Home In The Morning (30 page)

They say that truth can set you free, but sometimes too much truth can bury a man. You might say Mombasa was laid in the grave that afternoon, sipping tea in the Sassaports’ living room, each word out of Stella’s mouth another shovel of dirt filling that shell, covering him up, and this was before he returned home, his anger dulled by shock, chastened, to find his wife battered by a psychopath who’d thought to do his leader’s dirty work for him.

Katherine Marie came to in her bed with her eyes failing to open more than a slit, yet through that slit she could see him, Mombasa, weeping at her bedside, begging forgiveness and behind him, Stella Sassaport, holding a stainless-steel bowl of ice chips wrapped in a terry-cloth towel.

Miss Stella told me, Mombasa said through his tears in a voice and manner that sounded very like Li’l Bokay in the old days, she told me the truth about Bubba Ray and I am so very, very sorry, my angel, my queen, so very, very sorry. If you don’t forgive me for failing to protect you, I will kill myself. I will take a rifle and stick it in my mouth, I swear.

Her head hurt. She could not think clearly. She asked him where the children were, and he told her they were ok, they were with her mother. Curiously, she did not ask next where Dume was. Instead, she said: What do you mean about Bubba Ray? Stella told you what about Bubba Ray?

He let the truth spill. He told her about Dume’s accusations, how they’d thrown him for a huge, disastrous loop. But he now knew everything,
he told her, from the adolescent Bubba Ray’s rapine episode to his stalking of her, and she could only ask: But how did you know, Stella? How did you know all these things?

Jackson Sassaport’s wife raised her brows, grimaced, and shook her head. There was only one possible answer to that question, which she opened her mouth to deliver, only Mombasa interrupted, begging forgiveness again, promising the arrest and punishment of Dume once he found him, grasping her hand and covering it with kisses. Katherine Marie feebly drew her hand back, finding that her husband frightened her now, repulsed her as if he had been the agent of assault himself, while at the same time her heart broke at the sight of him destroyed by his own lack of faith in her.

Their marriage was never the same again. It took some time, but Katherine Marie decided to hang on with him mostly for the sake of the children, and because her life was devoted to the Black Warriors preschool and the Black Warriors walk-in clinic. She chose to continue to work tirelessly at his side in the world, but at night in their bed she was stiff and cold. She was hurt, disappointed in him that he had succumbed to the machinations of Dume and Matata. No matter what else happened in their lives, she’d always believed in Mombasa, believed in his character as much as his causes. Ever since that day in front of the village whorehouse, when he’d made his first vows to her, she believed that he’d take care of her, protect her. When Bubba Ray did what he did, it wasn’t her husband’s fault he wasn’t there to pound him into the ground and save her. But this time, this time she couldn’t help herself. She blamed him. Some part of it was his fault in her mind. Mombasa’s lack of trust, his anger, Dume’s violence: it got all mixed up together in her mind and she could not break away from any of it no matter how often they knelt together and prayed to Jesus.

In the greater community, she was in control. Once she had her strength back, she held a powwow with Dume’s men, demanding
apologies and loyalty oaths, which they offered. But because her innocence and Dume’s guilt made them co-perpetrators of the worst crimes, they hated her more than when they’d thought her guilty. Since Dume had disappeared off the face of the earth, one or the other of them daily suggested to Mombasa in either a veiled or direct manner that what they all needed more than anything was to even the score, to take revenge upon the man and town who had come between him and his wife, him and his warriors, to take revenge upon Bubba Ray Sassaport and Guilford, Mississippi. On a dark and pitiless day fresh on the heels of a long, dry night when his wife had turned from him in their bed once again, he agreed and asked his men to create for him an opportunity. They came up with a plot to blow up the draft board while Bubba Ray was there running paperwork in and out. The timer on the bomb failed. The plot was uncovered.

