Out of this benevolent light, Scorpion, one the sources of those fears, entered the darkness of Blackbird’s to stake out the inside. He shepherded four drinkers to tables near the front door, then sat at the head of the bar between the front door and the booth where Amelia “Beaujolais” Wine, the only black female police officer on the Boston police force, waited. Whenever direct communication between Mabi and Chief Ugolino was necessary, Mabi and Beaujolais met at Blackbird’s. Ugolino didn’t trust the telephone and Mabi didn’t trust police stations. On Scorpion’s signal, Mabi and Spider trucked in. Spider sealed the door, making the bar as impregnable as a union picket line thrown up around a Boston construction site to keep out black laborers. Five Trojans scattered themselves around the neighborhood.
Mabi paused inside the door to let his eyes adjust. Two TVs played behind the bar, a basketball game videotaped the previous evening on one, a game show on the other. Stilts, the afternoon bartender, pumped up the volume on both. Beaujolais wore street clothes rather than her police uniform, her blouse unbuttoned almost to the waist, no bra, her skirt slit three-quarters of the way up her thigh. In her late twenties, her thighs looked home to a baker’s dozen of sweet potato pies, her ass to another baker’s dozen. Black men want women of substance, she said to explain her girth. Her eyes weighed down with the glitter in her eye shadow, she sat with her arms spread wide, displaying herself like a piece of costume jewelry at a pawn shop or second-hand store. Mabi wasn’t in the mood for no boosting.
Mabi led her to a back booth, then sat opposite her. The images on the nearer screen framed her dark face in the glare of television light. Over her right shoulder, Robert “Double O” Parish slam dunked over the Chocolate Thunder for two points. “Badger! By supper.” Mabi slapped the table with the flat of his hand.
“Baby, you know the ribs they ain’t free.”
On the screen, Dr. J. pirouetted past Kevin McHale and sank an in-your-face lay-up.
“I’s already buttering his bread so thick his arteries be blockaded.”
“Something new needs something new.”
“What am I buying?” Mabi demanded.
“Ugolino stays off your case and only Badger’s baby black ass gets busted for Chelsea.” Behind Beaujolais, Tiny Archibald completed a backdoor play off Larry Bird’s outlet pass to Chris Ford.
“Listen up, marshmallow tits.” Mabi leaned forward and yanked one of her breasts out of her blouse and squeezed it until she winced. “You deliver me Badger or I’ll hack off your fucking tits, bronze ’em, and mount ’em on the grille of my ride.” He released her breast with a half twist that brought tears to her eyes.
She massaged her bruise marks and tucked her breast inside her blouse, buttoning it to the neck. “Ugolino ain’t offering a menu. You eat what he serves or you starve.”
“Starvin’ ain’t healthy for fat asses like him. Or you.”
Mabi fixed his eyes on Beaujolais until she looked away. On the television, Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell took Caldwell Jones inside, made the basket and drew the foul. Gesturing toward the basket with his patented wave, he canned the foul shot to complete a three-point play.
“You tell Chief Stereo,” Mabi said, “the North End, his North End, be the next Chelsea you don’t deliver Badger tonight.” When Beaujolais rose to leave, he grabbed the waistband of her skirt and pulled her toward him. “Don’t get sucked in by all this affirmative action shit. Boston still a plantation and you nothing more than the plantation owner’s fucking cunt.”
-3-
If Beaujolais was nothing more than the plantation owner’s fucking cunt, Mabi asked himself, what was he? A field hand? An overseer? Was he anything more than his name? Would he ever be?
Mabi. “Prophet” in Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew. A soldier in the army of Allah, the one true God who had revealed His divine message and chosen him as His messenger. His birth name, Leroy Wallaca, was a slave name. After his brother died in the Nam and he started gang-leading the Trojans, he called himself Priam after an ancient king who died for his people. Jim Ed didn’t die for his people; he died for whitey in a war against the yellow. At his brother’s funeral, he vowed not to make the same mistake.
