Insurrections (26 page)

Q. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A.
Bad reviews don't bother me. Like I said, it's another Cointelpro. They scared of a nigga like me rising up and becoming the black messiah. From now on, call me the Black Messiah [laughs]. But all this bullshit goes with the territory. It's cool. I know I got a great album. If you don't like it, then you brainwashed. I'm light years ahead, man. You might not be able to figure it out for ten, twenty years
.

Q. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A.
Look, I make music for my people, point blank. People with feet on their backs
. The children of Reaganomics still choked by evil economics,
to quote a great man—myself. But truly, I don't give a fuck who else listens to it as long as their money is green. If crackers want to pay me to talk black liberation to them, man, it's all good
.

Q. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A.
I want freedom, justice, and equality for my people—the same shit everyone else wants
.

It was a Wednesday evening when I walked into Hair It Is and froze in the doorway as the eyes of the women in the shop fell upon me. They waited for me to speak and I tried, but nothing came out. A woman walked over and grabbed me by the hand.

You must be Buckwheat, she said. Your wife told us you were coming. We're not going to bite. Come on.

What the heck happened to your hairline? a hairdresser with short trimmed hair like a boy's called out, and a chorus of giggles followed her mockery.

Don't worry about her, the woman holding my hand said as she
walked me over to a seat. You should have seen what her head looked like the first time she did it herself.

I tried to respond, telling her I didn't do it myself, but still I couldn't speak. She introduced herself as Shane. She had short elf-lock curls. They shone a lustrous white, and I couldn't stop looking at them. She led me to a spinning chair, almost like the ones in Sonny's II, but different, and immediately she set about washing my hair. Shane massaged my head, and her fingers were soft and smooth. A shiver passed over my scalp.

You want your nails done too? Of course you do, your wife said the works. She already paid for it, you know. You got a nice wife, Buckwheat. Just sit back and relax.

I felt a warm hand holding my left index finger and a file dragging across the nail. Someone removed my shoes and socks and began scrubbing away the dry, dead skin at my right heel, and before long the nails of my feet too were filed and treated with clear polish. I nodded in and out of sleep in their embrace. Finally I awoke to Shane gently shoving me. She held a mirror before my face. I was newly dreadlocked. Not a stray hair out of place, my locks swept back into neat rows. They had shaved my face so that it was as soft and smooth as a lady's thigh. The nails of my hands and feet shone. I was as pretty as a woman.

The beauticians applauded me on my way out, and this only angered me, though I didn't show it. Truthfully, I was enraged. Sitting in my car across the street from the salon, I slammed my fist into the steering wheel, dreaming all the while that it was L'Ouverture's face.

When my eyes caught themselves in the rearview mirror as I drove, I noticed that my eyelashes were long and pretty and when I blinked I looked like a cartoon version of myself. I had never noticed my lashes before. I wondered if the women had applied mascara while I slept as a joke. Perhaps it was my wife's idea. Yes. She told Shane to do it the previous night while I zoned out reading about L'Ouverture. It was retaliation for ignoring her. My eyes kept flitting back to my reflection. Even with the deep frowning crease that thickened my brow, my face still appeared soft and womanly.

Maybe it was my fault for keeping my eyes off the road, but this big black tank—it can only be described that way—veered in front of my Honda sedan, forcing me to jerk the steering wheel sharply to the left.
My tire bumped against the median and I swerved left and right across all three lanes before regaining control. A rapid pulse thumped in my throat. I slammed my foot on the gas pedal and cranked on my high beams, hoping to blind the driver in front of me. I became possessed by the spirit of a more aggressive man.

He moved to the right lane and I pulled alongside him, lowered my window, and waved my middle finger about. The man's windows were tinted and it was a dark night, making him somewhat unreal to me, like a ghost or a shadow. At that moment, as we pulled to a red light, I was content to leave it alone and make the left turn to head home. I raised my window and wondered what my wife would say about my hair. I imagined she'd be happy with my girlish appearance, and I shook my head side to side, feeling my hair gently bounce.

