Negrophobia

by Darius James

  SECOND BUPPET stands. His cotton hands gesture in excitement.

  SECOND BUPPET

  Peep dis’, Money! We film th’shit! We film th’shit! Right there! In the park! As it happens! Cinema verité. Claim th’shit was a revolutionary act jus’ like that brutha wrote back in th’sixties!

  FIRST BUPPET

  (rolling confused Ping-Pong-ball eyes)

  What brutha in th’sixties?

  SECOND BUPPET

  (smacking first Buppet on the back of the head)

  Th’brutha what designed th’pants with th’dick stickin’ out, knucklehead! We screen th’shit at Cannes, win us a Palm D’Or, an’ get our dicks sucked by a bevy of flybabes in bikinis on th’ Riviera!

  FIRST BUPPET

  I heard that! Then we could open up our own “joint” an’ sell ball caps an’ T-shirts with actual photos of us bangin’ th’bitches in the bushes!

  SECOND BUPPET

  Word! Who knows how far we could go? We might even sell sneakers on TV! But t’git our shit off the ground, we first gots to cop th’rock!

  First Buppet speaks to a MAN seated offscreen whose shadow is thrown against the floor.

  FIRST BUPPET

  Yo, man! You got five dollars?

  The Shadow stands.

  SHADOW

  (cheerful)

  You want five dollars? Sure. I’ll give you five dollars—here!

  SFX: Blam-blam!

  A blue flash illuminates the intersecting circles of surprise on the face of the FIRST BUPPET. Cotton filling falls in clustered yellow clumps from the bullet hole torn in his chest. Plush toy intestines plop from his split gut.

  SHADOW

  (concerned)

  Are you sure that’s all you need? I know times are tough. Let me give you more.

  SFX: Blam-blam.

  The bullets pop the Buppet’s painted Ping-Pong-ball eyes. A pink pincushion brain drops from his crumbling papier mâché skull.

  SHADOW

  (brightly)

  As the drug crisis facing today’s young African-Americans in the inner cities reaches genocidal proportions, I’d be more than happy to do my share and help out. Think a ten spot’ll hold you until you get on your feet?

  SFX: Blam-blam!

  First Buppet topples to the floor. The shadow turns to the Second Buppet.

  SHADOW

  (friendly)

  How ’bout you, pal? You look like you could use a few bucks.

  SECOND BUPPET

  No man! That’s okay! Keep yo’ money!

  SHADOW

  (compassionate)

  No, take it. Really. It’s alright. I’ve got plenty. More people in my position of privilege should do as I do! You’ll be able to go out and buy yourself that brand-new pair of sneakers I saw advertised on TV by that paragon of black enterprise!

  SFX: Blam-blam!

  Second Buppet pops like a rubber balloon. Cotton ticking clouds the air.

  The shadow fires his gun at random, popping Buppets as if downing duck silhouettes in a carnival shooting arcade. Gangs of screaming, gold-toothed Buppets stampede toward the exits, trampling one another underfoot.

  Shattering the overhead bulbs in a fusillade of Uzi fire, a posse of armed Buppets plunges the theater into a state of disordered darkness; the Shadow’s narrow white face is reflected in the firefight’s stroboscopic light.

  In white-laced Dr. Martens, the Shadow sings and dances on a goggle-eyed heap of COTTON COON CORPSES. He is accompanied by gunfire, police sirens, and belching, beat-box Buppets.

  SHADOW

  Don’t forget Thom Dixon!

  He warned about race mixin’!

  But the Liberals slipped their tricks in!

  And the Niggers got their kicks in!

  Shovin’ their big black dicks in!

  Remember Sammy huggin’ Nixon?

  Fight for your right to be White.

  (Don’t accept the tripe!)

  I only echo your fears

  The White Race/the Higher Man

  Will disappear!

  Time is getting shorter

  In this world of chaos and disorder.

  It’s like breathing under water.

  Look at the shrinking White Race border.

  White People! Pledge loyalty to the Order!

  Fight for your right to be White.

  (Don’t accept the tripe!)

  Niggers armed with Uzis

  Paid for by Zionist Jewsies

  Fuckin’ nigger floozies! Gonna

  Whack you while you snoozy! Then

  Piss in your Jacuzzi!

  I say we need a dramatic new mathematic

  To subtract this mongrel static!

