Midnight (15 page)

“Most of the brothers and the Mexicans up in here is half crazy from the shit they've been loading their systems up with for years. I don't feel qualified to talk too much about our Latino friends, but I
know
what we been eatin' since 1619 is fuuuucccked up.”

The prop wash sweltered, back spun, crystallized.…

Chester L. Simmons, ex-con man, ex-pimp, ex-ex-ex, managed to convince Clyde Johnson, aka “Bop Daddy,” that there was a racist plot behind the pushing of sugar, grease, drugs, and assorted chemicals into the African-American communities across the United States.

“What's this shit with ‘fast foods' in our communities?! It's like we don't have time to sit down 'n eat. Most of us ain't got nothin' but time; we ain't got no jobs to rush to. Isn't that interesting? The white boy is dead on the go, phone in the car, phone on the field, ready to go, but you don't see him grabbing those killer burgers and loading up on junk food.

“We spend the same money he spends, buying synthetic shit that don't do nothing but make you have a cravin'.… Check it out, youngblood. Put enough sugar in your tank and it won't run. You'll
think
it's running, but that's just an illusion.

My mother, my father, all of the sweet people in my life
—
you dirty rotten son of a bitch! I hate you Chester—I love you Chester—I hate you.… Godammit!

“Everything they push in our communities—Afro-African, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Indo-German, Brazilian, Colombian, you get the point. You got to, it's a dream, OK?

“Everything they push in our communities is sweet. I think it's a clever way to get us to swallow some of the bitterest shit the world has ever known. I had a couple funky chumps try to lay some sweet gin on me. You believe that?”

Why does my head ache the way it does sometimes? It's not a migraine thing; I checked that out. Why must I creep from place to place? No, the dreams don't seem to bear tall standing; I must lower myself. Chester mastered the dream in three of my minds.…

“Hey, I ain't got nothin' against eatin' meat. It's what you're eating in the meat that fucks me up. There's got to be some pretty powerful chemical they're using to blow a damn cow up to edible size in four months. Or is it three?

“And, hey, don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those funky chumps who believes that vegetables don't scream 'n cry when we cut and kill them too. It's just a matter of biology. I'd rather kill a tomato or a carrot, which doesn't have a heart like mine, or a liver, or a dick, than slaughter a cow.”

Chester was the man who made him understand that white bread wasn't really wonderful and that he ought to pay the Motherland a visit.

Bop felt himself staggering awake, feeling disoriented. Am I really in Africa? No, my dream takes place here, my nightmare somewhere else. That's for Rodney King, Benny Powell, Clarence Chance, La Tasha Harlins, the racist pre-New Year's sweeps through the project to arrest the brothers the racist police
thought
would fire their pistols on New Year's, for flooding South Central EL-A with “crack,” for making men lie on the ground (their initiation into manhood-humiliation?), for no jobs, for hopelessness, for the secret promotion of gang warfare between the races (within the races) by the Los Angeles Police Department, a fascist government unto itself, for sheer racism.

The fan ground to a stop, the Ghanaians had had enough. It was time to reflect. Bop laughed out loud.…

Wowwwwwwwww.…

7

He had come to the conclusion that the way the L.A.P.D. allowed the thing to happen was a set-up. Once the fires the down I'm gonna be in Ghana, West Africa, and when the revenge season comes in, I'm gonna be in Ghana, West Africa.

“What you must understand, Bop, is that most of the funky chumps on most U.S. police departments are regimented cowboys with John Wayne-type mentalities. They may lie about, but they're really trained to see things in black and/or white, and they relish that training, like Dobermans.”

“They're not like the lifers who're serving time with us in here. They're hundred-yard-dash men, there for the quick glory. A lot of them think they're in the Marines, that's why they say shit like, ‘We're in the front line against crime.'”

It was raining again. He was beginning to like the sound of it, and the chorus of strange frogs that made a sound like croaking trombones.

