Midnight (16 page)

One of the regulars in the Dew Drop Inn informed him, “Oh, these northerners, they do that a lot.”

“But why?”

“Ohhh, for different reasons, identification, whatever.”

Why not get some ID bracelets or something? Why scar somebody up for life?

He did a little stutter step away from the sofa to refresh his gin glass. Chester was right, Africa is heavy.

“Bop, Bop, Bop, youngblood, Africa is heavvvyyyyy. I mean, heavvvvvyyyyy, like layers and layers and layers of heavy. There will be times when you've pulled back one layer and said to yourself—‘Uhhh uhhh, so this is what we got under here huh.'

“But then you'll discover that that's just the top layer for the other top layers. And it's that way about everything—people, plants, animals, you name it. Just when you think you got a grip on something, you discover that it ain't what you thought it was.

“Africa slips in and out of you like that. There will be times when you'll hate Africa and Africans. Yeahhh, your own people. You'll go 'round asking—‘why y'all have to be like that?' But then you'll have moments when the love will come down on you so intensely that tears will come to your eyes.

“I've had all of it and some gray stuff in between.”

Bop remounted the sofa, a fresh dollop of gin in his glass. Gestures. The gestures always grabbed him, the way people seemed to be telling all kinds of stories with their hands. He had stood off to the side one day, watching Patience and a neighborhood woman talk, their hands fluttering like butterflies. If the hands don't say it, I can't imagine what could say it.

The language of the hands was a lot clearer than the verbal kind. Since his aborted Ga class, he had simply allowed the sounds to run into his ears and back out, without giving too much consideration for their meaning.

Wowwwwww.… Ain't this a trip. I'm surrounded by people who could say from one to the other, “Off him!” and I wouldn 't even know that the order had been given
.

He was impressed by the quickness of the Ghanaian eye. It only took a moment for him to realize that they were on to him, to his total scene. It startled him when the realization first took hold. It wasn't so much a matter of what he could see, it was a matter of what he could feel.

He had the impulse a half dozen times to turn to someone and say, “I know you've scoped my shit, what do you think?”

There was no need to do that. He could read in their body language that they dug him. There was a way that the waitress dug around in her nose while she waited for him to decide what he wanted to eat, the way the brother talked to him as he scratched his ass and pulled the cotton from his crotch.

How many times had they joked with Skateboard about playing with his stuff? That didn't seem to matter here. Women scratched and groomed their crotches as much as men. It just simply seemed to be the thing to do. Titties, noses, crotches, body functions assumed another dimension.

He thought about it for an hour one afternoon, realizing that he had just walked past a naked woman taking a shower behind a pile of bricks.
Wowwwwwwww
.

Ghana, Africa, was changing him, he could feel that. It wasn't simply the gin and the beer. There was something else happening that made him feel strangely frustrated because he couldn't find the words to describe it. It had something to do with how fluid people lived. There wasn't that separation between art and life that he had always been taught (either consciously or unconsciously) to respect.

Here, as the philosopher-poet Donny Hathaway put it, “Ever thang is Ever-thang.”

Why do they stack the oranges like that? Damn, I didn't know ripe oranges were green
.

He heard the Muslim call to prayer, nodded his head to the rhumba beat of the church drums down the street, and suspected that he was missing something when the drinkers in the Dew Drop spilled gin on the floor and mumbled prayers.

The knocking on the door seemed far away for a moment.
Who could that be?
He pulled himself into a sitting position on the sofa, took a sip of his drink, and carefully strolled to the door.

“Elena?”

“Well, are you going to let me in?”

“You are welcome.”

“Well, are you going to let me in?”

“You are welcome.”

“You are drunk.”

An hour later they were locked in a deadly sexual struggle.… “You are killing me! You are killing me! You are killing me!”

A few minutes later they keeled over into a sexual slag heap, love-drunk and excited by it. He felt her body pressed against him and felt like crying.

