dollars. If he did he would have niggers challenging him left and right, no, it didn't make sense not to punish Sammy-Sam.

            "Buckle your seat belt."

            "Huh?"

            Snowflake repeated himself, "buckle your seat belt."

            Snowflake was remembering the ride back home. All the way back home he had wanted to scream at his uncle, "why, why, why you did this to me?  Why?"  But at the time there didn't seem to be any reason other than his uncle wanted to and his uncle was strong, and he was weak.

            The only difference Snowflake could see between Sammy-Sam and himself when he had been forced on that awful journey was that Sammy-Sam wasn't crying. All during the deed, Paul Moore had cried, and afterwards, pulling his pants back up, and afterwards climbing back into the car—he had had to get back in the car, they were so far away from home—one hand on the door handle. Snowflake remembered how he had been ready to jump out in case his uncle tried to touch him again.

            Snowflake looked over at Sammy-Sam. Snowflake reached down with his left hand and hit the door lock buttons. The click of the automatic locks seemed to Snowflake to sound louder than they had ever sounded before.

            Sammy-Sam looked at Snowflake. Snowflake avoided eye contact and return his visual attention to the traffic.

            No, Snowflake could not afford to let Sammy-Sam go. Snowflake knew what had to be done and the only question was who was actually going to pull the trigger. Regardless of whom he got, if he was going to drive to Baton Rouge, Snowflake reasoned he needed gas. Riley's Shell station was nearby.

            Snowflake always bought Shell. Even when Carl and the others tried to start a boycott against Shell on the apartheid issue, Snowflake had not stopped buying Shell. He never drove cross a picket line but he was always able to find a Shell where there was no line. Besides, Snowflake reasoned, none of the other brands had a Black owned station nearby and there was one Shell station that was Black owned so that's where he would go.

            When they pulled into the gas station, a young, light-skinned girl with blue short shorts on was walking down the sidewalk. The girl's skin color reminded Snowflake of Sheila. Snowflake knew Sheila would do it.

            "Here," said Snowflake holding out a ten dollar bill to Sammy-Sam, "go get me a fill-up."

            Glad for the opportunity to get out of the car, Sammy-Sam quickly took the money, unbuckled the seat belt, and pulled on the door handle. The door was still locked. Snowflake didn't realize Sammy-Sam was waiting on him to unlock the door and Sammy-Sam didn't feel brave enough to ask Snowflake to unlock the door. After a few seconds Snowflake looked over at Sammy-Sam, he saw Sammy-Sam's hand on the door handle. Sammy-Sam pulled at the handle again. Only then did Snowflake understand that Sammy-Sam was locked in the car.

            Snowflake hit the master lock lever, "Hurry back, I ain't got all day."  Snowflake turned the engine off.

            Sammy-Sam jumped out of the car into the afternoon heat. After the tomb like cold of the car, both the high humidity as well as the high temperature of the outside air felt invitingly good.

            Sammy-Sam went to the window, paid for the gas, jiggling back and forth as he felt the pressure on his bladder.

            "Yall got a bathroom?"

            "Toilets on the other side, kid."

            Sammy-Sam ran quickly around the building almost unable to hold his urine. The door knob was broken and just a slight push sent the door flying open. Sammy-Sam fumbled with his zipper and barely got the zipper down and his penis in his hand before a long stream poured from him.

            After two minutes had passed and Sammy-Sam hadn't returned to the car, Snowflake turned his head to see what was happening. Snowflake knew Sammy-Sam hadn't decided to run. If he was going to run, he never would have come to Snowflake's house in the first place, but then again, Snowflake thought, you never can be sure what somebody will do under pressure.

            Pressing the power window switch, Snowflake eased the passenger window half way down. Snowflake didn't see Sammy-Sam anywhere. "This boy better not make me run after his ass."

            Snowflake lightly scratched the back of his neck. Looked up and thought about whether he should go looking for Sammy-Sam now or send somebody to get him later on. No, it wouldn't do for him to be seen running after Sammy-Sam. Snowflake looked out the window again and while he was looking began easing the window up. "I'll get him. Ain't no where he can run to that I won't find him."

            Snowflake turned the key. The engine started, but before he could put the car in gear, Sammy-Sam came running up to the car. Sammy-Sam tapped on the driver's window. Snowflake eased the window down.

            "I need the key to..." Sammy-Sam pointed to the gas pump, "to put the gas in."

            Snowflake stared at Sammy-Sam. The boy looked terrified. Without saying a word, Snowflake pulled the lever that opened the small door, which accessed the gas line. Then he eased the window up.

            Sammy-Sam heard the gas door pop open. Sammy-Sam ran to the pump and began pumping gas.

            "Bitch, you better be home," Snowflake said to himself as he dialed Sheila's number on his car phone.

            "What?"  Sheila answered the phone without any display of emotion or expectation, just a flat acknowledgment she was there. She might have been a tenth grader absent mindedly answering a teacher's roll call.

            "That's a funny ass way to be answering the phone."

            "What?"

            "This me."

            "What?"

            "I got some light work for you."

            "What?"

            "It don't matter. What ever I tell you to do, that's what you'll do."

            "When?"

            "In five minutes, bitch!  And hey, put some clothes on."  Snowflake hung up.

            Sammy-Sam saw Snowflake use the phone but he couldn't hear the conversation. The car only took $7.58 of gas. Sammy-Sam replaced the pump handle and ran over to the window to collect Snowflake's change. Sammy-Sam ran back to the car, stood at the door for three brief seconds trying to decide whether to knock on the glass or just get in. Sammy-Sam decided to get in without knocking.

            "What took you so long?"

            Sammy-Sam pathetically held out his hand with the $2.42 of change. Snowflake peeped at Sammy-Sam with a quick dart of his eyes and no motion of his head.

            "Keep it."

            Snowflake pulled out into the traffic. On the way over to where Sheila was staying, Anita Baker did all the talking.

            Snowflake parked.

            "You stay here. I'ma leave the keys in the ignition so the phone'll work. When the phone ring, you answer it. You know how to use it?"

            "Huh?"

            "You know how to use the phone?"

            "Uh-huh," Sammy-Sam mumbled affirmatively.

            Snowflake took off the sunglasses, put them in the glove compartment, exchanged them for his clear lens glasses and then climbed casually out of the car. Snowflake's eyes were good. He didn't really need corrective lens, however, he wore the glasses because he thought the expensive designer frames looked good on him—sort of gave him a distinguished, intelligent appearance.

            Anita Baker was still singing.

            A minute passed. Sammy-Sam was a jumble of emotions.

            "I won't cry."

            Another minute passed.

            Anita Baker was still singing. When the cassette had come to the end of one side, the machine automatically began playing the other side.

            Another minute passed.

            Sammy-Sam sat dutifully waiting for the phone to ring.

            Another minute passed.

            Another minute.

            The phone rang. Sammy-Sam pounced on it.

            "Hello."

            "Look like I'm gon be here awhile, Sammy-Sam. I want you to come on round. Climb over to the driver's side, turn the switch all the way off, take the keys out, open the door, hit the door lock, get out, close the door and come round here to the green house around the corner in back of you on your right as you walk to the corner. Hey, baby what's the address here. What?  Twenty-three what?  Twenty-three forty. Come to twenty-three forty General Pershing Street. Got that?"

            "Yes sir."

            "Good. Come on. And Sammy-Sam, make sure my car is locked."

            Sammy-Sam followed the instructions. He wouldn't allow himself to think about what would happen next. Snowflake had had the chance to kill him and didn't. Snowflake didn't even get mad with him. Sammy-Sam began to delude himself: maybe I'll get another chance after all.

            Sammy-Sam walked to the front door. Knocked.

            "What?"  It was a woman's voice.

            "It's me. Uh, Sammy-Sam."

            The door opened and Sammy-Sam relaxed. For only the second time that day, a slight smiled creased his young face. This was the woman who had sucked him off.

 

—kalamu ya salaam 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

RAOUL'S SILVER SONG

 

Raoul stood on the wooden patio balcony enjoying the twilight's slow departure. With the patient concentration of a piano tuner unhurriedly working in an empty ballroom, Raoul watched the evening shadow creep up the cream colored concrete wall as the sun light gradually dimmed and the criss-crossing sunbeam shafts merged into the darkest green of the shadow shrouded banana tree trunk.

With each slow breath, through nostrils that barely moved when he inhaled, Raoul caught the bouquet of courtyard odors: frying sausage from somebody's pan, shrimp in the alley from last night, and the sweet subtle fragrance of watermelon waffling upward from the Johnsons just below him, sitting out eating the pink fleshed fruit and chatting about their grandchildren.

But more than what he saw or what he smelled, Raoul liked what he heard: the sounds of a New Orleans evening in the Treme area muted by the wood of old buildings, sounds mingling like the melodic strains of a brass band improvising, different elements going to the fore and then receding: a rancorous car horn blown at two kids chasing a ball into the street, the high squeal of the car's brakes a cacophonous counterpoint to the car's blasting horn; Mabel singing to herself while she cooked, today her natural alto was stuck on "Amazing Grace" sung in C; the Johnsons listening to their favorite Louis Jordan recordings; someone's radio on loudly (the person was probably sitting on their front steps, with a beige touch-tone Princess telephone perched on the door sill, talking to a friend who was probably doing the same in her neighborhood), the station was WWOZ and the fifties R&B show had not too long ago come on; water and sewage moving through the plumbing -- thick, heavy iron pipes which were common decades ago -- that ran up the outside of the building next to the stairwell; a television barely heard, Raoul couldn't tell what show it was or where it was coming from, but he could tell it was a television because every 35 or 40 seconds a burst of forced laughter erupted instantly and died down quickly; the long soft watermelon burp from below; and, the low eruption from his own bowels as Raoul passed gas. 

What he liked about all these sounds is that no one sound was supreme, neither noise nor music was so loud or lasted so long that it dominated the soundscape -- this was a good band.

Although the catalogue of sensual stimulants was long and varied, Raoul felt relaxed here. He savored the ballad tempo of day's exit in this little courtyard. The atmosphere was soothing, it invited reflection, meditation, cat-napping, snoozing, quiet cigarette smoking, thinking things through, forgetting, reading letters over and over, a good long novel, memorizing a short poem. Everything. Nothing. Raoul liked this.

Raoul's hand rested lightly on the heavy wood railing, a railing pitted by the bombardments of time, a railing no longer smooth like it was when initially, proudly, installed by the Heberts, a neighborhood family of laughing carpenters (a father, Harold, two sons, Francis and Eric, and a cousin, Daniel, whom everyone called "Two-Step"). 

Whatever paint had once graced the railing was long since gone. Now the wood was colored by the pigments of natural aging: rain borne atmospheric dirt and rodent excrement, bird droppings and tiny insect slime; the bleaching of the merciless semi-tropic Crescent City summer sun; the seasoning of sweat and other body fluids; sundry dyes from a plethora of spilled drinks composed of every imaginable concoction of juices and flavorings used to disguise the sharp taste of the alcohol; colorings from an exhaustively long line of liniments, potions and medications (for example, a three-quarters full bottle of some chalky white substance of dubious medicinal value which had been pitched in real anger at the genitals of the third in a long series of tenants by a live-in lover on the way out -- the bottle broke on the railing when the tenant successfully sidestepped the not unanticipated missile); the indelible blotches left by blood from a terrible accident with a knife which left a little hand permanently scarred; soot streaks from a holiday inspired outdoor barbecue that should never have been lit there in the first place; not to mention the many burns from snuffed cigarettes and the 159 ice pick holes assiduously bored into the wood by someone who was bored out of their skull one day waiting for a certain individual who never came. 

None of this would have surprised Raoul. Like the patina of most elderly humans we meet whose skin tones reflect a full life, this railing had a long survival story. Raoul liked graceful survivors: people and things which held up well, didn't cry or carp about life's severities, but rather simply persisted in being what they were.

Raoul lived alone. He chose his lifestyle. He...

Someone was knocking at his door. He stood motionless. They knocked a second time. Raoul thought about not answering the door. A third knock. Louder. With the unhurried motion of a man who has enjoyed a long life and feels no pressure to accomplish anything else, Raoul moved slowly from the balcony into the front room and to the front door.

When Raoul opened the door a young girl stood there.

They looked at each other. She couldn't have been more than 17 or 18.

"Raoul Martinez?"

"Good evening."

"Excuse me. Good evening. Are you Mr. Raoul Martinez?"

"Who wants to know?"

"My name is Mavis Scott."

"And?"

"And. I'm, uh, looking for Raoul Martinez."

"What for?"

"Music lessons."

"I don't give music lessons."

"........."

"I said I don't give music lessons."

"I know all your music."

"What music?"

Mavis unhitched her large leather bag from her shoulder, lowered it gently to the floor, knelt beside it and quickly retrieved her flute case. She place the case on top of the bag, opened it, and assembled the flute, blew air through the silver cylinder to warm it, stood quickly and began "The Silver Song."

"Well. Uh huh. I still don't do lessons."

Without hesitation Mavis started into "Ra-Owl."

"Where you learn that from?"

"A record."

"I ain't got no record."

"June Johnson -- The Copenhagen Connection."

"That was... How you got holt to that?"

"I like your music."

"How you found me? How you know I was here?"

"I like your music."

"I like a lot of stuff. That don't mean I know everything."

"But if you really like something, you learn about it."

"Mavis..."

"Mavis Scott."

"Alright. Come back tomorrow. Four-thirty."

"You'll teach me?"

"No, I'll think about it. I'll tell you my answer tomorrow."

"You want me to call before I come?"

"Can't call."

"Oh they have phones at school."

"Can't call me. There ain't no phone here."

"Oh."

"Good evening Miss Mavis Scott. I'll see you tomorrow."

***

"Come on in."

When Mavis walked into Raoul's room, she felt like she was falling into a past she had never seen but a past she wanted desperately to know about.

Raoul walked away from Mavis. He opened a half closed door and disappeared into the adjoining room.

An old armoir and an old piano dominated the room where Mavis stood. She looked for a television but there was none. She looked for anything that would give clues to Raoul's personality, but there was nothing else personal in the room. The balcony doors were open to the courtyard and the window on the street side of the room was closed and tightly shuttered.

Raoul reentered the room, a trumpet in his hand.

Mavis looked at the piano. Raoul assumed she could play some piano. If she couldn't at least play some chords on the piano it would be a waste of his time to try and teach her anything.

"Ok, hit some chords."

He pointed toward the piano with his horn.

"Go head, girl. You say you wanna learn. This your first lesson."

She sat at the stool, her hands just above the keys and then rested them lightly on the keys. She wanted to cry, unable to think of anything that seemed appropriate to play.

"Mavis, blues, b flat, watch me. Uh, uh, uh-uh-uh-uh."

Mavis tried to think of blues chords, some notes, blues songs even. Every song she thought of she rejected because it was not the song he wanted. She didn't know what he was going to play but whatever he was going to play she knew it wasn't what she was trying to recall. With great effort she lifted her hands. It felt like some invisible force was trying to hold her hands down. Her hands dangled above the keys, coiled tightly, a leopard waiting to pounce but no prey passed her way.

Mavis bit her lip. Her nostrils itched and burned slightly. Tears formed on the inside edges of her left eye. He had already counted it out. Would it be too corny to play "CC Rider"? That was too simple. So was "St. James Infirmary" or even "Goin' Down Slow." But what key. B. Yes, he had said B.

Whenever Mavis was under pressure to perform her subconscious would flood her mind with so many possibilities that the hardest part of the creative process was not the thinking of something to play, but rather deciding on which one idea to play.

Once she had sat in at Jay-Jay's place...

"Girl, you don't know no blues? You don't know no blues, how I'm gonna teach you to play jazz?"

Raoul walked out the room.

Mavis cried quietly to herself. When Raoul returned with a piece of paper in his hand he pretended he didn't see her tears. Mavis quickly wiped her eyes with her forearm. Raoul sat the sheet of music on the piano stand. It was just a series of chords. No melody. No time signature. No bass lines. Just chords.

Raoul snapped out a slow walking tempo.

"Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh."

Mavis smiled when she heard Raoul's trumpet. This was "Ra-Sing." She hadn't recognized the changes written out on paper, but she knew the song. By the time they were at the tune's bridge, Mavis was very comfortable with the chords. If she were playing flute there is so much more she could have done, but on the piano all she could do was feed chords.

Suddenly he gave it to her.

Mavis was ready. She did a break and filled the hesitation with three deftly timed, chimming block chords. Then started a phrase that consisted of four chords which resolved on the next chord in the progression. At the bridge she dropped the tempo compeletely and strung out a set of altered chords which she had thought of two years ago while listening to the record over and over. Mavis was ready.

"Go on, go on, girl."

"I could play it better on flute. I don't have much piano chops."

"OK. Do it"

Mavis picked up her flute case from beside the piano stool, assembled her flute, held it to her lips and waited for Raoul's count.

Raoul closed his eyes. The only count was an almost imperceptible nodding of his head. But Mavis saw, she saw and was ready. He would see. She was ready.

They played "Ra-Sing." At the bridge he dropped out and Mavis confidently flew.

"Play it pretty baby, play the pretty way you talk."

They played the song through twice.

"Yea. Now that's better. Where you from girl?"

"Right here."

"Yea, huh."

"Yes," she smiled, resting her hands and her flute in her lap, allowing her head to tilt a bit to one side. "Same place you from. We both coming from the same place."

"Yeah," he said with a slightly mocking "we'll see about that" tone. "Let's take it from the git go. Watch me now."

They chased each other playing a fleet "Ra-Owl". He laughed at her swirling trills.

"Don't put no dress on this man now."

"No, just a pretty shirt," and she did it again.

It was uncanny the way this young girl played something like June did. At the bridge June had always hung back, quarter noting just behind the beat. She was playing it like June played it. They ended together, Mavis voiced below Raoul.

"Solid." He smiled. There was nothing like playing. Raoul thought about playing with June. Mavis was still laughing. "Yaknow, June always used to say," Raoul altered his voice to imitate June's famous growl, "mannn, ya don't play music. You serious music."

Mavis stopped laughing. She didn't stop smiling. She looked at Raoul.

"Girl, music is more than just a love, it's a passion and that's the way you got to play. It's got to be like you can't help yourself."

"You mean you got to give yourself to it."

"No, baby. I mean you got to get everything you need to live from it. Fish need water. Birds need air. You got to need music. Yaknow, you got to need it bad, so bad that when you don't play, you can't live."

There was still so much Mavis did not know about herself, especially about what she needed to feel fully alive.

Raoul wasn't looking at her. He started to play. His horn was at his lips. He fingered the valves quickly. His cheeks puffed out. He almost started but didn't. Raoul thought of something. Mavis didn't know what he was thinking but she could tell he was thinking of something.

Raoul didn't know why he thought so suddenly of Martin Luther King getting shot in the neck, except that really living was the only thing worth dying for. Living the way you wanted, doing what you wanted to do, that's all was worth dying for. Raoul played "The Silver Song."

Mavis joined him. They played forty-six and one half choruses when Raoul just stopped suddenly. He put his horn down. Stood up. Walked out the room. The lesson was over. It was almost night. Mavis packed her flute quietly and sat for a minute looking at Raoul's horn. She fingered the top of her flute case like it was a piano, she was fingering the changes to Raoul's "Silver Song."

She played the piano well, so well that her piano teacher encouraged her to become a piano major. He said she had the passion to play like he had never seen in a student in a long time. When Antonio Luzzio said that, Mavis wondered what did he know about her passions. All he could teach her was technique, she remembered thinking when Mr. Luzzio spoke softly about piano and her passion. Later, Antonio Luzzio said to her one day when she was playing Chopin for him: "Your hands love the piano and the keys love them back. I will teach you the technique so you can forget the technique."

Now, studying with Raoul, Mavis blushed to herself. She never thought she would be so thankful for what Mr. Antonio Luzzio had taught her. He had taught her to play correctly, so now there was nothing between her and the music. She could hear the changes and hit the right chords. She could also alter the changes and create new chords that were harmonically correct. "Thank you Mr. Luzzio," Mavis said to herself.

Raoul finally came back into the room. He was getting his soft leather cap out of the almost antique armoire. She had seen cedar robes before, with the long dressing mirrors and the strong but pleasant wood smell.

"I can't come tomorrow," she said as she watched him methodically place the black cap on his head. The cap looked expensive. Mavis did not know that the cap was from Norway, nor did she know it was a gift which Raoul cherished.

Her saying she couldn't come tomorrow reminded him to tell her she couldn't come on Friday; she didn't need to know why.

"Neither next day, either. Look here, for next time, work us out a 'rangement for "A-Train" in slow to mid tempo. You better mute me too."

"Why?"

"Why? 'Cause I said so."

"No, not the lesson, I understand that. I mean why I can't come on Friday."

"I done already tolt you, 'cause I said so."

"OK, Raoul," God, she hoped she had said his name casually enough, "because you said so."

He didn't answer. He left the room. The lesson was over.

***

They were playing Monk -- rather Raoul was playing Monk and she was struggling to find something to play. Everything she thought to play was so obviously not what should be played.

"Why is Monk's music so hard to play?"

"It ain't hard to play. It's hard to fake!"

Mavis chuckled almost inaudibly, agreeing with Raoul's pithy summary. Raoul played a half chorus and stopped.

"Monk made you play or else sound like you couldn't play."

Silence.

"Like the hardest thing about Monk is rhythm, and that's the hardest thing in life, to find your own rhythm."

"But when you playing with others you can't just play your own rhythm."

"The trick baby is to know when to solo, when to ensemble, when to comp and when to lay out. That's life. That's music. Sometimes you take the lead with a solo, sometimes you play your part right long side everybody, sometimes you're in the background accompanying what's going on, sometimes you don't play. Dig?"

"But how do you ensemble when everybody else is playing a way you don't want to play?"

Raoul turned to the piano and played the head of "Evidence" again. He picked up his horn and played variations on the theme. He got up off the piano stool and kept playing, motioning for Mavis to sit at the piano. Mavis put her flute on top the piano, sat and comped the changes. He stopped. She stopped.

"When you can't play, lay out." He played some more. She joined him. He stopped. She started to go on. She stopped.

"Some fools think shedding is about perfection, yaknow that 'practice makes perfect' bullshit, but, yaknow, that ain't where its at. Shedding is for learning what not to play, learning what doesn't work and learning not to do that. I mean your woodshed ought to be full-a all your mistakes. Practice making mistakes. Playing makes perfect. Shedding is all about making mistakes, baby." He started again. He stopped. She started to play something. It didn't work. She stopped.

"When you can play what you can't play now, then you can play." Raoul started again. Before she could start, he stopped. "Yaknow, it ain't about you. Monk was about Monk. But when you play Monk, you got to be you playing Monk. When you play your stuff then its about you." Raoul played "Evidence" again. Mavis comped. Raoul soloed. He altered the changes. Mavis followed laughing. Raoul's logic was so clear. He returned to the head. They ended together with a flourish, she had the sustain pedal down and the piano's resonance undergirded the mirth of their entwined laughters.

"Mavis. Blues. B flat. Use the flute. Uh. Uh. Uh-uh-uh-uh." And they were flying. She had a variation of "Killer Joe" that was smoking and matched perfectly what he was doing. Soon she found that she was leading the song. At the bridge she stomped her foot loudly on the floor, indicating a stop-time. She ripped off four measures and threw it at him. He was pleased with her self-confidence and began trading fours with her. She started flutter tonguing and screaming false notes. He wah-wah muted the horn with his hand. She hummed into her horn. He picked up a metal ash tray and got right nasty.

This was something like that night in Jay-Jay's when she had sat in but it was better because it was just happening, and she was not having to prove anything. Mavis remembered something she had played that night, it was something she had heard Rahsaan do on a record and she had copied it. When she did it that night, the crowd loved it. When it was her turn, she did that same thing.

Raoul stopped.

"Nah, why you played that. That shit don't fit. It ain't you, is it?"

"What do you mean it's not me."

"Who you heard do that?"

She started to deny that she had heard anyone do that. They were having so much fun playing. It had felt so good to be playing on an equal basis with him.

"Rahsaan."

"Who?"

"Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the alb..."

"Rahsaan can play Rahsaan. You play you and when you ready to play Rahsaan then you be you playing Rahsaan but don't be taking Rahsaan shit trying to make it yo shit. You don't know what all that man went through to get that sound. You don't know what he was thinking. And I don't want to know what you thought he was thinking or feeling. I wants to hear what you thinking and what you feeling, even when you playing his shit. Play me some Mavis Scott. I wants to hear Rahsaan, I'll put a record on."

"I just, I just thought it would fit there."

"Imitation don't never fit in jazz. Don't care how much some people might think they like it. Jazz is for real and if you ain't being for real, you ain't playing jazz."

Raoul walked out the room. Lesson was over.

