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The
Cotillion
Excerpt
FOREWORD
to whom it may concern
(and to all of you who ought to be)
My name is Ben Ali Lumumba, and I'm free, Black and
twenty-three. Okay, Lumumba is my given name. Dig. The
name I gave myself, that is. My slave name was-well
to hell with that. I'm a writer, understand. And I just
finished the novel that I'm forewording to you, dear
readers. I used to write my novels as I lived them from
Rio all the way to Zanzibar. In the oral tradition of
my African ancestors. I wrote my novels with my laughter
and my tears, with my blood and sweat and years of wondering
as I wandered (thanks to Langston) carousing, reading,
brawling, learning, looking, drinking, fornicating,
from Tashkent to Johannesburg, with all races and religions.
I did not discriminate. Right now though, I should state,
categorically, I have a tendency to boast and brag,
or, in other words, exaggerate, and sometimes I'm a
liar, like most men who have been to sea. I was a seaman,
see?
Yeah,
and like I can lie with the best of them. Which ought
to put me in good stead as a writer, right? One has
to lie sometimes to get closer to the truth. Check that
out. Okay, so after all those years of the seven seas
and far-off places in my blood, I was a salty sonofabitch,
and I didn't mind dying if dying was all. And here I
am back in the Apple, New York City, and my land legs
are still a little wobbly, but all that is over now,
and I have settled here in this place a few blocks from
where my mother birthed me. Dig. I decided to be a writer.
What else could I do, sentenced as I was (by me) to
dry land for the rest of my young life's duration? I
mean, I'd had it, for a time, with that traveling-is-broadening
shit. Now I was ready to zero in. Focus, baby. I bought
me a typewriter months (or was it years?) ago, brought
it to my crib and began to write my first book. Then
I started on my second book, after I gave up on my first
one. Temporarily. My first book was entitled All the
Way to Timbuktu, but I laid it aside temporarily till
I could learn much more intelligence about the international
scene, where things are never ever what they seem. My
second book is the one I have just finished, the one
I'm introducing with this hell?re introduction to whomsoever
it may concern. Dig it.
This book is kind of halfly autobiographical and halfly
fiction, all based on facts as I have gathered them.
I got my log together, baby, from the natural source,
the horse's mouth and his hinder parts. Also from the
lips of the sweetest girl on this terrible wonderful
earth. Dig it, and like I went to one of them downtown
white workshops for a couple of months and got all screwed
up with angles of narration, points of view, objectivity,
universality, composition, author-intrusion, sentence
structure, syntax, first person, second person. I got
so screwed up I couldn't unwind myself, for days. I
said, to hell with all that! I'm the first, second and
third person my own damn self. And I will intrude, protrude,
obtrude or exclude my point of view any time it suits
my disposition. Dig that. I read all the books on writing.
Egri, John Howard Lawson, Percy Lubbeck, McHugh, Reynolds.
You name it. I know all about the dialectical approach,
character development, cause-and-effect and orchestration,
the obligatory scene, crisis, climax, denouement, and
resolution. I was uptight with the craft shit. Can you
dig it?
I
decided to write my book in Afro-Americanese. Black
rhythm, baby. Yeah, we got rhythm, brothers, sisters.
Black idiom, Black nuances, Black style. Black truths.
Black exaggerations. Oh I can use the big Anglo-Saxon
words with the best of them, and I used them every now
and then for the benefit of those brothers and sisters
of the middle-class persuasion who are unduly impressed
with the king and queen's faggoty unimaginative English.
Nevertheless and basically, this is a Black comedy.
I mean a Black black comedy. Dig it. And I meant to
do myself some signifying. I meant to let it all hang
out.
But
now, on with the story. And Black blessings to you all.
Right on-
Ben
Ali Lumumba
son of
Harlem, U.S.A.
P.S.
But the story is not about me, not really about me,
but about a fox named Yoruba.
B.A.L.
1
YORUBA
Hey!
call her yoruba, right?
High priestess of the Nation!
You ready for that?
Negritude? Okay?
African queen!
Black and comely was this Harlem princess.
Yoruba, her father named her.
And
Yoruba she would always be-praise Allah from whom all
blessings flow. Would you believe-GreatGodAlmighty!?
She
was Yoruba Evelyn Lovejoy, a working girl that summer,
and a queen she was among all working girls. Hell yes!
Say it plain-Yoruba! Dig it! And named she was, proudly,
from her Georgia father's Black and wondrously angry
and terribly frustrated nationalism.
Pure, beautiful, untampered-by-the-white-man Yoruba.
Black and princessly Yoruba, as if she'd just got off
the boat from Yoruba-land in the western region of the
then Nigeria. Sometimes, when her father got into one
of his rare and whiskeyed moods, he would trace his
father's father's father back to Ogshogbo, then further
eastward, to Benin City, then clear across the mighty
Niger, at Asaba and Onitsha, south by southeast, by
ferry, foot and mammywagon, all the way to Arachuku,
that land of fable of the long juju.
