by Darius James
In naming one’s oldest and best friend, a friendship secured by love, one could do no better than Manbo Sallie-Ann Glassman.
•
As a consequence of my PTSD, I accidentally set my house on fire in 2015 and launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with recovery. I would like to thank the following for their generous support: Sammy Elmi, Lou Rusconi, Sheila Urbanoski, John Appel, Michael Stearns, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Legs McNeil, Donna Harati, Jenny Bee, A lex Abramovich, Jorg Sundermeier, Gillian McCain, Jack Sargent, Jeanne Palomino, Raquel Shapira, Cem Mengüç, Edwin Torres, Tim Beckett, Bonnie Finberg, Hiroo Yamagata, Njeri Cruse, Jen Berry, Thomas Rogers, Caroline Loewald, Dan Levy, Thomas Adcock, James Marshall, Michael Bird, David Stevens, Yvette Mattern, Mike Gorman, Terry Bizarro, Asher Lack, Greg Bossert, Nick Mamatas, Giacomo Servetti, Kim Waldhauer, Bernard Meisler, Florian Schleuning, Derrais Carter, Carolyn Williams, Evie Shockley, Gordon Beeferman, Gabriel Tolliver, Fred Carl, Maria Damon, Patricia Winter, Rob Hardin, Mike Ross, Crystal Rosado, Matthew Dropco, Krishna Lila, Judy Radul, Christoph Dreher, Stu Mead, Dominik Nagl, Janice Lowe, Julieta & Amanda, Tracie Morris, Dmitry Brill, Jose Padua, Charlie Huisken, Sandra Hunter, Mike Cockrill, Frank Moliterno, Robert Marshall, Scott Weaver, Julien Nitzberg, Fiona Helmsley, Patricia Eakins, Jennifer Krasinski, Elena Faro, Dominic Johnson, Stanya Kahn, Judy McGuire, John Oakes, Edward Champion, Patrick Hughes, Julian Higuerey, Nunez, Jenny & Eric Gonzalez-Blitz, Ira Silverberg, Eddy Falconer, Krystal Languell, Siobhan Ruck, Jenise Treuting, Dolorosa de la Cruz, Steve Dickinson, Peise Fabian, David Jaudon, Diane Lowy, Rahti Gorfien, Claudia Mauro, Nona Simmons, Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte, Sam Hoar, Christopher Sorrentino, Karen Pyudik, Tara Goodrich, Jackie Reingold, Sarah Ferguson, Mike Young, Valerie Caesar, Dawoud Bey, Rashida Bumbray, Todd Colby, Graham Foust, Pretty Penny Pick up, Elaine Kahn, Lori E. Seid, Jason Harris, Marilyn Nance, Thomas Willard, Susannah Israel, Lynn Tillman, Tom Angelo, Cara Benson, Reynaldo Anderson, Michelle Clark, Kristin Erickson, Judith Glaubman, Lynda Crawford, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Kimberly Ball, Greg Tate, Jeremy Segal, Dan Schick, Robert Boyd, Joel Rose, Wayne Moreland, Constance Tenvik, Lisa Guido, Julie Brumlik, and the numerous folks who wish to remain anonymous.
—DARIUS H. JAMES
2018
*His daughter, I am told, defied her father and defiled the sanctity of his home by stashing the book under cover of a plain brown wrapper.
†“Politically incorrect” had a markedly different meaning among members of the Black Panther Party than how it’s used today. Research its history. Google is your friend.
‡Think about that shit—the tongues of your so-called state representatives are lodged so deeply up the asshole of the NRA, even the sight of innocent Christian children sprawled in pools of coagulating blood couldn’t move their cold congressional hearts to legislate more stringent gun regulations. Obviously, these are people who do not give a fuck about you.
§This is only a slight fraction of the lives extinguished by American police. The actual numbers are in the hundreds of thousands.
‖My maddeningly brilliant friend Emily Carter asked: “What did anal leakage ever do to you?”
¶Obviously, I did but who pays attention to me? I mean, it’s no surprise, the origins of this country are rooted in a foundation of genocide and slavery.