Patience hipped him to it on his next visit to her quarters. “The frogs sound like frogs. How do they sound in America?”

“You don't hear 'em.”

She found it odd that frogs didn't croak in his country the way they croaked in her country.

He sprawled on her mattress on the stone floor, watching her prepare herself for him. She had taken her “baff.”

“Gbop, have you had your baff?”

He had never met a cleaner woman in his life. No matter what hour the tyrant she worked for let her off, she took her “baff.”

The tyrant that she called “Papa” was as close to a slave master as he would ever know.

“Patience, what're your hours?”

“I heat water at 4:30
A
.
M
.”

“OK, so that's when you begin. What time does your workday end?”

Her blank expression said it all. Papa called her with two buzzes of a buzzer inside her room. She was subject to be called at any time.

He was beginning to love the love-preparation ritual. After the “baff,” a self-body massage with various kinds of oils and creams, a scraping of the heels with a shard of glass, a liberal dusting of the underarms, breasts, and crotch with scented powders.

“Patience, what do those beads around your hips mean?”

“All girls have these.”

“But what do they mean?”

Hesitant pause.… “Men like to play with them.”

She sprawled onto the mattress beside him, fragrant, warm, experienced. Her obvious expertise bothered him a bit. He didn't have a clue as to whether he was “ringing her chimes” or not, but she was certainly ringing him. Their soft foreplay wound into hard lovemaking.

The buzzer sounded twice and she shook him off her body like a dog shaking water off its coat.

“Papa!”

He watched her scurry to pull on a gingham house dress and to knot a kerchief on her head.

“I'm coming,” she whispered as she scurried out of the door, leaving him literally quivering with anticipation.

Damn, what kinda shit is this?!

He checked the time in a shard of light. 11:15
P
.
M
. This motherfucker oughta be shot …, calling somebody to do something for him at eleven o'clock at night.

Patience had tried to give him some idea of what her work consisted of and when she did it, but he lost track of the bewildering number of things she did.

Ironing, washing, cooking, cleaning, gardening, shopping, serving Papa. She's serving him now. Bop stood and stared out of the only window in the airless room. The large house, the “Big House,” was twenty yards away and loomed over the “boys' quarters” like a threatening cloud.

He stood there with his hands on his hips, silently cursing “Papa” and all that he represented.

“Bop, you got to keep something about Africa in the forefront of your mind, 'specially ‘British' Africa. Them funky chumps from that little weird-ass island got over there and got ahold of the brothers' minds in a way that no one has been able to successfully explain to me. I mean, how could three or four little puny, pink-faced, constipated, semi-bi-sexual beaurocrats grab hold of fifteen million minds? I'll be a hundred 'n a day before I understand it.

“Right now, I swear to you, at this very minute, you got some Africans who would rather smell a white man's farts than eat a full meal.”

“Awwww c'mon, Chester, you gotta be kiddin'!”

“Read my lips. I kid you not. But it ain't just the Africans who were turned out by the English. It's the same way with them fools on the Ivory Coast, in Senegal, with the French, and down in the Mozambique and Angola with the Portuguese.

“You know something? I once did what I thought was a learned study on the subject. You know, why or how or what put so many of the African psyches into such a receptive mode for Eurocentric domination.”

“But they dominated us too, ain't that what you told me?”

“Damn right they did! Or tried their damnest to do it with the whip, the branding iron, the gun. And they failed because we were
not
receptive. Dig what I'm saying? We were
not
receptive. It's one thing to drag a funky chump out of his pad, ship him an ocean and a river away and force him to do what you want him to do. It's a completely different thing for someone to come into your house and start telling you how to run things.

“The English, the French, the Portuguese, the Germans, all of the Europeans have been so successful with the African psyche that a lot of the Africans have only one regret.”

“What's that?”

“That they no longer have white asses to kiss. And don't believe that all of the black folks in South Africa are happy about seeing the Afrikaner get his lumps.”

“You sho' is cold, Chester.”

