by Odie Hawkins
Marcus nodded in serious agreement, his reading having covered the South African sickness, its cancer.
“After a bit, some of the dudes who were lookin’ out for me, at the risk of their lives, helped get me a gig down in the diamond mines.”
“Diamond mines?!” Donnel showed the gold caps on his teeth in surprise.
“That’s what you heard, amigo diamonds! diamonds!” the Great Lawd Buddha licked his lips and sparkled his eyes in the oblique rays of the sun, caricaturing greed. “Every morning at 4:30 a.m., we slaves, yeahhh, that’s just about what we were, slaves makin’ so little a day, when you think about how much income we were makin’ for the Baas, translated meanin’ Boss. But actually goin’ deeper than that ’cause they had a system based on that Baas thing called Baaskap or Baaskamf or something like that, that was supposed to keep black people ’n everybody else un-white underground for the rest of their lives, and after they died, they’d bury ’em there.”
Marcus jammed his hands deeper into his blue denim jacket pocket and scowled at the wall above Buddha’s head. “Sounds like Mississippi or New York, don’t it?”
“Really!” Donnell affirmed, quietly slapping Buddha’s outstretched palm.
“But actually it was worse than that. Much worse. At any rate, I’m down underneath the ground, siftin’ diamonds up big as your fist, turnin’ each ’n everyone into the Baas, ’til one day my dirty, treacherous, U-nited States nigger mind started shootin’ off sparks. I knew, from havin’ watched it, that some of the dudes managed to get away with a tiny bit o’ stuff every month, industrial type diamonds, mostly. What I wanted to do was cop some authentic gems, some real stones.
“So, I got to work. It was really hard for awhile, to get my organization together. I mean, like a few of the more unsophisticated African brothers didn’t even feel that it was right to steal from the Baas.”
“Buddha! you gotta be jivin’!”
“I wouldn’t jive you, youngblood,” he answered his critic with a deadpan under his cap.
“But you see, their minds were formed in a tribal mold, they didn’t think it was right to steal from any-body, and to lots of them, despite the fact that they suffered under him, the white man was still a human being.
Deep, huh? probably one of the main reasons why all those black folks over there haven’t lynched all those white folks. At any rate, after a lil’ bit, I escaped from the mines.…”
“Escaped?” Brian asked.
“Uhhhh huhhhnnn, E-scaped. You see, at that time, you signed a contract for two years, one year or whatever, and the only way you could break your contract was to E-scape. I escaped and became a fence for the dudes I had organized in the mines.
“My thang went a lil’ bit like this, I’d pay about fifty dollars for a helluva gem, one-hundred, U.S. rates, for a fantastic gem and two-hundred, at least, for one of those overwhelming pinkie rings that you sometimes see on the small fingers of eminent sissies and stark ravin’ rich Harlem pimps.”
His audience held onto each other, their attention to his tale forcing them to disregard customary no-nos.
“I moved fast, bought everything that I could get my hands on, dealt with a rich ol’ Jewish diamond merchant who had an interest in the mines that the stones were being ripped off from. Now he really had a thang goin’ on. He couldn’t lose for winnin’ makin’ dough out of both ends.
“You dudes ever see a diamond merchant?”
The three men mechanically nodded no in unison.
“Well, take my word for it, they, ’long with the diamond cutters, are weird lookin’ lil’ bitty dudes. They all got pointed heads, they’re usually bald and they don’t have no emotion whatsoever and would do anything I mean, anything for diamonds. The dude I was dealin’ with, tryin’ to pull a super-grand stake together, in order to split the scene, tried to have me arrested a couple times, and when that didn’t work, tried to have me assassinated. All he cared about was the diamonds yeah, that’s all.”
He stood up to stretch his legs and eased back down into position, his belly hanging over his belt, Sumo style. “Anyway, within six months I had scrounged up ’bout $600,000 worth o’ diamonds, some really good ’n some really bad, and I was gettin’ ready to hat up but, as Lady Luck would have it, the night before I got ready to split, I was leavin’ a Xosa lady’s crib, a too-fine fine lady named Christa, at 12:30 a.m., and got picked up for a pass violation and that’s when the shit hit the fan.”
