Jackson, Katherine Marie said. Stella just had an idea I think might help Mombasa at his hearing.
He put his arm around his wife and bussed her cheek. Well, we know how brilliant she is. Whatever advice she gives, I’d say follow it.
I’m glad you feel that way. Well. Here it is, then.
Immediately on hearing Stella’s idea, Jackson regretted his largesse. It seemed the women, lost perhaps in some remarkable haze of forgetfulness, thought it would help Mombasa if Jackson appeared before the parole board to testify on his behalf. Or it might have been they wanted him to represent him. They weren’t that clear. Oh, I don’t know what good I’d do, Jackson started to say when the two of them interrupted to dissuade him. Stella: You’d do worlds of good. You’re the missing link. Katherine Marie: We’ve tried everything else. What’s left to lose?
Only my sanity, thought Jackson, but then he looked at the women looking at him. Their eyes were bright as full moons, their lips open and damp. They looked prepared to thwart any argument he might propose, even the most reasonable one, which was that, although a member of the bar, Jackson had no experience in parole matters. He was just a country lawyer with a civil practice. He drafted wills and wrote commercial contracts. He rarely litigated. After they’d all moved back south and lawyers were hired to petition that Mombasa be moved from the federal penitentiary in Virginia to the one in Yazoo City for his family’s sake, he’d not even been called upon to draft a letter. How could he prevail where some of the best minds of the ACLU had failed? What had he to add to the case beyond a few personal anecdotes that might lend context to Mombasa’s crimes but could hardly effect anything else? What were these women thinking? He looked into their eyes again, sighed. Under the fierce light of such determination, he was forced to acquiesce.
Alright, I’ll try. But Mombasa has to agree. I have to see him beforehand and he has to agree. What do you think, Katherine Marie? Can you get me an audience with himself, then? Will he see me?
I’ll make certain of it, don’t you worry about that.
Alright. If you do, I’ll try.
The women fell on him then, fondling and kissing him in the most pleasant way imaginable. He found it entirely impossible that he was in the middle of them once again after all these years. The wonder of it all had an odd effect on his reasoning, inspiring a surge of hope that maybe he could get Mombasa sprung from federal prison after all. How strange life is, he thought, entirely euphoric, how strange these two women met in the first place, how much stranger the friendship that sprang up between them, how even stranger than that, the fact that they’d reconciled after more than a decade of estrangement preceded by the worst argument he’d heard of in his life between two mature women, absolutely the worst.
Not even the most desiccated skeptic would deny that from the beginning Katherine Marie and Stella’s bond was a fateful one. It originated at a time and place no one expected, during an era when Jackson had decided his childhood friends were lost to him forever. Stella considered their storied selves two more of those ghostly attachments Southerners revel in, stuck in the past as they always were, her husband no exception.
Stella and Katherine Marie met independently of Jackson, which was the fateful part, on the maternity ward of Hamilton Hospital, an understaffed, poorly endowed health-care establishment that was more clinic than hospital, located in one of DC’s poorest neighborhoods. Stella was taken to Hamilton in an ambulance after passing out four months into her pregnancy in the home of an illiterate single mother of five whom she was helping fill out the new forms for food stamps. Katherine Marie was there to hand out Black Warriors of the African Jesus pamphlets on child-raising to the new mothers on the ward. At first, she only glanced at Stella, her brows knit with dark surprise that some white woman was taking up space a sister needed, a white woman who didn’t look half poor enough to belong there. As it happened, Stella Godwin Sassaport looked over in her direction at the same moment.
Jackson’s wife had already bled out the child he’d given her after three years of ardent, fruitless trying. She lay on a gurney in the hallway waiting for him to arrive and take her home. In those days, communication was neither swift nor certain. It was unclear whether Jackson knew yet where she was or why. She’d already waited three hours for him. If she’d been strong enough, she would have walked out and taken the subway home. She tried to get up on her own steam every twenty minutes or so, but her head swam each time. It was too much, the best she could do was half sit up. She was stuck there waiting, bleeding, stoic, dry-eyed, but she didn’t have to like it.
