Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  An upstairs window was wedged open noisily. A slim young black woman shimmied her legs over the sill and dangled them down toward the road, frowning at the noise. “Away from the front door, mister, you’re breaking the law,” she yelled down at the landlord. “We’re trying to learn some shit in here.”

  The property owner stared up at her, then bent down suddenly, removed his shoe, and hurled it up at the window. The shoe’s trajectory peaked two meters short of the woman. It hurtled back down to fall at the man’s feet.

  “Hey now, we’re right peaceful in ’ere. Why you gotta be so violent, Babylon?” The woman flicked up her middle finger in disgust.

  A police car pulled up outside the property, and the cameraman about-faced to film its arrival. From the still-open window, a black canvas sandshoe came rocketing in the direction of the landlord. Missing its mark, the sneaker startled the cameraman backward.

  “Away from the window, Liv,” Solomon cautioned from inside the makeshift classroom. His chalk-dusted hand was poised above the enormous black-painted wall he used as a board for his Black History classes. Struggling to maintain his frown, the young man turned his face back to his writing. It was difficult not to laugh at Liv’s antics as she balanced precariously on the windowsill, preparing to make a missile of her second shoe.

  The fire of the Railton Road rebel women was legendary. Along with their flares and clingy velour long-sleeved tees, they wore handmade African jewelry of exaggerated proportions: wooden carved giraffe earrings as large as the ear itself, and elaborately beaded necklaces long enough to hang to the navel even when wrapped around the neck several times. You didn’t want to catch yourself messing with these sisters, Solomon knew from experience.

  She was beautiful, though, this Olivia, with that cheeky sass and no-nonsense glare—those round, full cheeks and treacle-colored skin. Her left eye was glazed light blue, had been blinded in a scuffle with the cops at the national gathering six months ago in Birmingham. But even after that, Olivia was still breathtaking. Breathtaking and, Solomon was sure, starting to come round to him.

  Solomon finished scrawling the chapter number of the sermon, threw the chalk down on the ground and turned back to face the fourteen or so students who were dotted around the shag-carpeted room in various positions: on tatty cushions, sunk into wilted bean bags, resting their backs against the walls. He wiped his hands on his thighs then paused to look down at the thin layer of chalk dust finger-painted onto his black cords. His Doc Martens, threaded with the standard-issue yellow-flecked laces, were badly scuffed.

  Solomon suddenly looked up. “Genesis nine, twenty to twenty-seven,” he announced, his eyes stilled with the gravity of his task.

  The rebel students clapped in anticipation. This definitely wouldn’t be another church sermon of the kind they’d been avoiding from their grandparents and various community do-gooders all school break.

  “In Genesis nine, twenty to twenty-seven,” Solomon continued in the booming oratory of a Baptist preacher, “Noah tilted his face toward the east from where he stood on the fertile African soil of the border between Libya and Algeria.”

  The classroom hushed. Angry voices wafted up from the street below, buzzing mosquito-like through the quiet.

  “From where he stood on the border between Libya and Algeria, Noah’s gaze swept across to Afghanistan: over the dry Egyptian desert, through the raging rivers of Jordan, and out through Iran.”

  “Hallelujah, that ain’t no Bible story,” an approving voice came from the back of the classroom.

  “Dis man im prophet, praise de Lawd!” a young cedar-skinned Bajan girl with short spiky dreads chuckled behind her hands.

  The rest of the class shushed them to silence.

  Aware now that he had their full attention, Solomon threw everything he had into establishing the opening tableau. He bent forward as if leaning on a walking stick with one hand, mimed stroking a long beard with the other. “Noah’s gaze swept across to Afghanistan: over Egypt, through the rivers of Jordan, and out through Iran. His dusty white robes curtained down from his prophetic hand, as he turned and put the voodoo hex on his son Ham, through his grandson Canaan.” Solomon paused and looked slowly up at the class from his hunched-over position. “What did Noah say to his son?”

  The young Bajan woman stared at him, eyes wide. “Canaan’s curse,” she whispered quietly from behind her hand.

  “You, girl.” Solomon pointed at her with a sudden start that caused half the room to jump. “Repeat. Louder!” he barked.