Now-she-the
girl-Yoruba-walked westward through the jungle to Eighth
Avenue and went down into Manhattan's man-made earth
and took the "A" Train. Her middle name was
Evelyn, the first syllable pronounced, Britishly, like
the woman made from Adam's ribs and like Christmas Eve
and the night before the New Year. Spell it e-v-e-l-y-n-pronounce
it Eve-lyn, was her mother's contribution. Her strong,
proud, West Indian mother from the small and windward
island of Barbados.
The "A" Train almost leaped the tracks, as it
thundered underneath the city, reeling and rocking and
screeching, like it had blown its natural stack. Winging
nonstop from Fifty-ninth all the way to the main stem
at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth. Vacuum-packed with
perspiring, dehydrated, Black and white humanity of
all sizes and denominations. And air-swindled concoction
of sound and sweat and soap and perfume and beaucoup
talk, Afro-Americanese, West Indianese, Italianese,
Jewishese, Puerto-Ricanese, all screwed up with New
Yorkese. Africa-Europe-Caribbean. East to West, the
twain was met. And it was a mess to listen to. And hot
air, baby, by the ton, hot air was blown, stirred together
by the whirligig electric fans overhead and shaken up
by this St. Vitus-dancing, boogalooing, epileptic "A" Train. Funky Broadway all the time. Funky! Oooh! Yeah!
Dig it! Creating one overwhelming impact which rendered
Yoruba's senses numb, and the dear child almost senseless.
She felt a total assault upon her mouth, nostrils, eyes,
ears, throat. Her Black and brown and righteous body.
It happened every week-day that memorable summer, after
she finished high school and took a job downtown in
the garment wilderness.
FIVE P.M. And people erupted out of the monstrous buildings
like missiles catapulted from great guns, onto the streets,
and flowed in floodtide through the jungle toward those
insatiable subways, which, like great carnivorous beasts,
starved, and from another age, swallowed men and women
whole; then, belching and breaking wind and regurgitating,
threw them up again onto the overflowing streets uptown.
Every evening it was-
take
the "a" train
Every day. Every day.
Hurry-Hurry-Hurry-
take the "a" train
She-the girl-Yoruba closed her eyes, as she held onto
the subway strap, closed her large eyes, dark and wide
ones, and she could hear the Duke of Ellington's immortal
music, feel it pouring through her senses like cascades
of clear branch water, oooweee! Hear it, feel it, in
all its varied and varying movements, in a stormy crescendo
now, surging ever onward, upward, swelling, gathering
its forces as it went, sweeping all and everything before
it, even as the train itself went clackety-clack, slapping
the rails with its own peculiar Afro rhythm, amassing
speed and sound and frenzy, as it moved toward its conclusion.
Destination Harlem. It was the Soul Train. Dig it, mother-brother-sister-
take the "a" train
It was no accident, the girl, Yoruba, thought, that
a Black man had composed this great song, this tribute
to New York's regal train. A train whose soul was as
Black and beautiful as burnished ebony. It had rhythm.
It had heart. It had Negritude. Right? And it was not
the "B" or "G" Train, but the "A" Train.
With
her left hand Yoruba clung to the subway strap with
a kind of final desperation, as the train roared past
the local stop at One Hundred and Third Street, wailing,
moaning, groaning, making with the beat and the righteous
sounds and taking care of business. At the same time
the Black girl jabbed, accidentally-on-purpose, her
right elbow into a cushiony overstuffed belly of a fortyish-year-old
manchild, who stood behind her much too close to her
for comfort (Yoruba's blessed comfort), and was trying
his best to maneuver himself into an even cozier situation.
She had a violent, well-trained right elbow for mashers.
Sometimes she carried a hatpin for such overfriendly
straphangers.
The famous train was moving now past the local stop
at One Hundred and Sixteenth Street, and braking, shaking,
screaming, rocking, screeching like a jet airliner coming
in for landing. A case of pure and sweet hysteria. The
sound, the smell of burning black-eyed peas and fresh
coffee cooking, the shakes, the dance, the rock-the-roll,
the sweat, the vacuum-packed homo sapiens were too much
for Yoruba sometimes, and today, this day, she knew
a giddiness in her head and a feeling like seasickness
at rock-bottom in her stomach. She thought she might
faint standing up, and she panicked for a moment. She
would not faint though, she knew she could not faint,
for there was no space for such bourgeois self-indulgences
here on this jam-packed subway train.
She
was Yoruba (sometimes her father called her Ruba, with
affection). Eve and Ruby to her mother. Yo-roo-ba to
some. She was a burnished-Black-brown slightly burnt
toast of a girl; her skin was like it had been scrubbed
with fine stones from the River Niger (her father used
to say); scrubbed till her dear dark skin cried out
in hurt and protest. She had her mother's thin nose;
the tip was turned up ever so slightly like her mother's
disposition. She had her father's wide thick, curving
generous lips, sensitive and sensuous. Life-love-anguish.