**This is the principal reason why I have not completed a second novel. If you would like to enjoy more of my work, you can contribute your donations to a fund I have set up expressly for this purpose. Send to Paypal: [email protected]
NEGROPHOBIA
Negrophobia is rededicated in
memoriam to the late Gidget Gein
(Brad Stewart)
NEGROPHOBIA
is a work of fiction,
a product of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to any person,
living or dead,
is
purely coincidental.
Negrophobia is a work of fiction.
Every word is true. Fuck you.
THE AUTHOR
“Jim, the whole history of this republic is the rape of a white woman and the lynching of a nigger. Those two images.”
“You’re speaking of images.”
“Images my ass. I’m speaking on reality. That’s what makes this swirl go around. The lynching of niggers and the raping of women.”
—Steve Cannon
“Looney Tunas Under a Deep Blue Moon”
Minister Louis Farrakhan: The young lady said she’s afraid of violence. And isn’t it sad that we, who have been the victims of so much violence —now, whites fear violence from us. We do not have a history of killing white people. White people have a history of killing us.
And what you fear—may I say this sir? What you fear—and it’s a deep guilt thing that white folks suffer—you are afraid that if we ever come to power, we will do to you and your fathers what you and your people have done to us. And I think you are judging us by the state of your own mind, and that is not necessarily the mind of black people. Donahue: And we’ll be back in just a moment.
“Donahue,”
March 14, 1990
Show #0314–90
. . . sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.
—Paulo Freire,
“Pedagogy of the Oppressed”
Sometimes I feel like this whole world is a sharecropper’s shack. Some of us are niggers. The rest of us are black.
—Sean Kelly
Voodoo is magick’s African face in the West. Radical, transformative, and visionary, voodoo is a unique weapon of the imagination. Its rites, rituals, and spellcastings are techniques designed to stimulate the right-lobe functions of the brain—the center of dreams, poetry, spirit, intuition, and sexuality—and so provide its devotees with a powerful creative vehicle for pushing beyond conventional modes of being into the self’s dangerous terrain.
What occurs on the magickal level of voodoo is subliminal. It begins below the threshold of consciousness, in the subconscious, the seat of archetypes and emotions, our primal past.
Imagine the difference between conscious and subconscious as the difference between foreground and background. The foreground is detail. The background is pattern. Consciousness sees the tree. The subconscious sees the forest.
By manipulating magickal archetypes and symbols, a stereoscopic effect is created from the conscious and subconscious, manifesting a supraconscious.
Voodoo is a religion, but not a centralized one. Its acts are personalized—mutating, changing shape, adapting to their particular time and locale.
As a result, present-day urban America has spawned a new generation of loa out of concrete and steel, out of radio and TV, out of comics and film. The new loa are invoked by beat-box rhythm, Burroughsian cutup, industrial music, and the extreme edges of performance art.
Malcolm X is celebrated as a new loa in the Petro pantheon.
In the Western mind, rooted as it is in rationalism and Christian dogma, a dichotomy exists between Europe and Africa. Europe represents the foreground of the conscious. Africa is the repository of all that is vile, unspeakable, and taboo in the dark subconscious.
When the “detail” of the European conscious is reconciled with the “patterns” of the African subconscious, the cultural consequences for the Western mind will be devastating. . . .
—Doctor Snakeskin
The Blackman’s Guide to Seducing White Women With the Amazing Power of Voodoo
OPEN ON:
INT. Brownstone in Manhattan’s Upper West Side—Bedroom—Dawn.
EXTREME CLOSE-UP OF
A JOINT balanced on the rim of a silver ashtray. With cigarette paper the color of beach-bleached bone, twisted rather than rolled, and winding with arteries of thin black wrinkles emphasized in shadow, the joint looks like a shriveled, mummified cock stained by a ring of red lipstick. The camera pans along its length with lingering affection.
SFX: The joint’s sizzle is amplified, punctuated by the sound of pot seeds popping.
The ashtray rests on a mahogany nightstand with amorphous blots of light shivering across its surface. Set beside the ashtray is an open crescent-shaped box, all lace frills and gilded paper. Its star-stamped lid is embossed with the words:
Min. Louis Farrakhan’s “Ambrosia of Islam”
Do-for-Self Designer Chocolates
“Allah eats ’em! And you will too!”
