The Coup (13 page)

and level moral prairie of American goodness. This prairie's harvest celebration came at McCarthy each November, in the Thanksgiving football game against our arch-rival, Pusey Baptist, an even more northerly academic village of virgins and bruisers that, for the four years of my undergraduate career, was four times narrowly defeated-in 1954 by an intercepted pass, in 1955 by a goal-line stand, in 1956 by a heroic, dodging, arhythmical, incredible end run by a sandy-haired instant legend who next year died uncomplainingly of leukemia, and in 1957, most thrillingly for us non-gringos, by a field goal kicked sideways, soccer style, from the forty-three-yard line by a Peruvian general's degenerate son, who had gone out for the team as a way of making homosexual contacts. Memory, enough! Never-to-be-entered-again spaces the mind has hollowed out! The pom-poms! The beer kegs! The single-throated roaring in the concrete bowl, named Kellogg Stadium for its benefactor corporation and irreverently nicknamed the Breakfast Dish. And seen from high above through the vapor of tens of thousands of breaths, those synchronized American cheerleaders, a row of M's ("Give me an M," they would implore), yelling in the zero weather for victory as nakedly as Zulus ("Give me a Cst"), their cheeks flaming ("Give me a C, A, Rf"), their breasts pouncing as in rapid succession each dropped to one knee and shot forth an arm. Rah! I licked my lips, remembering the beer in the frats afterward, where the Pusey Baptists were invited to drown their annual sorrow, and the rugs stank like swamps of hops, and the exceptional coed, liberated without a restraining philosophy of liberation, liquidly consigned herself, in a ratty upstairs chamber, with hip-hoisted skirt and discarded underpants, to a line-up of groggy, beefy ejaculators. Sheba shifted her head, and our skins where melted together threatened to tear. She lay her head beside my arm, her jaw ajar, andwitha gray tongue licked the sweat from my pores. Was I happy? They called me so, but in truth the studies were hard. I had been granted a scholarship from some nefarious reserve of laundered and retitled government money, and had to keep up my grades, and in addition worked as waiter and short-order cook in various eating establishments within a walk of the McCarthy campus, including a Howard Johnson's, with its dummy minaret, on the thru-traffic edge of Franchise. I did not work in any of the places where my circle of friends gathered. I did not want them embarrassed by having me serve them. I did not want them to hear the towny waitresses and kitchen goons call me, not entirely without affection, Grease, Sambo, or Flapjack. Where was I? The Off-Campus Luncheonette was foggy with cigarette smoke and thermal-interface steam, with the plinging of pinball and the twanging of Patti Page; the Pure Dairy Products Ice Cream Parlor had twirled-wire chairs and round marbletop tables whose butter-pecan-streaked-with-blueberry surfaces camouflaged the slopped excess of our gooey sundaes and viscid, frothy sodas; the Badger Cafe offered sawdust on the floor and high-backed booths of dark-stained plywood. Here we would badger Oscar X about his remarkable faith. "You mean to say," Turnip Schwarz would insist in that Southern accent of gently prolonged incredulity, "that this Mr. Yacub really persuaded exactly fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine black people to this Isle of Patmos in order to breed some obnoxious race of white devils that none of these participants would ever live to see and that none of them would want to be anyway?" Oscar X usually wore brown suits and a white shirt with tie, and spoke in a diction of acquired precision, neatly baring his teeth at the close of each rebuttal. "It did not happen all at once. It took, according to the Prophet Mr. Farrad Muhammad, two hundred years of regulated eugenics to create a brown race from the black, two hundred more to produce from that a red race, two hundred more to produce a race of yellow folk"-a crisp little nod here to Wendy, silent on her side of the booth-"and from this a final deuce of centuries to the ultimate generation and supreme insult to Allah, the blond, blue-eyed, hairy-assed devils, who went nude on all fours and lived in trees, as all the textbooks tell us." "Friend," Barry Little told Oscar X, "that is the pathetic sort of horseshit with which the common nigger has been scrambling his brains in this land all along. You can't breed a race in a couple generations, you need a million years; and what the textbooks tell us for that matter is that the black man isn't the oldest thing, he is the newest thing in Homo sapiens, the latest improved model. This here Muhammad Fraud of yours had read a little Reader's Digest anthropology and had the Bible shouted at him by his momma and that was all the information plus his misery that he had." Esmeralda Miller was the only black woman at McCarthy. Her father