Her mouth told you so many things. Compassion, tears,
laughter. Her mouth was soul music, brothers. Listen
to the sounds come out. The bottom lip perhaps slightly
smaller than the top. Her eyes were Black on Black.
Oooh! so deeply black were they, and wide in the middle
and narrow at the outer edges. And slanting like the
Orient. The girl thought, here on this train there is
no room to faint, as smilingly she remembered an old
blues fragment she had heard the great Odetta do the
one time Ruba had been down to the Village Gate. She
thought:
ain't it hard to stumble
when you got no place to fall?
As
the train came reeling squealing screaming to a lurching
stop, throwing bodies against bodies, in an orgy of
crazy off-time dancing, and various and varied familiarities,
Yoruba thought she knew how Jonah must have felt in
the belly of Moby Dick's great-great-grandpoppa. She
thought, Jonah never had it so good. Grandpop's stomach
could not possibly have been as congested as the "A" Train. First and foremost, the great train was Billy
Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. So it was Blood. Right?
It was sound and frenzy, the thunder and the lightning.
The train was folks. Right? The train was also happenings.
Always and forever happening. Every day-every day. Hurry!
Hurry! Hurry!
Halfway between One Hundred and Sixteenth and One Hundred
and Twenty-fifth Street, the people fell away from each
other, the waves of people parted like the Red Sea must
have parted when old Moses waved his famous rod. This
time, instead of Moses, here on this train was a tall,
powerfully constructed Black woman, weighing in at about
two hundred and twenty pounds and nearing forty years
of sojourn on this planet. This time, instead of a rod,
it was an umbrella that the lady brandished. And she
waved it above her head and brought it down again and
again upon the blond head of a sawed-off, undernourished,
red-faced white man, as she drove him before her, and
beat him out of the train onto the platform. She outweighed
the pale-faced culprit by seventy pounds or more. A
clear-cut case of overmatching, or undermatching, depending
on your point of view or how you placed your bets this
evening.
As the dangerous and dastardly molester (you ready?)
pulled himself, with difficulty, slowly up from the
platform, Miss Heavyweight of Nineteen-Sixty-Something
shook her umbrella down at him, and told him, with enormous
dignity: "I bet you'll think twice about it the
next time you git it into your rotten mind to git fresh
with a poor helpless Black lady like me, you goddamn
no-good peckerwood trash. It's gittin so it ain't safe
for a lady to be by herself in broad open daylight.
I don't know what's gonna 'come of us poor defenseless
womenfolks. I declare before the Lord I don't."
The
four-eyed, bug-eyed, cross-eyed desperado looked like
an accident on the lookout for a place to make the scene.
He mumbled his apologies and dragged himself away down
toward the other end of the platform, limping along
pathetically, as if his life depended on it. Miss Poor
Defenseless Womanhood brandished her umbrella after
the hapless hoodlum. Then she turned and walked proudly,
and with righteous indignation, up the stairway to the
street.
Some
of the Black folk (including Yoruba) cracked up with
laughter, when a brother amongst them raised his arm
and pumped his right fist up and down, and shouted softly: "Black Power, mother! Black Power! Keep the mammy-hunching
faith!"
Up
topside on the street it was summertime and the breathing
was easier than down there in that underworld underneath
the city. Are you ready for Yoruba? Yoruba Evelyn Lovejoy?
She, the girl, the princess, felt good walking along
her street (One Hundred and Twenty-fifth) in the middle
September of her eighteenth year, and the dear fox knew
she looked good walking; moreover she was a child who
loved to walk. She always walked in a hurry, like she
was late for an appointment. Long-legged Black girl,
she was aware of the men along the main drag and the
eyes they had for her and the shaking of their heads
in honest admiration. She strolled like she was used
to carrying bundles on her lovely head, as if somehow
she conjured up from the depths of some dark mysterious
whirlpool of sweet remembrance deep inside of her, she
called up memories of the roads her great ancestors
used to travel on their way to Lagos and Accra. Enugu,
Bamako, Ouagadougou. Her distant cousins still strolled
down those distant highways. Uhuru! Skin-givers-plank-spankers!
Ujamaa!
She
was Yoruba and she was pretty poetry set to rhythm.
Proud she was and princessly. Her long legs were not
skinny, neither were they fat. Slimly round-roundly
slim. Her ample hips were built a trifle high up from
the sidewalk. That was the only thing. Some of her friends
in high school used to call the girl "High Pockets."
One old fresh big-head boy always called the child "Long
Goodie."