Just as the light turned, the man to my right cracked his window. I could see only the top of his head and a bit of his face. He stuck his hand out the window and gestured for me to lower my glass, and when I did he screamed, Bitch ass nigga! before speeding off.

With the shock of the moment, I didn't move for several seconds until the car behind me honked its horn. I sped off behind the black tank. It was several car lengths ahead, my stuttering Honda barely able to match the tank's speed, though I kept my eye on it.

So many thoughts tussled inside my skull. The man's face, what little of it I saw, was reminiscent of L'Ouverture's. It wasn't just the face but the waves in the piece of his hair that I saw. It was also the exquisitely crisp sideburn I glimpsed. I know it sounds mad, and it seemed mad at the time, but it was a possibility, as L'Ouverture lived right in town, somewhere in the very direction this bastard was headed. And I wondered if—no, I was sure—my hairstyle and my smooth face informed his choice of insult. I gripped the steering wheel tightly with my newly pampered, manicured hands, dodging in and out of traffic, hoping to catch L'Ouverture's Hummer, if indeed it was L'Ouverture driving the tank. And I hoped it was L'Ouverture, for the sake of that murdered officer, for The Barber, for every person inconvenienced by the cop's death, including those that now walked around with Afros or lopsided haircuts.

Earlier in the day I had purchased L'Ouverture's music, and now that I suspected it was him ahead of me, I slid his disc into the stereo system as chase music of sorts.

I flashed and honked, warning cars to move out of my way, and to my surprise they shifted to the side as if I drove an ambulance. It couldn't be him, I thought. Would a political radical zip through the city in a gas guzzler? Perhaps he kept the car to drive during the revolution he sings about, a time when all the world is destroyed and a new era is set to rise. I felt like the madmen I always admired. The reckless rebels I never had the courage to be.

The tank still headed in the general direction of L'Ouverture's neighborhood, and with each length of pavement that we tore through, I became more and more certain that I was tailing him.

The drums crashed through my speakers and then cymbals and rapid thumping. It sounded urgent. It sounded extreme. Now came a woman's voice, operatic and ethereal. It sounded like an apocalypse.

Just as we crossed over to Hilltop, the tony Northside neighborhood in which L'Ouverture lived, the tank stopped across the street from a deli, a convenience store, a cleaner's, and a seafood spot. I pulled my car up behind his. The door of the Hummer flung open and a man stepped out, slamming it behind him. He had a sturdy build, wore a white tank top, and had neatly trimmed hair. I couldn't see the man's face, as there were bright lights behind him.

I still had no calm, lucid thoughts as he came toward my car cursing and pointing. Emotions and colors whirred through my head. It was only later that they made any sense.

I charged toward the man, barely looking at him, swinging in a fantastic arc, punching him in his thick chest. My blows made a flat slapping noise. He roared and slammed his big fists into my face one by one, bursting my lip. He struck my face again and again, eventually knocking a tooth loose. I became dazed, swinging my hands, not knowing where to strike. My fists hit air, and when I toppled over, they scraped the concrete, tearing skin from my knuckles. The rubber sole of his boot slammed into my face. A mixture of blood and thick snot gushed from my nose. He grasped my dreadlocks and tossed me around. I could feel newly twisted locks unraveling. Pulling hair, I thought, is such a feminine thing to do. I had too much dignity to fight that way. I climbed to my feet, wanting to run, but men don't do that. Do they? No. Again I charged the man, and we clung together in a strange embrace, like weary boxers, though sometimes I wonder if we actually looked like lovers.

Hands pried us apart, and I spit and yelled. My blood stained his tank top. I tried—or pretended to try, I can't be certain which—to charge the man again. What snapped me back into lucidity was a voice from the crowd:

Y'all clowns need to get out of here. I called the police.

The man who spoke was a shop owner, I believe. He came from the deli across the street. I raced to my car, and the man I fought cursed me and called me a coward. People cried out to me, asking if I was all right, but I paid them no mind. I turned my car on and sped off, heading in the direction of my house.