was a dentist in a small city in upstate New York and she claimed she was a Marxist, in these days when that was a deadly serious thing to do. She was flat-chested and ash-colored and spoke in a level lustreless way, inflexible and indifferent, bored by arguing, the possessor of the flat truth. "You're both talking about alienation, man's alienation from his species being, and you can't talk about that without talking about the selfestrangement induced by forced labor. These racial categories are archaic, they have nothing to do with the class struggle; the black bourgeoisie, where it exists, is as oppressive, and in the last analysis as inevitably self-destructive, as the white, and now we have to add the yellow. Look at Liberia." Wendy unexpectedly spoke. "Yet didn't Lenin point out that Western capitalism has forestalled its doom by the exploitation, through colonial imperialism, of the natural resources and cheap labor of the non-white peoples?" "The white man is the devil," Oscar X broke back in. "He is a deliberately manufactured synthetic devil who is so disgusting the black man had to herd him across the Arabian desert and put him in those cold dark European Ice Age caves so he wouldn't destroy the world with his devilish mischief, and that is the proven historical truth, because that is where the white man came from; he was filling those caves full of gnawed-over bones while the black man down south was putting up those Pyramids easy as pie. These are facts." The door of the cafe opened, admitting cold air and Candy. "Here comes pinktoes," Barry Little muttered. She fetched her own chair and sat at a corner of the already crowded table. The faint flurry of greetings died to a silence until Hakim Felix al-Bini cleared his throat and continued the conversation. "It seems to me," he said, "the truth of a mythology should not be judged evidentially piece by piece but by its gestalt result. This Mr. Yacub, with his big head and his resemblance to Frankenstein, seems more than we need, from the standpoint of plausibility; but then so do Hitler, and Joan of Arc, and Jesus. They existed. Many things exist, and our dreams tell us many more exist, or exist elsewhere. What matters in a myth, a belief, is, Does it fit the facts, as it were, backwards? Does it enable us to live, to keep going? Yacub seems implausible but it does seem true, as we look around, that the white man is, as Oscar says, a devil." Candy blushed, right to the neck of her sweater. "I should resent this," she said, "except you're all so nice." "We are not nice," Barry Little said. "We are rapist apes." "White people don't mean to be devils." "No devil does," Hakim Felix told her. "But that is your tragedy, not ours." He took pity. "I was thinking less of lovely American coeds than of my French commanding officers. They wear stiff dark uniforms and boxes on their heads and they shriek and slap their African soldiers as if they are possessed. Even the way they move, in angry little jerks, suggests dead men animated by devils. What we call a zombi."?"' He was annoyed at her, for she had distracted him, with her complicated human situation of a white woman compelled to mingle with blacks, from some urgent general truth his mind had almost framed. Barry Little had turned to Oscar X again. "The U. s. Negro has peddled horseshit to OF Massah so long he can't stop peddling it to himself. Until he gets up off his shiny ass and starts playing the game he can keep squatting right at the bottom of the heap. The game is, grab. That's why we've come to school, to learn to grab. There's only one way up, and that's worm your way. Sister Esmeralda of the Communist Storefront Evangelical Association and I agree about one thing at least: forget your color, colored man. Your dollar's as green as the next." Turnip Schwarz said, "Willy Mays hit that ball over the fence, that's four bases for him too." "You are one thousand per cent off your greedy heads," replied Oscar X. "Without the Brotherhood of Islam or some such, the single black man in any Northern city is less than nobody. He is not there, he is a hole. When a brother of ours in Temple Two is pulled in by the devil police, we go show up at the station in our nice quiet suits and that brother gets legal attention. He is not bopped. Those devils tuck their clubs away and put on smiles, because they see power." "You can have power without superstition," Esmeralda said. "No," the future Ellellou said; the word "suits" had reminded him of what he had wanted to say. "It takes a mountain of myth to make even a grain of difference. It takes Mr. Yacub and the Isle of Patmos to make a man in the ghetto put on a suit. Oscar, you say Allah showed up in Detroit in 1930 in the person of a raincoat peddler called W. D. Fard and then disappeared in 1934; the Christians say He showed up in Jerusalem in the year 30 and then disappeared in the year 33. What is the result of these incredible rumors? Slaves lift their heads a fraction of an inch higher. Is this enough result? It is. Nothing less will produce any result at all. