Bad Boy Brawly Brown (44 page)

2

This time it made its way down into my gut.

3

“Come on, Fearless,” I said then. “Let’s go drink our coffee in 4

the front.”

5

He kept talking while I led him back to the sitting room.

6

“The men drove out in their own cars every mornin’. Most of 7

’em got there about five-thirty. One of the men was a guy named 8

Maynard, Maynard Latrell. More often than not, Maynard was 9

the one drove old Kit up to the farm. At least on the days he came 0

up.”

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F E A R I T S E L F

“So he didn’t come every day?”

“Naw. He used to but lately he been takin’ days off here and there. But never Wednesday. Wednesday was payday.”

I returned to my wooden chair. Fearless slumped back on the couch.

“How would he pick up the money for the day’s sales?” I asked.

“He’d go to each truck at the end of the day, count the melons, and take what they supposed to have.”

“How’d he know how many melons they supposed to have if he didn’t ask you?”

“I give a count sheet to Maynard and he give it to Kit. But Kit was gone since Monday last. The drivers just kept what they collected.”

“Why didn’t Kit stay at the farm?” I asked.

“He had spent months growin’ them melons. He said he was goin’ stir crazy and that he was afraid his girlfriend was runnin’

around.”

“He was afraid his girlfriend was runnin’ around but he didn’t say nuthin’ about his wife?”

“You gonna let me talk, Paris?”

“Go on.”

“Anyway, Leora told me where she lived and I said that I’d get a line on Kit. I asked around until I found out where Maynard was, and then I went over to see him.”

Fearless sprawled out on the couch. Upset as he was, he made himself comfortable as a plains lion. I was hunched over and at the edge of my seat. That was the difference between Fearless and me. He was relaxed in the face of trouble, where I was afraid of a bump in the night.

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“Maynard didn’t know too much,” Fearless continued. “He 2

said that he used to pick Kit up at a bus stop on Western at 3

four a.m. I asked him if he ever said about anyplace he might 4

hang out. At first Maynard didn’t remember, but then he thought 5

about Mauritia’s country store on Divine.”

6

Mauritia’s was a hole in the wall that sold clothes and beauty 7

products for Negro women. They carried hair irons and skin light-8

eners, fake fingernails and different brands of makeup designed 9

for various hues of dark skin. I had only been in there once. I 0

remembered that it smelled of coconut and rubbing alcohol.

“So you went to Mauritia’s?” I asked, trying to urge him on.

2

“Maynard said that early one morning a week before, Kit had 3

three boxes and that he had Maynard help him drop them off at 4

Mauritia’s front door. So I went over there to see maybe if he 5

worked for them part-time or somethin’ like that.”

6

Fearless sat up, took his coffee cup from the floor, and brought 7

it to his lips. He made a loud smacking sound and grunted his 8

approval.

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“It’s after three, Fearless. What did they say at Mauritia’s?”

0

“They said that they remembered a man looked like Kit come over to their place a couple’a times but that’s all they knew. He 2

was just droppin’ off for the man usually bring ’em their 3

Madame Ethel’s supplies. A guy name of Henry T. Orkan.”

4

My eyes were sore. I had been up until midnight reading
To
5

the Finland Station
by Edmund Wilson. I had just gotten to the 6

end of the section on Fourier and Owen when I fell asleep.

7

“Orkan lives out past Compton at the end of a lane that didn’t 8

have no other houses on it. I called up a cabbie I knew and had 9

him drive me out over there for a favor yesterday.”

0

“You mean Sunday,” I said.

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“Yeah. Orkan is a crazy old guy. He come outta his house with a shotgun cradled in his arm, askin’ me what I wanted on his property. It was nutty, Paris, like he was some kinda moonshiner in the back country instead of a man livin’ in the middle of a big city.”

I knew that Fearless hadn’t been afraid of that man sporting a shotgun. Fearless had never been afraid of anything.

“Did he tell you where Kit was?”

“At first he was all cagey, but when we got to talkin’ he warmed up. He told me that Kit just showed up one day with a receipt for the boxes of beauty supplies. He dropped by after that pretty regular for two weeks, and then he didn’t come anymore.

But he had got a number for Kit, though.”

“So this Orkan is a beauty product distributor?” I asked.

“I guess he is. That place’a his looked like a shanty down at the Galveston shore. No paint on it and all lopsided and messy.”

Fearless shrugged. “I called the number Orkan gave me. A woman name of Moore answered. I asked her about Kit and she said that she wouldn’t talk on the phone but that I could come by if I wanted to.”

“Why didn’t she want to talk on the phone?”

“Superstitious I guess. You know country people’s scared’a all these machines they got today.”

“So you went there?”

“It was a big old ramblin’ house. Must’a had a dozen tenants or more. They told me that Kit had taken a room on the top floor, but that he hadn’t been back there since the first day he didn’t come in to work.”

“Wait a minute, Fearless,” I said. “If Kit got a room on the top floor of a rooming house, then how could he walk out on his wife and child?”

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“That’s what I went to know from Leora,” he said. “I went 2

over to her apartment and asked why didn’t she know that Kit 3

had another place. But she said all she knew was that Kit had 4

been away at his watermelon farm. So I told her where he had 5

been stayin’.” Fearless hesitated again.

6

“What?” I asked.

7

“The funny thing was, all she had was a room and a half. And 8

Son wasn’t there with her. She said that she left the boy with her 9

mama, but you know, Paris, there wasn’t even one toy or buildin’

0

block on the floor. It wasn’t like a child had ever been in that house.”

2

“Did you say somethin’ about that?”