But
behind all that and notwithstanding, she was Yoruba
of the long strides and the swaying hips and the black
heavy hair down to her shoulders, of the dark staring
eyes, now laughing, now brimming-full with sorrow. She
walked along the street of dreams. Past the Baby Grand
Club, where Nipsey Russell used to call the question
nightly, before he got "discovered." Walked
past Frank's Restaurant, and across Eighth Avenue.
One Hundred and Twenty-?fth Street was also the street
of sounds. Magni?cent sounds. Jukeboxes all along the
main stem blasting out the classics. Serious music by
serious musicians. Max Roach, Ray Charles, Lou Rawls,
Etta Jones, Archie Shepp, John Coltrane, horn-blowing
horn-blowers. Abbey Lincoln wailing freedom. Nina's
Mississippi Goddamn! And always there was the aristocracy.
The Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie and the Earl
of Hines, Lester Young, the late lamented President.
Yoruba loved the street of sounds. This child dug the
aristocracy. And she was an aristocrat. Dig it! She
was clean! Black and comely! Understand?
The
marquee at the Apollo told her James Brown was holding
court. And Pigmeat Markham. George Wiltshire-yeah! All
right! Well! Folks were lined up almost half the block.
New York's riot squad stood at the everloving ready.
Three young jiving signifying cats, standing outside
the theater away from the line, eyeballed her as she
?owed along the main stem. Amongst all these strolling
people, she stood out like Lew Alcindor.
As
she passed, she heard one of them say, in a kind of
singsong, "Hi do, Miss Foxy Youngblood, please
m'am!"
Another
said, "Walk pretty for the people!"
The third one said, "Lord, make me truly thankful
for what I'm about to perceive!"
Yoruba
took it all in stride (and this father's child could
truly stride). Her head held aloft, she always walked
three inches taller than her actual height. (Did you
ever dig Miriam, on stage, Makeba?) Yoruba's face did
not give away the fact that she had heard the brothers
sounding on her, signifying, but all the same she felt
a nervous giggle in the bottom of her stomach.
"Walk that walk, Miss Sweet Chocolate Fox!"
"Miss Fine Brown-Black Frame!"
"Come on home, Miss Youngblood!"
Across
the street and down the block was the Black and Beautiful
Burlesque (the B.B.B. as it was called with fond aVection),
a famous girlie house, newly founded, where Afro-naturalized
Black beauties did a digni?ed striptease, by the numbers,
every day and thrice on Sunday. Long lines of voyeurs
clear around the block. And there were pickets picketing
pickets picketing pickets, who were picketing. After
a while you had to be some kind of a genius to ?gure
who was picketing whom and how come and what for. There
was a Black Nationalist group picketing the theater
against the whole idea of Black nudity. "A pure
disgrace!" There was another group of Black picketeers
against the admission of white voyeurs.
"Keep the Hunkie's eyes oV our Beautiful Black
women!"
There
was a group of integrated picketeers who came out forthright
for integrated burlesque queens. White queens had ?led
complaints against B.B.B. with the Human Rights Commission.
B.B.B. was where the action was, and there were ?st
?ghts every other night.
Across Seventh Avenue almost a hundred folks were gathered.
In the midst of them a Black man stood on a ladder beside
a ragged Star-Spangled Banner, which ?apped lifelessly
and indiVerently in a soft September breeze. A reddish-brown
smog hung over the city, ominous and brooding, as if
it might ?ing ?re and brimstone down upon the Black
and true believers any minute. The man on the ladder
was waving his arms back and forth and up and down,
as if he were directing traYc. He was working up a perspiration.
But Yoruba could not make out what he was saying until
she crossed over the beautiful wide parkway of an avenue.
Now she stood on the outskirts of the group of Black
folk and half listened to Billy "Bad Mouth" Williams. Self-styled Black nationalist leader. Self-appointed.
Self-anointed. Mayor of Black nationalist Harlem. God's
and/or Allah's most precious gift to the lucky Harlem
masses. Don't take anybody else's word for it. Check
it out with Bad Mouth himself. He'd tell you he was
the last of the great Black Nationalists. Uncrowned
prime minister of the Black government in exile. Hey!
There was Garvey, Malcolm, Bad Mouth Williams. After
that-well, Armageddon.
Yoruba
overheard one man in the crowd running down the action
to another. "Bad Mouth's here every damn day the
Good Lord sends, running his game, just as often as
goose go barefooted. He's the biggest bullshitter on
the Avenue."
He
was a man of medium height, was Bad Mouth, powerfully
gotten together, especially through his massive shoulders.
Coal-black was his skin, his eyes a?ame like burning
coals. And he could talk that talk. He could really
blow. He never drew large crowds like Malcolm used to
draw. And Yoruba remembered Malcolm. Oh my, yes, yes,
yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Praise Allah-she remembered Malcolm.
A Salaam Alaikum! Tall and ?re-haired, manhood oozing
from every pore of him, ?ery in his oratory, lightning
fast of wit, uncompromising in his integrity, tough
and tender with his people. She remembered Malcolm.
