by Odie Hawkins
“The Asantehene! If you don’t know who he is, I can’t begin to tell you. All I can say is this: when the Asantehene wants you, you wind up being where he wants you. He’s sorta like part god and part African.
“So there I am, in a huge room with the Asantehene and his linguist, that’s the dude who does all his rappin’ for him. The Asantehene is sittin’ on a golden throne, with gold strands of thread hangin’ down over his face, a couple gold nuggets weighin’ his fingers down, gold woven into his robes. Gold, damnit! Everywhere! And the linguist, a hip lil’ ol’ dude ’bout sixteen years older ’n’ Damballah is rappin’ to me, tellin’ me that the Asantehene wants me to find the Golden Stool for him.
“He wants me, you dig?! Chester L. Simmons, to find the Golden Stool for him. I almost shat granola crumbs when I heard that. Why me? And then the Asantehene spoke, or rather threw his voice from over in a corner, must’ve been a ventriloquist … dude had a voice like a bass conga drum.
“‘I have followed your movement around the outer edges of our continent, I know of your spiritual battles, what you have suffered and overcome,’ he says to me in letter-perfect, hightoned English, ‘and it is for these reasons that I ask you to find the soul of my nation.’
“Behind that he didn’t say another mumbling word, he just sat there, just as cool and serene as you please. The linguist held a medium-sized leather pouch out to me, and I crawled out on my hands and knees, the way I’d crawled in. I mean, like that’s the way you came to the Asantehene.
“Once I got outside, about five blocks from the palace, I opened the strings to the pouch and discovered it was filled with gold dust. Gold dust! I was shitless speechless. It was like … it was like the Lawd had asked you to find his favorite pillow and paid you out front for it.
“Now the thing was, I couldn’t say anything to anybody because nobody was supposed to know that the Stool was missin’.
“I mean, like if the Stool was missin’ people would start dyin’ off, out of sadness or whatever, 10,000 natural catastrophes would occur, in addition to the fact that the Asantehene would be lynched in fifty different ways, along with every member of his family, and his name would be in the books forever as the dude who blew the Stool. You talk about a motherfucker in serious trouble!
“I ain’t talkin’ ’bout him, I’m talkin’ about me!
“If I succeeded in recoverin’ the Stool, no one but the Asantehene and his linguist would know about it. If I didn’t recover the Stool, my ass would be in a sling, six feet under, and no one would know about that either.
“I was so shook up that I went off and drank pink gin for two weeks, tryin’ to find the vision for what I was supposed to be doin’.”
He turned the corner of the bottle up and killed it, so into his story that he had forgotten about the other people in the cell. “Oooopps, sorry ’bout that!” he apologized graciously.
“Fuck that, man! Go on, what happened?!” Marcus shot in.
“Well, once I got my head together, I started gettin’ the kind of logical vibes I needed. By way of the process of elimination, I figured out certain things. Number one, no Ashanti would be caught dead or alive with the Stool; their uhhh sensibilities just wouldn’t know how to deal with it. It would be like havin’ God’s ghost locked up on the closet. I was pretty certain that none of the other tribal groups had copped the Stool because if they had … hah hah hah well, if they had, they would’ve had a war on their hands that would’ve been guaranteed annihilation for everybody, forever. And ever.
“O.k., havin’ gone up ’n down, and in ’n out in my head, who could I settle down on that would be insensitive enough, disrespectful enough, vicious enough and cold-blooded enough to rip off the soul of a nation?
“The white boy!” Brian called out.
The Great Lawd Buddha leaned over unsteadily, the potato drippings singing in his skull, to slap Brian’s palm suavely. “Right on, brother! The white boy! Now I really had a problem. The English, the white boy in charge at that time didn’t dig me being in the country in the first place, and if I made any too wrong moves, my ass was gon’ be in another sling, so I had to proceed quietly.”
