Jackson laughed and put his arms around her just to get her to stop moving. With a feverish head resting over his shoulder, she continued praising Katherine Marie nonstop. If it hadn’t been for the miscarriage, he’d have thought she’d gone mad, but he suspected his wife’s sudden, even bizarre passion had something to do with her acute swings of hormone and her need to transfer her attachment to their dead child to someone else. Having suffered dreadfully over the past week with both her grief and his own, he decided on this occasion if it made her feel good, let her do it.
The next morning, Stella went to the library and looked up everything she could find about the Black Warriors of the African Jesus. She discovered much that impressed her and became even more stimulated. Although she was on medical leave from work, she went to her office at DHHS afterward, gathered a sheaf of funding applications, stuffed them into a file, then headed home to call Katherine Marie at the phone number she’d left with them the night before, the number of the Black Warrior preschool where she parked her kids and worked four days a week.
Malaika! Stella said, full of her particular brand of enthusiasm that electrified everyone who heard it, you’ve got to come over here today. I’ve got the paperwork for some grants I know you can use, and since I’m on leave these days, I can work them up for you pronto if you give me the information I need. I’ll get them expedited through the system, too.
Now, there’s not a grassroots organization on the planet that doesn’t need money. As soon as school was over for the day, Katherine Marie dropped her kids home for her mother to watch. She took the subway to the Sassaport apartment for the second time in as many days. Dume followed her, stationing himself outside the building to take notes. Once again, the spy scribbled down a description of the car and driver who took her home later on. He was nothing if not careful and thorough. He took down the eight names on the mailboxes of Jackson’s residence to cross reference with the registrant of the car whose identity he still did not have, because the Black Warrior contact at the police department was a janitor whom everyone at the station liked, but those granting favors took their sweet time about it.
On Monday, Mombasa arrived home from Chicago. He’d spoken with his wife several times during the last few days and knew all about her surprise encounter with the Sassaports, the grant applications, the dinner planned for the following week. He looked forward to seeing Jackson again. For a long time, he’d felt there was unfinished business between them. He’d never thanked him properly for his efforts back in the day, when the poor boy’d hung upside down and whistled Dixie trying to get the authorities to believe the truth about the night of his daddy’s catastrophe. When he got home, his wife was at work at the preschool and their children, two toddler boys and a ten-month-old girl, were with her. He dropped off his bags, took a shower, and went to his office on the first floor of their apartment building. There he found Dume and a contingent of his men, all with grave looks on their faces. What’s wrong? he asked, and Dume stepped forward while the others looked down at the floor unwilling to meet his gaze.
Read this, Dume said, handing him a file with an ominous black cover. Running crosswise around it as a seal was a thick band of red duct tape on which Dume had scrawled in magic marker: Top Secret.
What is this? Mombasa asked again. I ordered no reports of any kind.
Read it.
True to his name, Dume was a small bull of a man: dun-colored, low to the ground, ropy with muscles. He stood in front of Mombasa with his feet planted square and his arms crossed. He looked like a minotaur or a shrunken genie. The other man sighed.
And the rest of you, he said with a bit of a growl as too much drama was irritating to him, you all know what this is about? You all in on this “top secret”?
The half dozen men behind Dume continued to study the floor and shuffled their feet. Like a pack of danged slaves, Mombasa thought, despairing of his movement and its foot soldiers. As he cut the report’s seal with a pocketknife, he prayed that its contents were not as dire as their demeanor intimated. Please, Jesus, he prayed, don’t let it be about the KKK planning a raid on us or, worse, the FBI. Then he opened the thing and saw the file contained a single page dense with words. Its first sentence read: “A report on the activities of Malaika Cooper during Mombasa Cooper’s absence, especially those activities involving her intimate association with a white male, age undetermined, identity unknown.” Why, it’s Jackson, Mombasa thought immediately, and nearly laughed. He chewed his lip to maintain decorum in front of his men. Read the rest. “At one a.m., there came from the vehicle a frolicsome noise and Malaika Cooper and unidentified white male embraced and kissed and made reference to an assignation next Tuesday. A license plate number was taken down and is currently being tracked through our usual source at the police department.” There followed more information about the return of Malaika to the Sassaport residence, the two nights she went to work on grant applications with Stella, all of which he knew about while he was yet in Chicago. But in the hands of the document’s scribe, her activities looked to be those of a queen of whores, practiced in every art of deception and lust. Her lover—the eight last names taken from Jackson’s building’s mailboxes were supplied as a list of possible candidates—looked to be in bondage to her foul enticements.
Mombasa let the page fall from his grasp. It fluttered to the floor in eerie silence. He stood there, his arms sagging, holding the empty file as if it were a heavy book of ten thousand pages. He looked at Dume and the others with a great impenetrable sorrow, which they mistook for heartbreak on account of Malaika’s treachery. They murmured, inched closer to him to be of comfort.
As they drew near, his eyes widened, his hands clenched, which stopped them in their tracks. He glared at them in fierce silence, cleared his throat of the bile that had gathered there, then delivered a speech none ever forgot. My friends, he began in a tempered, paternal tone. It was the reassuring, authoritative timbre of his weekly radio address. There is nothing here that is a mystery to me. My wife has been in contact with an old and dear friend of ours from childhood. Our families worked for his family, we are intimately intertwined. His wife is a social worker. She’s been helping my wife with grants for assistance for our community programs. This is why you have seen her with this man and this is why she has been going to his address.
He paused to look the men in their eyes, each one in his turn, then continued.
