The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man

by Odie Hawkins

  “Did I tell you about what Buddha is doin’ these days?” Kwendi asked brightly, always the first to try to shove them away from the emotional doldrums.

  “No,” Lubertha smiled back at him wistfully, her eyes straying to the summer sunlight streaming down onto them from the window at Kwendi’s back.

  She listened carefully to the story, alert for the coded words that might indicate he was really talking about something else. He finished the story with an attempted flourish that fell flat and looked away, trying to keep the tears from coming out of him.

  “Yeah, Buddha is really something!” Lubertha commented strongly, helping him past the urge to cry. “It’s too bad he doesn’t write some of the lies he tells.”

  They both laughed cautiously, gently, as though at an old joke. Kwendi balled his fists up suddenly and pounded on his thighs, trying to massage away the tingling he felt.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” she asked, all love and concern.

  “Ohh, nothin’, nothin’ really. I just been pushin’ a lotta iron lately and your muscles get all tightened up sometimes doin’ that, you know what I mean?”

  Lubertha nodded numbly, wishing that the hour was over and wishing that it had just started, wishing that she could open her legs under the long counter and receive her man’s frustrations, love him then and there.

  They avoided each other’s eyes for a few moments, trying to reorder themselves.

  Kwendi gained control of himself first and stared lustfully at the woman he loved. How many summertimes had they sat across from each other? Wanting to touch, kiss, love. How many? “Lubertha?”

  She stared back at him, surprised to hear him call her that, … over the years he had coined the nickname, Cush, for her and had used nothing else.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know how much I love you?”

  A temporary attack of shyness forced her to lower her eyes. “I … I think so.”

  He opened his mouth to say more, but the guard’s stick tapping him on the shoulder canceled it out. “Time’s up, Jones.”

  They both looked at the guard in disbelief. Their time couldn’t be up, they had just sat down, had just begun to talk about important things. Nothing had been said.

  “I said, time’s up, Jones,” the guard stressed each word.

  Kwendi felt the corners of his mouth pull down, his temper begin to rise.

  “Be cool, baby,” Lubertha said across the barrier, unable to stand up, afraid that her tension would force her legs to buckle. “Be cool, baby,” she said again, as Kwendi was led away, back to his tier.

  Kwendi sat on his bunk, leaning his back against the wall, feeling the pressure from his homemade knife as he leaned, brooding. Motherfuckers He glanced apprehensively at the open cell door from time to time, thinking back to the too brief conversation he had had with Lubertha a few short hours past, about what they had said, … nothing. And what they would have liked to have said, everything.

  My Dearest Cush, you like that, don’t you? his mental letter began. Once again summer is here and this no-longer-young man’s thoughts turn to his love. I’ll warn you at the beginning, everything is on my mind, so don’t pay any attention to how it’s put. Six brothers have been stabbed already this month, I guess the prison sap is rising a little faster this year.

  He shook his head, erasing the imaginary letter, bounced from his bunk to snatch a pencil and pad from his storage shelf and remounted the bunk to write a real letter. Impulsively he began, “I’m happy about your book, so happy I don’t even know how to express my feeling in words. I hope you become rich and famous (no shit!).”

  He dropped the pencil and felt for the shiv stuck down in the back of his belt when he heard the footsteps.

  “Writin’ again, young warrior?” the Great Lawd Buddha asked him, looming up in his cell door.

  Kwendi relaxed. “Yeah, bruh Buddha … I thought I could put my time to better use than watchin’ a ten year old racist flick.”

  “Yeah, me too, I’m deep into a book on spiders.”

  They smiled warmly at each other.

  “Stay well,” Buddha said, goin’ on, “and watch your back.”

  “Right on!” Kwendi snapped and sat staring at the bars, the cages across the tier, after Buddha’s departure.

  “You know something, baby?” he continued scribbling impulsively, as though just beginning his letter disregarding all attempt at cohesion, “prison can be a strange thing. I reach a point sometimes when it seems that I don’t care. Realty ’n truly. Maybe it’s some kind of hypnosis. I don’t have a name for the feeling, but I recognize it when it comes down on me. Call it fatalism if you like.