Buddha paused to nod solemnly to six members of a Chicano group to whom he had given a Third World talk to, the day before. “Yeahhh, the shit sho’ ’nuff hit the fan,” he continued. “Number one, the police must’ve spent three or four months grillin’ me, tryin’ to make me tell them who the white man was behind my organization. The more I told them that I was, the less they believed me.
“Finally, it dawned on one of those superduper crackers that I was actually the Head Nigger in Charge. Now that really twisted their lil’ ol’ hate-filled minds around. Me, Chester L. Simmons from Miss’ssippi, one of their sister states, had actually been behind some grand theft action it was too much for ’em!
“Now what they did, some bureaucrat in the Racial Determination section, was this. Since it was obvious that no black man could possibly have schemed himself into the kind of dough I was into, or created the kind of structured stealin’ that I had created, then I must be a white man.”
“Wowwww! Talk about goin’ through changes!” Marcus burst out, eyes digging the Great Lawd.
“Hmf! Changes you say? Uhhn huh, as good a word for it as you could hope to use. What was happenin’, aside from all the money I was usin’ to bribe everybody and his brother with, was this. On the socio-political propaganda side, the authorities didn’t want any kind of word to leak out officially about my gettin’ past the diamond mine check system. Me, a black dude! I mean, like, after all, that would give a lot o’ people big ideas. So, therefore, in that typical iron-headed way they have of doin’ things in that fucked up country, they had me declared a white man. Can you git ready for that?”
“You a bad dude, Buddha,” Donnell assured him.
“By this time I’d been in the slams, in solitary for about six months, but my money was workin’ for me. I managed to stick coin to the Prime Minister’s uncle even … anything to get out. Now, young brothers, I’ll tell you the truth, if I’m lyin’ I hope God’ll strike me dead.”
He paused for a cigarette and a light, dragged in.
“I don’t know who really decided that the best thing to do was deport me, but I sho’ wanna thank him. Aside from my bribery, they wanted to get rid of me for political reasons. They didn’t want a declared white man that looked kind o’ black in jail creating some weird kind of martyr for the black people, so they forced me to agree to a deportation scene.
“Well, heyyy, you can imagine how I felt. I would’ve agreed to anything to get out of that place. Anything!”
“Right on, brother!” Brian cued in.
“Well, you can believe they fucked me over a lil’ bit before I was finally released. One day the guard would announce that I was leavin’ that evenin’, then turn right back around and tell me to forget about it … as well as your other kinds of regular torture. The South African white man is a stranger to most of the rest of the human race, him and the rednecked Mississippian. I don’t really know what happened to them durin’ the evolutionary process, but I do know this, a special kind of sickness settled into them hundreds of years ago and they’ve never been close to being healthy.”
The Great Lawd Buddha pursed his lips reflectively and slowly stood, his eyes following the lazy flight of a pigeon. Marcus, Donnell and Brian followed the direction of his eyes.
Brian, impatiently wanting to hear the end of Buddha’s story before lockup, asked “Uhh, so they booted you out, huh?”
“In the dead of night, my friend, in the dead of night,” he continued, snapping his eyes away from the pigeon’s flight, “me and th
ree other undesirable aliens. However, I could say, as a history maker, that I had had the opportunity to be a black white man in one of the most prejudiced white places on earth, and you can believe me, that takes some doin’.
“Awright, deported, hardshippin’ and in Zambia, tryin’ to shit out a few of these gems I’d stuffed away in my precious lil’ body.”
“You got away with some?”
“Clean as a whistle! They’d made me take some laxatives ’n shit, but years ago, in India, that’s another whole story, a great Yoga man taught me how to control my bowels. I mean, like I once knew how to half-shit or fart at three different tonal levels, and a whole bunch of other things, but you know how it is if you don’t practice.
“At any rate, I was home free, a pocket full of precious stones, off to trade with the Conquerin’ Lion of Judah, the King of Kings, His Imperial Lawdship, Haile Selassie himself.”
“Oh wowwww!”
“Yessuh! I figured that the only righteous dude I could deal with would be the Emperor of Ethiopia. I knew, if anybody had any dough at all, it would be him so off I go to Ethiopia.”