  “Number One: Sight your target. Become like a reptile. He said it with a smile. And his eyes were bright. You lay out your pattern of fire from left to right.”*

  Mulatto zombies, mixed up

  Commies and piebald geeks!

  Let’s get together and waste

  All those weak-blood freaks!

  “I intended to kill them. You decide what’s right and wrong.”*

  Burrheads! Baboons!

  ’Gator bait! Coons!

  Round ’em up! Blast ’em!

  Ship ’em to the moon!

  Fight for your right to be White!

  (Don’t accept the tripe!)

  “If your brain is a glass globe inside that skull, you work on reflex, you work on reflex. His exact words were: ‘Give me five dollars.’ The bulge in my pocket . . . is not a threat to me.”

  SHADOW

  Suckin’ germs from

  Green monkey sperm!

  Bustin’ baboon butt

  In a jungle hut!

  Yo! Hunkie! Purebred

  And funky! Don’t get yer

  Blood mixed up with that

  Deadly monkey the Afro-

  American junkie!

  Fight for your right to be White.

  (Don’t accept the tripe.)

  “If I had more bullets I would have shot them again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets.”*

  White people, wake up!

  The government of Zog

  Has your minds

  In a fog!

  The Shadow opens his black trench coat. A girdle of dynamite is strapped to his chest. He lights the fuse.

  Boom!!!

  One dead white boy.

  *The videotaped confession of a noted subway gunman.

  CUT TO:

  INT. Grindhouse—Lobby—Night.

  Night of the Swinging Nightsticks

  The explosion’s impact slams Bubbles through a set of double doors, sending her tumbling over the lifeless body of a Buppet sprawled in a pile of popcorn and cotton balls on the floor of the outer lobby. She relieves the Buppet of its ball cap and Uzi, leans against the popcorn popper’s cracked glass case, and pulls herself to her feet. She adjusts the cap on her head, twisting its bill to the side.

  A Buppet staggers out of the men’s room with a crack pipe pinched between his gold-capped teeth and notes that her nipples protrude through her torn bikini top. He fondles the bulge in his crotch.

  BUPPET

  (grinning)

  Yo’, AAP* girl, I got big monkey meat for you!

  Bubbles balances the Uzi on her hip. She aims for his throat.

  BUBBLES

  You’re as square as your haircut, chump.

  She pulls the trigger. The Buppet’s head pops from its neck in a spout of cotton balls and hums through the air in a whir of bleeding colors. Crashing through the lobby’s plate-glass window, the head spins out into the night.

  EXT. Grindhouse—42nd Street—Night.

  The head whirls into a mob of Buppets running amok under the grindhouse’s neon-fringed marquee, falling into unwitting black cotton hands. The severed head’s eyes circle inside their sockets. The Buppet holding the head shrieks in fright. His fluorescent bristles flare and stand on end.

  FLARE-HAIRED BUPPET

>   YOWSAH—! I been hit by th’Hip-Hop hoodoo!

  The frightened Buppet flings its arms in the air, hurling the head through the window of a Korean electronics shop. Glass rains to the sidewalk in glittering shards.

  As bullets zip all around, gangs of bottle-throwing Buppets rampage in the midst of raging bonfires and overturned garbage cans.

  A phalanx of police officers parade in military formation along 42nd Street, tossing vapor-spewing tear-gas canisters into the riotous mob.

  Truncheon-wielding police officers armored in insectoid riot gear gallop on dark, demon-eyed steeds, nogging knots of POP-EYED NIGS.

  Sirens wail. Bubbletops spin. Cop choppers hover overhead.

  Bubbles steps through the grindhouse’s empty window frame, belching incandescent Uzi burps in the greenish fog, and battles her way through the maze of battered bodies bleeding cotton balls on the blacktop. Buppets burst into flame and disintegrate in daffy dervish dance.

  A metallic, drumlike jungle beat clanks through the streets with ominous reverberations. An opaque shadow blankets the crowd. Confusion turns to still life. Tension stiffens the air.

  Suddenly, a bat-winged wad of iridescence drops from the sky and gobs the squad of MOUNTED POLICE. Plastic pop-ball eyes look up in hung-jawed awe.

  CUT TO: A FIVE-HUNDRED-FOOT-TALL CYBORG towers over the stark neon glare of Times Square.