The sound of a fellow inmate screaming on the tier below them sliced through Buddha’s narrative. They all tensed up. They knew the sound well. Someone receiving a “Dear John” letter, or suddenly being overcome by the pressure of the cage surrounding him or from a thousand other prisoned feelings had gone insane. The man below them, his lungs suddenly lined with steel, screamed ’til the keepers finally arrived, billy clubs and gas guns at the ready, prepared to beat and gas and drag him off to the Hole, for “rehabilitation.”
Buddha accepted another cigarette, his hands shaking slightly, aware of the importance of having something complete happen, especially where they were. “As we all know, money talks, all kinds o’ money. So that’s what I put to work for me. That and my game.
“It took me something like four months to find out how many, which and where foreign archeological expeditions had been, or was diggin’. I had cornered things down to that point. Since no one had ever seen the Stool, other than the Asantehene, I figured that some fool archeologists, rapin’ the country like they was doin’ in those days, had stumbled across the piece and was definitely keepin’ it cool ’til they got it out of the country.
“Usin’ the elimination process again, I sifted the expeditions … a French group, an Italian group, a Portuguese group, of all things, and about eight English groups, naturally.
“Gentlemen, you talkin’ ’bout a dude earnin’ his dust! I sho’ ’nuff earned mine that year. I got to the Stool, all boxed and on its way to Rome, the day before the S.S. Aida sailed.
“What I did was this: I found out that the Italians had stumbled across the Stool, which was buried, had lied to the English colonial master guys about what they had found and was gettin’ ready to arrivederci.
“Awright, playin’ the game, I managed to slip word in to the Englishman in charge. Naturally he’s pissed. I mean, like they were gonna put all the dagos in jail ’n shit, … but what he was really happy about was gettin’ his grubby hands on the Stool.
“As y’all know, the goddamned English had fought a war with the Ashanti over the Stool, years back, so they really felt groovy about gettin’ their hands on something that they’d fought like dogs for. But heyyy, this is the Great Lawd Buddha, right?!”
“Right on, Buddha! right on!” Brian yelled, oblivious to his surroundings.
“Yessuhhh, so what I did, with about eight of the most nervy Ashanti dudes you ever thought about hearin’ about, was perform the most perfectly executed robbery in the history of the country. One of the dudes who helped me rip the Stool off later became a cabinet minister, or the chief justice, or something like that, after Ghana got independent. The dudes who helped to pull the job off didn’t even want to get paid. I had to make them take some dust.
“My con to them was, you dig? I want you all to help me pull off a fantastic, incredible, unreal, daylight savin’s time holdup on the English.
“That’s all I had to say to those dudes, that’s all that we were goin’ to embarrass the English so bad that they would be walkin’ ’round with red faces for days. And that’s what we did, I organized on the q.t., of course, a tribal festival that involved the Asantehene. And while he was layin’ his blessings on the buildin’ the festival revolved around, with the Duke and the Duchess, the King’s representatives in attendance
“This is what we did. At the high point of things, my hip Ashanti buddies eased off with the Stool in a crate, singin’ ’n drummin’ ’n shit, in the middle of about fifty ’leven million fellow tribesmen.
“I’ll never know for certain, but I think I say I think the English knew what was goin’ down but they couldn’t scream, ‘Hey! bring that bloody Stool back!’ ’cause they couldn’t admit they had it, not with all those brothers out there. On the other hand, the Asantehene couldn’t admit that he was stealin’ it
back ’cause he was never supposed to have lost it in the first place.
“We wound up with what you might call an impass. Three days later, the Asantehene called me in again, laid another bag o’ dust on me without sayin’ nary a word; two days after that the English ‘advised’ me to get on. Or, as I remember the way the young stud put it, ‘Uhh, Simmons, we should like to see you depart on the next scheduled ship from this ahrea.’
“When’s that? I asked him.
“‘This afternoon,’ he told me and didn’t blink once.
“So, once again, there I was, orphaned in the world.”
He stood and stretched, “Yeahhhh, orphaned in the world.” He bowed to the men in the cell like a Mandarin lord and strolled out onto the tier, heading for his own cell, and the horrors awakened within himself from a couple hours of story telling.