  “Awww, but that’s not where I want to go. I do hope your book is more than a damn success, I hope it’s read, especially by those ego trippers in the Club. They need a whole lot more truth laid on them. Too bad they couldn’t understand why you had to leave them, squabbling and ripping each other up as usual.

  “I’ve tried to lay some weight on Abdul’s head but he’s so far off into being a savior that he can’t relate to reason anymore. Too bad.

  “Big Momma as a Muslim sister? Beautiful. I guess if Baby June could make it into the Nation, as fouled up as he was, no reason why Big Momma couldn’t give up snuff Inshallah!

  “Rudy got a kite through to me last week, did I tell you? Talking about his law studies, I really appreciate the help he has given on my case, but mostly it was about his feelings for Phyllisine Evans, once again, Inshallah!

  “No, baby, I haven’t become religious, not in that sense anyway, but Inshallah (God be willing) is a beautifully poetic expression that the Muslim brothers here use and I kinda like it.

  “Onward!

  “My day was made when I heard that Taco, Rina, Leo, Harry, Chili and Jake the Fake had cleaned the Office of Systematic Black Devaluation out for $300,000. The figure sounds a little high to me, but no matter, if they only beat them out of $300, at least some of that money finally reached some of the people who’ve had to habitually steal for a living, or worse. More power to the sisters ’n brothers!

  “What fantastic times we live in. I can remember a time when those particular sisters and brothers would’ve never taken themselves beyond a spontaneous ripoff. Maybe having an authentic, unrehabilitated crook as the ex-vice president of the country and an outright criminal with murderous tendencies as the president of the country has been an inspiration to a lot of people.”

  Kwendi calmly stuck his pencil behind his ear when his eye caught sight of the shadow cast by someone standing beside his cell door. He and the shadow remained in place for a few tense seconds.

  Smitty, the guard, tired of the cat and mouse game, eased into view, almost causing Kwendi to pull his weapon out. “No pitcher show for you tonight, young waryer?” he asked slyly, sarcastically, peering across at the tablet on Kwendi’s lap.

  “Not tonight,” Kwendi answered drily creep.

  “Too bad, good pitcher lotsa action.”

  Kwendi straightened his back, sitting on his bunk, and gave the guard such a dignified, mean, cold, merciless look that he simply walked away without another banal word, unable to cope with what the look said to him about his mother, his father, and all of the elements that made him feel proud of being a “guard.”

  The hate that Smitty felt tightened him up so badly that he had to grit his teeth a few times before continuing his rounds.

  “Lubertha, my beautiful Cush,” Kwendi continued as soon as Smitty passed on, “why do I waste all these words and all this paper? Doing everything but recording my love for you. I should spend myself lavishly on my feelings for you with every motion the pencil makes. I should scream, rant, rave my emotions across these pages like a madman, but instead I go off into what I think of our political system.

  “It smells worse every year, the ways and means to combat institutionalized racism and all the rest of the institutionalized bullshit most of us suffer under. See what I mean? Why can’t I
just leave my mind and heart at institutionalized loving you? And stop!

  “Wish I could, sho’ do. Wish I could!

  “I guess if my head didn’t pound as hard as my heart, if I could slide by all the hypocrisy, the sham and shuck that I see around me every day, well, I guess I wouldn’t be locked up, would I? Being in the inner prison, like the inner city, is a particularly good place to observe a lot of the crap from the only real problem is that the smell really gets you down sometimes.

  “I meant to ask you earlier, how are your parents? Your father especially? From what you’ve been layin’ on me, sounds like he has gone almost completely around. Groovy. I think it’s almost obscene sometimes how little attention so many of today’s so-called young militants have forgotten the brothers like your father.

  “Who knows? Maybe I’m getting old myself, but one of the things I’ve learned over a period of time is how to pay closer attention to the minds of some of these gray heads.