Just as Mavis was about to leave, her flute packed and her feelings shredded like a tom cat's favorite scratching pole, Raoul returned into the room with a picture in his hand. He held it out to her.

Mavis looked at it quickly.

"That's me and June in Copenhagen."

"Um humm." Mavis barely held the metal frame a full minute before gently returning Raoul's most treasured photograph.

"I thought you might like to see it, you know, you knowing all about me and June and such."

Raoul had no way of knowing that Mavis saw his picture everyday. How could he know that Mavis had her own copy, sent to her mother by June who was her second cousin. Raoul knew everything but he didn't know this. He thought Mavis was hurt because of what he had said to her, why else didn't she look at the photograph which he had seldom shown to anyone.

"Thanks." They stood uncomfortable in the silence like musicians listening to the playback of a sad take late in a recording session that has not gone well -- even though they had tried their best, the outcome did not sound too good. Maybe the best thing was just to pack it up and try again on another day.

***

After knocking twice and getting no reply, Mavis tried the door knob. The door was unlocked. She let herself in, moved quickly to the piano, and set up to shed -- it was no longer like basic lessons, now they spent most of the time practicing together.

The way they played together was almost like they were equals -- well not really equals, because Mavis was only a beginner, but they played together like colleagues, musical colleages. No, it was more than that, there communion felt to her like more than band mates who only played periodic gigs together and seldom saw each other beyond that. Well, although it was true these sessions were the only time they saw each other, still it was more than just sessions.

The way they would break out laughing simultaneously after playing a good exchange or after hitting an unplanned ending abruptly but precisely in tune with each other, that was like friends. That's what it felt like, good friends.

After all, Raoul didn't play in public anymore. Absolutely refused. So, in a sense, Mavis was Raoul's only peer. "Don't nobody want to hear no old man playing no more."

"You ain't old."

"You too young to know what old is."

But there was also something else simmering between them. Something just beneath the surface. At least, Mavis wanted there to be something else. Well, at least, sometimes she wanted there to be something else. She wasn't sure if he wanted there to be something else. He had never even so much as touched her before. Well he had touched her shoulder once and had nudged her with his hip to catch a beat or something, but his bare hand had never touched her skin.

Where was he?

Mavis played her flute for a minute or so, waited. Raoul did not appear.

Another Raoul-less minute passed slowly.

"Raoul."

Nothing.

Mavis looked at the bedroom door, or rather looked at the door she supposed led to Raoul's bedroom. She had never gone any further into Raoul's apartment than the front room where they shedded or quickly dashing in and out of the little bathroom on a couple of occasions.

Should she go inside the bedroom?

She went to the door.

Should she knock?

The door was already ajar.

"Raoul," she called out.

Nothing.

She touched the door.

Should she push the door open?

She opened the door.

Raoul lay sleeping on his bed. Naked to his waist, or maybe he was totally naked and only exposed to his waist; a spread covered the lower half of his body. Mavis could not tell if he had any other clothes on.

She trembled.

Should she?

She started to call his name.

Should she wake him?

Or, should she... ?

She undressed quietly, quickly. Maybe, if she just climbed into his bed. The window was open. A breeze blew through. Maybe, he wasn't really asleep. Maybe, he was waiting to see what Mavis was going to do. What was she going to do?

Mavis felt the wind dashing slyly between her legs, mocking her quandry, challenging her to move from the spot where she stood glued in confused frustration.

The wind blew again. She felt a chill there.

The curtain moved.

Mavis turned her head to look at the curtain. Is this what Lot's wife felt like, unable to go and unable to stay? Mavis' head hurt. Why was she even thinking about the bible and where did Lot's wife come from? Something moved.

Raoul had moved, turned half way over toward her.

No.

Raoul snored. It was a soft snore, but a snore. Would he wake up before she could get out of the room?

Carefully, slowly, Mavis bent to retrieve her clothing which lay in a shameful little pile beside her. This man was older than her father. Almost old enough to be her grandfather. Mavis did not understand the attraction, nor the repulsion, but she felt both, and, after initially acting on the former, was now being swayed by the latter.

The curtain moved again.

Mavis held her breath.

God, this was stupid.

With clothes in hand, Mavis stood trying to figure what was the better choice, try to dress quickly and silently in here, or slip naked back into the front room and dress in there. Suppose Raoul woke up while she was dressing? Suppose when she moved to go into the front room the floor squeaked or the door squealed and Raoul saw her naked?

How could she explain this to Raoul?

Raoul moved again, rolled away from the door.

Mavis dashed quickly into the front room. It took her so long to get dressed. Her hand trembled terribly.

Once dressed, she picked up her flute -- the metal felt so cold -- and stood silently in the middle of the floor. What now?

Eventually, she decided to leave.

At the front door she wondered whether Raoul was alright.

Mavis opened the door and closed it softly behind her and started to walk away. But suppose he were sick. He hadn't looked sick or anything. He looked alright. But maybe he had a heart attack. But she was sure he had been breathing normally. At least she hoped he had. Mavis didn't remember his snoring because she herself had not been breathing normally. If something were wrong and she left him like that; she couldn't do that.

Mavis went back into the apartment. Everything sounded ok.

Mavis walked across the room. She didn't hear anything that sounded wrong.

Mavis stood in the bedroom door. Raoul slept soundly, except he had turned toward the door and lay fully exposed. Mavis saw him facing her nude. She trembled anew. Finally she left.

***

"Hey girl what happened to you yesterday. I fell asleep about two and didn't get up til six. Did you come and think I wasn't home or something?"

"No. No. I didn't, couldn't come yesterday. I just came by today to pay you what I owe you because I won't be able to come anymore." Why had she lied? She wanted to call it back, but didn't.

"You don't owe me nothing. I just want to hear you when ever you start playing if you do like you say you gon do and if you keep playing like you been playing."

"Yes, when I really start playing I'll let you know and if you play, you have to let me know."

"I won't, but then, one never knows, do one?"

"No, for sure, one never knows until one does."

"Yeah you right, girl. Until one does, one don't."

Mavis stood up, "Raoul, thanks for your help." Her hand was sticking out toward him. He took her hand into the warmth of both of his and held it. He looked her in the eyes.

"Mavis, you pass it on whatever it is you think you learned funny girl."

"For sure. Always learn. Always teach. And always know when you suppose to be learning and when you suppose to be teaching."

He was still holding her hand. "Lady, you got it." He slowly returned her hand to her.

Everything felt so final, like this was graduation and even if they saw each other again it would be different. Maybe that's what calling her "lady" meant.

"Do you still, I mean are you still tied up on Fridays?"

"What made you ask that?"

She walked toward the door away from him, "Oh youth I guess."

"You'll get over it."

"Yes, well..."

"Goodbye sweet lady, play what you must but always be ser..."

"....always be serious about the music."

Raoul kissed her on her nose. She turned quickly, nearly stumbling as she ran hurriedly down the stairs onto the waiting sidewalk below. She heard a radio. She heard a tv. She heard some kids playing. Cars passing. Somebody arguing about something. A riverboat whistle blowing on the river. The St. Claude bus pulling off three blocks away. And quietly above it all, Mavis heard Raoul's "Silver Song." At first she thought the sound was in her head. Then she looked up.

Raoul was sitting by his front room window, playing with his horn stuck out the window, playing for the whole neighborhood to hear.

A new found confidence squared Mavis' shoulders as she loped down the street humming along with Raoul's trumpet.

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

BRAS COUPE

 

 

            "Kristin, I love you," I blurted, sounding like I was trying to convince myself more than Kristin, even though I was sincere. I both wanted her and wanted her to know I wanted her. Nevertheless, like rotely instructing a client on how to fill out a 941, at the moment, I felt emotionally disengaged.

            I snuggled closer. "Kristin..."

            "David, you don't have to say that to get me to do it. I know you love me."

            As I pressed close to her, all down my chest I felt her body stiffen. There was no smile on her face as my fingers traced the outline of her lips. She was distancing herself from me like I was the manager of a department where thirty grand was missing. I reached across her head and turned off the lamp on the night table. Almost as soon as the room was dark she spoke, "I'm not staying tonight. I've got an early meeting and I want to be prepared."

            I had been caressing the side of her face, down her neck and moving toward her breast when I stopped. Suddenly, I had the strangest sensation we were being watched. The light was out and we were alone, but it felt like Kristin's conscience was standing by the side of the bed auditing us. I imagined an unemotional spectre with PDA in hand intently and efficiently noting the details of every movement of two overeager people who were gropping in the dark searching for the right words to say to each other, determinedly trying to discover the right touches to unlock passion in each other.

            I wanted to say, Kristin, what's the real reason you're not staying? I wanted to say, Kristin, are you tired of sleeping with me? Maybe you want out of this relationship. Maybe you don't know where this relationship is headed. God knows I don't know.

            She placed my hand over her breast, "Come on, hurry up. I want to leave before ten."

            I didn't want to hurry up. I wanted to take it slow, like they say women prefer in those self-help, sex manuals Kristin furtively reads. I don't know why people even read those books, the procedures never work like they say. Even the ones with pictures don't work. It's a case study of diminishing returns. You try all that stuff and afterwards, all you've managed to accomplish is you've "tried stuff." The profit margin's too thin when you only accrue an extra penny's worth of pleasure for every dollar of time you invest in reaching the ultimate climax.

            She reached down and touched my dick. "You're not hard." She gently tugged at it. "Oh, David..." An exasperated exclamation, and then suddenly she scooted beneath the thin sheet covering us, and I felt her take me in her mouth.

            Please hurry up and get hard, I vainly instructed my dick.

            It didn't.

            After a minute or so, she gave up, pulled the covers back and sat up in bed. So instead of me asking her what's wrong, she was checking on me, "Honey, what's wrong?"

            I could feel my dick limp against my thigh. "Nothing."

            "Nothing," she softly repeated my lie like a proctor giving you a second chance to admit you cheated on a test. Then, with the adroitness of a prosecution lawyer waving a key piece of evidence before the jury, she reached under the covers and fingered my dick. "Yes, there is."

            I felt like I had been caught with a signed, blank company check in my wallet. Kristin had the uncanny ability to make me feel guilty about wanting to enjoy sex with her.

            "Maybe, I'm just trying too hard." Upon hearing my words, she immediately moved her hand.

            "Oh David," she said as she leaned over and kissed me. I didn't respond to her kiss.

            I wasn't looking for pity and besides it wasn't me taking the prufunctory approach. "I'm alright."

            I loved Kristin but I wasn't fully comfortable in bed with her yet. She would do whatever I asked her to but I always had to ask. I could never get a sense of what, if anything, she really wanted. Our relationship was humming along like a chain of hardward stores, efficient, neat, well stocked, well managed and totally without excitement.

            The lamp light blazed on. I turned my head into the pillow. The light physically hurt my eyes. After the metallic click of the lamp there was a long silence.

            "Did you hear about the shooting?"

            So that's what it was that was bothering her. God, somebody was always getting shot.

            "They," she paused briefly to let the weight of the loaded, one syllable sink in, "shot this lady's baby. My god, they shot a baby. None of us are safe."

            "What color was the baby?"

            "What difference does it make?" She misunderstood me. That was precisely my point, color shouldn't make a difference, but I knew that color was what she was really concerned about and not murder. "It was an innocent baby. Somebody has got to do something."

            "What color, Kristin?"

            "They didn't show the baby on television..."

            "What was the child's name?"

            "Etienne."

            I turned my head away and looked at the wall. I knew what was coming next, the same old white/black issue. I didn't feel like arguing about the color of a dead baby and whether color made a difference.

            "David, why did you turn away while I was talking? You make me feel everything I say is so wrong."

            The words I didn't dare let out of my mouth, played loud and clear in my head: Because if I turn around and tell you how racist you're acting, we'll end up arguing with each other and I don't feel like fighting. The truth is you're upset because the baby was white. If the baby had been black you might or might not have said anything but you certainly wouldn't have felt threatened. You...

            "I know you think I don't like blacks but that's not it. David, I'm scared."

            "I know. I'm scared too," I agreed, except my fear wasn't for my personal safety. My fear was that blacks and whites would never get beyond being black and white, separate, unequal, and distrustful of each other.

            "If you're scared, why did you move into this neighborhood? Something like fighting fire with fire?" I didn't answer and Kristin chattered on barely pausing for a response to her rhetorical question. "Soon as the sun goes down the only people walking around outside are..."

            I turned over slowly, lay on my back, and covered my eyes with my forearm. "Are what? Murderers? Muggers? Rapists? Thieves?"

            "You said yourself that some of these people don't even like the idea of you living in their neighborhood."

            "I'm really sorry to hear about that baby." I uncovered my eyes and reached out my hand to touch her knee. She covered my hand with a firm grip.

            "My brother says I should get a gun if I'm going to keep spending time with you."

            "I bet your brother Mike owns every Charles Bronsen video ever made and carries a long barrelled forty-four like he's Dirty Harry, or is it David Duke?" my accusation hung in the air like a fart.

            I could see her wanting to recoil but, like being trapped in one of those small interreogation rooms that IRS agents use for audits, there was no where to run and she had run out of documentation to prove her innocence. "Kristin, you don't have to come here unless you want to."

            "I want to be with you." Our eyes locked and searched each other until I turned my head and flung my forearm back across my face. Kristin started her well rehearsed sales pitch, "Besides, it's senseless for me to come pick you up, take you to my place, then bring you back to your place, and then drive back to my place."

            "That's right."

            "And you refuse to buy a car."

            "That's right. My bike and the buses do me just fine."

            "So obviously if we're going to be together I have to come see..."

            "At least until yall get bus service out their in civilized Metairie."

            "David, I'm not complaining about coming to see you. I was just talking about the safety issue."

            "Has anything ever happened to you around here, or to me? Has anybody even so much as said something out of line?"

            "David, it only has to happen once... and then... then you're ruined for life."

            "You only die once."

            Why did I say that? I have to learn to control my mouth.

            "Why did you say that? Mike says you have a death wish."

            "So your brother Mike has given up the family construction business to become a psycologist, huh?" She flinched at my parry but continued her offensive.

            "I told you about Ann Sheridan didn't I?"

            "Yes."

            "She'll never be right again."

            We were about to get into a bad scene. This was one of those classic delimmas: you're callous if you don't sympathize with the victim and you're a bleeding heart if you criticize the routine stereotyping. I felt like I was trying to talk to a client who was also a good friend and who was trying to get me to help them cheat on their taxes. I guess I could say, let's not go there; it's not healthy. Or I could sympathize, being raped is a terrible, terrible thing.

            "She's seeing a psychiatrist. She stays pumped full of drugs. And she can't even stand to be in a room with a black man." Clearly this was going to be one of those evenings when all of our time in bed would be spent talking about the major issues of the day rather than more productive and more pleasurable pursuits.

            "Hey, you want a beer?" I bounded out of bed. Two hops and I was in the doorway, "Abita Amber." I looked back, Kristin shook her head no.

            When I got back from the kitchen Kristin was laying still with the covers pulled tightly around her. I stood looking down at the trim form shrouded in my ice blue sheet. I had been so smitten by her from the first time I saw her jogging in the 5K corporate run.

            "Hi, my name is David, and I just got to tell you, I think you're beautiful."

            "David, I'm Kristin. Your flattery is appreciated, but you said it so easily, I'm sure I'm not the only girl who's heard that today."

            "Look, I'm not from here. How does one get to talk to a girl like you?"

            "Do you want to talk to a girl like me, or do you want to talk to me?"

            "Touche." We walked in silence for a moment, catching our breath. Then we started talking, and we talked and talked, and talked some more. And now here we are several months later.

            As the immediate past of our getting together jetted through my mind, I concentrated on Kristin's hairline and on the upper half of her face which was the only part of her visible. Her eyes were closed but I knew she was awake.

            "Suppose it happened to me?" she said, picking up the conversation where we had left off when I tried the let's drink a beer evasion. Her voice was partially muffled by the sheet but the import of her question came through unimpeded.

            I put the beer bottle down on top of Ed McMann's smiling face on the Publisher's Clearinghouse envelope announcing that I had won $30 million dollars. At least the worthless envelope made a convenient temporary coaster. Usually that junk went straight from the mailbox into the front room trash can, but Kristin insisted that I ought to reply because "who knows, you can win a lot of money"—as soon as she leaves it's trashville for that scam.

            "Don't think like that," was my reply to her question as I leaned over and pulled the sheet down so that I could see her whole face.

            "I can't help it. I'm a woman. You're a man. You just don't know."

            I sat down facing the foot of the bed, one foot on the floor, my left leg drawn up next to Kristin.

            "Every time I leave here after dark, it's traumatic." Ignoring the strain in her voice, I turned, leaned over, brushed back her auburn hair from the side of her face and lovingly surveyed her facial features. She was ravishing.

            The subtle scent of an Italian perfume intoxicatingly waffed upward from the nape of her neck. The milk white orb of a perfect, polished pearl, stud earring highlighted her porcelin smooth, golden colored facial skin which was cosmetized with a deft finesse that made it almost impossible to tell what was flesh and what was foundation.

            New Orleans women, the mixture of French, Italian, English, Indian, Black and, god knows, what else gave a new meaning to feminine pulchritude. She had a classic Romanesque nose and a pert mouth whose tips ended in a slight upturn which almost made it impossible for her to frown. The attractiveness of Kristin's almond shaped, light brown eyes nearly hypnotized me and made it hard to respond to what was clearly some serious issues that she wanted to talk about.

            "Sometimes, when I get home, I have nightmares thinking about whether somebody has broke in and...

            "And what, shot and robbed me or something?"

            "Yes."

            "Is that why you always call in the morning."

            "Yes."

            "I'll be sure to phone you if something happens to me," I tried to joke.

            "David what are we going to do?"

            "Try to keep on living. Try to love each other. Try to make this city a better place."

            "That all sounds so noble but I keep thinking about that baby and about Ann."

            "Don't think about it."

            "That baby wasn't thinking about it and now he's dead. Before it happened to Ann, she never thought about it. I'm not an ostrich. I can't just stick my head in the sand and forget about it." I had to smile at that and hold my sarcasm in check. I had started to say that's exactly what you're doing by living in Metairie.

            After a short pause, Kristin continued, "Why do they act like that. They have to live here too? Can't they see that..."

            "Kristin, sweetheart, we're all in this together," I whispered while running the back of my fingers up and down her forearm.

            "No, we're not. We're the ones who have everything to l....," her vehemence indicated a real feeling of being wronged.

            It never seems to occur to many of us that black people suffer more from crime than we do. "You know the overwhelming majority of murder victims are black. You know most of the rape victims are blac..."

            "I know about Etienne. I know Ann."

            "I bet Ann was crazy long before that guy raped her," I said under my breath. Before she could ask me to repeat what I never should have uttered aloud in the first place, I tried to change the subject. "Come here," I said as I slid beneath the covers and pulled her toward me. Outside somebody was passing with some bounce music turned up to 15. Bounce was that infectious, New Orleans variation on rap that featured chanted choruses over modern syncopated beats. I felt Kristin stiffen in my arms as the music invaded the atmosphere of my bedroom.

            "I don't know how you stand it," she said into my chest.

            "It's just music," I responded while rubbing my face into her hair.

            "I'm not talking about the music."

            "What are you talking about?" I asked, pulling back slightly so I could read her physical expressions.

            "Not knowing when one of them..."

            "Them. Them! Who is them? You mean a black person," I questioned while disassembling our embrace and stretching my arms upward.

            She propped up on one elbow and spoke down to me. "No, I mean one of those crazy young black guys, the kind who would shoot you for a swatch watch."

            I looked her directly in the eyes, "You mean the kind who listens to that music we just heard?"

            Kristin didn't answer. After a few seconds, I turned away briefly at the same time that Kristin reclined and twisted her head to stare up at the ceiling. I watched her and waited for her reply for about forty-five seconds. Although she didn't say anything, something was clearly going through her mind. Her eyes were darting quickly back and forth like she was checking figures in a set of books against figures on an adding machine tape. I finally broke the silence with a dare, "Penny for your thoughts."

            She responded while still looking up at the ceiling, "Honest injun?" That was our playful code to inaugurate a series of questions and answers with no holds barred.

            Now we were both looking at the plaster ceiling with the swirl design—I wish I could have seen how those plasterers did that. "Shoot your best shot," I said, my eyes still following the interlocking set of circular patterns as I reached out to hold Kristin's hand.

            "Mike says you probably moved to Treme because you've got a black girl on the side," she paused as the gravity of her words tugged at a question I knew was coming sooner or later. Her grip on my hand involuntarily tightened slightly, "Have you ever done it with a black girl?"

            "Yes."

            Her hand went limp and I heard her exhale sharply. I turned to look at her. She frowned, closed her eyes and spoke softly, barely moving her quivering lips. I wouldn't let her hand go even though she was obviously a bit uncomfortable interreogating me and touching me at the same time.

            "When?"

            "Five years ago, in college."

            She turned now and focused intently on my eyes, "That was the last time?"

            "Yes."

            "Do you... do you... I mean Mike says..."

            "I'll answer any questions you have Kristin, but I won't answer Mike's questions. I'm not in love with Mike."

            Silence.

            My turn.

            "You want me to compare doing it with you to doing it with a black girl, don't you?" Her face tensed. She pulled her hand away.

            Silence.

            There, it was out in the open. "If you want to know you have to ask."

            Silence. She rolled onto her side, faced me and used her cherry red, lacquered, finger tips to outline my short, manicured, strawberry blond beard. She started at my ear lobe and when she got to my chin, she hesitated, sighed, lay back squarely on her back, and tried to sound as casual as she could, "Did you ever have trouble getting it up with her?"

            "No," I replied quickly, almost as if I didn't have to think about it, but, of course, I had already thought about it when I discerned the direction her questions were headed.

            A terrifying hurt escaped Kristin's throat, it sounded like she couldn't breath and was fighting to keep from being crushed. "I can't..." Kristin's words peeled off into a grating whine. "David, why..."

            "Why, what? Why did I do it with a black girl? Why did I have trouble getting it up a few minutes ago? Why did somebody shoot Etienne? All of the above? None of the above? What?"

            "I'm going home." She threw the covers back and started to climb cross me to get out of bed. I grabbed her waist and pulled her down on top of me. She tried to resist but she only weighted 112 pounds and was no match for my upper body strength.

            "No, don't run from it. Let's face this. We can do this." I held her in a bear hug. She vainly tried to push away.

            "David, stop. Let me go!" she hissed, struggling to break free as I determinedly tightened my grip. "Let me go."

            Her small fists were pummeling my chest while I forcibly retained her in my embrace. She had been momentarily kneeling over me trying to scamper out of bed when I caught her in midmotion.

            "David, you're hurting me." I used my left hand to grab her right wrist and yanked her right arm. As she lost her balance, I rolled over, pinning her to the mattress. "Stop! Stop!" She started pleading, "please stop. Let me go."

            "Kristin, listen to me."

            "No, let me go. Stop." She was tossing her head back and forth, trying to avoid looking at me.

            "Kristin, that was five years ago. Five damn years. If you didn't want to know, why did you ask me?" We stared at each other. "Five years ago doesn't have anything to do with us to..."

            "It has everything to do with us. That's why you can't get it up with me, because I'm not black."

            I pushed her away, swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up.

            "Did Mike tell you to say that?" I spat out the accusation over my shoulder.

            After she didn't answer, I pushed my fists into the mattress and started to get up. I heard Kristin crying.

            "Why... how do you think it makes me feel? I come out here to be with you and... oh shit. Shit. Shit. Shit."

            I stopped midway in pushing myself up and allowed my full weight to sink back onto the bed. Now she was really bawling. I looked over at the Abita, grabbed the bottle and drained it. I sat focusing on the beer label and asking myself how did I let a couple of hours in bed degenerate into this mess.

            I had drunk the remaining third of the beer too quickly. A gigantic belch was coming and I couldn't stop it. For some strange reason I just felt it would be disrespectful to belch while Kristin was laying there sobbing, but I couldn't help it.

            The belch came out long and loud. "Excuse me," I apologized. Afterwards, I looked over my shoulder at a heaving mass of flesh and hair—even after our tussel, her long luxurious hair flowed beautifully across her shoulders as though sculpted by an artist.

            Her back was to me as she faced the wall silently crying and sniffling. I didn't know what to do, what to say. "Kristin, it's not..."

            "Give me a cigarette, please," she said without turning around while making a strenuous effort to stiffle the tears.

            I had an unopened pack of cigarettes sitting on the night table. Neither one of us smoked that much anymore except after we made love, we liked to share a cigarette. I ripped the cellophane with my teeth, peeled the thin plastic from the box and nosily crumpled the crinklely protective covering. I started to ask, why do you want a cigarette and we hadn't made love, but realized that would be a silly and insensitive question at this moment. I flipped the boxtop open and took out one cigarette. I pushed it back and forth between my fingers. As I lit the cigarette I felt a sudden urge to urinate but it seemed inappropriate for me to step away now. I didn't want Kristin to think I was running from her, or didn't want to talk, or whatever.

