The Coup (15 page)

its action may have been interfering, on their chilly elfin plane, with the call of the shepherd's piping. The fireplace itself, the hearth whose symbolic domestic centrality was so primitive that even I might have found here a familiar resonance, was swept as clean as a shower stall and ornamented with unscathed brass andirons supporting three perfect birch logs that would never be burned. Mr. Cunningham restored the conversation to solid English. "Feelicks, if I'm not being too personal, what's your major going to be at McCarthy?" "Freshman are not required to declare, but I had thought Government, with a minor in French Literature." "French Literature, what the hell use would that be to your people? Government, I can see. Good luck with it." "In the strange climate of my native land, Mr. Cunningham, the literature the French brought us may transplant better than the political institutions. There is a dryness in Racine, a harshness in Villon, that suits our case. In French Indochina, not many years ago, I had the experience of trading memorized sonnets by Ronsard with a prisoner of war, a terrorist who was later executed. In the less developed quarters of the world, the power politics of the West can be brushed aside, but its culture is pernicious." "Candy," Mrs. Cunningham began with the overemphasis of the shy, having seated herself in a wing chair patterned in cabbage-sized roses, her lean shins laid gracefully, diagonally together with a dainty self-conscious "sexiness" that reminded me of her daughter... who had vanished! Horreur! Where? I could hear her voice dimly giggling in some far reach of the house. She had gone upstairs, it later transpired, to talk with her "kid" brother; or was it into the kitchen, to renew acquaintance with the Cunninghams' colored cook? At any rate, she had left me alone with her terrifying pale parents, the female of whom was posed in mid-sentence, and who now settled on the verb she had paused to locate among her treasury of "nice" things- "alluded to your romantic adventures." "Not romantic, Madame; dreary, truly. The French in exchange for their poems asked that we fight in other poor countries. I obliged them in Indochina, for it took me out of my native village; when it came to Algeria, where the rebels were fellow Africans, I became a rebel myself, and deserted." "Oh dear," Mrs. Cunningham said. "Can you ever go back?" "Not until the colonial power departs. But this may happen within the decade. All it needs is a politician in Paris who is willing to act as a mortician. In the meantime, I enjoy your amazing country as a dream from which I will some day wake miraculously refreshed." "There's a question I'm rarin' to ask you," Mr. Cunningham said, rising ominously, but not to throttle me, as his growling tone for a second implied to my alert nerves, but to move to a tall cabinet and get himself another drink, from a square bottle whose first name was Jack, or was it Jim? The riddle of my own name he informally solved with, "How about you, fella?" My mouth was indeed dry, from unease. "A glass of water, if it's no trouble." He threatened to balk. "Plain water?" Then his mind embraced my response, as something he might have expected, from an underprivileged delegate from the childlike underworld. "Wouldn't you rather have a 7-Up? Or a Schlitz?" I would have, and brushed from my own mind the mirage of a beer sitting golden on a dark table of the Badger Cafe; but I felt the family dinner ahead of me stretch like a long trek through a bristling wilderness of glass and silver and brittle remarks, and had resolved upon sobriety as my safeguard. Also there was some silent satisfaction in impeding this big white devil's determination to be hospitable. "Just water, if you please," I insisted. "Your religion, I suppose?" "Several of them." "Some ice in it?" he asked. "No ice," I said, again against my desires, but in conformity with an ideal austerity I had grown like a carapace, in which to weather this occasion. "Alice," he said, with unexpected euphony; his obedient wife arose-the shepherdess did hear the shepherd-and went into the kitchen, which seemed to be, by one of those inscrutable jurisdictions whereby American couples order the apparent anarchy of their marriages, her province. Mr. Cunningham, freshly reinforced by his bottled cohort, pursued his interesting question, which was, "What do you make of our American colored people?" I had already enough converse with the disciples of Elijah Muhammad to hear the word "colored" as strange, but this strangeness was swallowed by the expanding strangeness of the preceding "our." I looked at my feet, for I was travelling in treacherous territory. My search for an answer was needless, for Mr. Cunningham was providing it. "What can we do," he was asking me, "to help these people? They move into a nice neighborhood and turn it into a jungle. You pour millions of state money in and it goes up in smoke. Our American