  “ ‘Let your bloodline be cursed with servitude, for you betrayed me, son.’ ” She recalled the sermon by rote, in the singsong recitation of a girl who’d been churchgoing since early childhood but never had the inclination to roll the words around in all her consciousness.

  “Let your bloodline be cursed with slavery . . .” Solomon straightened his back and paced up and down the worn tan carpet, weaving in and out of the seated students. “These are the words the antiabolitionists, the slave traders, the missionaries hung the annihilation of the African continent on.”

  Solomon’s sermon was electric, and the students were enthralled, but Solomon was running on autopilot. More important things were clouding his mind than the Genesis lecture and all the raucous goings-on outside. The Railton Road Panthers were expecting an important visitor from their brothers down at the Black House on Holloway Road. Solomon was waiting for De Frankie, or whatever the shape-shifter chose to call himself today. Solomon had been running the Black History classes at the Railton Road squat for almost twenty months now, a position he’d snagged as a result of his modern history degree, and which guaranteed him floor space to sleep on and scratch meals but was otherwise unpaid. Talk had it De Frankie was on his way to sound Solomon out for the position of Minister for Culture for the rising London Panthers.

  De Frankie came from the Old World—Port of Spain, Trinidad. The man had done time, lots of it. That much Solomon knew. Drugs, racketeering, attempted murder, rape: talk varied as to exactly what he’d been in the lockup for but seldom as to whether the charges were bona fide. A recent issue of the States brothers’ Black Panther newspaper at the Railton Road library showed De Frankie bumping fists with Malcolm outside a barbershop in Harlem. Malcolm fucking X. Their own Black British version of the paper, Freedom Now, sold on street corners from Brixton to Walthamstow, had recently documented the man’s supporters. The list filled a quarter-page column. Lennon and Yoko were on it—Lennon and Yoko, for crying out loud! Thousands of pounds, they’d donated.

  Solomon delivered his closing rhetoric then quickly dismissed the class. Roll on, De Frankie. This man would bring the revolution, Solomon was sure of it. He could hear the fiery thing approaching: the sound of a million kettledrums; of quiet rolls of thunder; of tough, dark hands beating down against hard pigskin leather. Africa was stirring. In Jamaica, in Barbados, in Trinidad. In Haiti, Guyana, Rhodesia. In Brazil, Botswana, Antigua. In Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Africa was slowly rising.

  The fear and wariness Solomon and his contemporaries had encountered upon their birth into the New World was in many ways predictable. Over time, though, it had suckled on itself, mutating into a bloodthirstiness that enraged Solomon. His uncle Markie, his father’s elder brother, had been buried back in Jamaica, but had fought and died under the Union Jack. Solomon’s own parents, pity their blind trust, had been persuaded to migrate by immigration barkers planted on the islands by the very country that now refused to acknowledge the white hate that stalked black children on its streets.

  Solomon knew the whole country could feel the Black discontent lurking beneath the surface, readying itself to launch at them. All over England, whites were gathering themselves against it. He’d even noticed a change in the growing-up National Fronters: the way they drew themselves upright now when they passed by him on the street, in a step of entitlement, once-scrawny plucked-chicken bodies filled out into broad shoulders and lean hard muscle. It was as if, over ti
me, the Front had nourished a part of the misfits previously starved of the nutrients they required to thrive.

  The Fronters would come for them sooner or later. Solomon and the other rebels could feel it. They were sick with the hopelessness of it all: the sit-ins, the placards, the letter writing. They were tired of the Special Patrol pat-downs and Met curb-cruising. And it seemed to Solomon that the world was with them, the brown world at least, rallying for their dues, fighting for freedom. Across the ocean, Malcolm had been taken. King too. And still the anger kept rolling—gathering and collecting until it seemed so large and universal that all of them felt electric with it.