            "Here." As I reached the cigarette to her, she sat up and took it without really looking at me and without saying thanks or saying anything. She must have really been pissed because she seldom became so nonplussed that she forgot her equiette training.

            I picked up the empty beer bottle and, at a loss for what to do next, I began reading the fine print on the beer label.

            I felt movement in the bed. When I turned to see what she was doing, Kristin stepped to the floor, cigarette smoke trailing from the cigarette she held in her left hand behind her.

            I felt like I was sitting for the CPA exam. Neither of us was saying anything, but I knew I had better come up with the right answers or this deal was off. I looked up as she stepped into the bathroom and partially closed the door behind her.

            I saw the light go on in the bathroom. I heard her lower the toilet seat and then the loud splash in the bowl as she relieved herself. After she stopped urinating, I heard the flush of the toilet and then nothing. Maybe she was sitting there still crying.

            I sat on the bed with an empty beer bottle in my hand. Damn, five years was a long time ago. Linda. I don't think either one of us was really in love. We thought we were. I rubbed the cool beer bottle across my forehead as I remembered those crazy days in Boston. I think what was the most surprising was how unremarkable the sex was. I mean it was good but it just was. It was no big thing. No ceiling falling on us, the earth didn't move. And there was no scene about it. We did it and enjoyed it and that was it. Not like... I didn't want to go there. I looked at the vertical shaft of light paralleling the edge of the partially open bathroom door.

            I think Linda caught more grief than I did. A lot of her friends stopped speaking to her. All my friends wanted to know was what it was like. Sex really doesn't have to be all this. I remember how nervous I was the first time and how she just said, "look, I don't know what you expect and I don't care what you've heard. We're just people. I'm not into anything kinky. You will use a condom and if I ever hear you talking any jungle fever shit, you'll be swinging through the jungle all by your damn self."

            The thing I most remember is that she said thankyou the first time I ate her out and she reached a climax. "I don't know what's wrong with me but this seems like the only way I can get a climax."

            I had tried to cautiously ask her what she meant without being crude or rude.

            "Head. Straight sex is ok but I can only reach a climax when I get some head."

            "Is that why you're with me."

            "David, don't believe that shit about brothers got dick and only white boys give head. And, for sure, don't believe that you're the only one willing to lick this pot."

            "No, I didn't mean...ah, I didn't mean to im..."

            "Shut up! You talk too muc..."

            "David, I'm sorry. I kinda stressed out because..." As I snapped back to the present, Kristin was standing over me. I hadn't heard her return from the bathroom. I realized I had been sitting with my eyes closed, rolling the beer bottle over my face, thinking about Linda. "...well because I was afraid of losing you. I know you love me. And I think you know how much I love you."

            Yeah, enough to come over to the black side of town at night, is what I thought but, of course, I didn't say anything.

            "You don't feel like talking do you?"

            "No, I feel like it. I want to talk. Let's talk," I answered quickly. I opened my eyes and focused on her petite, immaculately pedicured feet. Her toenails were polished the same brilliant red as her fingernails. Her feet were close together and her toes were twitching nervously in the shag of my persian blue carpet. Kristin was standing so close to me that when I looked up, I was looking right at her muff.

            I quickly placed the empty beer bottle on the night stand. I pulled her close to me, embraced her waist and kissed her navel. I felt her slender hands caressing my head. Where was the cigarette?

            "I know I'm not very sexy..."

            "Kri..." I tried to turn my head upward but she hugged my head hard to her stomach.

            "No. Just listen. I've got to say this. I know sex is important to you and I'm willing to try whatever you want to make you happy. Anything. OK? Anything."

            "Hey babe, we're going to be alright. You'll see. We're going to make it just fine."

            "Be careful who you love because love is mad," was all my father ever told me about love. Nothing about sex. Nothing about understanding women. Just love is mad. We were sitting in the front room listening to his Ellington records. He played that Ivie Anderson song where she sings about love being like a cigarette. And he played a couple of other songs. And a concert recording of Ellington, employing his trademark suavity, telling the audience, "We love you madly." I don't know how many other Ellington fans there were in Normal, Illinois, but early in my life my father recruited me simply by playing records for hours as he sat in the twilight on those evenings when he wasn't running up and down the road selling farm equipment.

            I guess I just wanted to be around him. He was so seldom there for any length of time, when he was there I did what he did. I listened to jazz. Mostly Ellington, Basie, and Charlie Barnet playing "Cherokee." I remember once Dad played Charlie Parker's "KoKo." Dad said Koko was based on Cherokee but I couldn't hear any Cherokee anywhere. He laughed. "Yes, sometimes life can be complicated." And then it was back to Ellington and all those gorgeous melodies. I still have the record Ellington signed for us backstage at the Elks dance many years ago. Well, not really signed because his signature wasn't on there. Just a scrawled "love you madly."

            "I believe you when you say that," Kristin intoned without missing a beat.

            "That's because I love you madly and mean it with all my heart." It had become easier and easier to reveal that truth to Kristin.

 

 

***

 

            "David, I just heard on the news that the casino is closing. What are we going to do?"

            "Well, you're going to hold on to your job with the tourist commission and I'm going to draw unemployment."

            "I guess now would be a good time for us to live together. I could move in with you—I mean if you want me to—and we could split the rent."

            "A couple of months ago you were scared to spend the night, now you're talking about moving in with me."

            "Only if you want me to." I detected a note of anxiety in her voice. Both of us were probably recalling that angry exchange we had when we first discussed living arrangements over dinner at Semolina's: "David, all I pay is utilities and a yearly maintenance contract, it would be a lot cheaper for you to move in with me even if you took a cab to work everyday."

            That's when I had unloaded, "I didn't move down here to live in a white suburb twenty miles away from the center of town. I know your family finds it a lot more pratical, i.e. safer, to enjoy New Orleans from a distance, but if I'm going to live in New Orleans, I want to live in New Orleans. Besides, that's one of the main reasons the city's so crazy now."

            And then Kristin had exploded with a preprepared litany of rationalizations: "There's nothing wrong with wanting to be safe. I love New Orleans. I didn't move to the suburbs to run away. I live in Metairie because it's family property and..."

            "Because you can't live uptown anymore because your family sold their lovely, hundred year-old, historic Victorian house," I had replied drily.

            "David Squire, you're just a starry-eyed idealist. You have no idea of how neat New Orleans used to be and how messed up it is now..."

            "Now that Blacks run and overrun the city. Right? Now that they have messed it up and made it impossible for us nice white folks to have a really neat time?"

            Kristen drew up sharply as if the bright faced college student who was our waiteress had put a plate of warm shit in front of Kristin instead of the shrimp fettuccini, which she hardly touched.

            "David, let's just change the subject, please," Kristin had said in the icey tone she used when her mind was made up and, right or wrong, she was going to stick to her guns.

            "Well just think about it, David. I'm not trying to push you or anything, it's just that my half would help with the rent." Hearing Kristin's languid voice flow warmly through the receiver made me realize that I hadn't responded to her question and that there had been several long seconds of dead air while she waited for my tardy reply.

            "OK, I'll think about it, Kristin. You know this whole job thing has happened so suddenly, I'm not sure what I want to do. So I'm going to just cool it for awhile and see how the chips fall."

            "God, David, you sound so cool to say you just lost your job."

            "Yeah, well, getting excited isn't going to change anything. Besides, I can get another job. Good accountants are always in demand."

            "David, I've got to go, but I just wanted to call as soon as I heard on the news..."

            "Kristin?"

            "What?"

            "I love ya."

            "And I love you." The worry vanished instantly when I reassured her that our relationship was not in jeopardy. Her tone brightened. "I'm on my way to the gym. I could swing by when I finish."

            "No, I'm alright," I heard the disappointed silence like she was holding her breath and biting her bottom lip. Why was I being so difficult when all she was trying to do was reach out and touch? Besides I had come to really enjoy her perky company. "But, on second thought, babe, it would be great to be with you. Call me when you get back in."

            "I can come now. Skipping one day of gym won't be the end of the world."

            "No, no, no, no, noooo. Go to the gym. Call me when you get back home."

            "I'll call you from the gym."

            "S'cool." I said slurring my signature sign off of "it's cool."

            "It'll be around 8:30."

            "S'cool. I think I'm going to walk down to Port Of Call and get a beer or something. Later gator."

            It was a near perfect November evening in New Orleans, what little breeze there was caressed your face with the fleeting sensation of a mischievous lover enticingly blowing cool breaths into your ear. It would have been a waste of seductive twilight to stay indoors. I grabbed my lightweight, green nylon windbreaker and ventured forth as though this evening had been created solely for my enjoyment. I didn't have to go to work tomorrow. I would hook up with Kristin a little later. My rent was paid. I had twenty dollars in my pocket and a healthy stash in my savings account. I didn't have a care in the world.

            As I neared Rampart Street, just before crossing into the French Quarter, indistinct sounds of music mingled from many sources: car radios, bars, homes. No night in the old parts of New Orleans was complete without music.

            This is where jazz began. My father the jazz fan had never been to New Orleans. Satchmo and Jellyroll walked these very streets. I looked up at the the thin slice of moon that hung in the sky, "Dad, I'm here."

            I knew he'd understand what I meant. He had been a farm boy who never really cared much about the land. What he liked was meeting different people. All kinds of people, but mostly people who weren't living where we lived. Dad would have loved New Orleans and the plethora of street denizens of amazing variety who seemed to thrive in the moral hothouse of liscentious and sensual living which was the trademark of Big Easy existence.

            Before I reached  the corner a police car slow cruising down the street passed me. I looked over at the cops, one blond the other dark skinned, and waved. Their visibility was reassuring.

 

***

 

            When I got back from Port Of Call it was fully dark. I should have taken my bike. Cycling was safer than walking. Moreover, walking through the quarter was more dangerous than walking through Treme which was flooded with police once the casino had opened in Armstrong Park.. Hummppp, I wondered if they would keep up the policing now that the casino was closed.

            It was about twenty minutes to eight. I had casually checked my watch as I turned off Esplanade after crossing Rampart. When I got close to my place, I saw somebody had left a 40 oz. beer bottle on my stoop. I picked it up and routinely checked all around me to make sure nobody was trying to slip up on me as I unlocked my front door. The alarm beeped until I punched in the disarming code—that was my one concession to Kristin. No, I wasn't going to buy a car, but yes I would get a security alarm system put in.

            I locked the deadbolt and flipped on the front room lamp. I felt like some Dr. John. I put the empty bottle down, twirled my cd rack, pulled out Dr. John's Gumbo, slid it in the cd player, turned the volume up to six and sang "Iko Iko" along with the good Dr. as I danced to the kitchen after turning off the floor lamp. I was using the empty forty oz. as a microphone and moving with a pigeon-toed shuffle step. I ended with a pirouette and a slam dunk of the forty into the thirty gallon kitchen trash can.

            While pulling off my windbreaker and hanging it in the closet, I heard a faint knocking but I thought it was one of the neighborhood kids beating out a rhythm on the side of the house. The knocking persisted, only louder. Who could that be, nobody besides Kristin ever visits me. I jogged into the front room.

            "Yeah, who is it?" I shouted out as I detoured to turn the music down.

            "I'm Brother Cooper, man."

            "Who?" I shouted through the locked door.

            "Bras Coupe," came back the indistinct reply.

            "I don't want none."

            "I ain't selling nothing. I just wanna ask you something."

            "What?"

            "Open the door, please, mister?" There was an urgency in his voice which I couldn't deceipher. I peered out the window next to the door but the streetlights were to his back and most of his face was in shadows. I turned on my front flood light. I still didn't recognize him. His left hand was empty, I couldn't see his right hand.

            "I ain't goin' do you nothing, man. I just want to ask you something."

            "I can hear you," I shouted back through the solid wood, dead-lock-bolted door. I continued watching him through the window.

            "Look, I'm just as scared as you, standing out here, knocking on a stranger's door, enough for to get shot. I know you don't know me, but I used to live here twenty-two years ago. I left town and I'm just passing through. My people done all gone and I just wanted to see the house I grew up in."

            This sounded like a first class line to me. He stepped back so that he was fully illuminated by the flood light. "Look, I couldn't do you nothing even if I wanted to—I'm cripple." He twirled around to show me the empty dangling right sleeve of his sweatshirt. He was probably too poor to procure prosthesis. "If you got a gun why don't you get it and hold it on me, I just want to see the house."

            I was in a quandry. Suppose the gun thing was a trick to find out if I had a gun. Suppose he was planning to come back later and rob me. He didn't look like anybody I had seen in the neighborhood before. And there was this tone in his voice—it wasn't fear, it was something else. He pleaded with me, "I wouldn't blame you for not letting me in, but it sure would mean a lot to me to see the house."

            "The house has been completely remolded, you wouldn't recognize it now."

            "If you don't want to let me in, just tell me to get lost. That's your right. It's your property now..." Renters don't have property rights I thought as I weighed his appeal. "But, you ain't got to handle me like I'm stupid. I know the house don't look nothing like when I lived in it."

            I said nothing else. He backed down the steps and stood on the sidewalk. A car passed and he flinched like he thought the car was coming up on the sidewalk or like he feared somebody was after him.

            "You white, ain't you? And you afraid to let a one armed, black man in your house after dark. I understand your feelings. Can you understand mine?"

            It pained me to realize I didn't and, worse yet, possibly couldn't understand his feelings. I had all kinds of black acquaintances that I knew and spoke to on a daily basis, but not one whom I was really close to. I had been here over a year and still didn't have one real friend who was black and not middle class.

            My mind ping ponged from point to point searching for an answer to his softly stated albeit deadly question. Could someone like me—someone white and economically secure—ever really understand the feelings of a poor, black man? Especially since I wanted honesty and refused to settle for the facade of sharing cultural positions simply because I exercised my option to live in the same physical space with those who had little choice in the matter.

            My pride would not let me fake at being poor, walk around with artifically ripped jeans and headrags pretending I was down. Besides when you get really close to poverty you understand that poverty sucks big time. You see how being poor wears people out physically, emotionally and mentally.

            These neighborhoods are like a prison without bars and a lot of these people are doing nothing but serving time until they can figure a way to get out, which most of them seldom do. Especially, the men. They just become more hardened, callous and emotionally distant. My stay was temporary. I was not sentenced by birth, but visiting, one step removed from sightseeing. Regardless of what I like to tell myself about commitment and sincerity, it was my choice to come here and I always have a choice to leave—a real choice backed up by marketable skills that would be accepted anywhere I may go. I know that most of the people in this neigborhood have no such choice.

            As if to distract myself from the meaning of this moment of conflict, I looked at the disheveled man on my sidewalk and wondered had his father ever played him music and told him that "love was mad"? Obviously his father had not sent him to college. Could not have. But the conundrum for me had nothing to do with poverty in the abstract, or even with letting this man into the apartment. For me the deep issue was stark and cold: was I mad for trying to love the people who created jazz? If this man had appeared at my father's door, would dad have let him in?

            I overcame my fear and my better judgement, pulled out my key and unlocked the deadbolt. I started to throw the door open, but realized that there were no lights on in the front room and the hall door was wide open exposing the rest of the house. "Wait a minute," I said firmly through the door.

            I turned around, flicked on my black lacquered, floor lamp, turned the cd player off in the middle of Dr. John singing "Somebody Changed The Lock" and then closed the hall door. I quickly surveyed the room to make sure there was nothing lying round that... wait a minute, why was I worried about the possibility of a one armed man being a thief?

            I returned to the door, peeked out the window—he was still standing there—and then released the lock on the doorknob. I cautiously opened the door. "I guess you can come in for a minute." I felt my pulse pounding and struggled to remain calm.

            He started up the steps slowly. His hair was the first thing I noticed as he stepped into the doorway. It was untrimmed, it wasn't long, but it was uncombed. As I surveyed him, I instinctively stepped back from him and then I reached out my hand to shake, "My name is David Squire"—suddenly I was assaulted by a distinct but unidentifiable pungent odor that I had never smelled before. He reached out his left hand and covered my hand. I realized immediately that it was a faux pas to offer my right hand to a man without a right arm. He seemed to sense my embarassment.

            "I'm Bras Coupe. Lots of people call me Brother Cooper." His hand was rough and calloused. His skin felt leathery and unyielding. I looked down at his hand. His claw like fingernails were discolored and jagged. When I withdrew my hand and looked up at his face, he was examining the room. He said nothing more and just stood there looking around.

            Finally, I stepped around him to close the door. The scent that I had caught a wiff of in the doorway, engulfed me now and wrestled with the oxygen in my nose. I had to open my mouth to breath. I was certain I had made a mistake letting him in, now the question was how to get him out.

            "You want to sit down," I asked in a weak voice?

            He slowly sank to one knee right where he was. After swivleling around so that he was facing me, he locked into what was obviously for him a comfortable posture. He leaned his weight on his left arm which was braced against his upraised left leg. It was almost as if he was ready to jump up and run at a moment's notice.

            "You do not use the fireplace." He raised his head slightly and audibly sniffed twice, his nostrils flaring with each intake of air. "No windows open." He sniffed again. "You don't cook." He rose in a surprisingly swift motion. And then for the first time he stood up to his full height. He was huge.

            I backed up.

            He laughed.

            "I'm not going to hurt you. If I wanted to, I could have killed you by now."

            As I measured him from head to foot, I couldn't hide my shock when I saw that he was barefoot.

            "You wear your fear like a flag." He nonchalantly watched me inspect him and laughed again when my eyes riveted on his bare feet. "Show me the rest of my house, David Squire."

            I was glued where I stood. I couldn't move. I had never felt so helpless before. "Do you understand what you feel? You should see yourself. Tell me about yourself," he commanded.

            I stammered, "What wha... wha-what do you want to-to know?"

            "I already know everything I want to know. It's what you need to know about yourself that matters. Why are you here? What do you think is so cool about all of this mess?"

            I couldn't answer. Somehow to say "I came to New Orleans because I wanted to get to know the people who created jazz" seemed totally the wrong thing to do. He turned his back to me and looked at my stereo system. "Do you have any of my music?"

            "Wha-what?"

            He stomped on the floor three times in rapid succession with his right foot, shouting "Dansez Badoum, Dansez Badoum, Dansez Dansez." Then he spun in slow circles on his left foot while using his one hand to beat a complicated cross-rhythm on his chest and on his upraised left leg. Somehow, simultaneously with turning clockwise in a circle, he carved a counterclockwise circle in the air with his head. His agility was breathtaking. He dipped suddenly in a squat, slapped the floor and froze with his piercing eyes popped out in a transfixing stare. I felt a physical pressure push me backward.

            "I thought you liked my music." He looked away briefly and then returned his full and terrible attention to me. I was quaking in my Rockport walking boots. Neither of us said anything and a terrible silence followed.

            "Talk to me, David Squire."

            "It's, it's about life." I stammered quietly.

            "Eh? What say you?"

            "Black music. Your music. It's about life. The beauty of life regardless of all the ugliness that surrounds... usss...." Instantly I wished I hadn't said that. It was true but it sounded so much like a liberal line. Just like when Dad had introduced me to Mr. Ellington, I couldn't think of anything right to say. So, I said the only truth on the tip of my tongue, "I love your music."

            "Am I supposed to feel good because you love my music? Why don't you love your own music? Why don't you make your own music?"

            I had never thought about that. It didn't seem right. There was no white man I could think of who could come close. Even Dr. John was at his best when he sounded like he was black. When I looked up, Brother Cooper had his eyes steeled onto me like an auditor who has found the place where the books had been doctored. My mouth hung open but I had no intentions of trying to answer that question.

            "After you take our music, what's left in this city?"

            "I'm not from here." Words came out of my mouth without thinking.

            "You're from the north."

            "I'm from Normal, Illinois."

            "Where did you go to school?"

            "In Boston."

            "Where in Boston."

            "Harvard."

            "Sit down David Squire." Still in a squatting position, he motioned toward my reading chair with his hand. "You look a bit peaked."

            I sat.

            In a swift crablike motion, he scurried quickly over to me without rising. He touched my knee. There was nothing soft in his touch. It was like I had bumped into a tree. "Harvard eh, your people must have a little money."

            "Most people think going to Harvard means you're smart." I blurted out without thinking. Putting my mouth in motion before engaging my brain was a bad habit I needed to loose.

            "Smart doesn't run this country. Does it?" He looked away.

            I began sweating.

            "Go relieve yourself," Cooper said without looking at me.

            As soon as he said that, I felt my bladder throbbing. I almost ran to the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I turned on the light, the heat lamp, the vent. I unzipped my pants, started to urinate and felt my bowels stir with an urgency that threatened to soil my drawers. I dropped my pants, hurriedly pulled down the toilet seat, plopped down and unloaded.

            I wiped myself quickly. I washed my hands, quickly. I threw water on my face, quickly. And then I looked into the mirror. My face was pale with terror.

            "David Squire, come, I must tell you something before I go." At the sound of Cooper's voice, my legs gave way momentarily and I fell against the wash basin. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I couldn't go back out there and I couldn't not go.

            "David Squire," the powerful voice boomed again. "Open the door."

            My hand trembled as I flicked the latch and turned the knob. I pulled the door open and there he stood directly in front of the door. "Every future has it's past. What starts in madness, will end in the same again. My name is Bras Coupe. Find out who I am and understand what made me be what I became. Know the beginning well and the end will not trouble you." He looked through me as if I were a window pane. I couldn't bear his stare, I closed my eyes.

            "Look at me."

            When I opened my eyes I was in total darkness. I shivered. I felt cold and broke out sweating profusely again when I realized I was laying on my back on my bed. Now I was past scared. I was sure I was dead.

            Then that voice sounded again, "You fainted."

            His words wrapped around me like a snake. I felt the mattress sag as if, as if he was climbing into my bed. All I could think of was that he was going to fuck me. All the muscles in my ass tightened as taut as the strings on my tennis racket. From somewhere I remembered the pain and humiliation of a rectal exam when I was young.

            My mother was sitting on the other side of the room and the doctor made me lay on my stomach. The last thing I saw him do was put on rubber gloves. They squeeked when he put his hands in them. And they snapped loudly as he pulled them snugly on his wrist, tugged at the tops and let the upper ends pop with an omnious clack on his wrist. "This might hurt a little but it will be over in a minute." And then he stuck his finger up my rectum.

            It felt like his whole hand was going up in there. I looked over at my mother. She didn't say anything, she just had this incredibly pained look on her plain face which always honestly reflected her emotions. "It will be alright, David. Yah, it will be alright," she said, sounding the "y" of yes as though it were a soft "j"—her second generation Swedish background was generally all but gone from her speech except for the stubborn nub that stuck to her tongue when ever she was under duress.

            What had I done? What did I have? The pain shot up from my anus and exited my mouth as a low pitched moan. I was watching my mother watch me. I resolved that I was going to be strong and I was going to withstand whatever this man was going to do to me.

            The man with his whole hand up my butt wasn't saying anything. He just kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing. I don't remember him stopping. I don't remember anything else except that despite my best efforts, I cried.

            And now, here I lay in the dark awaiting another thrust up my ass. The anticipation was excruciating. My resolve to remain stoic completely crumbled and I started crying—but not loudly or anything. In fact there was no sound except the impercible splash of my huge tears flowing slowly down the sides of my face and falling shamlessly onto my purple comforter.

            Suddenly the bright light from the table lamp illuminated my perdicament. He was standing next to the bed. I recoiled, rolling back from the sight of him. "Are you Ok?" he questioned me. "You look..." he stopped abruptly and cocked his head as if he heard something. After a few brief seconds he returned his attention to me. "They're coming." Without saying anything else, he turned and walked away toward the kitchen. A moment later, I too could hear a police siren.

            And then it seemed like nothing happened. Just hours and hours of nothing. No sound from the kitchen. Nothing at all. My heart was pounding.

            I tried to make myself sit up. It was like a dream. I couldn't move. I told myself to get up. But I couldn't move. I wanted to move. I wanted to run. But I couldn't move.

            Eventually I made myself stop crying. It took so much effort, I was almost exhausted. Suddenly there was a loud knocking at my front door. The rapping startled me. I involuntarily let out a brief whelp of fear, "Ah."

            Cooper appeared soundlessly at the foot of the bed. "Go."

            I jumped up.

            I was in shock.

            The knock was louder. I don't know how I got to the front door, but when I got there, I didn't say a word as the insistent tapping started again. It sounded like somebody beating on my door with a club. Suppose this was one of Cooper's friends come to do me in.

            I glanced over my shoulder at the back of the house. Cooper had turned the bedroom lamp off.