cities are being absolutely destroyed. Detroit used to be a great town. They've turned it into a hellhole, you get mugged by these kids right in Hudson's, the downtown is a wasteland. Chicago's going the same way. Hyde Park, all around the university, these lovely homes, a white girl can't walk her dog after supper without a knife in her stocking. The Near North Side's a little better, but two blocks in from the Lake you're taking your life in your hands. Why do you think I moved the family up to Oshkosh? I lost forty grand a year by leaving the city. But hell, the rates on real estate were going out of sight, the only way to get your money out of some of those neighborhoods was burn "em down. Cars, anybody who keeps a car on the street should have his head examined. They wouldn't just steal 'em, they'd smash 'em up compure spite. What's eating the bastards? You'd love to know." Mrs. Cunningham returned with the water, in a glass with a silver rim, and I thought of desert water holes, the brackish-ness, the camel prints in the mud, the bacterial slime that somehow even across the burning sands manages to find its live way. Mr. Cunningham's tone tightened a little, with his wife's return. There was this flattering about his tirade: that he was addressing me as a fellow sufferer, that the heat of his grievance had burned away my visible color. He went on, "I've had my knocks up here, trying to make a name coming in cold in the middle of life; but at least I'm not afraid my daughter's going to be raped and don't have to lock the car every time I stop to take a piss at a gas station." "Frank," Alice said. "Sorry, there, but I guess even over in the Sahara you know what a piss is." "Nous buvons le pissat," I said, smiling. "Exactly," he said, slipping a glance of small triumph into his wife. "Anyway, where was I? Yeah, my question: What's the solution for these people?" "Provide them useful work?" Made in all timidity, this suggestion seemed to tip him toward fury. His patchy look intensified, his hair fluffed straight up. "Christ, they won't take the jobs there are, they'd rather rake in welfare. Your average Chicago jigaboo, he's too smart to dirty his paws; if he can't pimp or hustle drugs, or land some desk job with dingbat Daley, he'll just get his woman pregnant and watch the cash roll in." "That is-what do you call it?-American individualism, is it not? And enterprise, of an unforeseen sort." He stared at me. He was beginning to see me. "Christ, if that's enterprise, let's give it all over to the Russians. They've got the answer. Concentration camps." "Daddy, you promised you wouldn't," Candy cried; for she had come down the stairs, freshly brushed, her face alight with the happiness of "home," her crimson lips renewed, her rounded slim body bouncy as a cheerleader's, in a cashmere sweater and a pleated wool skirt, which swirled as she swung herself around the newel post whose carpentered pirouette I had admired upon entering. "Wouldn't what, dear?" her mother asked, as if straining to hear, in this room of silent clocks and chiming resemblances. "Wouldn't bother Happy about the Chicago blacks." "Not just Chicago," her father protested, "it's lousy everywhere. Even L. a., they're pulling it under. Hell, Chicago at least has a political machine, to make payoffs and keep some kind of lid on. In a city like Newark, they've just taken over. They've done to Newark what we did to Hiroshima. Grass doesn't even grow where they are. They are the curse of this country, I tell you, no offense to our friend here." "Daddy, you are so ignorant and prejudiced I just can't even cry about it anymore. I didn't want to bring Happy here but Mother said I must. You make me very ashamed in front of him." "Happy, hell, he's out of it. He's an African, at least they got some pride over there. As he says, they have their own culture. The poor colored in this country, they got nothing but what they steal." And he not quite drunkenly winked at me. It crossed my mind that I, as an African, was being thanked because I had not come over here to stay and raise the automotive insurance rates with my thievery; more, he saw me as the embodiment of the mother continent that yearned, he hoped, to take the Afro-Americans back into a friendly, oozy chaos. "Exactly," I said, and stood. "Nothing but what they steal." In the rebellious act of standing I changed my perspective on the room, and was freshly overwhelmed by its exotisnte, its fantasy, the false flowers and fires, the melting-iceberg shapes of its furniture, its whiteness and coldness and magnificent sterility; the emptiness, in short, of its lavish fullness, besprinkled with those inexplicable cork coins. [I express this badly. The wet ring from a glass of Fanta has blurred my manuscript. I long to get back to the Bad Quarter of Kush, and the spaces of my dear doomed Sheba.] The "kid" brother had followed Candy downstairs. Frank Jr. was a furtive, semi-obese child of fourteen-old