The guard on the tower station above them, concerned about lengthening shadows and the intensity of their closeness, motioned them out to the center of the yard.
Marcus scowled up at the guard. “Hey, I got a lil’ home brew in my cell, y’all wanna …?”
“No sooner said than done!” Buddha agreed quickly, the last rays of the sun disappearing over the wall, chilling him to the bone.
The four of them made their way through the relays of contraband searchers, up to their tier.
Marcus ushered them into his cell as though he were receiving guests in a swank house. “Make yourselves to home. It ain’t much but it all belongs to the state.”
He uncovered a potent half-pint of distilled potato drippings, rubbing alcohol, iodine (for color) and the residue of several past batches and passed it to the guest of honor.
“Ooooowhhheeeeeee!” Buddha exclaimed, squinching up his already squinched up eyes. “Godddammmm! This shit is ugly!” He passed his critique on it and took another long swallow. The trio beamed around him.
“Go on, Buddha, you was in Ethiopia.”
“Uh huh, sho’ was. Got a fair and square deal on my gems from His Majesty, hung around Addis Ababba long enough to sock a couple crumbcrushers into a few ladies and departed, ten minutes ahead of three tribes of brothers intent on makin’ me marry their sisters and a red hot case of ol’ fashioned plague.”
Donnell spilled a little of the home brew down the side of his jaw. “What kinda plague?”
“The bubonic plague, young suh, the bubonic plague. The kind that they used to have in Europe that would kill off half of London or Paris or Amsterdam. The plague plague.
“But like I said, I was off. What I was goin’ to do was hit off ’round the eastern coast, shoot through the Upper Sue-dan right quick, slice through Egypt I hadn’t been to Cairo yet, whip ’round the edge of Libya, maybe get on back into Europe from Algeria, if everything was cool.
“As it turned out, everything was love jones, ’til I got to Algeria. Somebody had put out a contract on my ass. I don’t have to tell you who, and I guess it was stupid of me to be thinkin’ that the Algerians who wanted my nuts wouldn’t check back home every now and then.
“Anyway, whilst I was dodgin’ knives, bullets and shit being dropped from rooftops, they had started another one of those lil’ ol’ funny time wars they were in the habit of startin’. I think this one was about some dude snatchin’ some other dude’s woman’s veil off.”
“Pass it on, Donnell!” Brian reminded him, as he stared hypnotically into Buddha’s mouth.
Buddha accepted the half empty, half-pint bottle and bowed while seated, supergraciously, half lit.
“I got out,” he said curtly, after a quick swallow. “Who has our cigarettes?”
Marcus lit a Benson ’n Hedges and handed it to him respectfully.
“Yeah, I got out, fled to Casablanca, Morocco. Now that’s a town for you if ever there was one! At the time I swooped in, everything went! You hear me, lil’ brothers! Everything!! I hadn’t been in town fifteen hot minutes, black in white, white on black, moppin’ my face with a snow white hankerchief, when two of the most beautiful lil’ girls, teenagers actually ’bout fourteen ’n fifteen, grabbed me to lead me to their virgin mother.”
The men winked across the booze and their male feelings for those games.
“What could I say? What could I do? I ‘married’ all three of ’em that weekend and settled down to a harmonious domestic life. I must hasten to add, right in through here however, that the kind of domestic life I had wasn’t all that domestic. Within three months I had gotten my pinkie finger into the hash trade, had my big toe in the cocaine thing and was handlin’ a few choice gems. I had learned a whole lot about how to judge a stone from the ol’ pointy headed diamond merchant, and the rest of me was pushed off into them French diplomats’ wives, those that had a lil’ somethin’ to add to the family treasury.
“But, as usual, I got greedy. The more I had, the more I wanted. I tried to corner the hash market, and the king got salty and kicked me out. He really, actually was usin’ my dealin’s as an excuse. What he really wanted was my woman, Fatima.”
The Great Lawd Buddha uncoiled himself slowly from Marcus’ bunk, stood looking through the barred Gothic window, remembering. When he spoke again, after long moments of deep thought, his voice, a sound track of his experiences in life, carried the flavor of the souk, the yearning cry of the kif fiend, the smoke and intrigue of North Africa.