            I glanced out the front window. Two policemen were outside. One on the stoop, one on the sidewalk. I hadn't done anything wrong. Why were they knocking on my door?

            "Yes," I said meekly without opening the door.

            "It's the police, sir."

            I cracked the door—I had forgotten to lock it when I let Cooper in—"Is anything wrong, officer?"

            "Yeah, I hate to tell you this, but there was a double homocide a couple blocks away and we have reason to believe the murderer is still in the neighborhood." The officer spoke of two people murdered with the casualness only a New Oreans policeman could evidence when discussing the carnage that had now become some common. "Have you seen or heard anything?"

            I could have stood there for ten hours and not been able to honestly answer that question. I didn't really know what I had seen or not seen. At that moment I doubted my own sanity. Just then my phone rang.

            "One minute, officer, that's my phone." The phone stopped in the middle of the second ring before I could answer the extension in the front room. It was too soon for the answering machine to pick up. No, couldn't be—I instantly rejected the notion that Cooper had answered the phone.

            I had left the door open and the policeman stuck his head in and made a quick annoucement. "Sir, we're just advising everyone in the area to be careful and please call us immediately if you see or hear anything."

            I dashed back to the door as the officer was talking. He was a young, black guy, medium build, clean cut, and he spoke with an air of authority. I was about to say something to him when I heard Cooper call out to me from the bedroom, "that was Kristin, I told her you would call her right back."

            "Ok." I said, responding to both Cooper and the policeman. Before I could say anything else the policeman was backing away from my door. I turned quickly looking for Cooper but it was completely dark in the back and I couldn't see anything. When I turned back to the front door, the police cruiser was pulling off from the curb. I closed the door, pulled out my key and made sure that I locked the deadbolt this time.

            As I started toward the bedroom, I realized that I had locked myself in the house with Cooper. I froze in the hallway next to the bathroom.

            I turned the hall light on. I started feeling afraid again. The bathroom door was partially open. I stood away from the bathroom door and pushed it fully open. Nothing.

            I turned on the bathroom light. Nothing.

            The front room light was on. The hall light was on. The bathroom light was on. There were only two more rooms: my bedroom and the kitchen just beyond it.

            The bedroom was completely dark, as was the kitchen. "Cooper," I called out in a subdued and shaky voice. Nothing.

            I repeated the call a little louder, "Cooper." Nothing.

            I put my back to the wall and inched into the bedroom. Just inside the door way, I stood perfectly still, opened my mouth to balance the pressure in my ears and listened as keenly as I could. Nothing.

            The table lamp was only about three feet away but everytime I went to reach for it, something kept me pinned to the wall. Was he in the dark waiting to waylay me?

            "Cooper."

            Nothing.

            I took a deep breath, pushed away from the wall, and jumped on the bed. I was safe. I hit the lamp switch. Light filled the room. Nothing.

            All that was left was the kitchen.

            Now that most of the lights were on it was less frightening. I stepped into the hallway and reached my hand around the doorway to turn on the light in the little combination kitchen-dining room. This apartment was shaped funny because it was really a large double carved up into three apartments.

            There was nothing in the kitchen. I ran to the kitchen door which opened to the side alley. It was still locked with the deadbolt and I had the key in my trouser pocket.

            Every room was lit. There was nobody in here.

            I walked through every room growing bolder by the minute. I searched through each room three times. Nothing.

            Opened closet doors. Nothing.

            Pulled the shower curtain back and looked in the stall. Nothing.

            Looked under the bed. Nothing.

            I must have been hallucinating.

            I turned off the kitchen light and haltingly inched my way back into the front room.

            I turned off the front room lamp.

            I turned off the hall light.

            I turned off the bathroom light.

            I sat down on the bed and turned off the lamp.

            As soon as I felt the darkness envelop me, I flicked the switch back on. What was I doing? Where was Cooper? Was Cooper ever here? What the hell was going on?

            Then I remembered Kristin.

            I picked up the phone and dailed her. Her phone rang, and rang, and rang until the recorder came on. "Hi, I'm out at the moment, but I'll be right back. Please leave your name and number at the tone and I'll get right back to you. Thanks. Ciao."

            "David, get a hold of yourself. This is crazy," I mumbled to myself as I sat on the side of the bed staring into space.

            I got up again, went from room to room turning on all the lights. Tested the kitchen door. It was locked. Walked to the front of the house. Tested the front door. It was locked. Started at the front room and searched each  room in the house again. Nothing.

            I turned the lights off in every room except the bedroom. I sat down on the bed.

            I got up and walked around.

            I turned off the table lamp.

            As soon as it was off, I switched the lamp back on.

            I called Kristin again. No answer.

            I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face. Dried my face on the green towel hanging from the towel ring, turned off the bathroom light and went back in the bedroom.

            I kicked off my shoes. Lay down on the bed. Turned off the light. Heard something in the room. Turned the light back on. Nothing.

            I couldn't go on like this. Afraid of my own apartment.

            I called Kristin again. "I clearly remember Cooper saying that Kristin called," I said out loud to myself. She still wasn't home.

            I turned the radio on. I turned the radio off.

            I slipped back into my shoes and walked from the bedroom to the front room, turning on lights as I went.

            I walked from the front room to the bedroom, turning off lights as I went.

            When I got back in the bedroom I reached out to switch the lamp off, but I couldn't. So I stood there and looked at my hand on the switch. Finally, my hand moved to the phone and I called Kristin one more time. No answer.

            I lay down. I got up.

            I got tired of standing.

            I sat on the bed.

            I stood up.

            Then I thought I heard a knocking on the side of the house—Cooper was coming back. I walked through the house and turned all the other lights back on.

            I was exhausted. I didn't have the strength to leave the front room.

            I looked out the front window reconnoitering the area in front my house. I couldn't see anything.

            I left the window and stood in the middle of the front room.

            For the first time since I had come back from the Port Of Call, I thought to check the time. I looked at my watch. It was 9:05.

            I started to walk to the back of the house, instead I turned around. I had to go outside. I pulled out my key, unlocked the deadbolt, and threw the door wide open. I didn't think about setting the alarm, getting a jacket, or anything. I just stood in my open doorway and felt relatively safe now that I was halfway out the house. After a few minutes of deep breathing, I stepped completely out of the doorway and closed the door behind me.

            I looked up and down the street. A young guy was walking down the street with his hands in his pocket. Miss Sukky was pacing back and forth, plying her wares at her usual spot down the corner at Esplanade Avenue. A dog came sauntering toward me sniffing at the ground between the street and the sidewalk. The street mutt paused when he saw me, snorted gruffly, backed up briefly, turned and trotted away. A couple of blocks down, a police car's blue lights were flashing. It looked like every other night.

            Pow. Pow. I heard two shots in the distance and I jumped as each one went off. This was just like any other night. I had gotten used to the gunfire. Or so I thought. Pow. A third shot.

            I slumped down on the top step and before I knew better, I felt uncontrollable waves welling up inside me.

            For the first time since I arrived over a year ago, I began to question whether living here was worth playing Russian roulette, betting your life that the next murder wouldn't be your own.

            The economy, such as it was, was disasterously close to imploding. The gaming industry was a bust. Crime was spiralling out of control. Everywhere you looked the neighborhoods were disenigrating. Abandoned buildings, vacant property and housing for sale dominated the landscape—even on exclusive, posh St. Charles Avenue. The whole city was up for grabs.

            New Orleans wasn't fun like I had expected it to be, like I had wanted it to be. I couldn't go on pretending everything was cool. It wasn't.

            Madness again. That's what Cooper had said: Madness. Again. What did he mean by again? Was it ever this mad? Was New Orleans ever like this before?

            Kristin was always saying she admired my integrity. What would she think if she could see me now? I almost started crying again. I had to keep screwing up my face and rapidly blinking my eyes to fight back the tears—a crying man sitting on a stoop wouldn't last long in this neighborhood—but I wasn't totally successful and, everytime I wiped one away, another small tear droplet would form and sit at the edge of each of my eyes.

            Why was I crying? I wasn't hurt.

            But I was in pain.

            I wasn't robbed.

            But an essential part of my sanity was gone.

            "Kristin, I'm sorry." I had been so condescending toward her. I threw my head back and bumped it repeatedly against the front door. Harvard educated. Bump. Physically fit. Bump. And emotionally traumatized. Bump-bump. I head-knocked the door a couple of more times, partially dried my face with my shirt sleeve, reached into my pocket, pulled out my handkercheif and, in an almost pro forma attempt to clear my nasal passages, blew gobs of mucus into the white cotton. I sniffed once more, gave the tip of my nose another cursory brush and then dabbed hard at my moustache and down the sides of my mouth and over my beard. I folded the handkerchief and stuffed it back in my pocket. As I did so, my fingers touched my keys and I recoiled with a reflex action. I couldn't go back in there. Not now. Not tonight.

            I resigned myself to sitting on my steps all night. Or maybe I would walk over to the Exxon on Rampart and Esplanade and call for Kristin, and ask her... ask her what? To come get me. Ask her... somebody was standing in front of me.

            I was almost afraid to look the youngster in the eye, he might interpret my gaze as a challenge or a putdown. I had seen him around a couple of times. He unblinkingly looked at me like he was trying to decide what to do with me. I just looked at him.

            I could have gotten up and gone inside. I could have spoken to him. He could have spoken to me. But I just sat there and looked at him. He just stood there and looked at me. Neither one of us said anything.

            Finally, he nonchalantly turned, walked to the corner and stood there with his back to me. He pulled out a cigarette, lit up, blew smoke up in the air, turned around and started walking away. When he reached the far corner, he turned and disappeared. I finally exhaled.

            Leaning forward, my forearms resting heavily on my knees, I clasped my hands and dropped my head. "I don't want to die. Please, God. I want to live. I'm trying God. I'm trying my best." I couldn't remember the last time I had prayed to God. Whenever it was, for sure I had never uttered a more sincere prayer in my life.

            My hands were shaking. Literally shaking. I tried to keep them still. I could feel them shaking uncontrollably. I pushed them under my thighs momentarily, trying to sit on my hands to keep them still. It didn't help.

            I passed my hands through my hair, interlaced them behind my head and leaned back against the door. It didn't help.

            I leaned forward again, clenching and unclenching my fists. My hands were still shaking. I entwined my fingers and tightly clasped my hands. I had my eyes closed. I was afraid to look at my hands. Afraid to look at myself.

            I took a deep breath.

            "It's not worth it. It's not worth it," I heard myself muttering a bottom line assessment I never thought I would be thinking, not to mention saying it out loud.

            "David, what's wrong? Why are you sitting out here?"

            I looked up and there was Kristin, dashing out of her car and racing breathlessly toward me. I hadn't even heard her drive up. Her trembling voice was full of anxiety as she sprinted across the sidewalk.

            "Are you OK? I got here as fast as I could. Who was that on the phone?" her words gushed out in a torrent of concern and consternation.

            At that moment all I could do was drop my head and tender my resignation. This business was a bust, it was time to move on while I still could, "Kristin, I'm scared. Please, take me to your place."

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

AND THEN THEY LAUGHED

 

 

         SCENE ONE.

 

         —Places, everybody.

 

              A somber, chartreuse funk deftly settles expectantly into the cushions of the wicker sofa right between John and Angela.  Scooting its ass back deep into the throw pillows with the oriental scenes embroidered on them, looking from left to right, back and forth, checking out first the woman and then the man, the woman, the man, and greedily anticipating a rousing good fight, funk's emerald eyes were shinning with a scintillating brilliance.

 

              —Rolling.

 

              (If you were John right now you would be wondering why this woman was being so hard on you, calling your cards marked, your dealing cheat, throwing her hand to the floor, turning the table over and screaming about the sins of gambling.

              (If you were Angela right now you would be wondering why do men make you treat them so hard, why do they take a woman who sleeps by herself for some kind of rainbow trout to be caught with hook words, split open, gutted, fried, seasoned with dollops of hot sauce, and eaten with relish leaving only bones and a shriveled head on the otherwise bare plate.

         (If you were John you would be tired of this shit.)

              (If you were Angela you would be tired of this shit.)

 

              —Action!

 

              Funk knows that the fun part about this prime time drama is that an argument doesn't have to be about anything real to make a good show, it just has to be emotional.

 

              Once (a year to the day after their first date—she reminded him she had to remind him!) Angela wanted to talk about their future in the third quarter of a close game. 

Another time (about six months after he moved in) she wanted to discuss bills, 11:38 at night. 

Then there was the time they had just finished eating (at that time they hadn't even discussed living together) and John had even volunteered to wash dishes and Angela wanted to stand next to him rinsing the dishes and asking him questions about what he did with his dick.  With suds half way up to his elbows, John couldn't care less about what she put between her legs when he wasn't there so why, as he washed dirty dishes, did she care about who all he saw or why he wanted to sleep with a woman who wasn't her, shit, maybe the bitch was fine.  He even wiped the beige enamel top of the stove clean and wrung out the well used (three holes and frayed edges) dishrag.

              But though he cleaned the kitchen well, John had neither clue nor key to unlocking the deep concern he had for Angela which was incarcerated inside his size 47 1/2" expanded chest.  John's maturity, but a seed yearning for spring, was winter blocked by acquired emotions and ignorantly assumed stances that always seemed to missile guide the first words out his mouth -- maximum overkill syllables designed to destroy all vestiges of life.  John sincerely believed you had to be finger quick on the button push or else the other person's ICBMs would blow you away.

              Angela, on the other hand was visibly shaken, quietly close to crying.  Though she knew without a doubt when she was being fucked with, Angela was completely ignorant of what was happening inside of John, and, based on her ignorance and the stupid things John said and seemed to do with periodic regularity, Angela assumed the worst.  When the ground moves rapidly you don't have to be a seismologist to know it's an earthquake.

              It wasn't personal, there were many different Angelas and Johns tussling with this same bear.  Is there something in the air that makes it so hard now a days?

              "I don't know, maybe we, maybe I should be alone." Self-rejection didn't even sound like her voice. John was well enough equipped to interpret the no trespass termination inherent in the dangerous-colored, slicing sharp, concertina barbed wire gradually unraveling out of the cotton softness of her sound.

              "I don't understand what you want out of this." A torrent of cold, quick darting lizards fell into his lap. Well, he didn't want to always be on trial, that was for sure. She was smelling up the air. Wasn't she woman enough to say it straight out if she really didn't want him anymore? Every inch of her body was covered. After loosening the reptiles, Angela looked like she was headed underground. John flinched and moved back an inch or two in distaste, although he didn't know he was moving back.

              Angela saw the small movements of his flesh which portended major emotional shifts. She foresaw his big feet walking out the door. His green shirt turning sundown forest dark as he slammed the door behind him without speaking or saying any kind of goodbye other than the finality of his olive drab silence.

Angela saw John's muscular back hovering over Crystal's nakedness and sensed his delight in being inside of Crystal. He had someone else (even though he swore that "it" was over, Angela had seen:

(how Crystal eyed John when they had gone to the mayor's inaugural reception and Crystal was allegedly working the room for the mayor and had shook John's hand two beats too long and had barely, limp-wrist offered Angela only the top half of her fingers in a half-hearted gesture that was supposed to pass for a sisterly greeting,

(and, besides, Angela was neither blind nor vain, there was no way Angela's lanky leanness could even come close to any one of Crystal's eye-popping curves—not that John ever publicly gave Angela any reason to feel jealous but still every woman knows when a former girlfriend and potential lifetime rival is the kind of fine that every man wants to fuck,

(and besides Crystal looked like she always got her man, plus anybody else's man she wanted,

(and Angela, even though she hated herself for hating Crystal, well not really hating Crystal but rather hating Crystal's body, hating that Crystal had that kind of body that other women can't help hating because it made a woman feel, well, feel inadeq… ah, uncomfortable, especially if one was a little overweight, or a lot, or a little underweight, or a lot, or just a little skinny—like Angela was—or whatever,

(Angela really didn't want to dwell on how thin her thighs were,

(Angela must have been the only woman in the world who "loss" weight after having a baby,

(and Angela never could find a really pretty hairstyle to complement the long oval shape of her face—what shade of lipstick was that Crystal was wearing?—shit,

(Angela could understand why former-collegiate-all star quarterback John was attracted to Crystal who, even at thirty something, looked preppy as a goddamn college cheerleader,

(well, at least I'm taller—not quite up to John's 6'3" but at least 6" taller—than she is, is what Angela rationalized to console herself when Crystal brushed pass John for the third time in less than two hours,

(Angela was tired, if John wanted that—and there was no doubt in Angela's mind that "that" was waiting by the phone to call John the minute John walked out of Angela's door and was fully able to avail himself of the various female options lined up waiting for a chance to do what Angela had not been able to do,

(oh la-dee-da if it was going to be all this then let him go to Crystal, men always had someone else…) to be inside of and she had no one else she wanted inside of her.

Angela wanted to want John, but considering how everything was turning out, at that moment she didn't want him inside of her again ever, no matter how good it felt and it did feel good most of the time, but, so what, no matter, she could handle missing him, missing it. It would be hard but the way to deal with a snake is to cut its head off, don't delay, don't play, don't hesitate.

              "John, please leave."

 

         —Cut!

 

         Funk lay back exhausted but utterly thrilled, marveling at the depth of Angela's self-depreciating workout. Even thought that thing with Crystal had been over two years ago, Angela made that stale episode live again. God, she was good. The crying bit in the next scene was going to be a snap.

         Angela was glumly biting her lower lip, which she always did when the stress became a bit much. And John had just dummied all the way down, had not said a word as he did a mental inventory of what were the downsides to cutting his losses and booking up soon as this next scene was through—damn, she had said "please leave" just like she meant it, all soft and shit and with just enough resolve to make it razor sharp, soft but sharp, how did she do that?

         Funk could hardly wait for scene two.

 

 

         SCENE TWO.

 

         —Take it from the dialogue. Speed?

 

—Speed.

 

—Action.

 

"John, please leave."        

              John had his directions backwards.  When he should have been moving forward he had backed up, now he was reaching out for her with his snakes outstretched. Like he was trying to capture something.

              He noticed that she was wearing the silver earrings he had bought her. She could keep them. He wouldn't ask her for them back.  Nor the red suede shoes or the orangish Kenyan woven handbag. Or the three hundred twenty-five he had "loaned" her. "This is a loan, not a gift," spouting mixed signals. He knew when he wrote that check that he wasn't going to see that money again. He never meant to see it. John only meant for Angela to be in his debt.

              She stood up.

Vultures were on the roof. Patient.

Angela knew nothing stays fresh forever but must all flesh rot so quickly? Was this cancer or murder? 

She looked up and the jury was glumly filing in.

Wes had beat her twice. The first time he just knocked her down

and if they had not been living in Houston

and if she had not had a baby who was five months old

and if she had not been so young

and if she hadn't just made up her mind to make it work

and if her Honda didn't have thirty-seven more payments

and if Wes hadn't been tearfully pleading, his knees scraping the mauve, stain-resistant Dupont carpet on the floor of their three bedroom dream/nightmare house, his pale blue linen-shirted arms encircling her thighs, not caring about how he must have looked, singing an Al Green beg about how sorry he was

and we're going to make it

and I'll never ever hit you again,

and if her mother had not just gone back home after staying five weeks helping with the baby,

and if she were not up for a promotion at Xerox,

maybe she would have left then and there,

and thus, never would have gotten slapped a second time and ended up going off on his ass, pouring a whole pot of just cooked spaghetti down his back and grabbing a long, long kitchen knife when he started to move at her, remembering the way her jaw had hurt for five and a half days after he had knocked her down that first time and then promising herself, like a Jew viewing relics of the holocaust for the first time, "Never again. Never again."

She had told John this story. He knew not to hit her.

 

              Look at her she thinks I'm going to hit her. John couldn't help his thought process; his Negro male ego, having successfully gnawed through the rope holding the door, was now fully uncaged and roaming the streets of John's emotions. A well chewed human dove's feathers warmly covered the bellicose, blood stained jowls of John's unfettered ego.

              This was a strange ass woman.

              This was an ordinary male.

              Nothing prepared him for living with something he couldn't control. All his examples were wrong. He had never seen any of his peers treat a woman like their new car and really take care of her. From what all he knew about women John would bet the farm that if you didn't watch out they had a secret way to make a man cry, and what man wanted to cry?

 

              "John, please leave."

              "John, please leave."

              "John, please leave."

              If she didn't stop saying that he was going to have to punch her out.

              "John, please leave."

 

              Regardless of what John thought he was hearing, after saying it the first time, Angela had not said another word.

              At a moment when it would have taken a whole lot of understanding or at least the image of some man John respected advising John on the manliness of admitting confused emotions and admitting to being lost on the relationships frontier, John pushed on confident as Custer that he could cope with whatever Angela had in mind. On the wide screen Eddie Murphy (whom John mistook for an experienced navigator/scout) was acting the fool, his manic guffaws misdirecting John. It made sense to John.

              John had watched tv football.  He knew what was happening. A fatal loop of instant replay was stuck in John's head. Angela was standing over John's quarterback, pointing an outstretched finger into the poor boy's face. Actually she was standing astraddle him doing the Cabbage Patch over his prostrate body. How did that look on Monday night television, a sack on his fifteen, and she jumping up, standing one foot on each side of his hip, "take that motherfucker, take that motherfucker!"?

              "On who?  On you!" that finger with the blood red fingernail kept saying.  About thirty-six million people was watching her knock him flat on his ass and then gloating with a long red finger in his face!

              "John, please leave."

              Where were his blockers?

              "John, please leave."

              Five minutes passed like that.

             "John, please leave."

              Although there was always another game, who wanted to lose like this?

              Angela didn't want to repeat herself. Once was enough. What she really wanted was to disappear. She also wanted her little girl Harriet to grow up in another kind of country where she wouldn't be expected to be some man's woman. If there was such a country, Angela's daughter Harriet could be happy. She could have children if she wanted to. Could have a lover, if she found one she wanted, but she wouldn't have to be "his" woman. That's what she wanted.

              John was leaning against the podium wondering what he was supposed to be doing. He didn't know how to talk his way out of this one. Worse than that, he didn't even know he was not trapped in something that he had to escape. The microphone was on, the tape recorders were documenting, the reporters had their pens ready to scribble down every word of the post-game, wrap up.

              John was almost forty. He had seen a lot of shit. He had been with a lot of women -- well, without really counting closely, he had been with seven, uh eight women in some kind of serious, well, almost serious, well like he had lived with (more or less) four different women in the last seven years and almost got married twice. He was tired.

              He was also unreconstructed. He didn't know how to disarm. How to divest of the need to own. John was afraid to let go and afraid to hold on to a woman's inquiry into his guts. John's EWAD (Early Warning Defensive Radar System) went bonkers -- Angela was set to launch fifty questions. His ego was asking him why did it have to go back in the cage. There was no logical answer.

              And Angela, his sweet, sweet angel, had her own pack of troubles to tote, she couldn't help him with his. Besides she was no expert on safe cracking, there was no way for her to reach into his head or even if she could, how could she know his head was not what most needed reprogramming.

              How does it happen that you can get to someplace but you can't go back to where you came from? How does it happen that you long for something you ain't never had? Something dim but very valuable was in the distance and they both were reaching for it, but it was far off, far off. Very far off.

              John decided he was too tired to talk but really his problem was he couldn't read the script. All he knew was English, albeit at a first year college reading level, thank you; English, a language severly limited in conjunctions and in nouns denoting inner realities. John had fifty-seven ways to express anger and only two words that he knew of that seemed to fit this puzzle. He didn't even know sign language. He had his arms folded.

              Angela was deeply hurt by John's refusal to unknot himself, but she was determined. She had journeyed to the crossroads at midnight many times before. Sometimes confused, perplexed and in a quandary, Angela had simply sat on her rump and stoically greeted the dawn. He never met her there; one usual lie was that you had to go to the crossroads alone, but if two was one then being together was alone, right? Sometimes, just marching on down the highway, she would catch a reflection of her moon-shadow on the roadside and realize how doofus she was being by courting the devil behind the particular simpleton in whose hands she was considering placing her life, and invariably on such occasions when even a little sliver of a moon would throw a sharply defined shadow sprawling across the gravel, invariably those would be the times when she knew that the particular man was not worth the particular effort, so even before getting to the crossroads she would back down and return home, would tell Alfred, or whatever his name happened to be in this particular incarnation, "This is not going to make it."

Angela had become strong enough to resist jumping in the water just because a swimming pool was conveniently near, clean and available. Once she had gone right, got married to Westley Richardson, II, Esquire. Blood turned out to be an excellent lawyer, the natural profession of liars. And once she had gone left and not married Julius James Johnson, the man all his friends and acquaintances affectionately called J.J., even though returning the rings and canceling everything damn near broke his heart, Angela knew that was better than going through with getting hooked up to a plow she was not prepared to pull. By then Angela had learned to listen to her stomach which invariably got upset at the way J.J. treated women, and Angela didn't take it personally because the fool was even hard on his mama which was a sign clearer than that storm God dropped on Noah that things wasn't going to work out. Yes Lord, Angela had been to the crossroads.