enough, in my village, for the long house-whose complexion showed the ravages of sleeping alone, night after night, in an overheated room with teddy bears, felt pennants, and dotted Swiss curtains. The smile he grudged me displayed a barbarous, no doubt painful tooth-armor of silver and steel. His limp dank handshake savored of masturbatory rites. His eyes were fishy with boredom, and he tried to talk to me about basketball, of which I knew, despite my color, nothing. For this family occasion the child had put on a shirt and tie; the collar and knot cut cruelly into the doughy flesh of his neck. I thought, Here is the inheritor of capitalism and imperialism, of the Crusades and the spinning jenny. Yet he did not so much seem Mr. Cunningham in embryo as Mr. Cunningham, with his quirky bravado, desperate wish to be liked, and somehow innocently thinned and scattered hair, seemed a decaying, jerry-built expansion of his son. I perceived that a man, in America, is a failed boy. Then a black woman came into the alabaster archway of the living-room. For all the frills of her uniform, she looked familiar, with her heavy lower lip and fattening charms. Her uncanny resemblance to Kadongolimi was reinforced by her manner, which implied that she had had many opportunities in life and might well, with equal contentment, be elsewhere. "Dinner, ma'am." We all stood, in obedience to our queenly servant. But before we went in, Mrs. Cunningham, with a predatory deftness that showed a whole new piece of her equipment for survival, had silently as a pickpocket knifed behind me and placed my empty water glass, which I had set down in the center of an end table beside a sofa arm, securely within one of the little cork-and-silver saucers. Of course. They were "coasters," which in the friendly bars of Franchise took the form of simple discs of advertisement-imprinted blotting paper. By such sudden darts into the henceforth obvious, anthropology proceeds. Oscar X took the future Ellellou to meetings of the Nation of Islam; they disliked the term Black Muslims, though both "black" and "Muslim" seemed canonical. Temple Three, in Milwaukee, was two hours to the south, but another rushing, radio-flooded hour, in that many-knobbed, much-rusted, lavishly chromate guzzler of essence called, I thought oddly in a nation obsessed with the new, an Olds, took us to Temple Two, in Chicago, where the Messenger of Allah himself could be heard. He spoke in a murmur, a small delicate man with some resemblance, I was to notice when I awoke in Noire, to Edumu IV, Lord of Wanjiji. The Messenger wore an embroidered gold fez. He was a frail little filament who burned with a pure hatred when he thought of white men and lit up our hearts. He spoke of the white man's "tricknology." He told us that the black man in America had been so brainwashed by the blue-eyed devils he was mentally, morally, and spiritually dead. He spoke of a nation of black men, carved from the side of America like a blood-warm steak from the side of an Ethiopian steer, that would exist on a par with the other nations of the world. He rehearsed the services the black man had performed for his slavemasters in the United States, from cooking their meals and suckling their babies (yes) to building their levees and fighting their wars (yes indeed). He mocked the civil-rights movements, the "sitting-in," "lying-in," "sliding-in," "begging-in," to unite with a slave-master who on the one hand demands separate schools, beaches, and toilets and on the other hand through the agency of rape had so mongrelized the American black man that not a member of this audience was the true ebony color of his African fathers. "Little Lamb!" souls in our crowd would cry out, and "Teach, Messenger!" The litany of wrongs never wearied him, this shambling gold-fezzed foreshadow of my king. At his mention of rape, I would find myself crying. At his mention of the tribe of Shabazz, for which the word "Negro" was a false and malicious label, I would find myself exultant. At his amazed soft recounting of some newly arisen marvel of devilish hypocrisy, such as the then recent Supreme Court decision which told black men they were integrated and thus opened them up to the sheriff's dogs when they were such fools as to take their little scrubbed and pigtailed daughters to school, or such ancient marvels of Christian tricknology as the mixing of slaves in the lots as they were sold so that no two spoke the same language or remembered the same gods, so that no idol remained to these slaves but the white devil's blue-eyed, yellow-haired, historically grotesque Jesus, I would find myself wild with visions of what must be done, of sleeping millions to be awakened from their brainwashing, of new nations founded on the rock of vengeance and led by such quiet brown hate-inspired men as this, our Messenger. And on Tuesday nights (unity Nights) or Friday nights (civilization Nights) it was pleasant to mingle, and even to be cossetted as an