The day the federal agents came to arrest him, Mombasa was home helping his wife bathe the children. When the SWAT team knocked down his door, they were dressed in full battle gear with vests, helmets, shields, the finest rapid-fire weapons the year had to offer. The two boys screamed. The baby wailed. Mombasa stood up in his running suit, all soapy from the splashing of the kids, and without resistance offered himself up to the police as quietly as a lamb, saying: Please, please put down those weapons. My babies are here. They shackled his hands. They shackled his feet. Just before he was led out through the broken door, he turned to look at Katherine Marie. She was holding their youngest, Njeri. Her eyes were full of tears that did not flow. What have you done now, she asked. What have you done? I’m sorry, was all he said. I’m sorry.

He certainly was. Sorry enough to plead guilty. Every day before his trial and every day after, that look of cold tears refusing to fall burned into his soul. That and the eyes of his children, largest to smallest, rounded by fear. He sought redemption. He sought punishment,
without which he knew redemption could not come. And punishment the federal court was happy to provide. When the time came for him to say his piece, he spoke openly.

A madness overtook me, he told the judge. An anger and a madness. I saw that all my teachings were for naught. For there was a country I’d envisioned, a country of black men and women proud and strong, steeped in their African heritage, living apart but equal from their white neighbors, living apart but with Christian love the river between them. I saw them black and white fording that river that its currents might guide them in all their relations, I saw that river feeding the crops of righteousness on the banks of both sides. For then the black man would no longer be the thorn of infamy in the white man’s foot preventing him from walking blameless into the future nor the white man the sword of intimidation and dependence over the black man’s head. Each would become what the Lord Jesus intended: perfect men, loving each other without sin, without anger. Oh, the day came when I saw that all this was a shibboleth, a sham, the ridiculous dream of a ridiculous man. I was betrayed by my loved ones and made blind by a world that fostered their betrayal. And all the thoughts I had thereafter were thoughts of revenge.

While the story he told was only half the story, the judge believed the half he heard. He also believed every piece of evidentiary propaganda the feds put before him about Mombasa Cooper. He read transcripts of the famous speeches and radio interviews, whose centerpiece was the rage of the black man, Mombasa’s oratory métier, so to speak. From the birth of his movement, in the days after he fled from Parchman then rose up from the underground transformed, he preached loudly and on all occasions that rage was a phenomenon that came to the Negro as naturally as lilies came to the field, for the black man had neither to toil nor spin to experience it. From the moment he drew his first breath, he carried the seed of rage in his blood as the birthright of
oppression. Only as a Black Warrior of the African Jesus could he find the balm of divine love to transform it, he further taught, but that part of his theology was redacted by the prosecutor.

Considering him an imminent danger to the community at large, the judge sentenced him to life in federal prison, where the Black Warriors of the African Jesus survived in chains as a prison cult. Out in the free world where it mattered, the Panthers and others absorbed those Mombasa left behind. Soon enough, Malaika Cooper went back to being Katherine Marie, returning to Guilford with her children in the company of Jackson and Stella Sassaport, who returned for their own reasons, an event that did nothing at all to mitigate Mombasa’s anger and no doubt enflamed it further, reviving in the man a constant fire of discontent, which he battled against every waking hour of his imprisonment. Many days, he was victorious and offered thanks in prayer and sacrifice. Other days, he failed, exploding into acts of brutality large and small to his great remorse despite the fact that the objects of his outbursts nearly always deserved a beat-down or worse, no matter what god sat in judgment.

Katherine Marie’s world was in shambles. She had her own set of unchristian responses to all that happened. She was furious with Mombasa for ruining his life, their children’s, and her own—angry enough to abandon the Black Warriors to their imprisoned founder, refusing to take on the role of surrogate for the movement, which hastened its demise. She was angry with the government that sentenced her husband so harshly after all the injustice he’d experienced in the past. She was plain angry in general, angry with a whole pack of people. She couldn’t work up anger toward Stella, though. Stella was an outsider. A wrongheaded, willful, but well-intentioned outsider. When she contemplated the catastrophe that was her life, she made diagrams of cause in her mind drawn crisscross with betrayal. Stella was off the page. Jackson was not.