              At the crossroads anything you did had its ups and downs but, based on the lessons life had smacked hard into her head, for sure it was better to walk than wait, "Let's just end this now before one of us hurts the other."

 

         —Cut.

 

         Of the three, predictably, Funk was the only one not hurting: Don't stop now. Keep the action going while it's flowing. (You know Funk is a midget and likes to drag everybody down to its level.)

         Angela was so into the scene she didn't hear the director yell "cut." Even though there was this tremble in her voice, somehow, she was still holding her head up and keeping her face dry, even though a floodtide was raging just behind the brown damn of her determined-not-to-cry eyes.

         Funk knew it would be a waste of tears if Angela didn't cry until after John booked up. Funk decided to take matters in hand and started whispering the name of every man who had ever fucked and left Angela. Wait a minute, Funk thought, that's a redundancy of the first order. Everybody Angela ever slept with was gone—well, of course, she had put a couple of them out, but they were gone, and hence, had left. It wouldn't be long now before she jumped to the grand conclusion that going to bed with a dude wasn't nothing but a prelude to the man leaving her. Funk liked the symmetry of that: getting laid was a prelude to getting left—how they said it? Wham, bam…

 

 

SCENE THREE.

 

         (Do a slow-mo, three sixty shot.)

 

         —Action.

 

              John stood up. Turned slowly to walk out the room. And then, inexplicably paused. His back was to Angela. She wasn't looking. His voice stopped his feet from moving. He was shaken by what he heard himself uttering. He couldn't even look at her and say it. The words had thorns and ripped his lips as they poured out. Deep inside him he faintly heard something cursing at him. The mumble was the muffled indignation of his ego protesting confinement.

              But there was also a warm light beckoning through the fog. John could hear its slow blinking, an E major seventh chord with a husky Ben Webster whisper, only John didn't consciously know Ben Webster's sound so he could only recognize it in his subconscious having stored it deep in his memory cells when he was a child and his parents were playing Duke Ellington's "In A Mellowtone" RCA album with the 1940 Ellington orchestra's rendition of "All Too Soon" or the 1942 "What Am I Here For," both of which featured Ben in all his majestic glory. Although John could not have called Ben Webster's name to save his life, Ben Webster's sound was the singular touchstone that kept John from making a total fool out of himself and walking out the door.

         When John had first heard Ben Webster his mama and daddy were dancing in the front room and he was hanging over the side of a tub they had put him in to keep him from crawling around, and they were speaking some funny language that John did not remember sounding like the language he later learned to speak by mimicking them. That sound that was blinking like a beacon inside of him. He wanted to be his daddy dancing. He wanted Angela in his arms. He wanted to hear Ben Webster again. But he felt awful stupid. He had hugged a lot of women before. But none of the others made music in him and suddenly like a baby, all he wanted was what he wanted, nothing more, nothing less, don't give him no other arms, he wanted his mama, he wanted Angela to be his mama and he wanted to be his daddy.

              But just like John didn't consciously know Ben Webster, he also didn't consciously know what he wanted. Which didn't make John feel better; actually, not knowing what he wanted made him feel worse. Meanwhile John's feet stayed rooted to the carpet. E major 7th. He could hear it but he couldn't think it. John didn't think his inability to leave was right, in fact he felt down right weak. If Angela had been hugging him at that moment and had had her head resting on his chest, she would have heard a faint grunt, an involuntary exclamation that acknowledged that at least John knew exactly what Stevie Wonder meant when he sang "There's something 'bout your love..." da-da-da something "...that makes me weak, and knocks me off (pause) my feet."  Even though Stevie was blind, Stevie had peeped this, so maybe, John having all his faculties of sight intact, just maybe, this was the right thing to do. Or something. Maybe being weak was right. John was barely passing his first lesson in submission to human love.

              But Angela wasn't looking. When John had stood up, she thought that was it, blood was about to do the famous fifty yard dash right on out of the danger of relating to a female other than his mama.

Angela was deeply hurt by what she interpreted as John's refusal to speak in the mother tongue rather than growl in the colonial language. His silence handcuffed her, and him. She started to nickname him Cortez. Made love with his boots on. Saw her indigenous femininity as virgin territory to be mounted, surmounted, claimed and controlled, a phallic flag stuck into with its nuts waving in the wind. Thinking of love like a business: what he could gain, what he stood to lose. Angela was really tired, at that moment, so she didn't hear him stop, desert the armed forces, and of course she didn't hear that E major 7th, nor the Ben Webster buzz. But what she did hear, she didn't believe at first, even though she had been wanting to believe.

              "Angela. I don't know what to do. I'm scared of you. But, I love you."

 

         —Cut.

 

         Funk was furious. What a revolting development this was. Funk was sure that shit wasn't in the script.

After checking the newly revised script, Funk was even further dismayed to find out that Funk was eliminated entirely from the last scene.

Don't tell me you're going to shoot some lame-ass, happily-ever-after bullcrap Hollywood ending. Naw, couldn't be. This stuff just doesn't happen in real life. Not to Negroes; and weren't we supposed to be keeping this one real?

         Funk's bad breath was all up in Kalamu's face, but you know how  Big Mu can get when his mind is made up. Funk and Kalamu stood toe to toe for a minute, psychically parrying and thrusting retorts back and forth. Just looking at them, it didn't look like nothing was going on, but Kalamu was arguing with Funk the way authors do with their fictional characters, telling Funk, you don't like it you can just go head and write and direct your own story. But this is my project.

Funk, of course, shot back, naw, this ain't your story, this some bullshit trying to appeal to the women by putting men down cause a brother wasn't going to put up with somebody telling him it was wrong to feel the way he felt. Besides, Kalamu, you know good and well there ain't no happy endings for 99 out of a 100 Black couples.

Well, Funk, just call this: the one after ninety-nine. And with that Kalamu turned his back on Funk and called out: Make sure everybody has the revised script. The one with the Black ending.

         Kalamu knew that no matter how consistently acquainted with sadness this society forced our people to be, love and laughter was what we intimately craved and would risk everything to achieve. Fourth and inches. The safe play was to punt. But without a second thought, they lined up with two wide receivers and everybody else blocking.

         Funk reluctantly split behind the cameras, but staying nearby just in case one of them muffed it and Funk would be able to slip back in and put a real-ass ending on this bad boy.

 

 

 

         SCENE FOUR.

 

         —Is the crane ready for the overhead? This is the last scene, let's do it in one take. One smooth take. Tilt down as the crane goes up, zooming in as you rise. And Funk, back up, we're catching a bit of your shadow in the shot and we don't need that.

 

         —Action.

 

              Angela jumps up quickly but very quietly, she doesn't want to frighten him. Angela takes John's hand. Turns him around. He isn't crying. But his hand is shaking. She doesn't have to look in his eyes. She doesn't have to look period. Everything is bright, red bright, makes her close her eyes. She glances furtively at him before shutting her eyes.

              John's eyes are open but he isn't observing anything outside of himself. During this brief moment, John's eyes are a double mirror: he is looking inward at himself (even though he appears to be standing with his eyes wide open staring straight ahead at the hanging ivy in the ceramic pot with the macramé tie that Angela had labored on during the four and three quarter month period the last time she wasn't "seeing" anybody) and at the same time, Angela catches her own reflection in the opaque blankness of John's stare.

              Angela knows, with the unprovable certainty that those who believe in god possess, she just knows that at last, and also for the first time, somehow, John is deeply inspecting himself instead of questioning her motives when there is something he can't figure out. A pheasant, feathered the most dazzling green, flies across Angela's line of vision. She knows it has sprung from John's chest, free to fly the friendly skyways of her dream visions.

              Angela instinctively starts chanting prayers of thanksgiving. Cognizant that she is near a threshold and wanting to remain on the path, Angela humbly and silently asks the creator for guidance. There is no sound and she thinks the silence is the answer.

              "Don't do anything. Don't say anything. Just hold me."

              After he held her, they talk for thirty-nine straight minutes. It is a start.

 

***

 

          Today, it's one thousand, two hundred and forty-five days later. John and Angela are still together.

              They laugh about this now.

 

         —Cut! Ok, that's a wrap!

 

         By then Funk, in a truly foul mood, had angrily put on his wrap-around shades and silently slithered off the set into the urban shadows.

 

###

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

BUDDY BOLDEN

 

a bunch of us were astral traveling, pulsating on the flow of a wicked elvinesque polyrhythmic 6/8 groove. although our physical eyes had disappeared from our faces, we still had wry eyebrows arched like quarter moons or miniature ram's horns. every molecule of our thirsty skin was a sensitive ear drinking in the vibes. at each stroke of sweat-slicked drumstick on skins, our wings moved in syncopated grace. shimmering cymbal vibrations illuminated the night so green bright we could feel the trembling emerald through the soles of our feet. deep red pulsing bass sounds throbbed from our left brain lobes, lifting us and shooting us quickly across the eons. we moved swiftly as comets, quiet as singing starlight.

 

as we neared the motherwomb, firefly angels came out to escort us to the inner sanctum. with eager anticipation i smelled a banquet of hip, growling, intense quarter notes when we entered the compound. a hand carved, coconut shell bowl brimming with hot melodies radiating a tantalizing aroma sat steaming at each place setting, heralding our arrival. whenever i rode this deeply into the music, i would never want to return back to places of broken notes and no natural drums.

 

on my way here i heard nidia who was in a prison in el salvador. she had been shot, captured. her tormentors were torturing her with continuous questions, sleep deprivation, psychological cruelty, and assassination attempts against her family. she sang songs to stay strong. singing in prison, i dug that. 

 

once we made touchdown, we kissed the sweetearth (which tasted like three parts blackstrap molasses and one part chalky starch with a dash of sharply tart orange rind) and smeared red clay in our hair. then lay in the sun for a few days listening to duke ellington every morning before bathing. i was glad to see otis redding flashing his huge carefree smiles and splashing around in the blue lagoon. finally after hugging the baobab tree (the oldest existing life force) for twenty-four hours we were ready to glide inside and hang with the children again. whenever one returned from planet earth, we had to take a lot of precautions. you never know what kinds of human logic you might be infected with. since i had spent most of my last assignment checking out far flung galaxies, on my first examination i was able to dance through the scanner with nary a miscue. my soul was cool.

 

i only had ten centuries to recuperate before returning to active rotation so i was eager to eat. the house was a buzz with vibrations. a hefty-thighed cook came in and tongue kissed each of us seated at the mahogony table, male and female, young and old, whatever. that took about six centuries. she was moving on cp time and when i tasted her kiss i understood why.

 

up close her skin was deeper than a sunken slave ship and glowed with the glitter of golddust pressed across her brow and on the sides of her face just above her cheekline. she wore a plum-sized chunk of orangish-yellow amber as a pendant held in place by a chain braided from the mane of a four hundred pound lion. her head was divided into sixteen sectors each with a ball of threaded hair tied in nubian knots, each knot exactly the same size as the spherical amber perfectly poised in the hollow of her throat. i was so stunned by the beauty force of her haunting entrance, i had to chant to calm myself.

 

"drink deeply the water from an ancient well." was all she said as she spun in slow circles. tiny bells dangled between the top of the curvaceous protrudence of her posterior and the bottom of the concavity of the arch in the small of her back where it met her waist and flared outward to the expanse of her sturdy hips. suspended from a cord she wore around her waist, the hand carved, solid gold bells gave off a tiny but distinctive jingle which rose and fell with each step.

 

emanating a bluegreen aura of contentment, she didn't look like she had ever, in any of her many lifetimes, done anything compromising such as vote for a capitalist (of whatever color) or succumb to the expediency of accepting any system of domination. she didn't say a word, instead she hummed without disrupting the smiling fullness of her lips. she wasn't ashame of her big feet as she stepped flatfootedly around the table, a slender gold ring on the big toe of each foot.

 

her almond shaped, kola nut colored eyes sauntered up to each of our individualities, sight read our diverse memories and swam in the sea of whatever sorrows we had experienced. she silently drank all our bitter tears and became pregnant with our hopes. she looked like she had never ever worn clothes and instead had spent her whole life moving about in the glorious garment of a nudity so natural she seemed like a miracle you had to prepare yourself to witness as she innocently and righteously strode through the sun, moon and star light.

 

when she neared me she effortlessly slinked into a crouched, garden tending posture and, with sharp thrusting arm movements, choreographed an improvised welcome dance (how else, except by improvisation, could her movements mirror everything i was thinking?). placing my ear to her distended stomach, i guessed six months. she arched her back. a ring shout undulated out of her womb. i got so excited i had to sit on my wings to keep still.

 

when she stood up to her full six foot height with her lithe arms akimbo, i coudn't help responding. i got an erection when she placed her hand on the top of my head. she laughed at my arousal.

 

"drink your soup, silly" she teased me and then laughed again, while gently tracing her fingers across my face, down the side of my neck and swiftly brushing my upper torso, briefly petting the hummingbird rapidity of my chest muscle twitches. and then the program began.

 

a few years after monk danced in, coltrane said the blessing in his characteristic slow solemn tone. you know how coltrane talks. as usual, he didn't eat much. but we were filled with wonder anyway. then bob chrisman from the black scholar gave a short speech on one becomes two when the raindrop splits. everybody danced in appreciation of his insights.

 

when we resumed our places, the child next to me reflected aloud, "always remember you are a starchild. you will become any reality that you get with unless you influence that reality to become you. we have no power but osmosis and vibrations. as long as you don't forget your essence, it's alright to live inside something else." the child hugged me while extrapolating chrisman's message.

 

a voice on the intercom was calling for volunteers to help move the mountain. even though i wasn't through with my soup and still had a couple of centuries left, i rose immediately. i had drunk enough to imagine going up against the people who couldn't clap on two and four. "earth is very dangerous" the voice intoned. "the humans have the power to induce both amnesia and psychic dislocation."

 

the child smiled at me and sang "i'll wait for you where human eyes have never seen." we only had time to sing 7,685 choruses because i had to hurry to earth. our spirits there were up against some mighty powerful forces and the ngoma badly needed reinforcements. but i took a couple of months to thank the chef for sitting me next to the child.

 

"no thanx needed. i simply gave back to you what you gave to me." then in a divine gesture she lovingly touched each of my four sacred drums: head, heart, gut and groin. cupping them warmly in both her hands, she slow kissed an eternal rhythm into each. before i could say anything she was gone, humming the child's song "...where human eyes have never seen, i'll wait for you. i'll wait for you."

 

i got to earth shortly after 1947 started. people were still making music then. back in 1999 machines manufactured music. real singing was against the law.

 

walking down the street one day i saw what i assumed was a soul sister. she was humming a simple song. i sensed she was possibly one of us. she looked like a chef except with chemically altered hair on her mind instead of black puffs of natural nubianity. i spoke anyway. she walked right through me.

 

i turned around to see where she had gone. but she was gone. i looked up and i was on the bandstand. i was billie holiday. every pain i ever felt  was sobbing out of my throat. i looked at my black and blue face. the fist splotches from where my man had hit me.

 

"I'd rather

for my man

to hit me,

 

            then

            for him

 

to jump

            up

and quit me." i sang through the pain of a broken jaw.

 

"have you ever loved somebody who didn't know how to love you?" i asked the audience. in what must have been some kind of american ritual, everyone held up small, round hand mirrors and intently peered into their looking glass. the music stopped momentarily as if i had stumbled into a bucket of moonlit blood. my left leg started trembling. every word felt like it was ripped from my throat with pieces of my flesh hanging off each note. i almost fainted from the pain, but i couldn't stop singing because whenever i paused, even if only for a moment, the thought of suicide pressed me to the canvas. and you know i couldn't lay there waiting for the eight count, knocked out like some chump. i was stronger than these earthlings. i had to get up and keep on singing, but to keep on making music took so much energy. i was almost exhausted. and when i stopped the pain was deafening. exhausting to sing. painful to stop. this was a far heavier experience than i had foreseen.

 

i kept singing but i also felt myself growing weaker. drained. "i say have you ever given your love to a rascal that didn't give a damn about you?" this was insane. when would i be able to stop? there was so much money being exchanged that i was having a hard time breathing. i could feel my soul growing dimmer, the pain beginning to creep through even while i was singing. so this is what the angels meant by "hell is being silenced by commerce." legal tender was choking me.

 

for a moment i felt human, but luckily the band started playing again. some lame colored cat had crawled up on the stage and was thawing out frozen conservatory school cliches. made my bunions groan. but i guess when you're human you got to go through a lot of trial and error. especially when you're young in earth years. the whole time i was on that scene i felt sorry for the children. most of them had never seen their parents make love.

 

humans spend a lot of their early years playing all kinds of games to prepare themselves to play all kinds of games when they grow up. the childrearing atmosphere was so dense the only thing little people could do was lie awake naked under the covers and play with themselves but only whenever the adults weren't watching cause if those poor kids got caught touching each other, they were beaten. can you imagine that?

 

damn, i thought smelly horn wasn't ever going to stop, prez had to pull his coat, "hey shorty, don't take so long to say so little."

 

as soon as the cat paused, i jumped in "have you ever loved somebody..." yes, i had volunteered, but i had no idea making music on earth would be this taxing.

 

when our set ended, i stumbled from the stand totally disoriented. by now i almost needed to constantly make music in order to twirl my gyroscope and keep it spinning. after the set, i found it very difficult to act like a human and sit still while talking to the customers. i kept wanting to hover and hum. but i went through the changes, even did an interview.

 

"the only way out is to go through it all" i found myself saying to an english reporter who was looking at me with insane eyes.

 

he did his best to sing. "you've been hurt by white people in america and i want to let you know that there are white people who love and respect you." i could hear his eyes as clear as sid catlett's drum. i appreciated his attempts but those were some stiff-assed paradiddles he was beating. the youngster was still in his teens and offered me a handkerchief to wipe the pain off my face. i waved it away, that little bandana wouldn't even dry up so much as one teardrop of my sadness. at that moment what i really needed was a lift cause the scene was a drag.

 

"the only way to go through it all is to go through it all. yaknow. survive it and sing about it." i said holding the side of my head in the cup of my hand and speaking with my eyes half closed and focused on nothing in particular.

 

"why sing about it?" he said eager as a pig snouting around for truffles (even though he wasn't french, i could see he had sex on his mind).

 

"cause if you keep the pain within you'll explode." he reached for his wallet about to offer me money. for sure he was a hopeless case. once i dug he didn't understand creativity, i switched to sociology. "millions of people been molested as children." he had been there, done that. he was starting to catch my drift. "men been beating on women. you know i was a slave. that means i was violated. that means i was broke down. that means i would lay there and take it. in and out. lay there. still. i have heard reports that i was a prostitute. but i never sold myself just for money, i lay down because there was no room to stand up. in and out. in and out. til finally, they ejaculated. and finished. for the moment, for the night... til... whenever." i looked up and his mind was on the other side of the room; i had lost him again.

 

poor child doesn't have a clue. that's why he's looking all pitiful at me. i couldn't find a way to unfold the whole to him. i wanted to say more but their language couldn't make the changes. he will probably write a treatise on the downtrodden negro in tomorrow's paper.

 

sho-nuff, next day--quote:

 

 So-and-so is an incredibly gifted Black American animal. People were actually crying in the audience when she howled "No Body's Bizness" in the voice of a neutered dog. This reporter is a registered theorist on why White people are fascinated by listening to the sounds of their victims' pathetic crying. I had the rare opportunity to interview the jazzy chick.  Although she was not very familiar with the basic principles of grammar, I managed to get a few words from her illiterateness once she took some dope which I had been advised to offer her.

 I asked her what harmonic system she employed? My publisher had authorized me to offer her music lessons. I quote her answer verbatim.

 "I sing because, like the Funky Butt Brass Band used to holler, you got to open up the window and let the bad air out."

 That was it. When I turned off my voice stealing machine, she said "I got a lot of s--t in me. If I don't get it out, I'll die."

 If she doesn't die first, there will be a concert tonight. Cheeri-O. 

 

unquote.

 

i couldn't wait to get back to the motherwomb...

 

But, just as I was about to fly, I woke up. I was cuddled next to Nia's nakedness, her back to me, my arm embracing her breasts, and my leg thrown up in touch with the arc of her thighs.

 

I stared into the deep acorn brown of her braided hair. I couldn't see anything in the unlighted room except the contours of the coiled beautiful darkness of her braids. After a few seconds the sweet familar scent of the hair oil she used began lulling me back to sleep.

 

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough sleep time left to continue my flight dreams. And I spent the rest of the day trying to decide... no, not decide, but remember. I spent the rest of the day trying to remember whether I was a human who dreamed he was something else or was indeed something else doing a temporary duty assignment here on planet earth.

 

 —kalamu ya salaam

photo by Cfreedom

 

 

 

 

Could You Wear My Eyes?

At first Reggie wearing my eyes after I expired was beautiful; a sensitive romantic gesture and an exhilarating experience. For him there was the awe of seeing the familiar world turned new when viewed through my gaze, and through observing him I vicariously experienced the rich sweetness of visualizing and savoring the significance of the recent past.

I'm a newcomer to the spirit world, so occasionally I miss the experience of earth feelings, the sensations that came through my body when I had a body. I can't describe the all encompassing intricate interweave of spirit reality -- "reality" is such a funny word to use in talking about what many people believe is so unreal. I can't really convey to you the richness of the spirit world nor what missing human feelings is like. I'm told eventually we permanently forget earth ways, sort of like when we were born and forgot all those pre-birth months we spent gestating in our mother's womb, in fact, most of us even forget what it feels like to be a baby. Well the spirit world is something like always being a baby, constant wonder and exploration.

Reggie must have had an inkling of the immensity of the fourth dimension --which is as good a name as any for the spirit world--or maybe Reggie guessed that there was a meta-reality, or intuited that there was more to eyes than simply seeing in the physical sense. But then again, he probably didn't intuit that this realm exists because, like most men, centering on his intuition was difficult for Reggie, as difficult as lighting a match in a storm or imagining being a woman. In fact, his inability to adapt to and cope with woman-sight is why he's blind now.

I was in his head and I don't mean his memories. I mean literally checking his thoughts, each one existing with the briefness of a mayfly as Reg weighed the rationality of switching eyes. This was immediately following those four and a half anesthetized days I hung-on while in the hospital after getting blindsided by a drunk driver a few blocks beyond Chinese Kitchen where I had stopped to get some of their sweet and sour shrimp for our dinner. Through the whole ordeal Reggie never wavered. Two days after my death and one day before the operation, Reginald woke up that Monday morning confident as a tree planted by the water. Reggie felt that if he took on my eyes then he would be able to have at least a part of me back in his life.

He assumed that with my eyes he maybe could stop seeing me when he brushed, combed and plaited Aiesha's thick hair or sat for over an hour daydreaming at her bedside while she slept, looking at our daughter but thinking of me; or maybe once my chestnut colored pupils were in his head then my demise wouldn't upset him so much he'd have to bow his head like he was reverently praying when a woman jumps up in church to testify--like sister Carol had done the day before--and has on a dress the same color as the one I often wore.

Reginald was so eager to make good as a husband and father, to redeem whatever he thought was lost because of the way he came up. I am convinced he didn't really know me. He had this image, this ideal and he wanted that in the worse way. Wanted a family, a home. And I was the first woman he ever loved and who ever loved him. All the rest had been girls still discovering themselves. We married. I had his child. And for him everything was just the way it was supposed to be. For me, well, let us just say, some of us want more out of life without ever really identifying what that more is and certainly without ever attaining that more. So, in a sense, I settled -- that's the woman Reginald married. And in another sense, there was a part of me that remained restless. I hid that part from Reginald. But I always knew. I always, always knew me and yes, that was what really disoriented Reginald. He loved me and I could live with his love, but until he wore my eyes he never got a glimpse of the other me.

I used to think there was something wrong with me. I should have been totally happy. Of course, I loved our daughter. I loved my husband. I could live with the life we had, but... But this is not about me. This is about the man whom I married. I married Reginald more because he loved me so much than because I loved him back like that--I mean I loved him and all but I would never have put his eyes into my head if he had been killed and I had been the one still alive.