In a profusion of fluted-paper-coffins, spilling over the sides of the box, and lying scattered across the tabletop, are several fez-capped, frog-faced fudge figurines. Each leering figurine bears the likeness of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He clutches candy genitalia in tiny fudge fists. Spurts of white chocolate fleck his thighs.
The twisted paper’s luminous white, the ashtray’s silver glint, and the gilded foil of the candy box are in sharp contrast to the bedroom’s enveloping darkness.
The camera follows the joint’s curling, serpentine ribbons of smoke in a slow, upward tilt. The shot is held in midair as the gathering curls of smoke form the title in exotic lettering:
The title dissipates in the darkness. Dolly through smoke and gloam. Stop on a pair of charred, sequined Come-Fuck-Me Shoes hanging at the end of a ribbon draped over a nail. A dried long-stemmed rose is hooked on the head of the nail, its petals splayed like an open vulva.
The cloud of reefer smoke thins to a gray haze, and the disembodied voice of a TEENAGE GIRL is heard, modulated in tones from pot lethargic to speed-freak frantic:
DRUG-ADDLED TEENAGE GIRL
(v.o.)
On my thirteenth birthday, after recovering from the awful discovery that Transvestite Rock was not the hottest happening in puberty since wet dreams . . .
Come-Fuck-Me’s dissolve in the gloam.
The camera pans across a pair of large lips air-brushed on the wall. The lips are pouty and negroid with a touch of tongue, tooth, and saliva.
As the pan draws to a close, the camera betrays a pair of slender vampire canines protruding from the painted mouth.
Dissolve to smoke and gloam. The smoke churns with tumultuous effect. A mob of unruly Rocky-Horror cultists appear in a Montage of Polaroid prints, turning in slow pixilated stages from murky gray smudge to a clear color image: pudding-soft PUBESCENTS in glittering Come-Fuck-Me Shoes wearing tight denim cutoffs, slit along the seams, revealing inverted V’s of pale thigh. With bosoms bobbing under swastika-emblazoned valentine T’s, the PUBESCENTS tease beneath the marquee of New York City’s 8th Street Playhouse
Young wet mouths fall on pedestrian necks. Fangs flash. Flesh rips. Crimson rivulets spill from the corners of the girls’ mouth in sparkling tear-shaped droplets.
DRUG-ADDLED TEENAGE GIRL
(v.o.)
I burned my Rocky-Horror Picture Show paraphernalia, sequined Come-Fuck-Me Shoes and all. . . .
Dissolve to smoke and gloam. Tilt down the surface of a mirror. The oval mirror is set in an ornate bronze frame adorned with raised images of pagan bacchanalia. A candle flame’s reflection flickers in the mirror’s left-hand corner.
Over-the-shoulder shot of TEEN SEX-BOMB BLONDE. The BLONDE draws a figure eight on her face with a stick of silver greasepaint.
The face in the glass is an uncommon one in the world of the wakeful. It’s a face seen in the soup of sleep. A face that surfaces in a stew of haunted imagery. A face of fevered dreams.
The face suggests a breed of cat deified in the temples of ancient Egypt. And if the doctrines of karma and reincarnation were true, they would account for the look of haughtiness about the bow-shaped mouth. The hair is an abundance of lemon-cream curls, with the tip of each tinted a cotton-candy pink. Two braids entwined with strips of leather sprout from each side of the forehead. The almond eyes are large and lynxlike, refracting light in colors from pale green to ice silver. The nose curves to a soft, elfin point, its right nostril pierced with a slender gold ring.
Softness swells the heart. Blood bloats the groin.
DRUG-ADDLED TEENAGE GIRL
(v.o.)
. . . and became a real sixties-era, alienated-from-pig-values, tuned-into-K–OZMIK FM-radio freek. I was no phony weekend hippie. I was bona fide. I sucked off Jerry Garcia.
The BLOND BOMB paints in the figure eight until the ovals on her face are two solid disks. She stands and puts on a pair of black Wayfarer shades, posing before the mirror.