  * * *

  De Frankie thoughtfully stroked his thick beard. There was a wildness in his eyes that told Solomon he was dangerous. Not that kind of big-lipped, coal-faced dangerous the London newspapers implied when they spoke of “racial unrest” in the north, but a yellow-flecked iris insanity that said he was well prepared to kill, and maybe even already had. Solomon had expected anger, hate for sure, but not this kind of chilling skittishness. He’d been in De Frankie’s company for close to two hours and still felt on guard. They sat over their fourth whisky on ice at the kitchen table on the second floor of the Railton Road headquarters.

  “So. Three years at the Tech. In modern history. White history. Man like you, well schooled in Babylon’s lies. And you want a brother to trust the culture of the movement to you?”

  “You gotta know what they believe in before you can dismantle it,” Solomon replied carefully, lips slurping round an ice cube. His head was swimming. Stop drinking. The man wants you off balance.

  De Frankie refilled Solomon’s glass, carefully placed the bottle back down on the worn wooden table. Nerves getting the better of him, Solomon reached out and raised the full glass halfway to his lips. De Frankie quickly leaned forward and caught his elbow. Whisky slopped over the side of Solomon’s glass and onto his wrist. De Frankie’s fingernails dug into Solomon’s skin as he stared him in the face.

  “What is it you believe in, Solomon?”

  Solomon breathed in sharply.

  “Tell me what this doesn’t.” De Frankie let go of Solomon’s arm and tapped the three-page manifesto Solomon had been asked to write in preparation for the meeting.

  “What that doesn’t tell you, you don’t need to know.” Solomon spoke firmly.

  De Frankie looked irritated. “I heard you got children.”

  Goddamn. Motherfuck that. Solomon set his glass down on the table. He’d been sure that any disagreement between them would be around religion. Most of the brothers were into all the Muslim shit; he quietly went along with it as much as he had to, but anybody with half a mind could see he was a skeptic. There was no lack of loyalty in that, as far as Solomon was concerned. It was just that he didn’t need some religion to back his claim to what was rightfully for his people. But the babies. Fuck.

  “Haven’t got no children.” He knew that shit would bubble to the surface sooner or later. He’d never heard from either of those white girls since his mother had kicked him out of the house on Curtis Field Road. He’d just figured they’d had themselves taken care of or each given their baby to some bleeding-heart bourgeois black couple. What kind of simple-minded white English girl wanted to keep a little brown baby and end up all alone and talked about till kingdom come?

  “Some sweet little white girl that’s got a baby lookin’ jus like your ugly mug says you’re a dadda.” De Frankie looked at Solomon knowingly.

  Solomon had read all about the man’s views on the matter, heard him on the radio talking about betrayal and lynching black girls who take up with white fellows, making mockeries of black men. Solomon couldn’t understand it, really. One glance at the man and you could tell there was ivory close to the bloodline.

  “I tasted that candy once. The milk-bottle kind. It’s poisonous. Rots you.” De Frankie frowned at Solomon.

  Liv entered the room then, nodded at them, shuffled around in a kitchen drawer for barbecue tongs.

  “Nobody told you to knock around here, sister? We’re talking, innit!” De Frankie boomed, relishing the young woman’s startled expression. His eyes were fixed on the underwear outline showing through the seat of Liv’s camel-colored flares as she retreated from the room.

  De Frankie sucked on his teeth, grinned at Solomon. “Now that’s the kind of health farm I’d like to visit. Real wholesome. That warm little cornmeal bowl would fix me up good, don’t I know it. Amen!”

  Under the table, Solomon clenched his fists.

  * * *

  Following De Frankie to Railton Road came the new Panthers crew—a thug-squad assortment of ex-cons disillusioned with the academic leanings of the movement. Their step was heavy, with the can’t-lose confidence of having already sacrificed everything for that growing, pulsating black anger. Their eyes glowed like hot coals. They were armed with practical skills that Railton Road badly needed: they were butchers, blacksmiths, mechanics, and builders. The new rebels called for a body count, and it seemed evident to Solomon that the war had finally arrived.

  Outside Holloway Road tube station, coat collar up against the cold, Solomon leaned against a brick wall, blew on the fingertips poking out through the ends of his woolen gloves. He could just make out De Frankie’s head leaning out from behind the wooden palings of the terrace on the corner of Holloway and Francis. De Frankie’s navy beanie was pulled tightly over his bushy Afro. He was barely visible to Solomon in the evening fog.