“Buddha!?” Marcus called to him as he made his exit.
He turned, two cells away a quizzical expression on his Mao-shaped face.
“Buddha, you ever think about doin’ your autobiography?”
Buddha smiled at him coldly. “Yeah, I did do it once. It got all messed up, that’s why I’m servin’ time now.”
Marcus looked down at the floor helplessly, and then back up to see Buddha disappear into his own cell, ready for the evening lockup.
Sweet Peter Deeder sat in the corner of the sofa in his eighth floor apartment, a drink beside him, a three-hole notebook on his robed lap, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city.
What was coming up? Another lecture tour, a few t.v. talkshow shots, a best selling underground record album (Sweet Peter Raps), a couple other lil’ things, a movie role, possibly.
He took a long sip from his drink. So much had happened to turn his head around. He smiled solemnly at the memory of the brutal ass-kicking Kwendi and company had given him years back. Maybe they did me a favor, maybe that’s what finally did it, havin’ some young bloods try to wipe me out.
He set his drink down and made a note in his notebook “Ass kicking by young black nationalists, a turning point.”
Nawww, that wasn’t it, you son of a bitch you! he mumbled fiercely to himself. That wasn’t it and you know damned well it wasn’t. What’s one more ass-kickin’, more or less, even if that one put you in the hospital?
He stuck his pen behind his ear and reached for his drink, the city lights seeming to harden into cold, glistening splashes before his eyes.
Lulu’s eyes Lulu’s eyes his bottom woman’s eyes gleaming out at him like the eyes of some cursed statue, Lulu’s eyes, his dead bottom woman’s eyes curled around the hot shot he had accidentally given her as a present.
He poured the rest of the drink down his throat, trying to wash away the memory of the bona fide ’hoe he had been too afraid to love for five years, the one he had pushed, beaten, bullied, slaved, pimped. His bottom lady, the one who had stuck when everybody else had become unglued, the one he had killed.
He pushed the notebook out of his lap and shuffled over to his liquor cabinet for a fresh drink.
And Idella
He shuddered half the glass of scotch down. Idella caught running through the streets, stark ravin’ naked, mind completely shot by one-hundred and twenty-six tricks and eight rapes in a day and a half.
And all the rest of them. The poor fools who had come to the big city looking for glamor, romance, finance or whatever the hell it was that they sought and found themselves mummified into whatever Sweet Peter Deeder, pimp extraordinaire, wanted to make of them. He refilled his glass and slouched back over to the sofa, feeling too sad for tears.
Why couldn’t I have gotten my ass put in jail for something worthwhile, like Kwendi? Or Buddha? Or gotten killed, like Mayflower? The pantheon of neighborhood figures, sharers at one time of his mystique, flashed through his mind.
He stood up, postured drunkenly, became Ol’ Sweet Peter Deeder again, giving commands and making decisions, whippin’ asses ’n takin’ names.
“Bitch! I thought I told you to bring three-hundred dollars in here! What the fuck am I gon’ do with two-ninety-five? What the fuck does this look like to you, Sears’ bargain basement?”
“Idella! hold still! Don’t you move a fraction of an inch! If you force me to move from this spot when I swing at your motherfuckin’ jaw, I’m gon’ kill your worthless, triflin’, funky, jinky ass! I shoulda exiled your ass to Montana the day after you got here!”
The long, lush nights of being surrounded by soft, loving bodies, the wild flights of fantastic thought, courtesy of Our Girl, Miss Snow, the dynamite weed, the translucent feelings of pure, absolute power.
He settled back onto the sofa, mind juggling the pleasures and horrors of the past. And the remorse, the cold, deep, heart-crumpling awareness of how evil, dumb, foolish and stupid it had been to pimp sisters, black women, his Momma.
A bitter tear swam along the bottom lid of his left eye, threatened to break over the edge, to run down his carefully composed cheek, but failed. He picked up his notebook, put it down, plodded back for another drink and returned to try to get the notes for his new lecture series together.