After we went through all the organ donation legal rigmarole, we actually celebrated with a late night seafood dinner; that was about eight and a half months before Aiesha was born. Just like getting married, the celebration was his idea, an idea I went along with because I had no good reason not to even though I had a vague distaste, a sort of uneasiness about the seriousness that Reginald invested into his blind alliegance to me. You know the discomfort you experience when you have two or three forkfulls left on your plate and you don't feel like eating anymore, but you have always been taught not to waste food so you eat that little bit more. Eating a few more mosels is no big thing but nonetheless forcing yourself leaves you feeling uneasy the rest of the evening. I can see how I was, how I hid some major parts of myself from Reginald and how difficult I must have been to live with precisely because he didn't really know the whole person he was living with, and he would be so sincerely worshiping the part of me that he envisioned as his wife, while inside I cringed and he never knew that despite my smiles how sad I sometimes felt because I knew he didn't know and I knew I was concealing myself from him. Besides, what right did I have not to eat two little pieces of chicken or not to go celebrate my husband's decision to dedicate his life to me?

In hindsight I came to realize I shouldn't have let him give me things I didn't want. Reginald would have died if he had known that having or not having a baby didn't really make that much difference to me. He wanted... You know, this is really not about me. When we went to celebrate our signing of the donation papers, I didn't know then that I was pregnant but even if I had, we wouldn't have done anything differently; stubborn Reginald had his mind made up and, at the time, I allowed myself to be mesmerized by the sincerity and dedication of Reg's declaration--my husband's pledge to wear my eyes was unmatched by anything I had previously imagined or heard of. When somebody loves you like that you're supposed to be happy and if you aren't well then you just smile and, well, I think when he saw the world through my eyes he saw both me and the world in ways he never imagined.

The doctors told Reginald there usually weren't any negative side effects, although in a rare case or two there were some unexplained hallucinations but, even for those patients, counseling smoothed out the transition. The first week after the operation went ok and then the intermittent double visions started. For Reggie it was like he had second sight. He saw what was there but then he also saw something else.

Sometimes he would go places he never knew I went and get a disorienting image flash from a source about which he previously would never have given a second thought, like the svelte look of a waiter at a cafe, a guy whose sleek build I really admired. Reginald never envisioned me desiring some other man. I don't know why, but he just never thought of me fantasizing sex with someone else and now suddenly Reginald looks up from a menu and finds himself staring at a man's behind. Needless to say, such sightings were disconcerting. Or like how the night I got drunk on Tequila would flash back every time I saw limes. Reginald is in a supermarket buying apples and imagines himself retching, well, he thinks he's imagining dry heaves but he's really seeing the association of being drunk with those tart green, lemon-shaped fruit. And on and on, til Reggie's afraid to go anywhere new, afraid he'll run into another man I had made love to that he never knew about, like this person he saw in a bookstore one day, a bookstore Reginald never went in but which I used to frequent. That's how I had met Rahsaan. Reggie just happened to be passing the place, looked inside the big picture window and immediately peeped Rahsaan. When he looked into the handsome obsidian of Rahsaan's face with it's angular lines that resembled an elegant African mask, Reginald got the shock of his naive life. He didn't sleep for two whole days after that one.

And when he closes our eyes to sleep, it's worse. A man should never know a woman's secret life; men can not stand so much reality. Their fragile ego's can't cope. It's like they say in Zimbabwe: men are children and women are mothers. Being a child is about innocence, about not knowing the realities that adults deal with every day. Men just don't know the world of women. So after Reginald adopted my eyes, you can just imagine how often he found himself laying awake at night, staring into the dark trying to make sense out of the complex of images he was occasionally seeing: awakened by the terror of a particularly vivid dream in which he saw how he had treated me, sometimes abusing me when he actually thought he was loving me--like when we would make mad love and he wanted me to suck him, he would never say anything, just shove my head down to his genitals. Sex didn't feel so exquisitely good to him to see his dick up close, the curl of his pubic hair.

Although the major episodes kept him awake and eventually drove him down to the riverside, it was the unrelenting grind of daily life's thousands of tiny tortures that propelled poor Reg over the edge. Looked like every time he turned around in public he felt unsafe, felt vulnerable to assault from men he previously would never have bothered to notice. Seemed like my eyeball radar spotted potential invaders everywhere Reg looked: how to dodge that one, don't get on an elevator with this one, make sure there's always another person nearby when you're in a room with so-and-so. And even though as a man Reg was immune to much of the usual harassment, it became a real drag having to expend a ton of precautionary emotional energy in the course of taking a casual stroll down the block to buy some potato chips. The strain of always being on guard was too much for Reg; he became outraged: nobody should have to live like this is the conclusion he came to.

He never knew when the second sight would kick in and the visioning never lasted too long but the incidents were always so viscerally jolting that they emotionally disoriented him. In less than two weeks it had reached the point that just looking at make-up made Reg sick. He unconsciously reacted to seeing some shades of lipstick by wetting his lips with his tongue, like there was something inappropriate about him having unpainted lips--a vague but powerful feeling that he was wrong for being like he was started to consume him. And he couldn't bear to watch cable anymore.

The morning Reginald blinded himself, he stood on the levee staring into the sun without squinting. Silent tears poured profusely down his cheeks. He kept saying he had always thought our life together was beautiful, and he never knew I had suffered so. And then he threw a twelve ounce glass, three-quarters full of battery acid onto his face, directly into our unblinking eyes. A jogger that morning found Reginald on his knees, shrieking. The runner ran to a house and begged the people who lived there to call an ambulance for a Black guy folded over on the levee screaming about he didn't want to see anymore, couldn't stand to see anything else.

 

—kalamu ya salaam 

photo by Cfreedom 

 

 

AMIRI BARAKA ANALYZES

HOW HE WRITES

  

SALAAM: When you wrote A System of Dante's Hell, at one point you decided just to start with memory. You sat down and just started to write your first memories -- without trying to make any sense of them or to order them, but rather just to write whatever were your first memories. Is that correct?

BARAKA: Yeah. That's essentially what it is. I was writing to try to get away from emulating Black Mountain, Robert Creely, Charles Olson, that whole thing. It struck me as interesting because somebody else who had done the same thing was Aime Cesaire. Cesaire said that he vowed one time that he was not going to write anymore poetry because it was too imitative of the French symbolist and he wanted to get rid of the French symbolists. So he said he was only going to write prose but by trying to do that he wrote A Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. It's incredible when you think about that. For me it was the same thing, I was trying to get away from a certain kind of thing. I kept writing like Creely and Olson and what came to me was: "I don't even think this." What became clear to me is that if you adopt a certain form that form is going to push you into certain content because the form is not just the form, the form itself is content. There is content in form and in your choice of form.

 

SALAAM: Is there content or is there the shaping of content?

BARAKA: No, I'm saying this: the shaping itself is a choice and that choice is ideological. In other words, it's not just form. The form itself carries...

 

SALAAM: If you choose a certain form, then the question is why did you choose that form.

BARAKA: Exactly--Why did you choose that form?--that's what I'm saying. That's the ideological portent, or the ideological coloring of form. Why did you choose that? Why does that appeal to you? Why this one and not that one.

 

SALAAM: You said you were consciously trying to get away from the form?

BARAKA: Yes.

 

SALAAM: So, why call it A System of Dante's Hell?

BARAKA: Because, I thought, in my own kind of contradictory thinking, that it was "hell." You see the Dante--which escaped me at the time. It shows you how you can be somewhere else and even begin to take on other people's concerns--I wasn't talking about Dante Aligheri. See? I "thought" I was, but I was really talking about Edmund Dante, The Count of Monte Cristo. You see, I had read the Count of Monte Cristo when I was a child and I loved the Count of Monte Cristo. Edmund Dante, that's who I was talking about and I had forgotten that. Forgotten that actually it was Dante Aligheri although I had read that and there was a professor of mine at Howard, Nathan Scott, who went on to become the Chairman of the Chicago Institute of Theology. Nathan Scott was a heavy man. When he used to lecture on Dante, he was so interested in that, that that is how he interested me and A.B. [Spelman] in that. He would start running it down and we would say that damn, this must be some intersting shit here if he's that in to it. So we read it and we got into it. It was like Sterling Brown teaching us Shakespeare.

 

SALAAM: So the Count of Monte Cristo is what you were remembering?

BARAKA: Right. Absolutely.

 

SALAAM: But you were saying A System of Dante's Hell. Explain the title.

BARAKA: I had come up on a kind of graphic which showed the system of Dante's hell. You know, hell laid out in graphic terms showing which each circle was. First circle, second circle, etc.

 

SALAAM: That was Dante Aligheri.

BARAKA: Right. But seeing that, I wanted to make a statement about that, but the memory itself was not about that. See what I'm saying? I was fascinated by Dante's hell because of the graphic but when I started reaching into Dante, I wasn't talking about that Dante. I was talking about Edmund Dante. Remember, Edmund Dante, as all those Dumas characters--you know all of Dumas' characters get thrown down, get whipped, somebody steal their stuff and they come back. All of them do that. Like the Man in the Iron Mask, that could be Africa sitting up inside that mask. The same thing with Edmund Dante, who I didn't think was hooked up to the earlier Dante, but who was disenfranchished. Despised and belittled. And then his son, the count of Monte Cristo, puts all this money and wealth together. He's got an enourmous fortune, and he vows revenge on the enemies of his father. That is what was in my mind. What's interesting about that is first of all that it is Dumas, which I had read as a child before I read Dante Aligheri. I had read Dumas not only in the book but I had read classic comics, you dig? I had read all of that, the whole list in classic comics. That Count of Monte Cristo made a deep, deep impression on me. I think what it was is that I always thought that Black people generally, particularly my father, Black men like him, I saw a parallel with that. They had been thrown down. My grandfather...

 

SALAAM: And it was on you. You were vowing revenge on those who had thrown down...

BARAKA: Absolutely. My grandfather was "Everett"--which always reminded me of "Edmund"--my grandfather's name was Thomas Everett Russ. He was the one who owned a grocery store and a funeral parlor and the Klan ran him out of there. Then he got hit in the head by a street light, that's what they said when they carried him in, and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair spitting in a can. You understand? So Everett/Edmund, all of that shit. I always remembered him. Like the night that Dutchman came out. I went down to the corner to look at all these newspapers. They were saying all kinds of crazy things: this nigger is crazy, he's using all these bad words; but I could see that they were trying to make me famous. I said, oh well, I see.

 

SALAAM: What do you mean "make you famous"?

BARAKA: I could see that this was not a one night stand. They had some stuff they wanted to run about me, either on a long term negative or a long term positive. I said, oh, in other words you're going to make this some kind of discussion. For some reason the strangest feeling came over me. I was standing on the corner of 8th Street and 2nd Avenue at the newspaper stand reading. I had a whole armful. At the time there were a lot of newspapers in New York: The Journal American, The Daily News, The Post, The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, The Village Voice, The Villager, I had all of them in my hand. A strange sensation came over me; the sensation was "oh, you're going to make me famous," but then I'm going to pay all of you people back. I'm going to pay you back for all the people you have fucked over. That was clear. There was no vagueness about that. That came to my mind clear as a bell. That's why I think that whatever you do, there's always some shit lurking in your mind and if the right shit comes together--you know the difference between quantitative and qualitative, you know that leap to something else. It could be liquid and suddenly leap into ice, it could be ice and suddenly leap into vapor. When I got that feeling, it was a terrific feeling. It was like some kind of avenger or something. It was: Now, I'm going to pay these motherfuckers back!

 

SALAAM: Like, all of sudden you now know why you were put here.

BARAKA: Yeah, that's exactly right. Because until then people wanted to know about the village. I was kind of--not totally, but I was a little happy go lucky kind of young blood down in the village kicking up my heels. I mean I had a certain kind of sense of responsibility. I was involved in Fair Play for Cuba and those kinds of things. I had even worked in Harlem. But I had never determined that I needed to do something that personal and yet that general as pay some people back.

 

SALAAM: So this was not only personal; it was also taking care of business?

BARAKA: Exactly. I never saw that it was connected specifically to me...

 

SALAAM: So before your work, your writing, was personal?

BARAKA: Yeah, it didn't have nothing to do with nobody because it was just me. But then it was, now that people would know my name, I had a sense of responsibility. As long as I was an obscure person, I was going to kick up my heels and be...

 

SALAAM: Obscure.

BARAKA: Right. Whatever I wanted to do. Althought that's not a static kind of realization because you were moving anyway. You can't come to this new conclusion unless you have moved quantitatively over to it. So that was a big turning point because I said, God damn, look at this!

 

SALAAM: Was that when you got the idea for System? When did you get the idea to write System?

BARAKA: I had written System already, but the point is that that was actually a kind of a summing up of one kind of life to make ready for another. I can see that now.

 

SALAAM: So System, in a sense, was what made it possible for you to look forward because now you had looked back.

BARAKA: Yeah, it sort of like cleaned up everything.  You know how you want to clear the table. I had dealt with all of the stuff, now I can deal with the next phase of my life. Also, there's this guy, I think his name is Brown, he's an Englishman. There's a book called Marxism and Poetry, a very interesting book, but anyway he says that drama is always most evident in periods of revolution. In other words when you get to the point that you're going to make the characters so ambitious that they are going to actually walk around like they are in real life that means you're trying to turn the whole thing around. That had been happening to me. I started writing poetry that had people speaking. It would be a poem and then suddenly I would have a name, a colon, and then a speech, then a name, a colon, and another speech. This would be within a poem. The next thing I know I was writing plays. You could see it just mount and mount and mount. You wanted realer than the page. You wanted them on the stage, actually walking around saying it. I had written a couple of plays before Dutchman but the way Dutchman was written was so spectacular that what happened with it didn't surprise me. I came in one night about twelve and wrote until about six in the morning and went to sleep without even knowing what I had written. I woke up the next morning and there it was. I had written it straight out, no revisions. I just typed it straight out.

 

SALAAM: So where did it come from?

BARAKA: I don't know. My life at the time. Whatever was interesting is that whatever had promoted it, I just wrote it.

 

SALAAM: When you came in did something tell you to write this or did you have a routine that you would write every night?

BARAKA: No, I didn't do that every night. Most of the time I would get up and work in the morning or the afternoon, even though I did work at night a lot too, but on this particular night, I don't know. I just came in sat down and started, and typed until I finished. I didn't even know what I had written. You ever had that kind of experience where you are in that zone or whatever, you just do it til you're finished, then you go to bed. I said I'll look at that tomorrow, I'm too tired to look at that tonight.

 

SALAAM: Had you named it at that point?

BARAKA: Yeah. At first I was going to name it The Flying Dutchman and then I said, it ain't really the "flying" Dutchman, so I just call it Dutchman. You know the "Dutchman" was really the train, that was the flying in it. But then there was a lot of ambiguity in it in my mind. I didn't know if I wanted the train to be the Dutchman or the dude to be the Dutchman or the woman to be the Dutchman. So I just said, fuck it, it's all Dutchman. I had nothing really fixed in my mind; what I'm saying now is all hindsight. At the time I just felt like writing some stuff, wrote it, went to bed and got up the next day trying to understand what I had written. You know how that is.

 

SALAAM: After you looked at it again did you do revisions on it?

BARAKA: No, not really. I just looked at it. I didn't understand it.

 

SALAAM: What do you mean you didn't understand it.

BARAKA: I understood the lines, the words, but I didn't really understand what I was really saying. You can understand the words but not understand what you are saying, like: this is a car. You know what that means, but why are you saying that. What does that mean? I didn't know. So, I left there a couple of days. Then it occured to me the best thing to do with this thing is to look at it. So I submitted it to this workshop I was in. The great benovolent Edward Albee who had made some money off the Zoo Story and Bessie Smith had started this workshop. In fact, Adrienne Kennedy and myself were in that workshop, and quite a few, I thought, intersting white playwrights. Israel Horowitz, a guy name Jack Richardson--Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You In The Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad--, McNally, and a couple of other interesting playwrights. I had got up in there because I had started writing this drama and I thought that maybe it would help me. I had written about three or four plays before that, The Baptism, The Toilet. I had written some plays and lost them. We did one of them on the radio, The Revolt of the Moon Flowers. I don't know what happened to them. Somebody will come up with it.

 

SALAAM: At this point you were doing a lot of what some people would call automatic writing?

BARAKA: Yeah, but I always do a lot of that. I always allow myself to be as free as I can be within the context of what I think I want to say. I always feel that whatever is in you is probably a little more knowledgable about you than you. The best thing you can do is make sure it doesn't get crazy; it's like you're releasing something out of yourself. It's like you turn on a faucet and stuff starts pouring out of you but you can't let it just run wild, but it's certainly something coming out of you and the best thing is to let it flow but at the same time guide that flow. You can't just be completely unconscious.

 

SALAAM: So you want to organize the flow of the outpouring of the self?

BARAKA: Right. You don't want to just be...

 

SALAAM: Dissipated?

BARAKA: Right. You want to keep some kind of hand on it, some kind of consciousness. It can't be completely unconscious.

 

SALAAM: You had written Blues People, which is a formal study, you had done this major fiction piece, A System of Dante's Hell, you were doing the poetry, and you had gotten off into the drama. Why were you working in so many different forms?

BARAKA: Because I never thought I shouldn't. To tell you the truth, I like that I could do that. That intrigued me as a person. No, there are no restrictions on any of this, that's someone else's problem, it's not mine. I do what I want to do and I always thought what gave me that liscense to do that was the fact that I said that, that I had that feeling. I also felt that I never had any kind of strict need to be governed by America in that way. Even as a little boy I always felt that, I ain't yall cause if I was yall, I wouldn't be going through these changes I'm going through. I wouldn't have to be this Black outsider. If I was in the shit with yall, I wouldn't have to be me, so since I am me, fuck yall in terms of that. I will determine what I do. If I want to write plays, poetry, essays and anything else, I'm going to do that. Why? Because I can do that and I don't see any reason not to do that. My view was that I'm not restricted by yall because I'm not with yall. Yall have told us that: we ain't yall, therefore why should we be restricted by yall? I had that sense real young.

 

SALAAM: But at the same time, when you were first writing that stuff. Like the interview with you about Kulchur and Totem press and the guy was asking you about that. He asked you about being a "negro writer." The line you used was something like, If I'm looking at a bus, I don't have to say that I'm a negro looking at a bus pass by full of people, I can just say there's a bus passing by full of people.

BARAKA: Well, you see, the point is that I could understand that what I felt was in that anyway. What I felt was going to be in that. I could say, I am a negro looking at that but, but even if I said, I'm looking at that bus, it's still me. The point was how do you invest that actuality into what you have created. How do you make sure that's in there? It is in there formally because you said it's in there and you are actually a negro, but how do you make sure that's in there? Well, once the whole Malcolm thing came about, we got super on top of being Black. I think what I said then was correct except that later on we wanted to make sure that it was actually in there, that it was actually functioning, because it doesn't change the object. If I say look at that lamp or if I say I am Black, look at that lamp, it doesn't change the lamp but the question is what recognition of yourself do you want and what interest does that recognition serve. The insistence of Blackness might be its own worth. The real consciousness of being Black might affect your description of the lamp even if you don't say that. It might affect how you perceive the lamp. That's what I was wrestling with; yeah, there's still the bus but it's also still me saying it. But it is true that the degree to which you want that to be in that description is important.

 

SALAAM: At this point, your work was not autobiography in the sense that people talk about formal autobiography, but it was autobiographical in the same sense that a musician's solo is autobiographical. You had your voice and you were telling a story, much of which happened to you but a lot of which happened to you on an imaginative level and not necessarily on what would be called a factual level.

BARAKA: Yeah, it's like a doubled up kind of thing. Certain things that actually happen give you a certain kind of experience, part of that experience is just a recounting of what actually went down but certain parts of it is just a result of what happened. The experience gives you an experience, the actual experience gives you another experience. So now you're dealing with what happened and with what that happening made you think. That's the double up thing. Now, if you try to talk about what happened and about what that happening made you think without roping one off from the other, you know, without trying to separate them then you are creating another kind of form. But let me tell you about the form of Dante. What I thought of--and this is really a musical kind of insistence--I thought I'm going to get something in my mind but I'm not going to talk about it directly. I'm going to get something in my mind and I'm going to talk about what it makes me think about. Like if I think about New Orleans but I don't mention New Orleans directly but I let whatever kind of imagery comes out of that New Orleans just course as freely as it can while keeping my own hand on it to a certain extent. That is what I called my "association complexes"--I thought up a name for it for some reason. I would say this and whatever came off of that, I would run it. And that's what Dante was actually about. I was trying to run through the literal to the imaginative. That's what I was doing: taking an image and playing off of it. I thought that was something like musicians who take harmonies and play of it or taking the melody, dispensing with the melody and playing some other stuff.

 

SALAAM: You were doing the Cherokee/Koko thing?

BARAKA: Exactly.

 

SALAAM: You might alter the changes a little bit, but you were definitely changing the melody?

BARAKA: Oh yeah. I didn't want the melody. The melody was old, auld lang sgyne. I didn't want that. I figured that whatever I was going to play was going to come up in the same changes but it was going to be relevant.

 

SALAAM: What was your thinking about what people had to say about System? The reason I'm asking that is because the plays people could relate to as plays, the poems they had references for, particularly the early poems that they could deal with from an academic perspective, but System was a whole other kind of thing.

BARAKA: Like I said, I was trying to get away from what a whole bunch of people were doing, so it didn't make any difference to me. I saw this magazine for the first time in, I don't know, twenty or thirty some years, the magazine was called the Trembling Lamb. They published the first five, six or seven sections of Dante and I thought it was a breakthrough because I thought it was something different from what the little circumscribed community of the downtown hip was doing. So recognizing that, or at least what I thought I was recognizing, well, whatever people think, they'll think differently after awhile. It didn't make any difference to me what they thought.

 

SALAAM: So after it came out and you started getting reactions from people, what did you think?

BARAKA: Well, I never got any bad reactions at first. I got some reactions from critics whom I didn't think knew anything anyway, so that didn't mean anything. But in terms of my peers, I never got any bad criticism that would make me think I needed to do something else.

 

SALAAM: You describe it as a breakthrough...

BARAKA: A breakout!

 

SALAAM: So you make a breakout but all of sudden it's like you stopped writing fiction as far as the reading public goes?

BARAKA: I didn't see it that way.

 

SALAAM: I'm not saying you stopped writing fiction, I'm saying as far as the reading public goes what fiction came out after that?

BARAKA: Tales. But then when I look at it--well, the first couple of pieces in Tales are from Dante. They were written in the same period. And then a lot of those things that are post-Dante are still making use of the Dante technique. As a matter of fact Tales covers three periods, there's stuff from downtown, from Harlem, and even stuff from Newark. But it is the same kind of approach.

 

SALAAM: Ok, but then what? With the fiction--the reason I'm asking you specifically about the fiction is because publically we can trace Amiri Baraka the playwright. The plays are there, even the ones that haven't been produced that much, the scripts have been in circulation and in many cases published. The same for the essays and definitely the same for the poetry. Even when they weren't published formally, informally they were circulated around. But the fiction, not so. And at the same time, if we talk about a major breakthrough in terms of form, you probably made the biggest breakthrough with the fiction.

BARAKA: Hmmm. I guess you're right. But, you know, nobody ever asked me to write a novel.

 

SALAAM: What about the Putnam thing where they asked you to write...

BARAKA: Yeah, but then I wrote it and they didn't like it. See, the point is this is how I can guage what I can do. I'm a poet. How do I know that? I write poetry all the time. Can't nobody say shit to me about poetry. That's where I am. But if you want me to do some other stuff, you're going to have to say something about that. Like I wrote a lot of pieces of fiction in the last couple of years but that's because I decided to do that. I had some other stuff on my mind. I thought that maybe--and I still believe this--I shouldn't write fiction and I shouldn't write plays unless they are a form of poetry, that's my view of it.

 

SALAAM: What do you mean by that?

BARAKA: I mean that's the only way I think of writing. I would not think of writing a play or a piece of fiction unless it was poetic in the sense of investing the same kind of attention to the lines, and the rhythm, and the imagery. That's why in the last couple of years I've been writing fiction just to see what that's about. I'm very curious about things like that. I know that as far as the day to day America of my own mind, I'm a poet. That's the only thing I will do without nobody bothering me or asking me to do. I don't need nothing or no one to do that. I will write poems because I am alive. I will write them on envelops, books, paperbags. I'll write on anything in the world, newspapers, paper towels, toilet paper, anything. That's got something to do with your own obsession, your own modus operandi.

 

SALAAM: What I'm getting at is that you were conscious that you made a breakthrough with Dante and you were consciously trying to do something different. You were consciously trying to be different and you succeeded at being different.

BARAKA: Which allowed me then to continue doing what I was doing in the first place. In other words, once I discovered that I had gotten past that, then I could write poetry if I wanted to do it. For me, although I am interested in anything at any given time, poetry is the fundamentaly interesting things because it's the shortest and the most intense.

 

SALAAM: Yeah, but you write some long poems.

BARAKA: That's because I can sustain that, but I still believe that poetry is the most intense and the most direct.

 

SALAAM: In terms of what you do technically, at one point you were trying to write a certain way. Now that you have proved that you can write a certain way, do you still try to write in specific ways or do you just write?