African with a smattering of Arabic, among the beige-gowned women and dark-suited men who had redeemed themselves from the flash and ruin of the ghetto. Ex-criminals, many of them, they moved with the severity of sous-officiers, and I realized that, in this era when the magic wand is hollow and all wizards, chiefs, and Pharaohs went tumbling under the gun's miraculous bark, the army is the sole serious institution left-all others are low comedy and vacuous costumery. The army must rule. The United States takes noisy pride in its sack-suited government of lawyers and fixers, but the bulky blue army of police is what the citizen confronts. Their patrol cars bleat past every lulled couple's fornication nest. Their baby-faced officers waddle across Commerce Street with waistfuls of leather-swaddled armaments. Beyond these blue men, for my black friends, the government was a gossamer of headlines spun like fresh cobwebs each morning, and brushed away by noon. I perceived this then: government is mythological in nature. These stepchildren of Islam were seeking to concoct a counter-myth. "Also-salamu 'alaykumf" The Messenger's greeting rolled back: "Wa-'alaykum al-salamst" I had never heard Arabic, which in Africa stings like a whip wielded by slavers and schoolteachers, spoken so sweetly as here, in America, in the flat rote accents of children of janitors and sharecroppers, who had memorized their few phrases as the passwords into self-reliance and dignity. Takbir! God is great! Ma sha" allah: it is as God wills. If our non-alcoholic fruit punches, and the porkless delicacies prepared by the ankle-weary work-day kitchen slaves of white homes, all had a flavor of charade, it was a purposeful earnest charade, and with altogether another taste too, a sacred spicy something that prickled in my nostrils and made me, enacting my own charade as an authentic Child of the Book, feel more exalted, more serenely myself, than I did, in this treacherous land of kafirs, anywhere else. Although Oscar X, I years later learned, gave up the Faith in disgust at the Messenger's well-authenticated sexual lapses, and some of my chaste sisters have put on again the white robes of the Christian choir, and my earnest lean-faced brothers (their eyes glittering above their cheekbones like snipers levelling their sights, their dangerous nervousness sheathed in the quiet devil-garb of corporation lawyers and FBI men) have re-enlisted in the guerrilla war of the streets-though the Nation of Islam took a mortal wound when it became Malcolm's killer, and the Afro-American's misery moved on in its search for the revolutionary instrument, those ghetto temples were for me a birthplace. The Messenger disclosed to me riches that were, unbeknownst, mine. He taught me that the evils I had witnessed were not accidental but intrinsic. He showed me that the world is our enslaver, and that the path to freedom is the path of abnegation. He taught me nationhood, purity, and hatred: for hatred is the source of all strengths, and its fruit is change, as love is the source of debility, and its fruit is passive replication of what already too numerously exists. At temple meetings, on vacation from Candy Cunningham and McCarthy College with their noble schemes for my transformation into a white-headed, lily-livered black man, I was free to imagine myself in an absolutist form. Crystals of dreaming erected within me, and the nation of Kush as it exists is the residue of those crystals. The terrain became more mountainous; the patches of thornbush, the scant tufts of the world's dullest flowers, no longer could draw the least excuse for life from the gray rocks, the black air. At night the sound of dry ice shattering rocks gave staccato echo to the scrabble of the camels trying to keep their footing on millennial accumulations of scree. We rattled as we went, and Sheba's anzad (varied now and then by an end-blown flute that doubled as a dildo in the face of my impotence) eerily harmonized with the stony music our passage struck from the resonant minerals and crystals jutting around us. Haematite, magnetite, kassiterite, wolframite, muscovite, mispickel, and feldspars cast their glints by moonlight. I recalled Ezana's dark geological allusions, and wondered how my old Minister of the Interior was faring in captivity. We had shared the same caserne, heard together the call, "Aux armes! Aux armes! Les diables jeunesPeople Sentimental reflections of all sorts coursed through my weary soul. The moons waxed and waned; Dhu '1-Hijja became Muharram, Muharram became Safar, or else I had lost count. The water-hole scouts ranged away from the caravan for days, and some never returned. The moment was approaching when Sheba and I must leave the caravan and seek out the cave where the head of Edumu IV reportedly babbled oracles. In the vicinity of the cave, Sidi Mukhtar told us, European rock doves had gathered, and now one or two of these birds, gray, but with points