Two years earlier, 1979, when he was still Priam he first heard Allah’s divine message from a guest preacher at the New World Primitive Baptist Church, Professor Husam al din al-Saffah, a mullah and a professor of Islamic studies. To this day Mabi’s flesh crept up and down his bones when he remembered how al-Saffah scanned the congregation and locked eyes with him. Coal black, al-Saffah’s eyes burned with the fury of a Boston cop on a nigger hunt.
“Listen, my children,” al-Saffah had preached, “to Allah’s message, you Christians who go to Christian churches and sing Christian hymns and chant Christian gospels. When your grandparents struggled to break slavery’s chains, who did they pray to? The same God as the plantation owner who prisoned them in those chains! Who do you think this God, this white man’s God, this Jesus Christ Superstar God, listened to? Your grandparents or the Klan who carried his cross? Who burned his cross into their yards? Into their flesh? So long as you pray to this God who heeds only the prayers of white folk your souls will remain in bondage. Your bodies may know the delusion of freedom, but your souls know the truth of truths. When you understand this, only then will you shatter the chains that enslave you even as you sit here in your finery on this beautiful Sunday morning.”
In Mabi’s memory of that morning, al-Saffah spoke directly to him.
“Abraham, father of Isaac, prayed that a community submissive to Allah and taught by His messenger would arise out of Abraham’s seed. Muhammad is that messenger and the nations of Islam are that community, the only true descendants of Abraham. Muhammad restored to the religion of Abraham the purity destroyed by the blasphemies and corruptions of Christians and Jews.”
Al-Saffah lowered his hands and leaned forward as if he were about to whisper a secret into the ear of each congregant.
“Do not follow Jesus the Slaver. Let Muhammad lead you to Allah the Liberator who will preach to you of ajal.”
Al-Saffah slowed his speech and softened his voice.
“Life is like water sent down from heaven. Men, animals, plants, insects, all living things drink the water of life. When the earth takes on the green glow and glitter of the water of life and man thinks he has dominion over the world, Allah stops the rainfall and the glow and glitter decays into desert dust. No afflictions befall man that are not first written in Allah’s book. No one is born unless it is first written in the book. No one dies unless it is first written in the book. Jesus did not write this book. Nor did Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh.. Nor the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit. No. Allah wrote this book. Only Allah. Everything you have done and will do is written in Allah’s book, but the lines are not revealed to you except through your act of speaking them, your act of doing them. By the miracle of revelation, Allah makes you free.”
Al-Saffah was calm, deliberate, emphasizing his points with a gesture of his hand, a nod of his head.
“Allah gave everyone, everything, ajal, a term of life. You have a term of life. Nations have a term of life. Races have a term of life. The debasement of Abraham’s religion by Christians and Jews has a term of life. Only the final triumph of Islam is eternal and everlasting.”
Al-Saffah stepped down from the pulpit and centered himself on the aisle separating the pews.
“The black man’s bondage in Klan-white America has a term of life. Only when you accept the truth of ajal will you unshackle your chains and be truly free. Those who would be free, walk with me.”
This text had intrigued Mabi and he followed al-Saffah down that aisle, out of that church, into the light of Sunday’s sun. Al-Saffah had opened his eyes to how cracker devils bullshitted black folk by suckering them with Jesus the White and by scheming them into kissing the feet of Superstar’s cross. Al-Saffah had opened his eyes so that he understood Allah offered a religion where action not only spoke loud
er than words, but where action became Allah’s divine revelation.
For two years, Mabi had lived by this text. Made book on it. Had he misread it?
At al-Saffah’s home later that Sunday after church, al-Saffah had introduced him to chess. First, they had shared a meal of figs and olives, cubes of cheese, chunks of lamb flavored with spices he had never tasted before, and squares of pastry dripping with honey. After the meal, al-Saffah sat him on a small Oriental rug beside a low circular table decorated with a frieze of hand carved gargoyles. Al-Saffah reclined on a pillow across the table. On the wall above al-Saffah’s head hung eight scimitars, seven circling the eighth, the largest. Jewels overlaid their hilts, red, green, blue, some as clear as glass. Beside the scimitars, a sword and leather scabbard hung vertically.