  The man at the booth selling sweets and newspapers outside the station peered at Solomon anxiously, then squinted through the darkness in the direction Solomon kept glancing. He looked back at Solomon again, checked his watch. Only a slow trickle of factory workers and laborers were exiting the station entrance now. The newsstand man hurriedly stacked the last few dozen copies of the Evening News, piled up the boxes of gum and chocolate bars, cased up the cigarettes and locked his booth. With the small duffel bag containing the day’s takings clutched to his chest, he headed quickly down Holloway, away from where Solomon was lurking.

  Solomon smiled to himself as the shopkeeper peered back over his shoulder. Fool white man. Turning and straining through the darkness Solomon could see another brother standing just inside the station entrance, the elbow of his puffy black windbreaker just visible. The brother suddenly stepped out into full view, touched his right forefinger to his right temple, and stepped out of sight again. We’re on. The hairs on the back of Solomon’s neck were standing on end, prickling with anticipation.

  The roar of the train faded into the distance, and the woman appeared right on cue, shuffling tiredly through the station entrance with her matted winter coat pulled tight around her light blue factory uniform. She was preoccupied with searching for something in her large bag. Solomon had time to look her over properly, and as he did so he felt a sourness rise in his throat. She wasn’t what he’d expected. De Frankie said she’d been tracked. For months, half a year even, the Panthers had been following her. But she didn’t look to be a kept woman, wasn’t chubby and well creamed like he’d somehow expected her to be. Her hair was unstraightened in a natural Afro standing three centimeters high. Everything about her was Black London. She wore flesh-colored stockings that sagged around her ankles. Even the way she walked was familiar—head down, but striding urgently, with purpose. She reminded Solomon of his mother, and for a moment he hesitated. But farther down the road De Frankie was watching, waiting on him to prove himself. The young woman looked toward Solomon, nodded good evening and eased past on those been-standing-most-of-the-day-on-some-factory-line-without-a-meal-break legs.

  Solomon paused. He thought of those two girls, of those slim-hipped, silky-haired English girls whose bodies he’d known like he shouldn’t have. The girls he’d met at the polytechnic. They’d eyed him in the quadrangle, across the lecture theater, in the cafeteria line, glided friendly up to him all eagerness and curiosity. Solomon had given them what they wanted, exactly how th
ey wanted it. One of them had pushed him inside a specimen freezer in the science lab, pulled him down on top of her like she expected, wanted savagery, like she got off on the taboo of him. And when he’d gone at her, pressing down on her body long and tight like drying cement, she’d clutched him to her, pulled him in toward her. She’d thrown her hands back behind the splayed auburn hair that was flared around her face like fire and she’d smiled, daring him to pin them down. And when he had, she’d smiled at him. Smiled.

  The other girl had offered him a lift home in the car her father had bought her, the leather seats cold under his furious hands as she batted those long brown eyelashes at him. They’d parked behind the Tech. He’d gone at her gentle, not like the other one, but it soon became clear it was all an experiment. Egyptian eyes, she’d called them, Medusan hair. Until Solomon had felt dissected, scalpel-carved on the ethnographer’s table and no more than the sum of his African-originated parts. He had been a foreign country she was apprehensive about visiting but itching to explore. He’d felt her filing the fuck away to reminisce about when times were dull, postcard snippets of the exotic.

  And now this sister, this young, beautiful sister, was going home to it—home to some rich white man with a taste for brown sugar. Word was she was going to marry the guy. And he, as De Frankie told it at least, was from some wealthy lot up north. She certainly wasn’t dripping in jewels, so maybe they had disinherited the spoiled little rich boy for crossing the race line. In Solomon’s book that was worse: that hungry white man, prepared to give up all that wealth and privilege just for a little brown piece of a sister. Of course no brother would stand a chance against that kind of sacrifice. De Frankie was right. She deserved what was coming to her. She made Solomon sick. Solomon quickly stepped up behind the young woman, quietly tailing her as she strode along the footpath. Her house keys were now dangling from her right hand.