of lustre on the head and throat that bubbled up, in this monochromatic climate, to the verge of iridescence, could be seen at dusk and dawn, dotting a distant slope of speckled asphalt-colored shale like pigeons in the lee of chimneys on city roofs. Up and down we wound our way through alleylike passes so narrow the sky was reduced to the width of a river above our heads. The ordeal was aging Sheba: the baby fat of trust had fallen from her cheeks; some of the looks she darted at me sideways, through the asynchronous heaving of our camels' humps, were positively dubious. "Do you love me?" Candy would ask. "Tell me what you mean by love," young Hakim would counter, his emotional defenses well fortified by the years of arid book-learning: from Plato to Einstein, a steady explosion, the sheltering gods all shattered. "What do you mean, what do I mean?" Follow-up emergency vehicles wailed by on the street below. Their spinning red lights dyed the icicles at the window a bloody red: fangs of a deep-throated growl. "To what extent," he pursued, "is your so-called love for me love of yourself, yourself in the Promethean stance of doing the forbidden, that is, of loving me?" "To what extent, I could ask in turn, is your fucking me revenging yourself on the white world?" "Is that what your parents suggest?" "They don't know. They don't ask. After a certain age it's easier for them to forget you have a body. Marriage would be the only crunch." "Indeed." "What do you mean, "Indeed"?" "I mean, indeed, marriage would be a crunch." He changed the subject, so firmly she would know it was being changed. "This fucking to avenge oneself, I think that is an American style. I do not have, that I can detect, the sexual sense of outrage that our friends Oscar and Turnip and Barry bear toward the white man, whom they call, simply, the Man. The brown-faced Arabs were butchering and carrying off my people while the French were innocently constructing Chartres. The Tuareg have been more ruthless still. They are white, beneath their blue robes. In my land the black man is the Man, who performs generation after generation the super stunt of continuing to exist, to multiply among the pain and the heat. Noire is a river where others come to fish, but they do not swim with us." "Touch me while you talk. Please, Happy." He touched her white flank, from which the reflected red pulsing had ebbed. "In the village," he said, in his weariness surrendering to the first words that came, "we were always touching one another, uncles and sisters and friends, and then at thirteen the boys earn the right to sleep as an age-set, in the long house. I often think of your brother, the sadness of him sleeping alone, in a room all his. To emerge from such solitude into sexuality must be a great arrival, greater than in other nations, too poor to have so many rooms. And then the middle-aged of America do not touch either. At the end, the nurses and doctors handle you. It is a sign the darkness of the womb is being approached again." She turned her back and her skin felt cold as a snake's. She had wanted to talk about marriage. Pyrolusite, goethite, antimonite, quartz: Sidi Mukhtar named the crystals, winking. "Much treasure." He tapped the cliff. He had once fallen in with Rommel's armies and been trained in geology, in Erdivissenschaft. He had grown fond of the anzad player and her little protector. He was sorry to see them leave the caravan. But the dread time had come. At the same moment, Ellellou later learned from reliable sources, Michaelis Ezana was making his way through the midnight corridors of the Palais d'Administration des Noires. He had persuaded his guards, two Golo simpletons who had been shifted from the rat-killing detail at one of the surplus-peanut mounds on the plains near Also-Abid, that a six o'clock martini was a kind of internal ablution which should, for ultimate purity, be taken with the saldt al-maghrib. Day by day he increased the proportion of gin to vermouth to the point where the stout fellows, hardened imbibers of honey beer, toppled. His way was clear. As once before in these pages, as perceived from this same window, the muezzins' twanging call echoed under the cloudless sky as under a darkening dome of tile. Rather than risk confrontation with the soldiers and their doxies quartered in the fourth-floor corridor, who, if not fully alerted to the nuance shifts of inner-circle leadership in Kush, certainly had caught the smoky whiff of tabu that now attached to Ezana, he, by a series of ripping, knotting, and measuring actions that like certain of these sentences were maddeningly distended by seemingly imperative refinements and elaborations in the middle, constructed a rope of caftans and agals and descended, through the silver kiss of the last moon of Safar, down the wall, in his terrified descent accompanied by his indifferent shadow, a faint large bat-shape whose feet touched his abrasively. Ezana attained, without