She had been helplessly and hopelessly in love with
him, like a thousand other girls her age who were of
the Black persuasion, and she had cried continuously
and for four weeks running after that February Sunday
of the fatal infamy.
But
like the man said, Bad Mouth was consistent. Every day.
Every day. And he was a natural-born champeen at haranguing
and cajoling. Yoruba had heard most of his spiel it
seemed, a hundred times and more, and in many variations.
Bad Mouth could phrase like Louis Armstrong, could orchestrate
like Cootie Williams.
"I was born in North Carolina." Bad Mouth
paused and let this great revelation sink in. "I
lived in a house that I could lay on my pallet and look
up through the roof and dig the stars, and look down
through the ?oor and count the chickens. It was built-in
ventilation."
Behind this statement came a chuckling kind of laughter
from his audience. Yoruba laughed, notwithstanding she
had heard it all before. She laughed almost unknowingly.
"We
got so damn much fresh air we could hardly catch our
breath. Almost choked ourselves to death."
They laughed more loudly now. Warming up. And gathering.
"Go on, Bad Mouth."
"Tell it like it i-s is!"
"You
oughta be shame of yourself telling them all them bogus
lies!"
A
four-eyed bearded young man shouted, "Check that
shit out, Bad Mouth! Run it down, baby brother! Run
it down!"
"Watch
your language, young man," another man said to
the bearded young man.
"You
ain't got nothing to laugh about," Bad Mouth told
his audience. "Down home we did at least breathe
fresh air, but up here you don't do nothing but ?ll
your lungs with poison. Damn white man so greedy behind
them Yankee dollars, he has polluted the air you breathe
and poisoned the water you need to drink. Charlied so
greedy he'll wipe out his own race including his own
self just to make some more of that bread. And you niggers
running around here following them hustling preachers
teaching you to love the white man. You gon pray for
him that spitefully use you."
"Put
bad mouth on 'em, Bad Mouth!" one tall, skinny
Black cat shouted softly. He sported the baddest Afro-natural
hairdo Yoruba had ever seen, standing underneath that
wild black bush so thick and so way out the sun could
never touch his face, and he was slowly going pale from
the lack of sunlight. He wore a truly bad dashiki, long
earrings ?apping from his hound-dog ears like jingle
bells. Everybody on the street knew him to be a plainclothesman
in the hire of New York's Finest, even though his clothes
were hardly plain. Sometimes he wore a long ?owing yellow
boubou. He made all the meetings, the greatest shouter
in the crowd. Every day. Every day. Old Plainclothes
always made the scene.
Bad
Mouth continued. "These jackleg preachers telling
you when Charlie kick your ass on one cheek, you supposed
to turn the other one. You supposed to bend over and
to tell him, 'Be my guest.' That's how come some of
you walk bent over all the time. You done turned them
cheeks so many times you can't hardly sit 'em down to
rest."
"Blow,
Bad Mouth! Blow, baby! You bad-mouth motherfucker!"
"Rap, brother!"
"Sit down-sit down-you can't sit down-"
Bad Mouth paused and asked his people, "Am I right
or wrong?"
"Right!"
Plainclothes was jumping up and down. "Rap your
Black thing, baby!" He was working himself into
a lather. Sometimes he wore a red, black and green African
robe, one shoulder bare, the hem of the garment sweeping
the street, as if he were from the sanitation department
instead of the police.
"Check
it, Bad Mouth. Check that shit out!"
"Blow, baby, blow!"
"Do
your thing, baby!" The dashiki-ed plainclothesman
was screaming now at the top of his voice. Some of the
brothers called him Maxwell Smart. Some brothers called
him less aVectionate names.
"Run it down-run it down!"
"Them
hustling preachers telling you to love the man that
kicks your Black ass, and you ain't got no better sense
than to follow what the hustlers tell you. They the
biggest shuckers God ever put breath in."
"Blow, baby, blow!"
"Takes
a shucker to know a shucker!" From a lady in the
crowd.
"One
more time!"
Bad
Mouth continued. "I know hustling when I see it.
I used to be a hustler my own damn self."
"Used
to be?" From a brother in the audience.
"My
daddy was a stone hustler. Taught me all the ?ne points
of shucking and hustling. That's right. My daddy was
one of them big fat greasy Black and burly chicken-eating
Baptist preachers down in Peckerwood, North Carolina."
"Peckerwood,
North Carolina? Come on, Bad Mouth!"
One brother in the crowd said, "You a lying ass
and a tinkling symbol!"
"That's
right," Bad Mouth answered. "That's where
my daddy used to preach. That's where I come from. Peckerwood,
North Carolina. My daddy was a stone jackleg. Picked
cotton all week long and talked shit all day Sunday."
The
crowd was laughing now, without restraint. A toothless
old lady shouted merrily, "Mind your langwitch,
son, else I'll pull you down oV that ladder and wash
your mouth out with lye soap. Don't think you so big,
I won't take you down a peg or two."