Al-Saffah stood and drew the blade from the scabbard. “From Spain. The Nasrid period, fifteenth century. Part of my heritage.” He slid the sword back into its scabbard. “What is your heritage? A comic book?”
“Who squared you ’bout that?”
“A comic book salvaged by your father from the trash left behind by passengers on the Greyhound he drives? Tales of the Trojan War I believe it was called.”
“How you know that?”
“And, thus, Leroy Wallaca became Priam.”
“You been spying on me?”
“Allah does not spy. Allah knows and has decreed your ajal as Priam shall end.”
“No one ending nothing but me.”
Al-Saffah smiled, not a smile of joy or happiness, but a smile of satisfaction. He removed a lacquered box from a cabinet. “This chess set is from Iran, hand carved during the Seljuq period. Twelfth century.” Sixteen pieces of pale green marble laced with white highlights and sixteen pieces of tan marble with dark brown and white highlights nested in a black velvet liner. Al-Saffah handed him a pawn.
“Teach me to play. With this set.”
“You must earn the right to play with these.”
That Sunday after church, he began first weekly, then daily, chess lessons with al-Saffah, each starting and finishing with a reading from the Koran. Interspersed in the lectures about the function and purpose of each chess piece–how they moved, how the moves were recorded in chess notation, isolated pawns and weak pawn structures, time and tempo, openings and endgames–were teachings on the religion and culture of Islam. “Chess is really a game of war,” al-Saffah explained, digressing from the history of the Crusades and how Christians stole the Holy Land from Muslims. After a year, al-Saffah granted that he might play with the ancient marble set.
“How can this be twelfth century?” he asked. “It looks newer than today.”
“The army of Allah is almost twice as old.” Al-Saffah opened with the white king’s pawn to the fourth rank, P-K4, and he responded in kind. “If you became a soldier in His army,” al-Saffah said, “you will be ordained Mabi, which means “prophet” in the languages of Islam.”
“I like my name.”
“You discarded your birth name . . .”
“Leroy Wallaca a dumbass slave name. Priam the name of a warrior.”
“A comic book name.”
“A warrior’s name earned in battle. I’s proud of it.”
“How much prouder would you be if Allah bestowed your name on you?”
“You always been called al-Saffah?” He moved the knight in his queen’s bishop’s file to the third rank, Kt-QB3, to counter al-Saffah’s move of the knight in his king’s bishop file to the third rank, Kt-KB3. He liked the way the knights hopped, skipped, and jumped, one square forward or backward, one square diagonally either to the right or the left. It allowed for sneak attacks, unlike the bishops or rooks which moved backward or forward in straight lines like battering rams or the pawns confined to moving forward, one square at a time except for the opening move when two squares were possible. He would master this game, not for the sake of the game itself but because he understood how its lessons would translate to the gang-wars fought on the streets of Boston.
Al-Saffah remained silent as they exchanged moves, until after thirty for each he captured Priam’s queen and announced check.
“Why me that Sunday in church?” Priam asked as he captured al-Saffah’s queen and moved out of check.
“It was written in Allah’s book.”
“Don’t be so fucking bogue.”
“Your choice of the language of the street imprisons you in the past. Liberate yourself from that past. The present is ephemeral. Leroy Wallaca and Priam are ephemeral. Only the future truly exists. Only Mabi is eternal.”
“I’m no player piano and you no piano man.”
“Mabi is a rare name reserved for special people.”
“You a nickel slick and a nickel short.”
“The riches of Allah are not measured in base coin.”
“You talk like you’re on the pipe.”
*
Names had bedeviled Mabi for as long as he could remember, especially his own. Once again, he was six, an old six, his first day of school, when teach taught the class how to look up their names in the phone book and home-worked them to print out the name above, the name below. He found one, his old man Gideon, stooping between Wall and Wallace. He spent the rest of the day playing with the letters, arranging and rearranging them to form other names. “Alcawla” was his favorite because it was as mysterious as the frizzly chicken Gideon hung in the kitchen.
“Count them Walls and Wallaces,” he said to his mother Hannah. He handed her the sheet of paper on which he had scrawled “Wallaca.” The a’s looked like o’s and the upper case W filled as much space as the rest of the letters. “How come only one Wallaca?”