“I'm telling you the truth, youngblood, as Shango is my witness. You'll see it when you get over there. The British are gone but you'll see African brothers treat each other just the way the white boy treated them. And make no apology about it, they'll just straight up treat the lower man like a piece of shit and keep on stepping.”

Yeahhh, right again, Chester
. He backed away from the window and lay back on the mattress.

“And how did we manage to wind up being so different, so unreceptive?”

“That's been the subject for another one of my learned studies. My basic theory, supported by three sub-theories, is that the actual enslavement process took us completely into the belly of the beast. Like, you know, we went up through the funky chump's intestines, took side views of his heart and liver, and discovered, yea verily! This is a dirty rotten motherfucker we got here.

“Oh yes, we got a few among us who resent the fact that they ain't fully white. But the majority have been unreceptive. If we hadn't been unreceptive, we'd still be pulling plows through cotton fields right now.”

Patience returned an hour and a half later, tired again. “Papa needed to have silver polished for the guests coming tomorrow.”

The lovemaking that followed her return bordered on the purely mechanical. They both wanted to get it over and done.

He couldn't really figure out what made him do it, but he felt challenged to learn Ga from listening to the sound of the jokes that the brothers made in the Dew Drop Inn.

“Hey, I could learn the shit if I had somebody to teach me.”

“I will teach you.”

The quiet guy with the pop-bottle-bottom-sized glasses spoke softly but authoritatively.

Bop bought a notebook and had him over for an hour on Monday and Tuesday. He made an excuse for not being available on Wednesday, and by Thursday the project was permanently tabled.

This shit is harder than Chinese arithmetic
.

Life in Osu was infinitely interesting on one level, almost boring on another level. It was interesting to see how people occupied themselves, boring to see them do it. The yarn lady spent the day frying and selling sliced yams, the kenkey lady spent hours selling kenkey, the little boys pushed makeshift cars through the rutted road, people washed their clothes and hung them out to dry.

There was a flavor about it he couldn't touch, a kind of satisfaction. He spent a half day wandering through the streets, surreptitiously checking out the full, tart breasts of the young women and the gorgeous hips of the mature ones.

Sisters got some butter on these buns, f'real
.

And then back to the Vernon house for a cold gin and midday introspection.
What makes this Africa? The people don't really seem a lot different than they do at home. If it wasn't for the language thang, I could be in Watts. Or the Westside of Chicago. The food is different, the way they eat it is different, but what makes this Africa?

He fought with himself about questions that he knew he had no answers for.
I shouldn't be asking what makes this Africa, I should be asking why am I here?

That question took him through two tall glasses of cold, meditative gin.

Well, of course, there was Chester L. Simmons' challenge to him. “Bop, I'd be willing to bet you a half dozen granola bars that you'll be back in here this time next year.”

“Bullshit! Chester, by this time next year I'm gonna be in Ghana, West Africa.”

“Seeing is believing.”

Yeahh, how about this, Chester, my man? I'm here. Yeahhh, I'm here, watching dudes in funky little bars pour some of their drink on the ground and say prayers before pouring the rest of it down their throats.

He sprawled on the living room sofa, nipping his gin, tripping a bit.
I wonder why they do that?

He trickled a few drops of gin onto the floor beside the sofa and tried to think of something sacred to say. “I am now, I was then, and I will always be a Brick.”

He swallowed a gulp of gin in imitation of the akpeteshie drinkers and gagged.
Damn, I don't see how they swallow that shit like that
.

The gin seemed to shroud his mind in a fine mist, making him feel as though he could come to grips with stuff he normally shied away from.
Why would somebody take a knife and cut his baby's face all up like that?
They had to be babies when they got slashed up like that.

He subconsciously frowned, recalling a trio of young faces that he had come across on a side street one afternoon. Three young boys, no older than twelve or thirteen, their faces incised with precise cuts. He couldn't stop himself from staring.
Damn, what chick would want a dude with his face all sliced to ribbons?