So, was the man I fought really L'Ouverture, the Black Atlas, the Black Nietzsche, the Black Messiah? Of that I can't be certain, and I can't say that I don't care, though I would like to be able to say that I don't care, but the truth is that I still do wonder.

I knew for sure, though, that there was a knurled knot by my right eye and that it would swell. I thought of how angry my wife would be. My lip was torn. There were bruises and cuts along my cheeks and a bleeding space to the right of my front teeth. My hand bled. The skin at my knuckles and my fingers was scraped raw and would later be scarred. The white collared shirt I wore for work was shredded and stained with blood. And I didn't notice it as we fought, didn't at all feel it when it happened, perhaps it was the adrenaline, but I now sported a bald patch at the side of my head. The man had ripped out a handful from its roots. I had lost my soft feminine shine.

I went deep into the Wildlands one day, and when they found me, I was near death. My flesh generated enough heat to keep a power plant going for a month, probably. I burned at 107 as if my heart had been replaced by a tiny sun. The doctor tells me brain death begins at 106. He says this ashen-faced, surprised I'm sitting up, conscious, bleary and dazed, but alive.

My parents sit across from my bed in Cross River Hospital Center, the place I was born. Here too I watched my son, Djassi, push himself into the world. I'm hoping the universe is not angling for some sort of sad symmetry, making my place of birth also my place of death.

Monique & Neville Samson, two human beings yet one person. My father reminds me of when I was four and I hit my older brother, Blair. Daddy asked me why I did it and I said, Dad, you know I'm brain damaged.

Now you are, he says, cackling, leaning into my mother as she taps his arm and tells him to hush.

This is serious, Mr. Samson, the doctor says.

He tells me it's probably malaria or Chik-V, or dengue fever or something else you can't get in America. Don't believe any of that, please. I just went into the forest; I didn't leave the country. Though it's true that mosquitos have never been my friend, what's really going on is that Cross River is trying to kill me. The doctor talks and I can feel my heart beating at a rapid speed and the heat from my skin is burning my sheets but not really, that's just the delirium. I think of the times I visited my godmother and cousins with my grandmother—my mother's mother—in Trinidad back when I was young and Granny was still living. The trucks driving by at night spraying white smoke into the air. Smoke seeping
through the tightly drawn jalousies. The fleeing mosquitos seeking refuge in the house in East Dry River that my mother grew up in, the same house her mother grew up in. The bugs hide for a while but then all die away. For a week, no mosquitos drink from me, and all my old welts stop itching and fade from my skin. In due time the bugs return, swarming me late into the night. Maybe, I think sitting in that hospital bed, they put something deep inside me that's only coming to life now.

Mr. Samson! the doctor says.

Kin! my father calls.

I look up.

The doctor says: What were you doing so deep in the Wildlands anyway?

I tell the doctor I was looking for myself.

(I don't tell my father when he asks.

Nor my mother.

Nor my wife, Peace.

I whisper it to my son later because he's a baby and thus unable to speak it.

I'm not here to tell you about my time in the Wildlands either, so if you've come for that, then I'm sorry, but you'll be disappointed. Remind me later, though, and I might tell you.)

My father breaks the silence. Only two types of people does go so deep in the Wildlands, you know: fools and madmen.

You forgetting the wolfers, my mother replies.

What you think they are?

What about Blair? I ask. He think he a wolf hunter.

My father schupses.

A set of chupdiness, he mumbles. He a fool too. We only have one sensible child, Monique. Laina would never have go so deep in the Wildlands. Your brother and sister call yet, Kin?

Of course not.

My father sighs.

My father talks, but he never talks, you know. When we get silent and it's just hospital sounds around us, and I ask him to tell me about his father, he
pauses and says, What's there to say, boy? Then he becomes quiet and offers to watch Djassi so Peace can visit. Peace is the last person I want to see.

Like, Pop, I say, you tell me the funny stuff, like when that white guy beat up the ref at that soccer game—

Never see a cutass like that.

But what about the other stuff, huh, Dad?

My mother says she'll go to my apartment to watch Djassi. Before either my father or I can object, she's out the door. It's just me and Neville Samson.