  It looks like a cross between a Tyrannosaurus rex and a steel-drivin’ John Henry with a retractable chrome-capped penis gripped in its pincer claw. The cyborg’s face is flat and brutish, with two red beams glowing from inside the sockets of its ovoid head. Tiny rockets built into its massive black frame breathe jets of blue flame. The cyborg walks with halting steps. Its footfalls are loud and leaden. Its eyes flash danger red.

  The cyborg strokes its segmented metal hose, spurting a semen-like substance through the air, and a deluge of jellied jism pours through the streets. Buppets scatter in terror. Police officers are squashed underfoot.

  CUT TO:

  With infrared, cybernetic night vision, the cyborg scans its surroundings. A frost of crystallized cum coats all in its path. A cursor beeps on the cyborg’s heat-sensitive optical monitor. And alien glyphs are generated in digital display. The monitor magnifies the image of a rubber-clad dominatrix with an enema tube coiled around her arm.

  Looking below the glass-encased poster of the dominatrix, the cyborg’s head tilts with a grinding whine, finding Bubbles crouched in the shadows of a porn-theater’s open-air foyer.

  Scooping her up in its claw, the cyborg stares at her quizzically, the light in its eyes softening with what appears to be affection. Its jaw snaps open.

  Bubbles is tossed inside. Crunch!

  *Anglo-American Princess.

  INT. Cyborg—the Image Chamber.

  Negromancer

  Screaming at the top of her lungs, Bubbles tumbles through the tunnels of the cyborg’s twisted plumbing and lands on the octagonal floor of a black-lit room with a pastiche of ever changing imagery on its walls. She sits up and stares in confusion.

  As her eyes adjust to the ultraviolet light, she sees a blurred, backlit Silhouette shuffle from the image chamber’s walls. An empty white linen SUIT slowly walks into focus. The suit’s pant legs jerk like a marionette’s, and a pair of white gloves hovers below its sleeves. Lavender-colored vapors swell from the opening in the neck of its shirt collar and condense into a floating mass of glow-in-the-dark dreads. Two luminous eyes and a plump, red mouth glow in the ovoid space under the nest of knotted hair.

  TALKING DREADS

  Do you like my little toy? It’s the Negro of the future—one hundred and ninety tons of urban combat machinery. My designers were inspired by a book written at the turn of one of your Earth centuries: Tom Swift and His Steam-Powered Negro.

  An aged hardback volume materializes in midair. The TALKING DREADS’ white-gloved hands open the book and point to an engraved illustration of a husky, broad-shouldered white boy shoveling coal into a chute located at the rear of a huge Black robot. Its caption reads: “Why, Tom, it’ll rival the cotton gin!”

  TALKING DREADS

  Charming illustration, isn’t it?

  The book is tossed aside. It evaporates in a shimmer of lavender glitter. Bubbles tilts her head in curiosity and stares into the pair of suspended eyes. The mouth knowingly smiles.

  TALKING DREADS

  I seem familiar to you, don’t I? There’s something about my face you know, you can’t place it, but you know it, and you find your familiarity with it strange. You shouldn’t. I’ve made contact with your world before.

  My first attempt at intelligent communication with this planet was a disaster, a real misfire. I communicated my presence to a receptor, a Scottish woman living in India, by projecting myself into her dreams. Unfortunately, she garbled my transmission. The image skewed in her mind, rooted, and spread like a weed. This was the result.

  A second illustrated volume appears, this time in a radiant burst of magenta. The Talking Dreads hands the book to Bubbles, who opens it and reads:

  Lil’ Black Zambo

  Lil’ Black Zambo was a little nigger boy. Or pickaninny. Or jigaboo. Or any number of names we have for little colored children—shine, smoke, snowball, dinge, dust, inky, eggplant, and chocolate moonpie. And since Lil’ Black Zambo lived with his mammy in a one-room hut made of mud and leaves near a croc-infested swamp in the Jungle, we can call him ’gator bait, too.

  There was not much in the hut where Zambo and his mammy lived: a dirt floor, several pairs of dice (Zambo and his mammy liked to roll the bones), and hundreds of big, brown cockroaches with wings snapping clickity-click splat as they buzzed through the hut and slapped against the walls.