BARAKA: I just write. It like that Billy the Kid story. Billy the Kid was walking down the street and his nephew said he wanted a whistle, so Billy pulls out his gun and pee-owww, shoots a reed through. And they said, how do you do that, Billy, without aiming. Billy says, I was always aiming. The point is that you get skills and understanding that is part of your whole thing and that gives you the confidence to do it, once you know you can do it. Whatever you need to do you can do that because you have already done it, you have thought about it, and you know what that is. To me that's the initial gratification. I think there's a lot of gratification in that people don't even know about. People see the results of it, but there's a lot of stuff about form and content that nobody will ever really know why they did it. It's a matter of actually feeling your own self. For instance, Art Tatum. They say Tatum would practice twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. Now somebody practice the piano sixteen hours a day, when it comes time to play, playing ain't nothing. It's effortless. But what was he doing in that crib for sixteen hours.

 

SALAAM: So what kind of shedding do you do?

BARAKA: Shedding? Well I do that all the time. I throw a lot of stuff away. I mean I write a lot of stuff and throw it away, but it don't be a long thing, it might be a series of short things. I mean experiments with stuff, with voices, tenses, the abulative, the past perfect.

 

SALAAM: So you try all kinds of things?

BARAKA: Why not? I don't want to be held down by the language. In other words, if you just know one thing, well that's all you can do, but if I know that in this tense I can do such and such, then there's all kinds of stuff that can come to you imaginatively.

 

SALAAM: Are you viewing it like music then? You take a given theme, but you know that if you play it in a minor key you will get one feeling and if you put some major chords in it, you will get a different feeling?

BARAKA: Absolutely, absolutely. It's always music in that sense. I always use the reference of music to justify anything wild that I might want to do in writing. I mean I could go from James P. Johnson, to Duke Ellington, to Monk and be playing the same tune, but it come out different sounding. Listen to Liza for instance. How much more stength do you have to know all three of those references, to have all that laid out in your mind...

 

SALAAM: And not just to know it abstractly, but to be able to do that. To be able to play like that. That's one thing about using the music as a reference: all the cats who were innovators, who make a breaktrhough and made a contribution and created a new form, they had first mastered a previous form.

BARAKA: I would agree with that, yes.

 

SALAAM: So in a sense you were working at mastering the previous shit, so you could do the out shit?

BARAKA: Oh yeah. Absolutely. At a certain point when you get to that (he mimics running scales on a piano), that itself provides the logos for doing the next. You keep saying well I did that shit, so what's next? if you were free to do what that suggests, what would you do? Play backwards, play it upside down. What if I took just those two notes? You know what I mean? What are the feelings that come out of there.

 

SALAAM: So then you're talking about the freedom principle?

BARAKA: That's what it is. It's nothing else but that.

 

SALAAM: Did you ever decide to be a writer and if so when?

BARAKA: I think I decided when I got back to New York from the service. When I first came back I was thinking that maybe I would be a painter.

 

SALAAM: You were really thinking about being a painter?

BARAKA: Yeah, but at the time I said, well, that's too much work to buy the canvas, and then to have to buy paints, framing shit and having shit all stacked up in the studio. I thought that, finally, that was too much trouble.

 

SALAAM: Did you like painting?

BARAKA: Oh yeah.

 

SALAAM: What did you like about it?

BARAKA: The question of interpreting something from real life and making it into an image of it. That was interesting. Plus, my mother had sent me to all these different classes. I took piano lessons, drum lessons, trumpet lessons--I must have taken piano lessons three different times. I went to drawing and painting lessons. That was when Newark was a real city and they had these classes with teachers all over the place, but then the middle class left to pay us back for burning Newark down around `66. Anyway, that's why I had a broad kind of aesthetic and knowledge about creating stuff.

 

SALAAM: Ok, you had all those music and art classes, but you only had one creative writing class and that was in high school. Is that right?

BARAKA: Yeah, but my mother used to have me reciting the Gettysburg address once a year in a Boy Scout suit, and she would have me singing, there was always some kind of approach to word, image and music. I always had that in my mind as points of a triangle.

 

SALAAM: Of the three, which one held the most interest for you early on?

BARAKA: The music because I always wanted to do that but the word was always closer. I always had more control and more understanding of the word.

 

SALAAM: So why did you go to New York thinking about being a painter if the music was what you liked and the word was what you could deal with the easiest?

BARAKA: Because I had given up the idea of being a musician when I went away to college. I used to play the trumpet locally until I went away to school. When I went away to school, I never picked it up again. I figure it must have been something. Maybe it was the closeness to the word that relieved me of that other need to deal with the music. It was the closeness to the word and then a beginning to see the word as a kind of music that I could control as opposed to the instrument.

 

SALAAM: Which you could play but which you couldn't control as much as you could the word?

BARAKA: I didn't have the kind of facility. The things I had in my head as far as music, I never got close to except with words.

 

SALAAM: So what you were carrying around in your head, you tried to get it out with the horn and it wouldn't come but with words it would come out?

BARAKA: Yeah. With the horn I could just hear it, I heard what I wanted. I heard trumpet players who sounded like I would have played like that if I could have played. I would hear people say, damn, that sound something like Miles, but Miles was a paradigm rather than what I wanted to sound like. As a kid I used to try to play like Miles and be like Miles but actually it changed at different times. At one point I thought Kenny Dorham was closest to what I wanted to sound like, then parts of Don Cherry, than parts of this kid named Norman Howard who played with Albert Ayler. But it all was a kind of word making sound. That's what I liked about Kenny it would be (imitates a Kenny Dorham riff), that clipped, staccato sound, that sound of actually breaking it down to almost syllables and vowels rather than that logato sound. I guess it was more percussive and sounded more like spoken phrases.

 

SALAAM: So after Howard you went to the service.

BARAKA: Yeah, after I got thrown out.  I wouldn't never read the stuff asigned for class, I was reading all the time but I wouldn't read assignments. I had taken chemistry, that pre-med stuff. I got very bad marks in chemistry. The only courses I really did well in was, perdicatably, English, the humanities, philosophy, that kind of stuff, although I got good marks in physics for some reason. But chemistry and all that other stuff, I bombed in that.

 

SALAAM: You were thrown out because of academic reasons?

BARAKA: Yeah. Plus, I had been thrown out two or three times for various things.

 

SALAAM: Like what?

BARAKA: Well mostly for academics but also for not being cool. I had a real bad reputation in the dormitory and my room was always filled with merrymakers. A whole crowd would be in there. So the dormitory director was always in there. We had like a crew actually. It was a combination of Jersey, New York, and Philly in the main, but we also had some Chicago people and we even had a couple of hip dudes from St. Louis and Detroit. I guess it was a big city thing.

 

SALAAM: So there is no currency to the rumor that you were thrown out for eating watermelon.

BARAKA: Well, that was one of my suspensions but that didn't get me thrown out. What happened was I was just sitting out on campus on a park bench cutting this watermelon in half. I wasn't even eating. Actually, I was just sitting there with it and was about to cut it because half of the watermelon belonged to another dude, Tom Weaver, who is now a lawyer in Philadelphia. Half of it was his, so I was sitting there. But, you know, we knew what we were doing. We were making fun of these negroes. I was sitting there with it and this guy comes up to me and says, hey, don't you know you're at the capstone of negro education and you're sitting there blah, blah, blah--get rid of it. I said, well, I'll get rid of the half that's mine--which was, of course, more bullshit. [Howard President] Bush figured that we were fucking with him all the time. I don't know if the watermelon qua watermelon was the real deal, although to be sure the negroes didn't like that, but I don't know if it was a regular colored person with watermelon and he said that to them and they just left, I don't know if it would have had the same impact.

 

SALAAM: ...as when it was the leader of the merry pranksters?

BARAKA: Right. He knew we hadn't just wandered in off the fields with that watermelon. So he figured what are you niggers trying to do, you know you're trying to make a joke. That was funny to us because we thought they were corny anyway. Nobody there dug Charlie Parker. That's the way we estimated it. They didn't dig Charlie Parker so they didn't know what was really hip.

 

SALAAM: What year was this?

BARAKA: `54.

 

SALAAM: When you got kicked out what did you tell your parents?

BARAKA: I told them I got kicked out. There was nothing else I could tell them. That's when I went to the service, because I was really hurt and embarassed. I was embarassed because they were hurt.

 

SALAAM: Because you didn't mean to hurt them.

BARAKA: No, but I was their oldest son. I had scholarships when I went away from home. I wasn't supposed to just dive bomb like that. I don't know what they thought really except that they were surprised and disappointed that I had fucked it up like that.

 

SALAAM: And then you headed on in to the service which was a complete disaster.

BARAKA: Complete! I figured I had dive bombed into the underworld then. I even saw some of the guys I had been in college with who were now officers and I was like an airman nothing. I didn't have any stripes and then I got to be an airman third class and had one stripe, an airman second class with two stripes, while most of these dudes--hey, some of the dudes I was in school with are admirals and generals now. Andy Chambers the head of the naval something. Tim Bodie the head of air military command or some shit. A lot of these jet pilots was close friends of mine. The guy who was head of the secret service that guarded the president was my roommate in college.

 

SALAAM: You were kicked out of the air force also weren't you? What was the specific charge?

BARAKA: I was kicked out of the air force for fraudulent enlistment.

 

SALAAM: What was fraudulent about your enlistment?

BARAKA: That I hadn't told them that I was a red, that I had been fucking with people who were on the House Unamerican Activities Committee. It was largely bullshit, but you know. Remember they had the attorney general's list, which turned out to be completely unconstitutional, but the list which listed these organizations which were "out." Well, a couple of those organizations I had had affiliation with.

 

SALAAM: When they asked you or when you enlisted?

BARAKA: When they asked me later and when I thought about it, I told them.

 

SALAAM: These are your late teens and early twenties; was there any place that you could stay that was acceptable to you and you to them?

BARAKA: I don't know. I'm still trying to figure that out. When they kicked me out of the village, I thought that was complete.

 

SALAAM: What do you mean "when they kicked you out of the village"?

BARAKA: When I left. It's the same thing; when you figure you can't stay there anymore, when you figure that whatever they are doing you don't want any part of it, so what's the difference? In other words, when the management grows intolerable, you have to hit the road. If you don't hit the road then, that means you're just fooling around.

 

SALAAM: You were doing a Trane book a while back, whatever happened to it?

BARAKA: It's still around. The early chapters, about five or six chapters, are there, plus I've written reams of stuff on Coltrane that would go into it. So, I would do that early stuff and I would add all the stuff I written since and that would be the book.

 

SALAAM: Is Trane the only person you've done a book like that on?

BARAKA: No, I've got a book like that on Monk, and one on Miles, and probably Duke in a minute.

 

SALAAM: So what do you do, you just write this stuff? I mean, how do you write stuff like this knowing that it probably won't get published?

BARAKA: Some of it is published in small journals, some of it is published in Europe, some of it is fugitive stuff published in this review, that review, stuff all over, which when taken together would make a book. I would probably put a circle around it as an overview of the material, but I know there's enough material to make a book. Oh, I have a book on Malcolm X too. It's about thirteen or fourteen essays and some other stuff, seven or eight poems and a couple of plays. You know but it's like people don't be flocking to that stuff. You tell them about it and that be it. These publishers are not really interested. I mean a couple have asked me for books and I tell them I have those books but they don't seem like they are interested. Like the Malcolm book, I thought they might be interested in that. They have books out about Malcolm by everybody, people who don't even know anything about Malcolm; I mean little corny motherfuckers got a thing on Malcolm. See they want the opposite of what would be a mass, democratic, revolutionary line. They are into the debunking and lying period, rewriting and revising history right now. After every revolutionary period they always have a period where they revise it and say: all that stuff you think happened, didn't happen. The Rodney King syndrome ["can't we all just get along."] I mean I've got books that actually explain Malcolm, explain the motion from say Malcolm to where we are and where we have to go. But apparently I have to just do those books myself, or create a network, or make a cooperative hook up with other publishers. Another thing I've been thinking off, people I know that have the same kind of thing in mind, I thought that if they had a publishing operation, I could be part of it. I would have an imprint.

 

SALAAM: What's interesting to me is that you do all this writing in so many different genres and covering a broad range of material even though there is, shall we say, a publishing freeze on the ink that is coming out of your pen.

BARAKA: Yeah, well, what can you say? That's like a cycle or a circle. You have to live with that.

 

SALAAM: It reminds me of these jazz artists, back in the day, in the forties and the fifties and the sixties, who were making all this music knowing that most of it was never going to be recorded and put out there.

BARAKA: That's the way it is. You just have to focus on what you're doing and do that the best way you can without letting the static be louder than the music.

 

SALAAM: How did you learn to write so fast?

BARAKA: Necessity. I guess, being an activist you don't have that kind of spread out time that these people seem to say--the classical, actually the court writers--seem to think is necessary. I'm not in to being a court writer. You have to find a way to make use of your time the best way you can, which a lot of people don't really understand, but that means you have to do it when you're conscious of it. You can't say I'm "going" to do this and I'm "going" to do that. You have to do it when you can do it, and hope you can find it.

 

SALAAM: And when you can do it, sometimes it's just maybe an hour here or a couple of hours there.

BARAKA: Yeah, that's about it. But, you'll be surprised that when you're pressed like that a lot of times your mind gets clearer.

 

SALAAM: So you think that far from being an impediment to your writing, your involvement in activism has helped to strengthen and focus your skills as a writer?

BARAKA: Yeah, it makes you more focused and more rapid. You know you've got to get in and get out, you've got to say exactly what you want to say, and you've got to figure that's it.

 

SALAAM: And also figure that you may not get a chance to say this again.

BARAKA: There you go. If I've got the chance to do this now, I better walk it right now, because this might be it. And then the question is, let me try to find this shit. But I think that it works because you know time is a precious sort of thing. You don't think of it as anything else. This is important, it's precious and this is the time that I have.

 

SALAAM: Again, using the music as a metaphor, it's sort of like being in a band and you know yall are going to play tonight. You don't necessarily know what tunes the leader is going to call but when the leader calls a tune and it's your solo, you can't say well wait a minute, I'm not ready for that.

BARAKA: Naw. You don't have that problem with me. You just say go and I'm on that. The thing is trying to--well, it's like you got these bullets and you're trying to find a gun. Hey, you know where we are, right? You understand how we got here? Well, the rest of that shit need not have too much explaination.

 

SALAAM: In terms of what you use with your writing style, you once said you knew you were a negro because you loved irony--or something to that effect. What does irony have to do with it?

BARAKA: Bloods are always laying down syllables on people, especially when they didn't have the chance to really jump on them and kill them or else to get away from them, they be hiking them. They be murder mouthing them on the cool. I think it's not just in the sense of people not knowing what you're saying, but it's like heaping it up--you can some shit straight out and then be heaping some stuff on top that makes it straight-out-er, if people dig it. After awhile for the blood, it's just a style. You're always using language like that. Like the blue notes, they are always turning them.

 

SALAAM: Is this part of the ambiguity of language that seems almost intrinsic to the African American use of the word?

BARAKA: Yeah, because the blood's use of the word has to do not only with the written but also with the spoken, because before the written is the spoken. The written is actually a kind of conduit for the spoken for Black people. A lot of these people their language is always written so that's where it is. But, at least for our tradition, and I think anybody who is serious about language, always sees the written as a conduit for the spoken for the perception of reality. The spoken word is alive.

 

SALAAM: What do you mean by "alive"?

BARAKA: It's live, it's coming from a live person. It's in the form of your life, it's not after the fact. It's at the time of.

 

SALAAM: So it is in the now time as opposed to past time?

BARAKA: Right, it is it's pulse, it's beating as you hear it.

 

SALAAM: Taking it to another level, are you saying that the spoken carries the meaning but it also carries the rhythm of the life that utters it?

BARAKA: Yeah. And the sound ot it--the page has no sound on it and that's a whole different color butter right there because the sound is very important. If you start with the spoken rather than the written, then to get that spoken into that written requires that you do a lot of shit to the written to make it accomodate the life of the spoken.

 

SALAAM: Is that part of your struggle with writing: to make the sound look like something?

BARAKA: Yeah, to make the sound carry off into a text. It's like Duke, you can look at Duke's scores, if you can read, and you hear something but you don't hear Duke. You could read Afro-Asian Eclispe all you want but you won't hear it unless you hear it. To hear that, to me, is a totally different experience.

 

SALAAM: Do you see yourself as a writer being a translater of sounds and of the sound experience?

BARAKA: Yeah, because if it's not about the sound, it ain't real to me, because I think of that as real life. That's why by the time the written catches up with the spoken its obsolete. These people be writing some stuff that people were running long time ago in form and content.

 

SALAAM: So now form and content, are usually listed as the two major variables, but I would like to propose and get your reaction to this proposal: form and content are basically a western dualism, and that as far as the African and African-American traditions go, you have form and content, but you also have style. So you take somebody like Claude McKay could take the sonnet and work with the sonnet and come out with something like "If We Must Die."

BARAKA: Yeah but to me, that form was still a straitjacket for that particular content. The difference between McKay and Langston's stuff is the difference.

 

SALAAM: I'm not saying that form is irrelevant.

BARAKA: No. But you have to have correct form or otherwise your shit is going to be fucked up. It's like if I put you in a cop suit, I don't care what you think, somebody might say there's a cop, shoot him. There's a content to form.

 

SALAAM: So you're saying that each form--particularly once it has been codified into a specific form--proposes its own content.

BARAKA: Absolutely, because it carries thought with it, and it carries reason. There's a reason for that form; it coheres with somebody's language, somebody's rhythm, somebody's life, and somebody's philosophy.

 

SALAAM: How does it carry the content?

BARAKA: It carries the content by putting a philosophical emphasis on certain aspects of life.

 

SALAAM: So you're saying a philosophical emphasis on abstraction will give you a proclivity toward certain forms, and a philosophical interest on sound will give you a proclivity toward other forms?

BARAKA: Yes, for instance, one time I asked a big time capitalist why they were so wary and suspicious of art. He said because it's unpredictable. That explains it. If you are a merchant and you've got to have predictable results for your bottom line, then the form of what you do, you want that to be predictable too. You don't want form to be a verb, you want it to be a noun. You want form to be a receptacle of whatever you want to put in it. You don't want the form to be alive. I'm looking for an alive form.

 

SALAAM: What is a live form for you?

BARAKA: One that relates to what humans still use to communicate, and the ways that they communicate, and the reasons why they communicate.

 

SALAAM: In looking at the form in some of your work, in some of the short plays that you wrote, often characters would be speaking a language that is recognizable as standard english--and I'm not talking about slang, I'm talking about some way out shit.

BARAKA: Well, if you listen to the rappers, or like I was looking at this movie, A Thin Line Between Love And Hate. Well the way they talk in there that's not just regular Broadway theatre language. All that stretching and bending of words, and different voices, and emotional kinds of uses of vowels, and songs in the middle of talking, that's got to do with a living kind of life style not the written text that referenced in dictionaries. You can't find that in thesauruses and stuff. That has to do with Black thought, Black music, Black lifestyle. The ballad form, communication by tones and rhythms. To get that into the work is hard on the page. You have to have notations if you're going to use pages.

 

SALAAM: Like in Home on the Range and Experimental Death Unit you have people talking all kinds of stuff. How did you write that--I'm asking a technical question. Did you put words in a hat and just pull them out?

BARAKA: No, I got the rhythms of what I thought they might be saying.

 

SALAAM: What do you mean by rhythms?

BARAKA: Well that kind of people I was creating, well their personalities would make them go (does a chipper sing-song rhythm).

 

SALAAM: So you heard the sound of what they would sound like, but how did you get the words?

BARAKA: That's what I heard. You just try to make an omnamyopoetic representation.

 

SALAAM: Omnamyopoetic? Is that a technique you use often.

BARAKA: Yeah, always. That's what bebop is. You take the rhythm and make it into a vocal sound.

 

SALAAM: So the rhythm becomes the melody and the harmony?

BARAKA: Yeah, which it is anyway, to me, always, but that's another thing. I'm still working on that.

 

SALAAM: Again going back to the music, when you listen to a lot of James Brown, he started off in a classic rhythm and blues bag, but some where around the mid sixties he started changing and by the seventies he was in so deep a funk that everything in the band was playing rhythm, it didn't matter what instrument it was.

BARAKA: That's right. That's what you hear in the best of the jazz people, too. Blakey, Trane, Monk, Duke, the rhythm is principal.

 

SALAAM: So this omnamyopoetic form--not form--but approach that you've talking about, this is a prioritizing of rhythm in your approach to writing. Is that a correct assessment?

BARAKA: Right. It's rhythm as language.

 

SALAAM: So you first hear what the characters would sound like.

BARAKA: I'm hearing it as I write it down.

 

SALAAM: And hearing that sound leads you to what words to choose.

BARAKA: Those are the words. When I hear them, they are saying words, I've just got to try and figure out what those words are. The thing is to transfer them to the page. The translation of rhythms.

 

SALAAM: So how does that work with your poetry?

BARAKA: It's the same way actually. The rhythm is the leading factor, even the theme has a rhythmic aspect to it.

 

SALAAM: Has that always been or has that been something that has developed over time with your work?

BARAKA: It's been clearer. It's always been but it's clearer as I've gotten clearer.

 

SALAAM: Given that for all artists there are moments of clarity that are so absolute everybody can see them, and whether the artist digs the product of that clarity or digs whatever came out of that is another question. For example, Kind of Blue will always be one of Miles' more definitive statements--not to say that nothing else he did was important but...

BARAKA: Yeah, that's all rhythm and harmony. Nothing but rhythm and modes...

 

SALAAM: Rhythm and basically the feelings that you can project through those rhythms. Then you've got A Love Supreme for Trane. Charlie Mingus said Tiajuana Moods was his, and if not Tiuajuana Moods, you had Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. They all had strong rhythms. In terms of your writing, what is your Kind of Blue, your Love Supreme?

BARAKA: Why's actually says that in a lot of ways.

 

SALAAM: Why's is actually a score rather than a book of poetry? I mean, you indicate the musical references, but until you hear it recited, sung and played, you haven't really dug it. You can't fully appreciate it just by reading the score, you've got to hear it.

BARAKA: I think you were right in saying that Why'a is a musical score. It is in a lot of ways. It lays out that music to show you the kind of feeling that the words are supposed to be attached to.

 

SALAAM: You don't see that in your other work?

BARAKA: A lot of the poetry I think is like that. I get fixed on a particular rhythm and I can get words out of that.

 

SALAAM: What about with the prose, anything in the prose?

BARAKA: Well, to me, the prose is an extension of that. I don't think you can write prose unless you've got a rhythmic understanding of language, a feeling. When Ismael Reed says he doesn't hear any music when he writes, I say, oh yeah, I can understand that because that just tells me that you think you write purely from the top of your head. That ain't nothing.

 

SALAAM: Well that ain't all for sure.

BARAKA: To tell me that you're writing from the top of your head is to say simply that the whole depth of your experience is not valuable.

 

SALAAM: It's also to say that your heart ain't it, not to mention your gut and your groin.

BARAKA: Can I quote you on that. I can dig it. You know, pretty soon, they will have some stuff with which to write things down that will be more than just words. It will have sounds, rhythms, dances, facial expressions, all of that, you know what I mean?

 

SALAAM: All of that will be part of the presentation. So, why haven't you recorded more?

BARAKA: Well, I haven't had the time really but I is in a minute. Probably early next year, I will start having stuff coming out.

 

SALAAM: Given your breakthrough with System of Dante's Hell--you personally breaking away from a lot of other contexts and trying to achieve your own voice--and given that you continued to write fiction but not much of it was published after Tales, why do you think that your fiction has not published. You've been able to get your prose, and your plays even--and that's odd to get more plays published than fiction--why do you think that is?

BARAKA: I don't know. I've got more stories than people think. It's just a question of what you have time to focus on.

 

SALAAM: But how can you get more plays published than fiction?

BARAKA: Because I had plays done, performed, and therefore, for the commercial eye, that means there's more of a reason to do it, I guess.

 

SALAAM: Did you ever think that maybe it was because what you were doing was too far out for most of the fiction publishers?

BARAKA: I know some of that was the case, but the fiction will come out when it comes out. I have several novels--they be talking about these people writing novels now, but these are novels I wrote fifteen years ago and they are stranger than a lot of that shit they praise now. I think it has to wait until there is an appreciation of it.

 

SALAAM: How can there be an appreciation of it before it arrives?

BARAKA: Because other people will be doing stuff like that, and then the whole question of language can be a little deeper than it is. It's not there yet, but it will be there in a minute. I thought it was coming a couple of years ago, but...

 

SALAAM: What are you looking forward to doing?

BARAKA: I'm looking forward to getting all the books I have written published. I'm looking forward to writing a book on how to make revolution in the United States. That's the one that I really want to write. The whole connection, historical, political, cultural.