the makeshift rope's breaking, a window of the third floor, which housed the People's Museum of Imperialist Atrocities. As he had in descending prayed, the window was unfastened; or, rather, the catch had long since come loose from the wood, baked by the daily heat to the friability of clay. He pushed it open with a crackle and, trembling, dropped to the floor inside. Few visited the Museum but nostalgic reactionaries. The leather trappings on the French parade harness had been nibbled and consumed by the starving. The little model, meant to scandalize with its penury, of the typical servants' hut circa 1910 had been carefully dismantled and smuggled outside to serve as shelter for a family of Istiqlal's urban homeless. The torturing apparatus, dominated by a gaunt dental drill, and the guillotine, Gothic pinnacle of Gallic justice, cast the longest shadows as the Minister of the Interior stole barefoot among the dusty museum cases. The cases contained lumps of rubber and gypsum and other raw materials gouged from Noire by naked workers (shown in a miniature tableau, balsa-wood bodies expiring of exhaustion at the mouth of a papier-mache mine) paid a few centimes a day. An entire case was filled with centimes. Another case held only imperialist mustaches and monocles; these latter winked as Ezana's shadow soundlessly passed. The next case held emptied bottles of the colons' ungodly poisons-absinthe, cognac, champagne, Per-rier water; their glimmer was doused and rekindled again as Ezana, his heart thumping, slid by. In other cases, more darkly, lurked Bibles and missals in their pernicious range of sizes and languages; displayed with them, wittily, were the ledgers of the army of the profiteers, the plantation managers, the concessionnaires, the export-import agencies, the factors of European cloth and cutlery in the remote villages, the shipping lines that creakily plied the Grionde. Ezana had once made a study of these ledgers, and after some consultation with Ellellou had suppressed this curious finding: none showed a profit. On paper, colonialism was a distinctly losing venture. The cost of the armies, the administrators, the flags, the forts, the bullets, the roads, the quinine, the imported knives, forks, and spoons, quite outweighed the grudging haul of raw materials and taxes elicited from the unprincipled, evasive chiefs and stubbornly inefficient populace. The most rapacious ex- ploiter of them all, King Leopold, who permitted appalling atrocities in an attempt to balance his books, had to be rescued from bankruptcy. As the colonies were jettisoned into independence, the ledgers of the metropolitan capitals registered distinct relief. The most outre region of France Outre-mer, Noire, had been, in Paris, a minor statistical nuisance. Why, then, had the oppressors come? As Ezana moved barefoot through the deserted museum, the nagging question merged with the discomfort in his feet, their soles, for too many years cradled in Italian leather, made tender by the daring descent down the rough inner face of the Palais. The Europeans had come, it seemed, out of simple jealousy; the Portuguese had a fort or two, so the Danes and Dutch had to have forts. Egypt fell to the British, so the French had to have the Sahara; because the British had Nigeria, ihe Germans had to have Tanganyika. But what, then, was there to do with these vast tracts? Drain swamps, shoot elephants, plant cocoa, clear the way for missionaries. In Noire these activities had been carried forward in the most attenuated way: there were few swamps, and fewer elephants. Nevertheless the Gauls had gone through the motions, and a handful of Frenchmen who at home would have been outcasts here established, on the backs of blacks little more aware of their presence than of flies on their skins, a precarious, shrill self-importance. A case in the museum held whips, ranging from the brutal cicotte, a length of hippo hide for flogging plantation workers into line, to the dainty silken fouet with which a regional administrator's wife could chastise one of her maidservants, knots having been artfully braided into the ends of the threads. The next case contained obscene accessories of a brothel in Hurriyah maintained for white militia and laborers by the dusky autochtones. Contact, of a sort, had been made. Civilization like an avalanche of sludge had collapsed into the blank clean places of the maps. Skins rubbed as among sleepers with shut lids, thrashing and tugging at the covers. Along one dark wall there were great maps of the sub-Saharan empires, Songhai and Mali and Kanem-Bornu; these too had been imposed from beyond and their rise and fall punctuated by the severing of many an ear, hand, and head. On this same wall hung daguerreotypes gone coppery and quaint, of frilly picnics in the bush, of military parades aligning multitudinous buttons, of a painter in the goatee and slack white shirt of the fin de siecle scrupulously loading his easel with an