  “Let’s face it, some of them got so badly brutalized so early that they are just shells, but the others, the ones who grew out from under their oppression, have something vital to say to all of us. A lot of things bother me these days, maybe it’s because I have too much time to think. I’m bothered by the fake wars that are created by the rich man’s media for black people to deal with, for example. Strange, isn’t it? I think, that despite the fact we are a more unified people than we’ve ever been, there is too often an overblown story somewhere about how badly we get along.

  “No matter whether it be the so-called sister-brother battle or the sister-sister battle or the brother-brother battle, or whatever. They don’t overemphasize the internal problems of the Lithuanian community or the Chinese.

  “Mentioning the Chinese, the yellow people. It’s a shame that our people won’t pay as close attention as we should to the lessons that many other peoples could teach us. The Japanese, the European Jews of Israel, the Chinese and the Scandinavians come to my mind, along with the Swiss.

  “Yeahhh, I’m hip to what a lot of the brothers would probably say It ain’t black-black-black.

  “And, I guess in the sense that they understand blackness, it wouldn’t be. But I think we owe our people the best kind of life that they can have for the remainder of their time on Mother Earth. Somehow, to me, it seems stupid not to be as selective as we can possibly be about our needs damn the Wants for awhile. We’ve been carefully programmed to want. Want is a luxury, not a need.

  “We want a hog, we don’t need one. We want a flashy wardrobe, we don’t need one.

  “If only we could learn a facet of the Japanese lesson. Here is the only group of people on earth that the white men experimented an atomic bomb on (they would’ve dropped a few on the Indians, if they’d had some), and what it did to them is something we can see happening right before our very own eyes. My theory is that their hats went so deep that they decided to take over the world that was responsible for bombing them. And, as we can see, they be doin’ it too.

  “I think we could learn a helluva lot from them about many economic things.

  “I get so goddamned tired of hearing so much so-called black talk, darkass rhetoric is what I call it, talk designed to excite the people, and then what? I’m not saying become exactly like the Japanese, because they’re fucking themselves up, becoming mechanical-computer-chrysanthemums. Remember how much I used to disagree with Rudy about his Third World approach? Well, I hate to admit it, but on quite a few points, the brother is right.

  “We’ve been so programmed to deal with our own localized oppression that we forget that there are other people in the world in much worse shape than we’re in.

  “Can you imagine the kind of force we would constitute if we stretched our groovy black hands straight down south? Like, I mean, through Mexico, Central America and into South America as a whole. They have a bunch of Indian folks that we could hook up with, not to mention the ‘overseas’ blacks, and I ain’t just talking about Mother Africa either.”

  Cherub Brooks strolled into the cell, taking off his shirt and yawning. Kwendi felt foolish for allowing himself to be taken by surprise by his cellmate’s entrance. The joint was not a hip place to allow surprises to happen. “How was the movie, bruh?” he asked, cleaning up behind his oversight.

  “Shhhiit! If I’d a known they were gonna show something that fuckin’ bad, I’d a stayed home and played with my dick.”

  Kwendi laughed, the tension gone for a few minutes.

  Cherub Brooks, all five-feet-five of him, ex-boxer, ex-pimp, ex-bookie, ex-juvenile delinquent, rapist thief, drug peddler, con-man, swiveled his baby face around on his muscular, weightlifter’s neck as Smitty and three other guards marched up to the door of the cell.

  Kwendi high-signed to Cherub on the q.t., get this to my woman … and casually dropped the tablet on his bunk as he stood up.

  “O.k. Jones, roll up your bedding and let’s go.”

  “Go where, for what?”

  “I’m signing you into the Hole for thirty, for insubordination.”

  “For whaaaa …?”

  “You heard me, damnit! Insubordination! And I got witnesses.” He nodded toward his three partners, who nodded back agreeably, shotguns leveled.

  Kwendi smiled bitterly and turned to his cellmate. “See what I mean, Cherub? When I talk about revolution. There is no way to please the oppressor’s strange whims, you must attempt to overthrow him by any means necessary.”

  Cherub looked into his friend’s eyes and saw black steel shimmering.

  “C’mon outta that cell, you sonavabitch! Or we’ll come in and drag your black ass out, piece by piece!”