 

SALAAM: So you want to write a David Walker book and get yourself killed?

BARAKA: I don't know about that.

 

SALAAM: You understand what I'm saying?

BARAKA: Yeah, I know, but that's what has got to be done. The book that I've got to write which I'm ready to write now is how to make revolution in this country, which is a broad kind of philosophical and agitational work. That's what I'm trying to do.

 

SALAAM: What is the easiest way for you to write: typewriter, pencil or computer?

BARAKA: Computer now, but it's difficult to do any of it when you don't have the time. I have to handwrite a lot of stuff only because I can't always get to a typewriter or computer.

 

SALAAM: When you say computer now, why do you say now?

BARAKA: It used to be typewriter.

 

SALAAM: Why the typewriter as opposed to hand? You can type faster than you can write?

BARAKA: Oh yeah. I don't want to have no hookup with a pencil. I want to get it done. I don't want to be messing around with it in no kind of physically debilitating way which is what handwriting is for me. Why should you handwrite it when you can do it another way? All I want to do is get them down.

 

SALAAM: And you find the computer a better tool than the typewriter?

BARAKA: Absolutely, because you can store it and all of that. You can print out a whole lot of copies at once.

 

SALAAM: So you're not talking about he specifics of putting it on the page, but rather what can be done with it once you've got it in the computer?

BARAKA: Right.

 

SALAAM: Do you find the cut and paste, or going back and being able to insert or delete easily, do you find that useful?

BARAKA: Absolutely.

 

SALAAM: When you write do you throw away much?

BARAKA: Yeah, more than you think. But I throw it away in a swoop. That's the way that I get it. I write it in a swoop and if I don't like it, I throw it away, and if I do like it I throw it on a pile. For me, once I get on it, once I get the chance to do it, seven times out of ten it's going to be something I want. If I get the chance to do it, it ain't going to be no problem.

 

SALAAM: Do you do a lot of thinking about it before you write it, or do you just do it?

BARAKA: Sometimes, I think about it but most of the time I just write it. I have it in my mind for a long time whether I know it or not, so when I get to it, it's coming out of there. That's it.

 

SALAAM: Is there a difference for you writing on assignment as opposed to on inspiration?

BARAKA: Assignment sometimes is hard because it's a task even if you want to do it, and a task usually has a level of resistance to it, for me anyway. It's still something you want to do but it's just that you might also have something else you want to do at the same time.

 

SALAAM: You were at one point noted for the record reviews, music columns, and stuff like that. At one point you were the "hottest negro" doing that. At one point you were the first Black writer to have a column in Downbeat?

BARAKA: I used to write for them all the time, but that was always give or take. You never knew. I was on the porch.

 

SALAAM: So you would throw your columns up on the back porch and pass back the next day and see which ones they took and which ones they left?

BARAKA: Yeah, that was it. And then they came with shit after I got out of there saying "Is LeRoi Jones a Racist" on the front cover. I said, these motherfuckers are really out, this is the dog.

 

SALAAM: Did you view those as assignments or as inspiration?

BARAKA: I wanted to write about the music so it didn't matter.

 

SALAAM: Did they ask you to write a column about such and such, or did you just present stuff to them?

BARAKA: I asked them to write a column: Apple Cores. That was it.

 

SALAAM: You were basically writing whatever you felt like writing.

BARAKA: Yeah.

 

SALAAM: Writing the liner notes, how did that work?

BARAKA: There was a blood in charge of A & R (artist and repretoire) at Prestige, Esmond Edwards. He the guy who set that up--for which I am ever grateful.

 

SALAAM: Why were you grateful?

BARAKA: Because it was a gig and I needed that gig very badly. It was a real job and he gave it to me, maybe once a week. I used to do fifty dollars a liner note and I would do four a month. At the time that was like a monster, a blessing.

 

SALAAM: How would you go about doing the liner notes?

BARAKA: I would get the record and bam, I would play it and while I was playing it, I would write it.

 

SALAAM: Did you talk to the artists, interviews and stuff, or did you just write from your own reactions?

BARAKA: If I could get them, I would talk to them. Call them up. I would always need a lot of help and I would always want to talk to them anyway. I was always interested in jazz musicians, what they thought and what their lives were like.

 

SALAAM: If you had to leave and somebody said you can put a book together and we're going to put them in a time capsule, plus we're going to put them all over the world--maybe about twenty of them in different parts of the world, and they are going to opened up a hundred years from now, what of your stuff would you put in there?

BARAKA: Ahhh man. I guess Blues People would be one thing.

 

SALAAM: Why Blues People?

BARAKA: Because it tries to lay out some stuff that might be valuable to people even in the future.

 

SALAAM: What else?

BARAKA: I don't know. I'd have to think about that. Certainly Black Fire and Confirmation.

 

SALAAM: Which brings up the question of editing. A lot of people think you made your mark first as a poet, but actually you made your mark first as an editor and a publisher. Was that by conscious design? Did you say to yourself I think this is the way to really break into this stuff.

BARAKA: Yeah. I thought that the best thing for me was not to wait for the people to come publish me but to publish people so that I could publish myself and whatever else was happening to make a way for a whole group of young people.

 

SALAAM: So you consciously set out to become an editor and a publisher?

BARAKA: Yeah.

 

SALAAM: Where did you get that idea from?

BARAKA: From me.

 

SALAAM: I asking this because what you're saying implies that you wanted to do more than just get yourself in print.

BARAKA: Yeah, that's right. I thought that it would be better to get everything that was happening because that would make whatever you were doing more significant. It was not just you, it was a lot of people that had these ideas.

 

SALAAM: When we read some of the letters, statements and interviews with people form the village period about you, when they would mention you, a lot of the writers and publishers had a lot of respect for your talent as an editor. Did you think of yourself as talented as an editor?

BARAKA: Yeah. I thought I knew how to get together something that people wanted to read. I figured if I found something I wanted to read then I knew a lot of people would like it.

 

SALAAM: How did you develop that talent?

BARAKA: I think by knowing the field and know the varieties of that discipline, knowing about magazines and about other kinds of publications, which I did know a great deal about.

 

SALAAM: How did you know about that?

BARAKA: While I was in the Air Force I had read everything in the world.

 

SALAAM: Is that what you did while in the Air Force instead of Air Forcing?

BARAKA: Yeah, I was the night librarian, and I ordered all the books. The woman who was the day librarian found out I knew all about the books so she hired me as the night librarian. So the whole time I was at Ramey when I wasn't up flying, I was in the library. I ordered all the books and the records. I had my own group in there. We would sit there get drunk and read and listen to music.

 

SALAAM: You mean you went through that whole library?

BARAKA: Yeah, I stocked the sucker. Not only did I go through it, but I stocked it. I would go through all the bestsellers and the publisher's catalogues and find out what was happening, what was I supposed to know about, what was I supposed to read.

 

SALAAM: Basically you read not only what they call the classics, you read everything that was happening?

BARAKA: Yeah. Bestsellers, classics, whatever. I would check it out and find out what was it, what was it supposed to be, who was a Kafka. I would search around until I would find Kafka, I would read it, and then I got it.

 

SALAAM: Where there any particular individual editors whom you liked?

BARAKA: No. I used to read so much different funny shit. I liked a thing called Accent, that was the University of Illinois. When I got out the way Johnathan Williams did his Jargon Books. Then I started seeing other stuff from people all over the world, different magazines and stuff. From that I could see what it took. The form would be functional in the sense that it would be alive and it would carry the content in the way that you wanted it to be understood.

 

SALAAM: By the time you started doing Yugen all that other stuff, you had already peeped most of the stuff that was out there and you had made a conscious decision that this is what I want to do.

BARAKA: Yeah.

 

SALAAM: So then, Black Fire is no accident?

BARAKA: Right. It was just a matter of me getting to that particular gig, because any place I would be, any group of people I would be with, I would try to collect, sum up and anthologize.

 

SALAAM: When you say any group you would be with you would try to collect, sum up, and anthologize, why? What was the motivation behind that?

BARAKA: So that it could be a lasting kind of presence. Something that indicates that your experience wasn't just personal and transient, that it had an objective kind of impact and function in the world.

 

SALAAM: So that if people want to look at what was getting ready to jump off with American fiction, you had to pay attention to Moderns, right?

BARAKA: Right.

 

SALAAM: Are you saying that this was a conscious decision to try to codify this is what's happening right now in that particular genre?

BARAKA: Right.

 

SALAAM: And you did the same thing with Black Fire?

BARAKA: Right.

 

SALAAM: And you did the same thing with Confirmation, although a lot of people slept on that? Why do you think people slept on Confirmation?

BARAKA: Because they wanted them to. What are you trying to do Amiri?

 

SALAAM: And who is they?

BARAKA: The controllers of public information?

 

SALAAM: Are you going to do anymore editing?

BARAKA: Yeah. I'm thinking of some stuff that I would like to do.

 

SALAAM: Like what?

BARAKA: Well I'd like to take Black Fire and extend that and make it a statement of then through now.

 

SALAAM: In listening to the tapes and the recordings and everything that you have done over the years, has performance shaped the way you write and use your poetry?

BARAKA: It has something to do with the shape that it takes, obviously, but not in terms of the catalyst. I guess the catalyst is ideas and emotions. Sometimes you can see that the very kinds of methods that you use, remain in your consciousness, that is, if you use a lot of rhythmic kinds of methods and processes, then it means that even when you're not doing that, that kind of presence is going to linger in your skull.

 

SALAAM: You have three specific recordings that you did completely--I mean you as a soloist and not just one or two cuts on a compilation. You had Black & Beautiful, Soul & Madness which had an R&B base partly and a new music base partly. That kind of showed two different directions all at one time happening.

BARAKA: That's because that's what I dig. I wrote a thing called The Changing Same; it's my feeling that the music is a whole. We get blinded, not necessarily blind but the blind folks and the elephant. We get a piece of where we're coming from, where we are at in our time, place, and condition. We get what we're able to get, what we can dig, or perceive, or understand, but if we can dig the whole thing and dig that it all belongs to us, then we could use it like we want to use.

 

SALAAM: What made you think, or feel, that putting a piece out like Beautiful Black Women with the Smokey doowop, that the people who would dig that would also dig something like Form Is Emptiness?

BARAKA: Because they go into deeper shit in their churches. Number one. These people [avant garde artists] think they out, they need to dig these negroes in these churches jumping up and down with their eyes rolling around in their head smoking a cigar. I haven't seen anybody doing that on stage. All that whooping and hollering and rolling on the floor and kicking their feet in the air, and starting to scream about Jesus, Jesus. You ever seen somebody wild with Jesus? That's what I was saying about James Brown long time ago. Poets was thinking they were getting out there but they had better check James Brown. His voice was further out than Ornette and them because James' voice had more himmy, dimmy, shimmy, scrappers in it that you can hear. To me it was just a release of the whole consciousness.

 

SALAAM: When you got to Nationtime it seemed like you were able to orchestra that whole sweep of the music, from the chants with percussion, to the R&B and doowop, to the new music and everything.

BARAKA: Yeah, because I feel it all. it obviously wasn't a commercial catalyst. We were doing it because we wanted to do it. We were obviously digging Martha and the Vandellas and digging Smokey, just like we were digging Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and Trane. To us it was just different voices in the same family, different voices in the same community. I know that the screaming and hollering in James Brown and the screaming and hollering in Albert Ayler was the same scream and hollering, you understand.

 

SALAAM: Yeah, coming out of different mouths but the same spirit.

BARAKA: Right, the same sound, different experiences they had, but it was the same: gift of song and story, same gift of labor and spirit. It's the same gift, like the gifts of Black folk DuBois talked about.

 

SALAAM: Do you consider Nationtime the most realized of all the recordings?

BARAKA: In some way yes because of the formal kind of preparation and the fact that the people we were working with we had worked with both organizationally, ideologically and artistically, so there was a kind of ensemble strength. There are some other records I like the stuff we did on them, you know that record with David Murray, but Nationtime I like for the whole ensemble, plus we had some hip people like Reggie Workman and Gary Bartz. And we had the scratch [money] to put it together and do it. I guess it was like some Earth, Wind and Fire stuff, we had a chance to get the shit, plan it, go over it, and then go in the studio and get down with it. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go from rhythm and blues, to new music, to Africa at will.

 

SALAAM: When you got to New Music, New Poetry, with David [Murray] and Steve McCall, that was a point when you were introducing marxism into the lyrics of the poetry and the music was new music but at the same time it had sort of like a funk thing but not quite.

BARAKA: Well, see, those elements are in David. David, like Albert [Ayler] had that. That's why I was drawn to them because their playing includes the whole spectrum, the new and the old, the main and the out. When I worked with them I knew that they were going to do some stuff and whatever it was, it was going to have those elements in it. Wherever you go with it--sometimes it's going to sound straight out funky, sometimes it's going to be reaching into the way-gone-asphere, it's going to be as varied as the different aspects of our music is.

 

SALAAM: I have tapes of you reading from as early as 1962 or `63 and even back then the sound of your voice is much the way it is now--your sound, in the musical sense of sound, is relatively the same. You hear it and say, I know that, that's Baraka. But how you use your voice today has changed dramatically. Now when you do the poetry programs, first of all without saying anything--you don't introduce the music that you hum or sing, you just go into it and start beating on the podium to get the rhythms and humming or scatting the melody, and then the poem floats in on top of all of that, but you are consciously setting it up as though you were a band and not just an individual standing up there reciting poetry.

BARAKA: Right. That's because I learned that you can't be limited by what you feel by the circumstances--I mean you are limited but you ain't gon be limited. I can't have a band with me all the time. So what does that mean? It means you have that musical insistence without the band, although you feel that, that's why you call for a band. It's like DuBois told Shirley [Graham DuBois], she said I don't have any pencil, no crayon, no books, what should I do? He said, be creative. So, that's the only thing you're left with. It occurred to me that as a musical presence the human is the instrument, that's where all those instruments come from. We have created all those instruments, so we must be able to create them in some kind of approximate way by ourselves.

 

SALAAM: But you have consciously decided that creating the music is an essential aspect of performing the poetry?

BARAKA: Yeah, because it makes me get off the line.

 

SALAAM: Come up off the page?

BARAKA: Exactly. Otherwise you be just reading, which is what they do in symphony orchestras. They put the score down there and they read it, but that ain't what we want to hear. In that sense the self gratification in terms of what you dig at the same time puts it in a more live kind of form. And that's what I'm interested in. A lot of times people's poetry be dull because they are not interested in it. They're not trying to communicate to you their ultimate concerns even if that's what they were doing once in that poem. They are going through a formal process. It struck me that to get away from the incessantly formal or the overly formal nature of readings--remember that if you're reading, if you're a professional poet, that's your gig, that's your job. If you're going to approach it without trying to reach the element that inspired it in the first place, well, why do it?

 

SALAAM: At the same time, does using the music make the "I" less the individual I and more the collective I? For instance, when you use Monk's music, that's everything Monk means to you but it's also everything Monk has meant to other people in the world.

BARAKA: Absolutely and it extends that kind of feeling which is the essence of what that poetry is. If the poem has some relationship to that piece of music--other than arbitrary--then that relationship is going to be stated a little more forcefully too.

 

SALAAM: At one point you were talking about having the music be popular with the people. I assume that when you were talking about that, you were implying that there had to be a connection between what you were doing and what people were receiving. Did you mean the audience as consumers or the audience as validators, or what? How did you mean that?

BARAKA: To reach them not because you were trying to sell them something but rather to turn them on, in the old sense of that, to tell them what's happening. You're trying to teach and reach, you're trying to educate and agitate. Propagandize. To mean all art is propaganda but not all propaganda is art, like Mao said. You try to move people to what it is that you understand about the world.

 

SALAAM: You have attempted to make a statement about what direction poetry should go in other than an academic direction. Was that conscious on your part?

BARAKA: Certainly. That's something that comes with degrees of your own self-consciousness. At the point that I could see that there was this and that, I certainly wasn't interested in that and I was doing this, and the more you do this, then the more openly you are opposed to that. Because you can be opposed to something objectively and not even know it. Somebody can do a close reading of your shit and tell you. At another point you become aware of it, or you are aware of it from the jump. But the more you are conscious, the more you will be conscious.

 

SALAAM: Ok, so describe your writing style. Do you consider yourself an avant gardist, a mixture of surrealism and realism, what?

BARAKA: I don't eschew any form, that's my line. I'll try anything.

 

SALAAM: So you're like want these dudes walk up on a stage and tell the band, call whatever you want to call, I'm with it?

BARAKA: That's right, as long as it ain't nothing completely corny.

 

SALAAM: What you're doing with fiction stylistically, don't you consider that really different from what most people are doing?

BARAKA: In some ways yeah, because of what I'm attempting to do. As far as the evolution of stuff, if you see something that seems new to you, you understand that it's different from a lot of stuff, but that's not it's total value. It's value is that it gives you a sense of being somewhere you are not, of saying something that you haven't, or giving some kind of presence to some kind of feeling or expression that you haven't done before. But in terms of it being different from this, this, and that, I'm aware of that but I don't ultimately think that's the most valualbe thing about it. I just think that's the way I am.

 

SALAAM: So you're saying, I am different but that ain't the important thing. The important thing is that by articulating this difference I can open up some stuff that hasn't been here before.

BARAKA: Exactly. Cause I know it's different but I also know that some of the stuff that is different, I wish I hadn't done it. I mean there's a whole lot of different funny shit I've done that if you ran it pass me, I would say no, I wouldn't do that again. If you have some sense of your own presence--like DuBois said, if you have some kind of self-consciousness then you should expect to be doing some different shit because I've had a different experience than most people. I've been to more places, seen more stuff. I can look at shit and say, oh no, that ain't shit, that a lot of people ain't even seen yet. You're trying to get pass what is bankrupt and get to what is essential. I conceive of shit every night and then it will go away, but if it's something that you really need, it will come back to you.

 

SALAAM: Many critics and cultural observers have said that Baraka is very much influenced by Black music, and they start looking at the obvious things like you use music when you perform the poetry, but they don't look at what it means temperamentally and structurally to be influenced by the music. Tempermentally, for instance, you're not interested in composing a masterpiece, you just want to blow everything you can blow at whatever time you're blowing.

BARAKA: Exactly. That's it. I mean the thing is, like somebody said, how many different feelings can you have? How many different ideas can you have? Hey, I don't know. I know Duke Ellington registered 2,000 pieces of music and I have no doubt that 1,999 of them are tough, and I bet you that half of them don't sound like anything you ever heard in your life. Why? Because he was thinking about some other shit, that's all.

 

SALAAM: A lot of people say that Duke was a great, great composer, but they don't really listen to Duke's band. Duke would take a song he wrote in the thirties and when the forties come they play it in a different way, and when the fifties came, he played it another way. He just kept on changing.

BARAKA: Plus, he had a lot of stuft they would compose on the road, and when they came off the road he would have it recorded. He would tape it. The other thing about Duke was constant experimentation--experimentation for experimentation's sake in the sense of, I don't mean in the sense of "well, just for the hell of it." Like Mao said, the three major struggles in life are class struggle, the struggle for production, and the struggle of scientific experiment. That's a struggle, trying to find out. The question of scientific experiment is a question of human development.

 

SALAAM: It seems to me, that you be on the road so much, and reading your poetry at conferences, and universities, and for political gatherings, that always reading for audiences colors what you are trying to do with the poetry you are writing right now, as opposed to when you were in a situation when people were publishing your poetry in books. I'm saying that at one point you were in an environment in which the ultimate thing was that the poem was going to be published somewhere; now you are in an environment where the ultimate thing is that you are going to be giving a speech or a reading somewhere and you are going to recite your poetry and be looking to rouse people up. Is that a correct assessment?

BARAKA: I don't know, maybe that is, but, you know you have like an ideal audience or an ideal reader in your mind. But then again, maybe it's true because publication is not the first thing on my mind.

 

SALAAM: What I'm saying is that most of your audience is a listening audience right now.

BARAKA: Yeah, I would imagine. I think that has been for awhile. We started thinking about readings a long time ago as opposed to publishing. I mean publishing has always been in it, but even now I'm thinking about how to have cds and stuff like that. I guess that is a part of it. I don't think about it, but like you say, I guess it is in the context of doing what I'm doing. It probably is a more oral thing than what I was doing before.

 

SALAAM: The period when academics love to lionize LeRoi Jones was a period in which text, or paper, had a prominence that it doesn't have in your life at the moment.

BARAKA: That's true. Plus, we're performing all the time with music, so, yeah, that does it.

 

SALAAM: So then, people who talk about the diminished quality of your work are speaking strictly from a text perspective. But, first of all, you're not fixated on the work for the page and secondly there's a whole other aesthetic which the work on the page could never be the fullness of what you want to do now in terms of what you hear with music and what you hear in your interaction with a live audience.

BARAKA: Yeah, that's true but first of all it's ideological. The people don't like the work because they we're talking about shit they don't want us to talk about. That's before anything else. Secondly, what you're saying is true. It's true that the kind of trends that are working in the arts today are so counter to truth and beauty. You encounter people like the language poets talking about they want to get rid of the narrator and all they end up doing is creating poetry that is duller than the dullest of the old time poetry. You know, academics are reactionary. I'm saying that fundamentally it's ideological. These people do not like your attention to the things you want to write about. Secondly, that might be true about text, but that's secondary. And then when you see what they are interested in writing about, which is nothing. If you take the story out of life what is that? A random of heaping of things? At the root you're dealing with a whole backward, reactionary school of thought. The ordering of American literature, of western literature is basically the most savagely racist kind of thing you can imagine. Did you see that pantheon of world literature that the Britannica published? A hundred great books--not one of them is Black, and only one woman, that's Willa Cather. And then the man had the nerve to say that DuBois would have made it but he wanted to write about real shit, he kept writing about reality. So against that, it doesn't matter. You could be writing for the page, but if you were writing stuff that was patently opposed to the concerns that they want you to be concerned with… Man.

 

SALAAM: Is part of the issue not just the issue itself, but what direction or perspective you take on the issue and to whom you address your take on the issue?

BARAKA: Yeah. The stuff that can be looked at both ways; some shit they don't want you to even mention--you're right, it comes down to whose side you on.

 

SALAAM: Without going too deeply into naming names, a number of writers have received the MacArthur genius award, and whereas you never expected to be lionized by those folk, still at some point how do you feel--not what do you think about it, but how do you feel when you see…?

BARAKA: It's just confirmation that you know what you're doing and you ain't doing what they want. Look man, if Stanley Crouch can get a genius award and Marvin X didn't get one, it make me know the quality of that because what he doing is something that somebody who gives out genius awards wants him do. So they say since you doing that, you're a genius, and you, since you ain't doing it, you ain't a genius. It's frustrating sometimes…

 

SALAAM: What's the frustration?

BARAKA: The frustration is that I wish I had $250,000. (Laughter.) That's it. Other than that, there ain't no frustration.

 

SALAAM: What is the legacy of your poetry?

BARAKA: Legacy? I don't know. The legacy is whatever you can think of, do it. The only legacy I can see is the legacy of trying, regardless of whatever genre or what kind of social perspective you want to have, do it to the upmost and don't let people try to spook you in terms of the direction you need to go in. Whatever direction you think you need to go in, you need to go there with all your might and let the chips fly where they may.

 

SALAAM: Like when you left the Village and came walking up 125^th street with the flag in your hand accompanied by Sun Ra, you were annoucing you were leaving one place and arriving some place else?

BARAKA: Right. No matter what people think about that, do that. You see then nobody can say, that didn't happen like that because that was like a period--bip--this is what actually went down. And you know the self-consciousness you get when you get older--cause when you are young, you don't have any self-consciousness at all--in hindsight looking at it, you might say, "well, that might have been a trifle much," but you don't need to double think yourself. Like Billy the Kidd with the whistle, you need to aim all the time so you don't have to aim when it comes time to shoot.

 

SALAAM: So in essence, you're at a point now, where just your sheer age forces you to be reflective because you've got more to look back on than you have to look forward to in terms of life on the planet. So your age is forcing you to be relfective and you're saying that you have achieved a certain consciousness that you didn't have when you thought you would be around forever.

BARAKA: Well you know, you figure when  you pile up stuff and pile up stuff, pretty soon the stuff be piled up around you and you got to look at it and say what is all this stuff piled up around me and what is it's significance. I just hope that it has the significance of at least pointing out that you need to do whatever it is that you make up your mind you want to do, and do it full up and not be second guessing yourself about whether you should… cause in the end you can keep polishing the gun but you don't get no shot.

 

SALAAM: You got a pretty gun…

BARAKA: But you ain't shot shit. Man, go on and shoot and hit something, even if you ain't got nothing but a raggedty old gun.

 

—kalamu ya salaam