Hannah leaned against the door still wearing her nurse’s whites. Her shoes hung in a plastic bag on the back-door knob waiting for morning. She smiled the automatic smile mastered in nursing school to appear cheerful when treating patients who would never see their next birthday as she reviewed her son’s homework.
“How come there be only one?” he asked again.
Hannah shuddered. Fear still bewitched her. The immigration officer unable to pronounce or spell their surname had renamed them Wallaca after the Ethiopian village they had fled. If Leroy could find their name in the phone book, so could the Ethipian Emperor’s militia, but Gideon refused to pay for an unlisted phone number. Waste of money, he said whenever she brought it up. Nothing but a hex protects against a hex.
After supper when Leroy came in from shooting baskets at the playground and Gideon returned from driving the Greyhound, he asked his father what “Wallaca” meant.
“What do you mean, ‘mean’?” his father replied, hiding behind a comic book he had scavenged from trash left on the bus.
“Where’s our name from?”
Gideon looked up, his eyes puffy and bloodshot from a day on the road. “Names don’t come from nowhere.”
Leroy shifted the basketball from one hip to the other. “Billy Sunshine says it a slave name.”
Hannah stepped in from the kitchen, wearing her fruit and vegetable apron, green apples, green tomatoes, green summer squash. “Slavery ended long before we . . .”
“Hush up, woman.” Gideon rolled the comic book into a rod and slapped it against his leg.
“Billy Sunshine says we’re off the plantation,” Leroy continued. “Says we white-blooded.”
Gideon threw the comic book at Leroy. “Tell Jim Ed to read you this ’fore bed.”
Hannah slumped against the wall. Her apron wrinkled. The fruits and vegetables drooped as if they were spoiled rotten. “With all President Johnson’s doing,” she said to Gideon, “life’s going to be different for Jim Ed and Leroy. They have to be ready to live in the new world.”
“You can bleach your talk, woman, but you can’t bleach your skin.” He held up that day’s New York Daily News. Two headlines framed a front-page picture of blacks looting Rothstein’s Furniture on West 125th Street during the power black-out that darkened the entire East
coast two nights earlier. “Top Cop: Shoot to Kill,” read the headline above the photograph. “Cong. Powell: We’re not Animals,” read the lower headline.
“Shoot who?” Leroy asked.
Gideon scowled. “You, you ninny. You.”
Hannah picked the comic book off the floor and handed it to Leroy. “Go upstairs.”
“Go upstairs.” Gideon elevated his voice to mock his wife. “There be more truth in that comic book than in that new world she always taking text on.”
Hannah nudged Leroy toward the stairs, then retreated to the kitchen. Gideon bunkered himself inside the Daily News.
That night, Leroy asked his older brother, Jim Ed, “What you know ’bout our name?”
“Nothing but a name same as Russell,” Jim Ed said.
On the ceiling, Jim Ed had tacked a poster of Bill Russell, center for the Boston Celtics, which Gideon had bought Leroy at a Celtic-Knicks game in Boston Garden where they celebrated Leroy’s sixth birthday. First in line at the souvenir stand, last to be helped, had so angered Gideon they left before the end of the third quarter. Still, Leroy liked the poster’s smiling leprechaun, the fierceness of Russell’s eyes, and the straight line of his body from fingertips to toes as he leaped to block a shot. Leroy jumped off the bed, mimicking Russell’s shot-blocking leap. His fingertips brushed against the poster.
“I bet Russell knows where his folks be from,” Leroy said.
“Don’t take Billy Sunshine’s slave-name shit so serious,” Jim Ed said. “He’s so backwards he brushes his teeth with toilet paper and wipes his ass with a toothbrush.” Jim Ed sat down on the edge of Leroy’s bed, the comic book on his lap.
“How come the old man gets so mad when I ask him?”
“He’s just tired from driving.” Jim Ed opened the comic book so Leroy could see the drawings. “This called Tales of the Trojan War, written in way back years by some dude named Homer.”
The Fire This Time Page 24