You're killing me? Huh? That's a big joke; I'm the one whose going to die. How could you do it to me, Elena, how could you? Here I come all the way over here to get AIDS
.

Dammit!

The Vernons were due in a day or so, and he had nine more days to feel Africa.

“Elena, you 'sleep?”

“Yes please.”

The next day he wandered through the rutted streets of Osu, alternately feeling sorry for himself—how the hell should a motherfucker feel with a body fulla AIDS?—and strangely elated. The Vernons were due any moment and he felt he had to stuff himself full of experiences before he would be forced to share his life with them again.

The Children of Osu
. The glossy photographs came to life in front of him, to the side, behind him. The little girls un-selfconsciously pulling the crotches of their panties to one side for an innocent pee.

The hop-clap game that the girls played every time they stood in a circle. The little boys who used such ingenuity to create rolling vehicles; Ideal milk cans mounted on straight axle sticks, pulled by lengths of wire. Bottle tops punctured to make four-wheel drives, boys rolling bike rims, old car tires, whatever they could find that would roll.

He couldn't really put his finger on what it was about these children that made them so different, so attractive to him. He had never really paid children much attention; they were always underfoot, a necessary evil.

These were different children. They weren't as loud and rowdy as the little brothers and sisters at home. He had never heard one of them cuss, unless they were doing it in a language he couldn't understand.

They didn't jump up in front of you, challenging you to beat them down, or act out of pocket in any way. They were children and they seemed comfortable with the idea.

He didn't feel the same ease with the brothers his own age.
Wowwwww, these have to be some of the squarest brothers on the planet
.

They were drinkers. He checked them out in the Dew Drop Inn. They came into the place, holding hands (he thought that was odd at first), slugged down four or five tots of gin and brandy, and staggered back out.

He couldn't find a fix for them. They didn't seem to pay the ladies a lot of attention, but it was quite obvious that they did like the ladies.

There was just a gap between himself and them that he felt.

It was like they hadn't done anything or been anywhere or seen anything. He kept a cordial distance.

The woman thing was something else. There was a potential girlfriend for him wherever he paused to do anything; the chick at the post office was always smiling at him. The girl in the kiosk with the big juicy lips winked at him constantly. The schoolgirls in their uniforms, who knew he was an American, dropped their voices whenever he came near.

“Hi you young sisters doin' this beautiful day?”

They giggled and one, the boldest with the best command of English, would answer for the group. “Good afternoon.”

Yeahhh, it was all flowing to some kind of conclusion: The funerals blocking off sections of the street while people got tipsy and did quiet little dances by themselves, mostly women, he noticed. The colors, always the colors. The old man in his red and green kente weave, the jet black woman in red and yellow stripes, the purples, shocking pinks, autumn russets, the ivory whites, turquoise, shades in between shades.

And I thought my shit was going to be eye-catchin'.…

One evening, after a two-hour session of sippin' the local gin at the Shalizar Bar, he stumbled into a chop bar and pulled up on some banku and fish stew.

Wowwww, this shit is good
.

He couldn't really decide if it was good because he was semi-drunk, or whether it tasted better being licked off his fingers, or whether it was just good, period.

Wowwww, this shit is good
.

He couldn't really understand kenkey, that tamale-like ball of corn that was wrapped in an oil leaf. They oughta stick some hamburger off into the middle of this shit. He smiled, thinking of what Chester Simmons would've said regarding his thought of having hamburger in the kenkey.

“That's the problem with the world today, Bop, too many hamburgers floating around. We got some funky chumps who would rather have a hamburger than have a woman. Hamburgers, to them, have become cigarettes. Maybe they oughta be called ciggieburgers, to give credit to their addictive qualities. But it's not really the hamburgers, or ciggieburgers, themselves that cause the real problem; it's the mentality that supports that kind of eating. It begins to intrude on every area—‘burgeremotions.'