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the divinity of this or that itinerant-the crucial question isn't Can you prove it? but Does it give us a handle on the reality that otherwise would overwhelm us?" His voice sounded strained, reaching. But he discovered in the faces in the booth that his high-pitched oratory was not absurd, or not only absurd. Of course he had in his mind not the parochial concerns of these Americans-even the poorest of them rich by African standards-but the dim idea, stirring, of distant Kush. Candy placed her pale hand upon his and patted it, in consolation for an impossible future, or to recall him to this moment, these foreign accents, these abundant beverages, this cozy bar, this "bull session." Shots rang out beyond the tent, barking and then whining, spanking the sand in spurts. The rifles of the caravan guards, old M-i6's bought at discount, were not slow to answer, through a thatch of grunts and scuffling. Men raced by. Shadows flickered on the tent sides. The silent comedy of men fighting for their lives. Ellellou pressed Sheba beneath him, rolling her off the mat into a sandy corner where an assassin would not be likely to aim. His brain moved in the lazy logical notches that crisis activated in him, the synapses huge as lightning. He saw with microscopic clarity the glistening impasto of sweat and sand on Sheba's neck, noted that a necklace of fine lapis lazuli beads had been broken by the violence of his protective action. He calculated the odds that his identity had been detected, decided they were 50-50 (mtesa, who had told Ezana of the mysterious truck, was the negative binary pole), and, given a prevalent co-efficient of danger, decided to stay in the tent, in his opaque, bullet-permeable prism of anonymity, rather than make a break into the wind, the dust, the shouts, the colorlessness. He amused himself, in the space between volleys of bullets, with searching amid the sand granules for the tiny lapis lazuli beads Sheba had shed, which would have been easier to find had their sparkling blue not ebbed from them. He sifted in his inner ear the friendly gunshots from those of the raiders, and heard the latter describing an arc that was coming no closer, that indeed was receding, into the desert reaches of the level truth that nothing matters in our human scale, for Allah truly is great. Takbir! This phrase had dawned in its grandeur for Ellellou not in his animist village but far from home, where the clubby minority students of McCarthy College had in the cheerful, smoky, bibulous flush of youthful egoism and sexual undercurrent forged the personal armament that would hold off the white man's encircling, sniping world. Through Oscar X young Hakim rediscovered Islam, travelling with the black American to the mother shrine, Elijah Muhammad's Temple Two in Chicago, or to the nearer, less majestic Temple Three in Milwaukee. Amid these conservatively suited brothers and reserved, chastely gowned and turbanned sisters, the future Ellellou, welcomed and yet set apart as an African, found reminiscence of his deserted continent's dignity, its empty skies and savannas, its beautiful browns. Subsequent palavering in the stirred-up caravan failed to discover any purpose to the raid. Nothing was taken, not so much as a camel-bag. A number of empty bottles-Mockobckeh, they said, OcoSaHave BoflKa-dropped by the shouting, shooting camel-riders muffled in tagihnusts had the hollow glitter of a deliberate clue. "Either," the President confided to Sheba, "they were Tuareg drunk on CIA bribes, or CIA operatives wishing to seem to be disguised Russians, or Russians who with the clumsy effrontery of these telltale leavings wish to suggest that they are CIA operatives." Sidi Mukhtar had another thought. "You know," he said, "still slave-raiders in Balak." Ellellou scoffed. "That all died out with Tippu Tib." "Not all," the caravan leader said, some hidden cause for humor creasing the withered rascal's features. "More selective now. Quality market instead of quantity." "But who would they be after?" Ellellou asked, feigning innocence of the knowledge that he himself, the President, was the caravan's prize. Sidi Mukhtar winked toward the disguised dictator's tent. "Fine woman," he said simply. Shadows, angels, dangers, trucks on the road, radio waves in the air slip by us. The incident had the quality, an impalpable slithering-by, of those Wisconsin nights when, outside in the snow no whiter than Candy's hips and flanks as they gleamed within the erotic turmoil of bedsheets, a siren went by, bleating and beating blue upon the bricks, the ivy, the windowsills, the steeples and silos of sleeping Franchise. In their senior year Candy had received permission to rent a room off-campus, with another girl, who for erotic reasons of her own was much in Green Bay. The room, above a realtor's office, was until this