One night during Mombasa’s trial when Jackson brought a gift of groceries and children’s toys over to her house after work, she lit into him for telling Stella what he had promised to keep secret forever. He had to bear some guilt, she told him, for everything that went out of control after that, including Dume’s beating and Mombasa’s bomb plot. If only he’d kept his vow forever, everything would have been alright. Nothing so irrevocably awful as what had happened would have happened. The vow, she said, had been sacred. The sacral power of the vow had protected both Mombasa and her. But once it was broken, bad juju had flooded them. Oh, why did he do it? Why did he betray her confidence? Why did he tell Stella? Why did he not see that his vow to her took precedence over what he felt for his wife? Oh, never mind, she said, don’t even try. She knew why.

You’ve been corrupted! Katherine Marie charged, stabbing a bony finger into his chest. It’s insane you can’t see what she’s done to you! Changed you into a lowlife weasel! My dear white Southern gentleman manqué. You are a fraud! No true gentleman would do what you’ve done! For what? For her!

Jackson begged her forgiveness until she granted it, groveled without understanding at all how she came to these conclusions, especially the one that made him the scapegoat, the bad guy of the whole debacle. He’d never forget the way he’d at last dropped to his knees in front of the couch on which she sat, her sweet chin pointed up, her arms folded across her chest, her mouth wrinkled up in disdain. Her right hand suddenly shot forward to just under his nose and he kissed it as if she were a queen or a pope, begging pardon one last time before she said: Alright. I’ll forgive you. Now, get up. You look ridiculous.

When he reported their conversation to his wife, expecting her to defend him, to wonder with him at the remarkable inconsistencies of Katherine Marie’s thoughts, Stella only laughed. Good! Good! She’s angry and fighting back! At first I thought she was headed down that
sad road of victimhood when she chose to stay home with a man so easily convinced to betray her trust, but now I see: She is back to herself! She has the fire again! Oh, Jackson, can’t you see how wonderful this is? Well, yes and no, was his response, he could and he couldn’t.

Not that either woman cared. They had bonded and their bond was fresh, tight, it innervated them. Like all women who feel finished with seeking the love of a man, whether because they are supremely secure in their attachment or supremely disenchanted, this bond took center stage in both their lives while Jackson and Mombasa became ancillary, taken for granted.

After Mombasa went to prison, Katherine Marie needed the Sassaports as much as they needed her. As the man left standing, Jackson was doted on by each of the women, his attentions fought over on occasion, but in a way that threatened no one. Although he remained in the carnal sense absolutely faithful to his wife, he could not help but sometimes feel as if he had two wives, one of whom he lived with and another for whom he ran errands, dispensed professional advice, and whose children he chauffeured from school to sports to dance lessons and sometimes, when it could not be helped as their mother was busy, to the prison to visit their daddy. Until the women argued, Stella was content. She had her work, her friend, her friend’s children to foster and lobby for. Under her wing, Katherine Marie got the education she’d always longed for and started her nursing career in earnest. Everybody’s lives were busy, productive. Stella led the local fund-raising drive for the new temple Rabbi Nussbaum built over in Jackson, but the building was bombed not six months after its dedication. Two months later the front of his home was blown off too. Nussbaum wanted to leave Jackson after that but couldn’t find another job. He remained depressed, despite Stella’s best efforts at cajoling him, until 1973 when he finally retired to San Diego. Six months after Beth Israel was bombed, Dr. King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy joined
him in the afterlife shortly thereafter. Stella, Jackson, and Katherine Marie might have fallen into a deep depression themselves over all this death and mayhem, but a war was declared on poverty and there was too much to do to mourn for long. They moved back home where the South was slowly changing while essentially they did not, a fact that made them all delirious with a sense of purpose, achievement, and happiness—all of them, that is, except Mombasa, who moldered in prison, stewing in his anger and regret.