And now this black woman dressed like an African missionary in a white robe and head wrap, a giant wooden cross around her neck, cast a look at her that was not at all pleasant, so Stella stared back at her as if to shout: Dammit, do I look like I want to be here? In that moment, their eyes locked with the suddenness of a thunderbolt’s strike in an open field on a dry afternoon, each overwhelmed by an attraction, a comprehension neither could define, an intimation perhaps of the pairing between them that would take place in the days and months to come, although neither understood it at the time, neither could tell you what it meant even today. Still, there it was—undeniable, pulsing, hot as a living thing, pulling at each of them, striking then pulling them toward each other, and because they were women, they gave in to its force. Katherine Marie walked over to Stella, stood there at the side of the bed, and asked: Do you need something? Yes, thank God you’re here, Stella said, resisting an urge to take up the stranger’s hand and kiss it, her gratitude was that strong. You look like a kind woman. I lost my baby today. I want only to go home. They say my husband’s been called, but I’m not sure. I’ve been waiting hours and hours. Can you find out for me if a Jackson Sassaport is on his way to collect me? Could you, please?
Katherine Marie’s jaw dropped, her eyes bulged, she was that shocked by the sound of a name she’d not thought to hear again the rest of her natural life. She may have reeled, since a gang of burly black men in camouflage pants, black berets, and white T-shirts emblazoned with a clenched fist holding a crucifix stepped forward from out of nowhere to surround her. They were the bodyguards Mombasa assigned to protect her when she went around the city for her works of charity and consciousness-raising. Jackson? she said to Stella after waving them off, S-a-s-s-a-p-o-r-t? Not out of Guilford, Mississippi? Surely not that Jackson Sassaport?
Yes. That would be my Jackson. Do you know him?
I do believe I do. It’s been a fair amount of time.
Are you from his part of the world, ma’am? Of course you are. I hear it in your voice.
Both women felt an odd sense of nausea next, the kind of nausea that affects sensitives just before an earthquake or visionaries before giving up their selfhood to an invasion of alien spirit. Katherine Marie introduced herself.
I am Malaika Cooper, only Jackson would know me as Katherine Marie.
And your husband is Mombasa, once known as L’il Bokay.
Oh my Lord.
Katherine Marie sank onto the foot of Stella’s gurney, overcome by the queer coincidence of it all. It was not long afterward that Jackson arrived at last, rushed to Stella’s side, unaware the woman sitting with her back to him was his unrequited love from back home. He rushed past her, embraced his wife, weeping into her neck, while he mumbled I’m sorry, I’m sorry, our poor little child, I’m sorry, I’m sorry over and over again. Now that he was with her, Stella allowed herself to sob in his arms. For a time, the rest of the world faded away. Out of respect, Katherine Marie removed herself to the opposite end of the ward. She tried to keep an eye on them while preoccupied with her proselytization, waiting for an opportunity to present herself to her old and dear friend. A swarm of accidents prevented this. First a listener of Mombasa’s weekly radio address buttonholed her to pepper her with scriptural quotations. Next, a new mother all of fourteen years of age grabbed her skirts and begged for information on public assistance. By the time she fended off the
first and helped the girl locate a social worker, the Sassaports were processed out of the ward. Katherine Marie consoled herself thinking she could easily find Jackson again through the hospital records. Meanwhile, Stella had recovered her equilibrium enough to tell her husband in ragged voice of the extraordinary resurrection of his past mere hours after the demise of his hope in the future, pointing with an unsteady finger in the direction of Katherine Marie’s back, which disappeared at just that moment around a corner. He turned, saw nothing, did not believe her. Her story sounded exactly the kind of hallucinatory experience a person in extremis might achieve. Then he saw a Black Warrior of the African Jesus pamphlet in the lap of a woman with an infant at the teat and wondered.