3

“No. I didn’t even think about it really. Later on I did but 4

right then I was just doin’ what I promised I would. After that I 5

went down to Marmott’s on Central and listened to Lips McGee 6

and Billy Herford until almost midnight. Then I went home. I 7

didn’t think about Leora again until my landlady Mrs. Hughes 8

told me about the cops.”

9

“Cops? What cops?”

0

“They was askin’ about me and if anybody around there had ever heard of Kit Mitchell. They told her not to tell me they were 2

there, but Mrs. Hughes likes me so she was waitin’ by her door 3

for me to get in.”

4

“What do the cops want, Fearless?” I asked, sounding more 5

like a doubting parent than a friend.

6

“I don’t know, Paris. But it don’t sound good. I mean, she said 7

that they were in suits, not uniforms, and they called themselves 8

detectives.”

9

My mind slipped into gear then.

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“Why’ont you go upstairs and take my bed, man? I’ll sleep down here.”

“No, Paris. I don’t wanna put you out your bed.”

“Just do what I say, okay? Go on upstairs. I’m going to want to talk to you more about this thing with the Watermelon Man, but we should wait until we’re both sharp. You get a good night’s sleep and we’ll get into it again in the morning.”

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Black to the Future

by Walter Mosley

I’ve been reading fantasy and science fiction since I was a child. From Winnie-the-Pooh to Tom Swift

and his Jetmarine; from Marvel Comics to Ray

Bradbury to Gabriel García Márquez. Any book

that offers an alternative account for the way

things are, catches my attention—at least for a few chapters. This is because I believe that the world we live in is so much larger, has so many more possibilities, than our simple sciences describe.

Anything conceivable I believe is possible.

From the creation of life itself (those strings of molecules that twisted and turned until they were self-determinate) to freedom. The ability to for-mulate ideas into words, itself humanity’s greatest creation, opens the door for all that comes after.

Science fiction and its relatives (fantasy, horror, speculative fiction, etc.) have been a main artery for recasting our imagination. There are few con-cepts or inventions of the 20th century—from submarine to newspeak—that were not first fictional flights to fancy. We make up, then make real. The genre

speaks most clearly to those who are dissatisfied with the way things are: adolescents, post-adolescents, escapists, dreamers, and those who have been made to feel powerless. And this may explain the appeal that science fiction holds for a great many African-Americans. Black people have been cut off from their African ancestry by the scythe of slavery and from an American heritage by being excluded from history.

For us, science fiction offers an alternative where that which deviates from the norm is the norm.

Science fiction allows history to be rewritten or ignored. Science fiction promises a future full of possibility, alternative lives, and even regret. A black child picks up a copy of
Spider-Man
and imagines himself swinging into a world beyond the limitations imposed by Harlem or Congress. In the series of

“Amber” novels, Roger Zelazny offers us the key to an endless multitude of new dimensions. Through

science fiction you can have a black president, a black world, or simply a say in the way things are. This power to imagine is the first step in changing the world. It is a step taken every day by young, and not so young, black readers who crave a vision that will shout down the realism imprisoning us behind a wall of alienating culture.

In science fiction we have a literary genre made

to rail against the status quo. All we need now are the black science fiction writers to realize these ends.

But where are they?

There are only a handful of mainstream

black science fiction writers working today. There are two major voices: Octavia E. Butler, winner of a coveted MacArthur “genius” grant, and Samuel

R. Delaney, a monumental voice in the field since the ’60s. Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due are

starting to make their marks. There are also flash-es of the genre in such respected writers as Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell. But after these nota-bles, the silence washes in pretty quickly.

One reason for this absence is that black

writers have only recently entered the popular genres in force. Our writers have historically been

regarded as a footnote best suited to address the nature of our own chains. So, if black writers wanted to branch out past the realism of racism and

race, they were curtailed by their own desire to

document the crimes of America. A further deter-

rent was the white literary establishment’s desire for blacks to write about being black in a white

world, a limitation imposed upon a limitation.

Other factors that I believe have limited

black participation in science fiction are the uses of play in our American paradise. Through make-believe, a child can imagine anything. Being big

like his father. Flying to the moon on an eagle’s back. Children use the images they see and the ones that they are shown. Imagine whiteness. White

presidents, white soldiers, the whitest teeth on a blond, blue-eyed model. Media images of policemen, artists, and scientists before the mid-’60s were almost all white. Now imagine blackness. There

you will find powerlessness ignorance, servitude, children who have forgotten how to play. Or you will simply not find anything at all—absence. These are the images that have made war on the imagination of Black America.

It is only within the last 30 years that blackness has begun appearing in even the slightest way in the media, in history books and in America’s sense of the globe. And with just this small acknowledgment

there has been an outpouring of dreams. Writers,

actors, scientists, lawyers, and even an angel or two have appeared in our media. Lovers and cowboys,

detectives and kings have come out of the fertile imagination of Black America.

The last hurdle is science fiction. The power of

science fiction is that it can tear down the walls and windows, the artifice and laws by changing the logic, empowering the disenfranchised, or simply by asking, What if? This bold logic is not easy to attain.

The destroyer-creator must first be able to imagine a world beyond his mental prison. The hardest thing to do is to break the chains of reality and go beyond into a world of your own creation.

So where are the black science fiction writers?

Everywhere I go I meet young black poets and novel-ists who are working on science fiction manuscripts.

Within the next five years I predict there will be an explosion of science fiction from the black community. When I tell black audiences that I’ve written a novel in this genre, they applaud. And following this explosion will be the beginning of a new autonomy created out of the desire to scrap 500 years of intellectual imperialism. This literary movement itself would make a good story. The tale could unfold in a world where power is based upon uses of the