  Zambo’s pappy, Tambo, who liked to drink cheap coconut wine, ran off long before Zambo was born, so Zambo and his mammy were very, very poor. They didn’t give out welfare checks in the Jungle. The Jungle was uncivilized. Or at least that’s what Zambo’s mammy, Mambo, said. “When we gwine git civilized so I can git on d’welfare?”

  Zambo’s mammy was as big as a gorilla and looked like one, too. She had big, red lips stretched out of shape by two clay plates stuck in her face and a big, white bone pushed through her nose. Her knuckles even dragged on the ground.

  Zambo was no looker himself. “Lawd! What I do to deserve such an ugly chil’?” his mammy moaned. “An’ why you give him such nappy hair? It look like d’wool knotted up on a sheep’s ass!”

  Zambo was real, real black. Spear-chucker chocolate, his mammy said. She clacked her lips and told Zambo he d’darkest chil’ she ever seen. Darker than her frying pan even.

  “Dat pretty damn dark!” Zambo said.

  “Damn right!” Mammy exclaimed. “When you born, you so dark, d’docta slapped me!”

  Zambo’s eyes grew big and sad when his mammy said that, thinking, “What I do to be so black an’ blue?”

  (Sometimes Louie Armstrong flew out to the Jungle with his band and jammed for the Jungle Bunnies. That’s where Lil’ Black Zambo picked up all his blues references. All the Jungle Bunnies in the Jungle would show up, dressed in their finest feathers, and smoked the Mezz. As Pops blew, the Jungle Bunnies, high as a kite, cheered, “Oooga-booga!”*)

  Now Lil’ Black Zambo loved to eat watermelons. He didn’t eat the red juicy part because he didn’t like the seeds.

  “What I look like sittin’ in d’Jungle spittin’ a bunch o’ seeds?” he said. “Can’t kill no lions wif a moufful o’ seeds!”

  So he ate the rind and threw the rest away.

  But more than watermelon, Zambo loved pancakes. He loved pancakes more than he loved his saucer-lipped mammy. Mile-high stacks of pancakes dripping with sweet sugary syrup and lots and lots of hot yellow butter. Zambo’s lips got greasy just thinking about it. Umm-umm!

  Zambo’s mammy made him pancakes three times a day, every day. She made her pancakes from scratch. They didn’t have Aunt Jemima in the Jungle.

 
Zambo liked missionary sausage with his pancakes real special. “Mammy, when we gwine eat mo’ Bibletotin’ whyte folks?”

  So Zambo’s mammy would file her teeth, streak her face with fresh daubs of paint, and go into the bush, trapping herself a nice, plump white missionary. She’d grind him into wormy bits of red meat, stuff him into a tube of monkey’s intestines, and fry him up grease-poppin’ brown.

  “Uuuumm-yum, Mammy! I love whyte people!”

  One day, as Zambo’s mammy stirred pancake batter made from scratch, and battled an airborne squadron of flying cockroaches, she complained:

  “We so uncivilized! We don’t have welfare checks or Aunt Jemima mix or nuffin in d’Jungle! When we gwine git civilized an’ go pick cotton fo’ d’rich whyte folks in America?”

  Zambo tugged at the fringes of his mammy’s straw skirt. (Zambo’s mammy wore a straw skirt and nothing more. When her picture was published in National Geographic, baring her black bushbabe bod and flat Jungle Woman tits, she knew she’d finally been civilized. She could just see the welfare checks flying in.) “An’ not only dat, Mammy!” he said. “We ain’t got no hot yellow butter, neither!”

  “Oh no!” his mammy wailed. “We ain’t got no hot yellow butter! What me an’ my poor chil’ gwine do now? He gone haf t’eat his pancakes wif sweet sugary syrup! Damn dis uncivilized Jungle life!”

  With her face buried in her hands, she dropped to her knees on the hut’s dirt floor and began to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Mammy!” Zambo said, forking a pancake into his mouth. “Look! I eatin’ it! It good wif jus’ d’sweet sugary syrup! I don’t need no old hot yellow butter! Hot yellow butter ain’t good fo’ you no way! It high in cholesterol, it harden on yo’ arteries, an’ give you hypertension, d’number-one killer o’ black folks today! Dat one thing I’ll say fo’ dese damn flyin’ cockroaches. Dey strict vegetarians!”