The camera tilts up the reflection in the glass. The BLOND BOMB wears cleated Dr. Martens marked with anarchosatanic symbols in metallic paintpen. Adhesive black Spandex clings to her sturdy athletic legs and outlines her protuberant pudendum. Her graffiti-scratched black leather jacket is ornamented with chrome studs, razor blades, and used syringes. Her puffy pink areolas peek through the shredded curtain of her black T held together by a confusion of safety pins.
DRUG-ADDLED TEENAGE GIRL
(v.o.)
Then I improved m’moves, switched m’grooves, an’ sleazed into a pair of snakeskinned voodoo hooves. I got th’drop on bop. I let m’fingas pop. I became th’girl th’worl’ couldn’t stop. I was the baby blon’ th’boys couldn’t con. I was th’one everybody tried to hit on.
I was wicked white heat from cheek to feet. I’d throw you in a state of agitated doggie heat. I’d make you dream ’n’ steam then cream ’n’ y’jeans ’cause I was the reigning queen supreme of the cover-girl wet dream.
Stop tilt on face for head shot. The girl in the glass smiles at her reflection, stroking her cheek with the blunt edge of an open pearl-handled straight razor.
DRUG-ADDLED TEENAGE GIRL
(v.o.)
My name is Bubbles. Bubbles Brazil. I have a heart of gold. My blond mons of venus is clipped and shaped like a golden valentine.
Lick it lovingly . . .
Bubbles folds the straight razor and drops it into her jacket’s inside pocket. Dolly in for close shot of Bubbles’ face.
On the final two syllables of the last line, Bubbles voice dips on the first syllable and rises on the second.
BUBBLES
You can never be too cool!
FADE
INT. Brownstone—Kitchen—Morning.
Close-up on a chunky, brown-faced, kerchief-headed woman grinning from a cylindrical box of Savanna Sal’s Hominy Grits.
Pull back and reveal a hefty black arm, with sagging, hamhock-shaped biceps, stirring a thick white brew in a black cast-iron pot.
SFX: A series of short, farting bursts as grits boil and bubble.
As the ladle is lifted from the pot, two pudgy fingers pinch a live white mouse by the tip of its tail, dangling it over the rising wisps of steam. The mouse is casually dropped into the pot of bubbling grits.
With its tiny pink feet paddling frantically, the agonized mouse squeals, vomits blood, and dies. The ladle is placed back into the pot and stirring resumes. The dead mouse sinks beneath the surface of the grits.
Black woman’s mouth into view. Her gums are dark chocolate. Her teeth are canary yellow.
BLACK MOUTH
When ’at boy gwine learn his sef some sense? Ah done tol’ ’at boy messin’ wif dem whyte gals gwine a git ’im kil.
Camera pulls back and reveals a monstrous, mammy-sized cookie jar of a woman with doughy animal features and crazed incandescent eyes. Her nappy bleached-blond Afro is a crown of spiky thorns matted with sweat and splashed with splots of Day-Glo colors. Her face and arms are splotched with leaflike patches of missing melanin. The twirl of brown and pink stripes on her left arm resembles the markings of a tiger’s coat. A pair of mascara lobster claws wing her eyes.
As the MAID talks o
n the telephone, she stirs the brew of grits, cradling the telephone’s mouthpiece between the underside of her chin and the cleft of her shoulder. An open pancake box, a batter-spattered mixing bowl, and fish entrails are seen on the nearby counter.
MAID
(talking into telephone)
Jus’ don’ listen. Head hard as a rock. He knowed wha’ happen’ t’his Unca Lemmie down in Georgia wif dat young whyte gal.
Yas, chile. Dem fool crackas strung ’im up, gutted ’im lak a pig, ’n’ bar-be-cued his black b’hine. Dey stood ’round smackin’ dey lips, talkin’ ’bout “Gimme ’notha dem greasy nigga ribs!”
Ah don’ know! You tell me what dat ol’ snaggamouf, buck-eye coon want wif a young one? Broke-dick nigga couldn’t get his dick hard since 1926!
