Home In The Morning (28 page)

Katherine Marie’s jaw dropped, her eyes bulged, she was that shocked by the sound of a name she’d not thought to hear again the rest of her natural life. She may have reeled, since a gang of burly black men in camouflage pants, black berets, and white T-shirts emblazoned with a clenched fist holding a crucifix stepped forward from out of nowhere to surround her. They were the bodyguards Mombasa assigned to protect her when she went around the city for her works of charity and consciousness-raising. Jackson? she said to Stella after waving them off, S-a-s-s-a-p-o-r-t? Not out of Guilford, Mississippi? Surely not that Jackson Sassaport?

Yes. That would be my Jackson. Do you know him?

I do believe I do. It’s been a fair amount of time.

Are you from his part of the world, ma’am? Of course you are. I hear it in your voice.

Both women felt an odd sense of nausea next, the kind of nausea that affects sensitives just before an earthquake or visionaries before giving up their selfhood to an invasion of alien spirit. Katherine Marie introduced herself.

I am Malaika Cooper, only Jackson would know me as Katherine Marie.

And your husband is Mombasa, once known as L’il Bokay.

Oh my Lord.

Katherine Marie sank onto the foot of Stella’s gurney, overcome by the queer coincidence of it all. It was not long afterward that Jackson arrived at last, rushed to Stella’s side, unaware the woman sitting with her back to him was his unrequited love from back home. He rushed past her, embraced his wife, weeping into her neck, while he mumbled I’m sorry, I’m sorry, our poor little child, I’m sorry, I’m sorry over and over again. Now that he was with her, Stella allowed herself to sob in his arms. For a time, the rest of the world faded away. Out of respect, Katherine Marie removed herself to the opposite end of the ward. She tried to keep an eye on them while preoccupied with her proselytization, waiting for an opportunity to present herself to her old and dear friend. A swarm of accidents prevented this. First a listener of Mombasa’s weekly radio address buttonholed her to pepper her with scriptural quotations. Next, a new mother all of fourteen years of age grabbed her skirts and begged for information on public assistance. By the time she fended off the first and helped the girl locate a social worker, the Sassaports were processed out of the ward. Katherine Marie consoled herself thinking she could easily find Jackson again through the hospital records. Meanwhile, Stella had recovered her equilibrium enough to tell her husband in ragged voice of the extraordinary resurrection of his past mere hours after the demise of his hope in the future, pointing with an unsteady finger in the direction of Katherine Marie’s back, which disappeared at just that moment around a corner. He turned, saw nothing, did not believe her. Her story sounded exactly the kind of hallucinatory experience a person in extremis might achieve. Then he saw a Black Warrior of the African Jesus pamphlet in the lap of a woman with an infant at the teat and wondered.

Later on in the week, Katherine Marie determined where the couple was living in the town. She took the train over without her bodyguards
or calling first and rang the doorbell. Jackson answered. He dashed down from the third floor of the building to the first and stuck his head through the entryway, as the buzzer was broken. When he saw her, he knew her instantly despite the passage of time and her African costume. He embraced her there on the front stoop, saying: So my wife is not insane! And the two of them beamed and rocked back and forth close as twin babies in their mama’s arms until they became aware of the stares of passersby, at which point they released each other and Jackson ushered her into the apartment. How is your wife? Malaika Cooper née Katherine Marie asked right away. Jackson shrugged. Depends on the day. She tries to be strong, but her hormones are crashing. It makes her difficult, she’s just not right most days. And you, Jackson? How are you doing? He smiled. Why, sad. Of course, I’m very sad, thank you for asking. I do think your arrival, though, will perk us both up quite a bit.

Which is exactly what happened. Despite everything else that came to pass, for a good number of years following that day, the Sassaports clung to Mombasa Cooper’s family with a kind of relief borne out of the desperation caused by three more miscarriages before the issue of offspring was finally put to rest. In a way, Malaika and her children became for them a repository for all the emotions they’d had to squelch along with any hope for their own progeny. She needed them, too, after her own reversal of fortune during that same year as the first Sassaport miscarriage.