“Fatima Fatima,” he spoke her name reverently, as though whispering into the Prophet’s ear. “So beautiful, so deep and so arrogant that when she walked through the streets … pin-striped tattoo blued from her chin to her bottom lip, dudes used to walk into the sides of the buildings, or start prayin’ right on the spot. And Aissa and Naima were just about as fine as their mother. So much of what was happenin’ to me in those days was so mysterious, so unbelievable. Like Fatima and her daughters, for example.
“And I had to leave it all,” he said suddenly and remounted his seat of honor. “Yep, once again I had to leave it or run the risk of being drowned by the king’s men in a sand dune somewhere.”
“Hey Marcus, you got any black shoe polish?” a fellow con leaned into the cell door.
Marcus frowned, nodded no and tried to wave him away, but the brother, peeking in, caught up by the rapt expressions on everyone’s face, eased in and squatted at the foot of Marcus’ bunk.
Buddha, Algerian flamenco, wavy blue sand, home brew, Rabat, Marrakesh, Casablanca and Fatima sizzling through his imagination, merely nodded at the brother and rapped on. “After my expulsion I became a lost man. It was as though my senses didn’t want to work anymore, as though too much had happened. It was terrible, purely and simply terrible, my brothers. I became a soulless, ash-splattered, piss-stained, dodo-covered representative of humanity, sleeping wherever my head found itself, eatin’ goat turds and rat shit, searchin’ for my Self again.”
The latest addition to the group looked from one face to the other, seeking some explanation for where they were, but receiving none, listened harder.
“If you can get into what my trip was. Here I had been declared a white man in South Africa, managed to avoid the perils of being lynched, had made it around the eastern fringe of Momma Africa and all of a sudden, for only reasons that the Great It has an explanation for, I find myself in rags, walkin’ down through Mauritania, tryin’ my goddamnest to get to someplace on the west coast, to get on a freighter, or a slaveship, or somethin’, headed for the Indies, at least. My luck had run out, and I knew it.”
He turned the bottle up and sipped delicately, as though it were his by reason of possession no one bothered to correct him.
“I still had a diamond big enough to constipate an elephant in my rags, but I was savin’ that for the finale, for my grand exit fro
m Africa. What I had in mind to do was drop it in the Atlantic, a hardened tear for the souls of all our brothers ’n sisters who had jumped, been pushed, or had in some way, wound up being shark’s grub for a few hundred years durin’ the black human being trade.”
Marcus, an Ourstorian, looked at the Great Lawd Buddha with a tearful gleam in his eye, the home brew almost pushing it out.
“In Africa, amongst the religious people, you always pour what they call a libation to the gods on every occasion. That’s what I had planned to do. But, as usual, Mr. Fate spread his fingers all over my plans and took me off.
“I wouldn’t even attempt to try to take you dudes through all the supernatural trips, all the days ’n nights of starvation, both physical and spiritual, the times I was lost amongst people who thought I was a god, or a dog, or any of that all of the moments of intense ecstasy and profound sadness I experienced durin’ my two-year walk.”
“Two year walk?!” the newcomer exclaimed.
“Shut up, Amos,” Brian said quietly, brutally.
“Yeah, two years I walked,” Buddha favored him with a wise old glance, “from the outskirts of Casablanca, through what they used to call the Spanish Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, the Ivory Coast on into Ghana.
“Now strangely enough, for some reason, by the time I made it to Ghana, my mind seemed to clear itself, to come alive again. All of a sudden it seemed that I was amongst my people. Can y’all get into where I’m comin’ from?”
All four men, his audience, nodded yes, yes, yes, yes.
“I don’t know what it was, really. Maybe it was that cup of twenty-five year old palm wine a sister on the outskirts of Accra laid on me, or the words of an American blood who spoke to me or whatever, but I was back in the world uhh huhh … back in the world. Naturally I wound up dealin’ with the slickest motherfuckers in six countries for this stone I had. Got a decent price for it too, went out and bought some hip kente cloth robes, partied a lil’ bit and the next thing I know, the Asantehene of the Ashanti people is requesting the pleasure of my appearance.