"Uh-uh!" From a chuckling brother in the crowd.
"Go on, Mother," Bad Mouth said, good-naturedly.
"Go sell your papers on another corner."
"I
ain't your mother," the old lady ?red right back
at Bad Mouth. Both of them were speaking louder now,
almost shouting, competing with the ?re trucks that
came clanging down the avenue past the meeting, piercing
eardrums with their sirens blasting. Every evening about
this time the ?re trucks paid their respects to Bad
Mouth's meetings, or to any other meeting on this corner
of all corners. The speaker's ladder stood in front
of Michaux's famous Black and nationalistic bookstore.
Diagonally across the avenue stood the famous Hotel
Theresa, where the great Joe Louis used to hang out
in the late thirties and early forties, and where history
was made in the early sixties, when Fidel took up lodging
there and people stood outside in the chilly rain and
shouted:
"Viva Castro!"
"Viva Fidel!"
"I
ain't your mother," the old lady repeated, shouting
even louder this time. "If your mother hadda brung
you up right, I wouldn't have to be putting your backside
down this late in life."
"OOOoo-weeeee!
You ready for that?"
"Grandma
putting old Bad Mouth in the natural dozens-damn!"
"Blow,
grandma! Blow, baby!"
"Old
Bad Mouth do not play the two-time-sixes!"
"Let him pat his big bad feet then. Miles Davis
plays it!"
Everybody was laughing now, including Yoruba. And more
folks were gathering now, attracted by the laughter.
It was as if Bad Mouth and the old lady had learned
their lines and rehearsed them well ahead of time.
Well?
Would you believe?
"Go
along, old lady," Bad Mouth said tolerantly. "I
want to talk to my people about some serious matters.
If you can't listen quietly, get yourself your own corner
and draw your own crowd. I pay weekly rent for this
here corner."
Yoruba
walked away from the gathering crowd, away from the
scattered laughter. Behind her she could hear Bad Mouth's
froggy voice croaking to his people.
"Black brothers and sisters, it's time we chased
the Bible-toting money-changers out of the holy places
of our worship. Am I right or wrong? It's time we got
some healthy-sized buggy whips and kicked some big fat
rusty-dusties and took some names. We got to get our
own houses clean before we can worry about taking care
of Whitey's. Am I right or wrong?"
Yoruba
thought, It's preachers today. Yesterday it was "Negro"
leaders. The day before that it was the "white
Communist liberals." Tomorrow he would be doing
a putdown on something else. The labor movement. The
NAACP. The President. It was always something, or somebody.
Bad Mouth was the World's champeen putdowner. He'd tell
anybody: "Not a living ass is sacred, when Bad
Mouth begins to blow. The best you can do is batten
down the hatches, send out hurricane warnings and pray
to Allah for a rainbow."
Behind
her, she could hear him carrying on. "Take this
city! Take it! Take it! It belongs to you. And it's
just right here for the taking. Between the spooks and
the spicks, we can take this valuable piece of real
estate known as New York City. All we got to do is get
together. But you wanna chase the great and glorious
white folks all over the mother-loving suburbs!"
He paused. "And you don't want no power. You just
want to intergrate."
She
walked a few blocks up the avenue, as the applause and
laughter ebbed behind her, walked past a half dozen
bars and liquor stores, and people, and just about as
many funeral parlors and store-front churches, and people,
and she turned right oV Seventh Avenue into the block
where she had spent most of the eighteen years of her
life. She, the girl, Yoruba, was, at long last, home.
This
evening, somehow, when she reached the block, she felt
an overwhelming relief coursing through all of her senses,
as if she had been on a long long journey into a foreign
land, a hostile country, and now she had come home at
last. It was not the ?rst time she had had this feeling
after she had spent all day downtown in Manhattan in
that jungle that some people called the garment center.
Today, as she walked toward the other end of the block,
warm memories poured over her with the coolness of a
sweet summer shower. And she was a little girl again.
Romping rope (double dutch) and hopscotch (potsy) and
tag and ten-ten-double-ten and follow-the-leader. Tag
was a game that went on and on and on and never ended.
Playing with Enrique and Ernie and Claudie and Lloyd
and Susan and Cheryl and all the rest of that ragtag
group (her mother's term for the gone friends of her
yesteryears). All of the times that came back to her
now from that faraway age were good times to her. It
seemed a million years ago. But Yoruba remembered.
Remembered
skinny, big-eyed, snotty-nosed Ernie when they were
both about six and seven and eight years old (he was
always two or three years older), and they were puppy-lovers,
and he, her ragged Black prince, would come and sit
on her stoop with her for hours and pick his nose and
sometimes suck his thumb, and stare at her in a kind
of wordless admiration. His father was a seaman and
was away from home much of the time. His mother did
days work away up somewhere in the Bronx. Remembered
the day she invited Ernie to dinner, much to her mother's
great annoyance. She had told Yoruba a million times: "I ain't want you playing with them common low-class
Southern niggers on this block, and I particularly ain't
want them in my house."