The day Katherine Marie ventured over to a pocket of white neighborhood near DC’s Embassy Row to pay her first visit to Jackson and Stella, Mombasa happened to be in Chicago at the University of Illinois, participating in a three-day panel discussion with representatives from the organizations of Dr. King, Bobby Seale, and Stokely Carmichael on the various philosophies of black liberation current at the time. He felt lucky to be there, as he didn’t enjoy the cachet the
others did. The sun that shone on him the day the ACLU vindicated him and he announced the establishment of his party had long ago set. The Black Warriors of the African Jesus had devolved to a footnote in a movement overshadowed by the rising stars of newer constellations, that is, more recent victims and heroes engaged the public mind. Mombasa was entirely aware of his status as a minor satellite of civil rights activism. He hoped to reignite community interest in his ideas through the conference, although he had no allies there. None of the other participants lived on his side of the street. To a man, they considered him not enough this, too much that. Dr. King’s people, the most honored by the white world, were never separatists although the spiritual countenance of his movement came closest to that of the Black Warriors of the African Jesus. The others, arrivistes when compared with the works of Dr. King or Mombasa, were suspicious of anything he had to say. Bobby Seale, at the dawn of his romance with Marxism, considered Christianity a slave religion, while Stokely Carmichael reckoned the Black Warriors too focused on negative imagery. Their founder’s awareness of all this had an effect on his performance that day. After hours of timid discussion and deference to opinions contrary to his own, he became confused, dissatisfied with himself, and he needed to consult his wife. Why did I take a backseat? he wanted to ask her whom he trusted above all others. Why did I beg pardon so many times? How would his subservient demeanor appear to his followers? Would they be as disappointed in him as he was in himself?

As soon as he could get to a phone, he called his wife at the apartment that served as both their home and party headquarters in DC. Her mama answered the phone. She’s gone out, he was told, I’m watchin’ the kids. Where’d she go? he asked. Well, now, I don’t really know. To see some friends. Mombasa arranged that he would call back later that night, but when he did Katherine Marie was still not home. He called
the head of her bodyguard detail. He had no idea where she was either. Mombasa worried himself into a near fit. The bodyguard called the chief of Black Warrior security to let him know the wife of the leader was missing. This man, a man called Dume, was a small, suspicious man well suited to his work, a man disastrously married three times to three different roundheels, a man who considered all women untrust-worthy, morally weak, generally inferior. He parked himself outside the Cooper apartment watching for Malaika’s return to see if he could catch her up to anything untoward.

It was Jackson’s fault she stayed out late that night. She tried to leave three or four times, and each time he dissuaded her, begging her to share their evening meal with them, promising to drive her home. How often is the lost found? he asked. Better yet, how often does my wife find a friend? And that made Katherine Marie laugh, even though she didn’t know Stella well enough yet to get the joke. She was just guessing by the tone in Jackson’s voice and by the way Stella hit him in the shoulder that there was some truth in his question, some exaggeration and wherever the meat of it lay, she could see he loved his wife anyway, purely, to distraction, the way she loved her husband. And that felt fitting and right and good in an extraordinarily satisfying way, which, if she analyzed it, had something to do with both Jackson’s feelings about her and her own shadow feelings about him. Now that they were all securely married, she could admit to herself how much she’d always cared for him without seeing him as some kind of forbidden threat, and so she did.

He made dinner for them all, a down-home dinner with grits and spoon bread both, and he served wine, the best jug they could afford, Tavola Red. Everybody got a little drunk. Stella made sure Jackson drank half a pot of coffee before he drove Katherine Marie home. On the way, he said: Malaika, Malaika, you know it’s real pretty, but I just cannot get used to it. You’re always going to be Katherine Marie to
me. How’s your mama do it? How’s she set into calling you a different name than she’s called you her whole life? Now, I can easily call L’il Bokay Mombasa because, let’s face it, look at him, he’s a Mombasa. Just say it slow and deep: Mom-bas-a. Mom-bas-a. Yes, indeed. He’s a Mombasa if there ever was one, although I don’t know if there ever has been one before now, has there? It’s a place not a person name, isn’t it?

Katherine Marie was pleased with Jackson that he knew that, because there were maybe three white people in all of America at the time who knew that.

Yes. It’s a port city in East Africa, a major trading post of slaves passing through the hands of Moslems and the Portuguese.