He sat once again with the notebook in his lap, staring out at the city. Cryptically, he began. “Respect! You can’t respect yourself or those you pimp. Nixon had no respect. When I was a pimp, I had no respect. I thought just like him, that everybody was my fool.”
He didn’t turn when the children rushed into the room, into his work.
“Don’t bother Daddy, Tamara! Melba! He’s busy!”
Peter Dawson turned to look at his wife, a square-ass high school teacher with loads of mother wit, a profound understanding of where he had come from, and smiled drunkenly.
She swept the children along in front of her, cold and chattering about their evening at the movies, turning to wink seductively at him as she made her exit, and said, “Don’t work all night, Peter Momma gets cold in bed by herself.”
He almost laughed aloud as he scribbled points to make for his next talk, at a co-ed college thank God! Wonder what kinda ’hoe she woulda made? he mumbled to himself and went on to his next point, feeling tipsy but free.
Chapter 5
Getting By
Lubertha stared at the dull circles under Kwendi’s eyes, the heavy, tired, defiant look at the corners of his mouth. Visiting days were much harder sometimes than other times. This was a hard one, Kwendi being out of the Hole for only a week. A feeling that she would never see him again settled in on her, forced words to flow from her.
“We had our first snow this morning.”
Kwendi nodded, feeling unable to speak, his love down on him so heavy that he seriously considered jumping across the glass paneled barrier to kiss his woman.
“And, as usual, I found myself wishin’ that I was pregnant. I do that a lot, ’specially when it rains or snows.”
Kwendi nodded again, realizing that she was writing him a verbal, visiting day letter. Writers are really funny people, he reflected, smiling more now.
“You know, I think the most romantic shit you could ever imagine sometimes. Like, at times I see the two of us floating away, way above the heads of all the people we hate, livin’ a really beautiful life.”
“Sounds like you’re loaded to me,” he said softly, humoring her.
She flashed him one of her we-us-you-me smiles. “I guess, at times, in my state of mind I feel naturally high.”
Kwendi’s mind shot to the middle of his month in solitary. Yeah, you could be high from a lot of things.
“Sometimes I work myself into such a state that I feel, I feel superlucid. Super ain’t it a shame the way people are allowin’ this creep to run the government?” she veered off suddenly.
“Uh huh,” Kwendi answered quickly, feeling more into the visit second by second. “All of it is just a bunch of drummed up drama. The jive political drama. Well, we know where that takes us … hah! there’s got to be somethin’ better than the Republicans ’n the Democrats. The sociol
ogical drummed up drama, hyped up social divisions that make it supereasy to keep the real rulers, the money grubbers, in power.
“Ooops, I’m sorry, baby,” he apologized, “I didn’t mean to monopolize the conversation. How’s your father?”
“Oh, that’s o.k., I get off into things myself, as you well know. Daddy’s become such a groove. The other night he came home growlin’, with a newspaper under his arm, spread it out on the kitchen table and actually started ravin’! I mean, sho’ nuff ravin’!”
“What about?” Kwendi asked quickly, the contagious feeling of something seriously funny making him feel that way.
“Something we had rapped about a few nights before, he ’n I, Manipulation by Big Money Interests. I can’t remember exactly what the article was sayin’, but at any rate, in its own shabby way, it was tryin’ to justify jackin’ up the poor so that the rich could get some more.”
“I can dig it.”
“Anyway, I don’t know about my Daddy sometimes, he can come off with the weirdest notions in the world sometimes. Especially about politics, but what I’ve been noticing more and more, is that he’ll come right back at me with my argument a week later, if necessary.”
Kwendi laughed, seeing Mr. Franklin’s brusque manner and his bristling mustache in his mind’s eye. “When’s your book comin’ out?” he veered off, anxious now to ask, say everything, knowing that the visit would be over too soon.
“Ohh, ’bout the first of the year,” she replied, trying to be modest. “You know, even though Third World Press is publishing it, they still want to take advantage of the commercial side of things. Can you imagine, Kwendi …? I got a book comin’ out, about us! What more could any writer ask for?”