But at the dinner table she pumped the boy with questions
like she was from the FBI or something.
"How many rooms in your apartment, Ernest?"
"Two rooms and a bath, Miss Daphne."
"Is that exclusive of a kitchen?"
"Exwho-sive?"
Yoruba's
father said, "If you're so interested, why don't
you pay Mrs. Billings a visit sometimes? You are the
nosiest woman God ever made."
Mrs.
Lovejoy ignored her husband, as she had a way of doing-sometimes. "You mean your mother has one room, one kitchen
and a bath, ain't you, Ernest?"
"Yessum, that's what I meant to say. And the toilet
is down on the next floor. We use it with the Williamses.
Sometimes we have to stand in line. Sometimes we have
to use the pot."
"Where
do you sleep, Ernest?"
He
picked his nose and stared at his finger. "With
my mother most of the time, excepting when my uncle
spends the night, he sleep with Mama, and I sleep on
the cot in the kitchen. Course when my daddy is home,
he sleep with Mama-"
Ernie
was usually a quiet boy, but when he got turned on,
it was hard to turn him off again.
During
those days, Yoruba's folks were more "well-off" than Ernie's. They afforded all of two rooms and a kitchen.
All this and a private bath. The girl slept in the living
room on a great Bistro convertible. It was after midnight
when she was awakened by her parents' voices from the
bedroom. She lay there between sleep and wake trying
to get herself together.
Her
mother with her clipped British-Barbadian accent. She
talked twice as fast as her father.
"One
of these days you'll listen to me, damn your Black soul.
I tell you a million times these damn low-class darkies
on this block is no damn good! Nothing but a bunch of
wort'less vagabunds. I ain't blame the white man for
not wanting to live around them."
"Shut
up, woman," Matt Lovejoy harshly whispered. "You
wanna wake up Ruba?"
"That's
why I try to teach my daughter to stay away from these
wort'less pickaninnies on the block. But the more I
try to culturize her, the more you pull the other way.
You're enough the vex the devil himself."
She-the
girl-Yoruba-sitting up in bed and staring through the
darkness toward the bedroom. She had been dreaming,
and she had trouble now figuring out whether this was
part of the dream or not, or was the dream the real
thing and was this a nightmare she had stumbled into?
Lie back on your bed and close your eyes and try to
catch up with your dream again. Shut out the sound of
battle from the other room. Put your fingers in your
ears. Still you hear the battle raging.
"Quiet, woman, goddamnit! Keep your mouth shut
and people'll just think you a fool. Keep opening it
and there ain't gon be no doubt about it."
Yoruba
pulled the sheet up over her head and tried in vain
to shut out the sound of her mother's weeping. "You
ain't appreciate me!" Crying-sobbing-choking. "You
ain't love me!"
Her
father's rough and tender voice. "Come on now,
Daphne-come on now. You know better than that. Come
on now, lil ole crybaby." In the eyes of Yoruba's
imagination, she could see her mother, still shaking
with sobs, cuddling up to her father now. "You
ain't appreciate nothing I try to do." She had
seen it happen before-the times they'd fought in front
of her. "Crybaby-crybaby-crybaby." Her mother
was in her father's arms now, and Yoruba was wide awake,
and it would be hours before she fell asleep again.
She would never catch up with her dream. She could not
even remember what her dream had been about.
Ernie's
mother had died a few years back, and Yoruba had no
idea where Ernie was now or whether he was living or
dead. Maybe he was at sea like his father used to be
most of the time. It seemed centuries ago when they
romped innocent and heedless up and down these streets,
this turf, this block. And ripped their dresses and
tore their pants. And laughed just for the sheer joy
that came from laughter. It didn't have to be funny,
whatever it was they laughed about. Her mother wanted
her to be a lady and never run and sweat and play or
swear or rassle with the hoi polloi. "Never get
your face dirty. Never ever soil your dresses." But her mother fought a losing battle.
She
remembered how she would be playing in the streets with
her friends and she would look down the street and see
her father turn the corner coming home from work, and
she would take off down the block like jet propulsion
and race toward him and leap into his arms. It was the
happiest moment in the day for both of them. Her father
would put her on his shoulders with her legs around
his neck and ride her all the way up the block and into
the house.
Her
mother would scold the two of them. "Take that
child from around your neck. How can I ever teach her
to be a lady? Both of you're just as common as all the
other no-good darkies in this ratty neighborhood."
And it was indeed a ratty neighborhood. The rat inhabitants
made their presence felt all over. Always they were
in evidence. Walked along the streets, worshiped in
the churches, dug the movies in the theaters, especially
the cowboy pictures. Put up light housekeeping in the
tenements. But refused to chip in on the rent. The rat
population was ever on the increase. Wherever people
of the neighborhood were, rats were always very close
by. They had a fond affection for the folks of Harlem.