Why would Bokay want to do that? Name himself after a slave city?

Well. He feels it emphasizes that the shame of slavery does not belong to the enslaved. Plus, he feels it brings him closer to the African Jesus who was a slave to the empire of Rome which killed him.

Since he was elated for the first time since they’d lost the baby and in his cups no matter how much coffee he’d swilled, Jackson said: Well, indeed, darlin’. I do not know about that, but better you all blame the Romans instead of the Jews for killin’ your Lord Jesus. My whole life, I got plenty neighbors blamin’ the Jews. Don’t need the ones I actually love doin’ so.

Katherine Marie looked at him with a blank, startled look, and then she started to laugh. As they’d pulled up to her building, she kept laughing, making of her laughter a good-bye accompanied by a buss on the cheek, which was innocent, and Jackson, though terribly pleased, knew it was innocent. But Dume, on watch from the street corner, did not. Jackson yelled out the window: So, we’ll see you a week from next Tuesday? as Stella had suggested a reunion dinner for the four of them, the children included if the Coopers wished. Dume wrote the phrase down along with Jackson’s license plate number and cursed them both under his breath.

When Jackson returned after driving Katherine Marie home, Stella was awake and excited, pacing around the house taking dessert dishes and ashtrays into the kitchen, straightening magazines on the coffee table and the like all in a manic putter. Oh sweetheart, she said as soon as he walked in the door, I understand why you fell in love with that girl as a child. She’s fantastic! So beautiful! And so smart! And what noble bearing, right down to the point of her chin! Have you noticed how it always points sort of up? Did you see how well she wears those robes of hers, which, let’s face it, must be tremendously hot and uncomfortable? Stella pretended she wore them herself, miming the sweep and grace of Katherine Marie’s perambulation through the living room. I saw at the hospital how everyone she talks to respects her. She treats everybody the same, young and old, male and female, ignorant and refined. When you were cooking, she told me about her pet projects with the Black Warriors. There’s a preschool and food pantry in Anacostia, a drop-in clinic and youth counseling center in Marshall Heights. They’re so well organized, and she created everything by herself without formal training. She’s had to learn how to do it on her own, from working in the trenches. Oh, how I wish she were my protégée. I could make her into the head of Human Services in half a dozen years! I’m telling you, Jackson, she’s the most inspiring woman of her race I’ve ever come across, maybe the most inspiring of any race, and I do believe I’m in love with her myself!

Jackson laughed and put his arms around her just to get her to stop moving. With a feverish head resting over his shoulder, she continued praising Katherine Marie nonstop. If it hadn’t been for the miscarriage, he’d have thought she’d gone mad, but he suspected his wife’s sudden, even bizarre passion had something to do with her acute swings of hormone and her need to transfer her attachment to their dead child to someone else. Having suffered dreadfully over the past week with both her grief and his own, he decided on this occasion if it made her feel good, let her do it.

The next morning, Stella went to the library and looked up everything she could find about the Black Warriors of the African Jesus. She discovered much that impressed her and became even more stimulated. Although she was on medical leave from work, she went to her office at DHHS afterward, gathered a sheaf of funding applications, stuffed them into a file, then headed home to call Katherine Marie at the phone number she’d left with them the night before, the number of the Black Warrior preschool where she parked her kids and worked four days a week.

Malaika! Stella said, full of her particular brand of enthusiasm that electrified everyone who heard it, you’ve got to come over here today. I’ve got the paperwork for some grants I know you can use, and since I’m on leave these days, I can work them up for you pronto if you give me the information I need. I’ll get them expedited through the system, too.

Now, there’s not a grassroots organization on the planet that doesn’t need money. As soon as school was over for the day, Katherine Marie dropped her kids home for her mother to watch. She took the subway to the Sassaport apartment for the second time in as many days. Dume followed her, stationing himself outside the building to take notes. Once again, the spy scribbled down a description of the car and driver who took her home later on. He was nothing if not careful and thorough. He took down the eight names on the mailboxes of Jackson’s residence to cross reference with the registrant of the car whose identity he still did not have, because the Black Warrior contact at the police department was a janitor whom everyone at the station liked, but those granting favors took their sweet time about it.