Later on in the week, Katherine Marie determined where the couple was living in the town. She took the train over without her bodyguards or calling first and rang the doorbell. Jackson answered. He dashed down from the third floor of the building to the first and stuck his head through the entryway, as the buzzer was broken. When he saw her, he knew her instantly despite the passage of time and her African costume. He embraced her there on the front stoop, saying: So my wife is not insane! And the two of them beamed and rocked back and forth close as twin babies in their mama’s arms until they became aware of the stares of passersby, at which point they released each other and Jackson ushered her into the apartment. How is your wife? Malaika Cooper née Katherine Marie asked right away. Jackson shrugged. Depends on the day. She tries to be strong, but her hormones are crashing. It makes her difficult, she’s just not right most days. And you, Jackson? How are you doing? He smiled. Why, sad. Of course, I’m very sad, thank you for asking. I do think your arrival, though, will perk us both up quite a bit.
Which is exactly what happened. Despite everything else that came to pass, for a good number of years following that day, the Sassaports clung to Mombasa Cooper’s family with a kind of relief borne out of the desperation caused by three more miscarriages before the issue of offspring was finally put to rest. In a way, Malaika and her children became for them a repository for all the emotions they’d had to squelch along with any hope for their own progeny. She needed them, too, after her own reversal of fortune during that same year as the first Sassaport miscarriage.
The day Katherine Marie ventured over to a pocket of white neighborhood near DC’s Embassy Row to pay her first visit to Jackson and Stella, Mombasa happened to be in Chicago at the University of Illinois, participating in a three-day panel discussion with representatives from the organizations of Dr. King, Bobby Seale, and Stokely Carmichael on the various philosophies of black liberation current at the time. He felt lucky to be there, as he didn’t enjoy the cachet the others did. The sun that shone on him the day the ACLU vindicated him and he announced the establishment of his party had long ago set. The Black Warriors of the African Jesus had devolved to a footnote in a movement overshadowed by the rising stars of newer constellations, that is, more recent victims and heroes engaged the public mind. Mombasa was entirely aware of his status as a minor satellite of civil rights activism. He hoped to reignite community interest in his ideas through the conference, although he had no allies there. None of the other participants lived on his side of the street. To a man, they considered him not enough this, too much that. Dr. King’s people, the most honored by the white world, were never separatists although the spiritual countenance of his movement came closest to that of the Black Warriors of the African Jesus. The others, arrivistes when compared with the works of Dr. King or Mombasa, were suspicious of anything he had to say. Bobby Seale, at the dawn of his romance with Marxism, considered Christianity a slave religion, while Stokely Carmichael reckoned the Black Warriors too focused on negative imagery. Their founder’s awareness of all this had an effect on his performance that day. After hours of timid discussion and deference to opinions contrary to his own, he became confused, dissatisfied with himself, and he needed to consult his wife. Why did I take a backseat? he wanted to ask her whom he trusted above all others. Why did I beg pardon so many times? How would his subservient demeanor appear to his followers? Would they be as disappointed in him as he was in himself?
As soon as he could get to a phone, he called his wife at the apartment that served as both their home and party headquarters in DC. Her mama answered the phone. She’s gone out, he was told, I’m watchin’ the kids. Where’d she go? he asked. Well, now, I don’t really know. To see some friends. Mombasa arranged that he would call back later that night, but when he did Katherine Marie was still not home. He called the head of her bodyguard detail. He had no idea where she was either. Mombasa worried himself into a near fit. The bodyguard called the chief of Black Warrior security to let him know the wife of the leader was missing. This man, a man called Dume, was a small, suspicious man well suited to his work, a man disastrously married three times to three different roundheels, a man who considered all women untrust-worthy, morally weak, generally inferior. He parked himself outside the Cooper apartment watching for Malaika’s return to see if he could catch her up to anything untoward.