“You slap some pre-fab, pseudo-meat patty on a grill, singe a puffed-up piece of synthetic nerve endings beside it, a few dashes of salt and pepper, and everybody is ready to bullshit each other. The grilled onions lie to the ‘burgeremotions,' the pseudo-bread buns collapse at the thought of a real grain, and when a piece of soap-sudsy cheese is mashed on the whole shebang, we're ready to lie each other to death.

“That's the gist of it; we don't want to go too heavily into what burgerization does to a so-called civilization. It's impossible to truly clone extraordinary ideas, feelings, and emotions. Burgerization tends to make a lot of funky chumps believe that they are really on it because they're doing exactly what the next funk chump is doing, either at a faster or a slower pace. They actually begin to think that they're thinking new thoughts, swimming up new streams. Them burger sessions have completely flattened them out.

“Some of them wander off into really bizarre bags: ‘What is an African'—seminars on the subject. Langston Hughes, using Simple, explained what an African in America is. But maybe he didn't go well with the kind of mustard they wanted to popularize, so they didn't listen to him too hard.

“John Coltrane blew on 'em. Duke Ellington, with his elegant ass, God, how I love to see that man glide onstage in front of his instrument.… ‘Love you all madly, yes, madly.' He could rap.

“Billie Holiday, Miles, Piz, Bird, musical wizards, no cloning possible. Think of what we would have on our hands if they could've cloned Billie Holidays—Lady Day, or Pres?

“‘What is an African?'—seminars on the subject, Oh well, what the hell. Perseverance might be an African trait I remember a Chinese sage, back in Mac's day, say to me, ‘Chester, I don't see how your people stand for all this shit?' Now, he really didn't know what an African was. I could see that. If he really didn't understand that we don't take no shit, then there wasn't a lot to say to him.

“Yeahhh, perseverance might be considered one of the traits we've demonstrated to the world I'm sure it comes direct from the Diaspora fax machine.

“What is an African?

“What is a human being? Nawwww, no sense being stingy with praise; you gotta give it to the European; he framed a reference for people of color and we bought into it. It would be hard to imagine a seminar on ‘What is a European?' But that's what happens when one funky chump gains the uppers in the media game. He can show up to waste time on nebulous bullshit, like ‘What is an African?' while he goes on to perpetuate Superman, Tarzan, and a bunch of other mythological stuff.

“The European unwisely pitted himself against the colored world way back when, because of fear of annihilation and his being down in the gutter trying to defend his image ever since. His defense of his urge to be in control has popularized prejudice and racial tensions. Recognize these two relishes for your burger? Prejudice and racial tensions.

“In short, all of these instant coffee things caused us to do ourselves in, here on this planet. I can just see some funky chumps in the next cosmos, peering through the time warp at us, saying …, ‘Wowwwww! Look at how them funky chumps wiped themselves out.… They went for the quarter pounder.'”

The Vernons came in midafternoon, dusty, irritable, thirsty. He didn't feel that he knew them.

“Bet you been doin' a lotta fuckin' since we been gone, huh?”

The brother could get pretty gross after a couple Club beers. And the target for most of his gross behavior was his wife. Bop checked the scene out closely: been married longer than he had been alive, done a lot of shit together, and now he was tired of her and she was afraid of losing him because she didn't want to be alone.

The first evening back was a heavy one for Bop. Fred got ripped on three Club beers and began to rag Helene's ass. “Bitch! You can kiss my dooky hole! I don't need you! Fuck you!”

She tried to ride it out, placing a dignified look where her self-esteem used to be.

Bop knew the scene well, had been exposed to it a number of times. The man was schizo-drunk and abusive. The woman was the target and victim of the abuse, and after awhile played into being the target and the victim.

Some women he knew had actually defended their abusers. “Awww, Johnny don't mean no harm when he jumps on me like that; he's just drunk and confused.”

Chester Simmons, an acute observer of everybody else's domestic scene, put it in other words:

“Most of these battered women, I don't care if it's physical or verbal, become pawns in the ‘victims syndrome.' The victims syndrome is what happens when a victim begins to defend her abuser's ‘right' to abuse her. It can get real crazy. Real crazy.”