Notwithstanding, it was a case of unrequited love. Loveless
love. Yoruba would always remember her father's desperate
lifelong battle with the rodent citizenry. Big rats,
little rats, in-between. "There gon be more of
them than Black folks one of these days. They gon take
over Harlem before we do." He would put down big
steel traps all over the apartment and bait the traps
with bread or cheese. But these rats were city-slick
and hip to everything and everybody. Next morning, the
food would be gone, the traps sprung, but not a single
rat in any of the deadly traps. Her father tried to
figure it out, and after months of great puzzling frustration,
he concluded: "These damn rats so hip they put
broom straws in their mouths to spring the traps and
get the cheese."
Yoruba
remembered sleepless nights, with the sound of rats
playing in the kitchen, in the oven, and rattling the
pots and pans. Some nights she would awaken and hear
them scratching and romping around inside the walls.
One night about three o'clock in the morning, a trap
went off (bang!) and they all jumped out of bed and
her father switched on the lights, and before they could
get to the place of execution, bread, rat and trap had
already split the scene.
A
couple of rats got so bold and familiar, the Lovejoys
knew them by sight. They would walk out in broad open
daylight. And stake their claims. Her father named them
Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. He said they had
more sense than their namesakes, seeing as how they
never got caught.
One
night when Yoruba was about five years old, a great
big rat got real affectionate and jumped into her bed
and bit her on the jaw. Left a scar on her face that
was still with her. Her father said it was her tribal
mark. People thought it was a birthmark. Said it was
her beauty spot. Her father battled the rat for more
than half an hour all over the kitchen. Quietly swearing
and swinging the broom, he must have struck the rat
more than fifty times, blood splattering all over the
place, till the rat ran out of steam and let himself
get cornered, and Yoruba's father swung away at him
till the blood flew all over the kitchen floor and all
of the poor rat's insides had come outside.
All
in all they were good days though, rats and all, the
way the girl remembered them. And some days in this
new time, she wished desperately she could turn back
the clock and be her father's baby again. Dirty-faced,
dress-torn, snotty-nosed tomboy. But she could not turn
back the clock. She never really wanted to. And she
was Yoruba, gentle Yoruba, and she had grown to be a
gentlewoman, despite her mother's dedication and determination
that this dear child should achieve ladyship. "Lady
Eve-lyn."
In
front of her house now, three-storied-and-basement brownstone.
They lived on the parlor floor. She hoped her father
had come home from work by now. Particularly this night,
she hoped Matt Lovejoy was already home. She did not
feel like facing her mother alone this evening in the
very very middle of her eighteenth September.
She
turned and stared back down the street past the children
skipping rope, playing potsy, a few of them calling
playful pleasant motherfuckers, past the winos on a
stoop, and the junkies, past the forever double-parked
cars, stared longingly toward the corner at the other
end of the block trying to look Matt Lovejoy around
the corner coming home from work. She felt that if her
father did materialize in the deep glow of the Harlem
sunset she would break into a run like in the old days
when she was six and seven and eight and believed in
a jolly, old, fat white man by the name of Santa Claus,
and thought the whole world was right there on her block
in Harlem, and God was great and God was good and everything
was for the best, because He worked mysteriously, the
Grand Magician of them all. Cars honking, racing motors,
fumes belching, children screaming, cursing, squealing,
laughing. She stared past the busy intersection clear
across Seventh Avenue all the way west to the river
where the sun was a blazing disk of fire and washing
the streets with a million colors and descending slowly
down between the buildings at the very end of the street,
down down it was sinking slowly sinking to set afire
the Hudson River. Her eyes filled up and almost overflowed
at the beauty of the Harlem sunset. The tenements bathed
in soft sweet tender shadows now. She took one long
last look down toward the other end of her block. Come
around the corner, Daddy! Come around the corner! And
I will run again to meet you. She turned toward the
house. Maybe he was already home. Silently she prayed
he was already in the house.
She
was in no mood this day to hear her mother carry on
and on about the grandest of all the Grand Cotillions. "You are indeed a lucky one, Eve-lyn. And of all
the scrumptious places, it will be held downtown at
the Waldorf, where few white folks get a chance to go
and decidedly no niggers at all. You'll be one of those
selected too. The grand magnificent Cotillion. It's
everything I've worked to give you, dearie. The opportunity
of a lifetime. My own dear baby is going to be a debutante!"
The
girl walked wearily up the steps. Suddenly she was of
the aged ones. And heavy-limbed. As if great iron weights
hung from her arms, her legs. Her body tired; her soul
weary; her mind exhausted.
Be home, Daddy!
Be home, Daddy!
Be home, Daddy!
Please!
Be home.
Novels
available in the Coffee House Press Black Arts Movement
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