  Kwendi smiled again, this time at the four beefy men standing in front of him, and suddenly charged them, the impact of his move was so sudden and so great that Smitty, Kwendi’s knife in his eyebrow, and the guard next to him were falling over the tier railing before their weapons fired.

  The other two guards and Cherub looked over the rail solemnly, down at the heaped trio on the stone floor, three floors below.

  “That dirty rotten son of a bitch!” one of the guards muttered and leaned his shotgun against the tier railing, hostility negating his customary regard for s.o.p.

  “C’mon, Moose, let’s throw this bastard over too!”

  The two guards immediately found themselves dealing with a man fighting and screaming for his life.

  The writhing heap of men below, Kwendi, Smitty and the other guard, tangled, broken, dying and the grunting, savage struggle going on between Cherub and the vengeful guards was enough for the mass of prisoners returning from the movies.

  The newspaper headline said, two days later, in retrospect, “Riot Started By Inmate’s Suicide.”

  Epilogue

  Lubertha sat in her room, looking out at her neighborhood, at the stream that seemed to be shimmering up from it in the aftermath of a sweltering summer day. She began to slowly unbraid her hair, row by row, absently.

  The funeral was over, and there was a degree of happiness mixed in with her sadness … At least, goddamnit! he’s not behind bars, caged up like an animal anymore.

  She could hear her mother and father talking quietly from the next room, the tinkle of whiskey glasses. Even her mother was having a taste. Why not get drunk after the world had come to an end?

  A crooked smile flitted across her mouth as the Spinning Top Dude turned the corner and began to struggle up the street, weaving drunkenly through the groups of people congregated on the sidewalks, trying to evade the crackerbox heat of their shellshocked rooms. Bet he really misses his buddy

  I bet

  The sudden, agonized growl that tore itself from her throat surprised her, the angry sound of a hurt animal.

  Mrs. Franklin rushed to the bedroom door. “Lubertha, you awright, baby?”

  The moment gone, eroded by a steady stream of silent tears, she answered calmly. “I’m awright, MommaI’m awright.”

  “Are you sure?” her mother
asked, wanting to make certain, wanting to go beyond the door and nurse her daughter’s grief.

  “Uhhhhuh,” Lubertha answered.

  Mrs. Franklin walked back slowly to the front room, nodding to her man, she’s all right, she’s all right. They both understood that she wanted to be alone at this point in time.

  Lubertha held her face in her hands for a few minutes, muffling her grief, the tears dripping like blood through her fingers. Finally, as though in a trance, she glided over to her desk, pulled ten sheets of paper from her desk drawer and began to write. “Dear Kwendi,” she began, before realizing her mistake. She felt the impulse to break down completely, but held the urge back and erased the words instead.

  Starting on a fresh sheet of paper, she headed it, “Lament for Kwendi.”

  “Lament for Kwendi

  “Kwendi, a love lost, a child unborn, another bloody sacrifice. In the beginning you were there, the greatest and best impact on my eighteenth year

  The man for all my life, the one who understood exactly what kind of love I had to have, and what kind of love I had to give. Our exchange was beautifully even steven.

  Kwendi, a love found, a child unborn, another bloody sacrifice.

  We knew, soon after our spirits mated, that there was no hope for us, just wanting justice. But, being black, we hoped anyway.

  Blindly we hoped, the disillusioned outcasts of a cynical, racist society.

  We rapped about the possibility of changing ‘our country,’ this hypocritical fortress that our slave masters forced us to call home, long ago. No wonder, you often said, that there were no champeen black swimmers, who in the hell would dig swimming after a Middle Passage Trip?

  With the outside possibility of change for the better, from every kind of bitterness, to some kind of sweetness, we formed the Club.

  It was not the first Club. The first shipment of our forefathers formed the first Club the name for an instrument that we hoped to use with constructive force.

  But we were young and hadn’t fully realized how well our people’s minds had been seersuckered, hogged, dogged, slanted, catalogued, footballed, tracked, highjumped, whiskied, wigged, doped, bleached