It was Jackson’s fault she stayed out late that night. She tried to leave three or four times, and each time he dissuaded her, begging her to share their evening meal with them, promising to drive her home. How often is the lost found? he asked. Better yet, how often does my wife find a friend? And that made Katherine Marie laugh, even though she didn’t know Stella well enough yet to get the joke. She was just guessing by the tone in Jackson’s voice and by the way Stella hit him in the shoulder that there was some truth in his question, some exaggeration and wherever the meat of it lay, she could see he loved his wife anyway, purely, to distraction, the way she loved her husband. And that felt fitting and right and good in an extraordinarily satisfying way, which, if she analyzed it, had something to do with both Jackson’s feelings about her and her own shadow feelings about him. Now that they were all securely married, she could admit to herself how much she’d always cared for him without seeing him as some kind of forbidden threat, and so she did.
He made dinner for them all, a down-home dinner with grits and spoon bread both, and he served wine, the best jug they could afford, Tavola Red. Everybody got a little drunk. Stella made sure Jackson drank half a pot of coffee before he drove Katherine Marie home. On the way, he said: Malaika, Malaika, you know it’s real pretty, but I just cannot get used to it. You’re always going to be Katherine Marie to me. How’s your mama do it? How’s she set into calling you a different name than she’s called you her whole life? Now, I can easily call L’il Bokay Mombasa because, let’s face it, look at him, he’s a Mombasa. Just say it slow and deep: Mom-bas-a. Mom-bas-a. Yes, indeed. He’s a Mombasa if there ever was one, although I don’t know if there ever has been one before now, has there? It’s a place not a person name, isn’t it?
Katherine Marie was pleased with Jackson that he knew that, because there were maybe three white people in all of America at the time who knew that.
Yes. It’s a port city in East Africa, a major trading post of slaves passing through the hands of Moslems and the Portuguese.
Why would Bokay want to do that? Name himself after a slave city?
Well. He feels it emphasizes that the shame of slavery does not belong to the enslaved. Plus, he feels it brings him closer to the African Jesus who was a slave to the empire of Rome which killed him.
Since he was elated for the first time since they’d lost the baby and in his cups no matter how much coffee he’d swilled, Jackson said: Well, indeed, darlin’. I do not know about that, but better you all blame the Romans instead of the Jews for killin’ your Lord Jesus. My whole life, I got plenty neighbors blamin’ the Jews. Don’t need the ones I actually love doin’ so.
Katherine Marie looked at him with a blank, startled look, and then she started to laugh. As they’d pulled up to her building, she kept laughing, making of her laughter a good-bye accompanied by a buss on the cheek, which was innocent, and Jackson, though terribly pleased, kn
ew it was innocent. But Dume, on watch from the street corner, did not. Jackson yelled out the window: So, we’ll see you a week from next Tuesday? as Stella had suggested a reunion dinner for the four of them, the children included if the Coopers wished. Dume wrote the phrase down along with Jackson’s license plate number and cursed them both under his breath.
When Jackson returned after driving Katherine Marie home, Stella was awake and excited, pacing around the house taking dessert dishes and ashtrays into the kitchen, straightening magazines on the coffee table and the like all in a manic putter. Oh sweetheart, she said as soon as he walked in the door, I understand why you fell in love with that girl as a child. She’s fantastic! So beautiful! And so smart! And what noble bearing, right down to the point of her chin! Have you noticed how it always points sort of up? Did you see how well she wears those robes of hers, which, let’s face it, must be tremendously hot and uncomfortable? Stella pretended she wore them herself, miming the sweep and grace of Katherine Marie’s perambulation through the living room. I saw at the hospital how everyone she talks to respects her. She treats everybody the same, young and old, male and female, ignorant and refined. When you were cooking, she told me about her pet projects with the Black Warriors. There’s a preschool and food pantry in Anacostia, a drop-in clinic and youth counseling center in Marshall Heights. They’re so well organized, and she created everything by herself without formal training. She’s had to learn how to do it on her own, from working in the trenches. Oh, how I wish she were my protégée. I could make her into the head of Human Services in half a dozen years! I’m telling you, Jackson, she’s the most inspiring woman of her race I’ve ever come across, maybe the most inspiring of any race, and I do believe I’m in love with her myself!
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