I am gravely disappointed in you. You, whom I have loved. You, whom I have nurtured, worried about, sacrificed for as if you were blood of my blood. How can you slander my wife so? How could you rush to judgment about the mother of our movement?
As he spoke on, his volume gradually increased until his voice became loud, almost booming, and there was a graveled quality to it that bespoke an enormous effort at self-control, as did his tight, bloodless fists that raised to just above his waist then stopped as if an invisible bar kept them low, restrained, unable to pound the daylights out of the assembled, each of whom surely deserved it.
What has she ever done but school and heal your children? Have you no respect for her? For her work? Have you no respect for me or for my work? How you have angered me! I cannot stand the sight of any of you. Get out. Get out. You have angered and disappointed me to my core. If I attempt to deal with you now, I might do something I regret.
All of them, to a man, trembled in their boots.
What? You are still here? Get out, I said. Get out. You, whom I loved, have broken my heart. I warn you. My rage cannot be far behind.
Their heads low, they shambled out.
And close the door on your sorry asses!
To a man, Dume and his cohorts were stunned, shamed, frightened, and yes, even more hateful toward Malaika Cooper than before, because she was not like them, warriors deserving of Mombasa’s understanding and support even when they were wrong. She was nothing but a woman in the year 1967, therefore, a nonentity, but a nonentity who had somehow tricked them, somehow
shown them up. That she had tricked them in collusion with a white family, a white family whose head had been, so to speak, her massa back home, well, this was, considering their separatist beliefs not to mention the times, traitorous, inflammatory in the worst possible way. A campaign began among certain members of the Black Warriors of the African Jesus, one of whisperings and malicious conjecture worthy of a tribe of Iagos: a campaign to dishonor, to destroy the marriage of Mombasa Cooper, a campaign that only redoubled its efforts when their objective looked more and more difficult to achieve given their leader’s weakness— which is how they saw it—his weakness for the wiles and falsehoods of his wife, Malaika Cooper, the treacherous whore.
Dume struck upon the brilliant idea that one of them should go to Guilford, Mississippi, and investigate the history between the Sassaports and Coopers. He sent a man known as Matata, who traveled south under his slave name, Michael Borden, so as not to arouse suspicion or hostility among the locals.
Born in New Jersey and raised, if you can call it that, by a heroin-addicted jazzman and his songbird wife, Michael Borden was a born con man. A creature of the streets, he was sleek and handsome, a silver-tongued charmer, expert at determining within the first five minutes of a stranger’s acquaintance what it was exactly that a person expected him or, really, wanted him to be and then, like a shape-shifter, he became it instantly, which had a hypnotic effect on those he met. They opened up to him without hesitation, gave him whatever he asked for, whether money, information, or love. Against such talents, the simple folk of Guilford didn’t have a prayer. They gave Michael Borden everything they had in a weekend. Only, many of them didn’t know what they were talking about, and the rest had forgotten exactly the details of what they did know. The story he brought back to Dume was incomplete where it wasn’t inaccurate. At the same time, it was all Dume needed to stick a knife in the back of Malaika Cooper.
He went to Mombasa with his tidbits of half-truth and stale gossip, arranged them in the most damaging manner possible, and whispered their venom into his ear so that they dripped like acid from an eyedropper directly into the most tender part of his brain. Bubba Ray, he hissed. Unnatural lusts between them, he murmured, or it’s thought by some he gave her money. The boy ruined, obsessed and always in the village, he hissed some more, ending with: Jackson knew, Jackson always knew. And Mombasa remembered the year Katherine Marie seemed to turn on him. How he’d reached out to Jackson for help that night everything changed forever. It was as if Dume put together for him the pieces of a puzzle he’d long ago given up trying to solve. He could not believe any of it for a Yankee minute, but it fit so well he could believe all of it. Confusion and heartbreak and anger came over him in a rush. His finer impulses were crushed in that tidal wave of emotion until all that was left was the rage of his speeches, of his philosophy—an epic, transcendent rage, a primeval rage borne of his blood.
He did the only thing he could with it. He let it explode in a verbal barrage of disgust and condemnation. At the top of his lungs, he cursed all Sassaports. He cursed his wife. He wondered aloud if his eldest child was a shade too light. He fled his office with the starburst of a preacher’s fire trailing behind him to find his wife or Jackson or both and settle these matters once and for all.
Ignorant of the danger awaiting her, Katherine Marie chanced to stop by her husband’s office an hour later. When she closed the door behind her, she found Dume there, sitting behind Mombasa’s desk with his feet up and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s at his elbow. He was celebrating his victory over her, his most-hated enemy, icon of all the women who had betrayed him. She greeted him with her mouth pursed in disapproval but, as she was afraid of no man, she went to the desk to find a file she needed for Stella’s forms. Suddenly, Dume stood, grabbed her by the wrist, and swung his other arm to strike her, openhanded, so that she fell to the floor. Pervert! he shouted. Whore! And with a cracker child! He laughed at her lying there stupefied by his accusations and, pulling her up by a handful of hair, began to beat her in earnest. Your husband has cursed you, he shouted, and I am his instrument! His hand came down and down and down until she could no longer see and the lights went out and then nothing. Nothing.
While Dume took it upon himself to discipline his wife, Mombasa went to Jackson’s house to confront him. Matata drove him there. He stayed in the car but Mombasa leapt out, charged up the building’s front steps. He gained entry, nearly broke down the door of the Sassaport apartment screaming: Jackson! Jackson! Do not think you can hide from me!
Jackson was at work. It was Stella who opened the door in an act of either bravery or foolishness. She took one look at the enraged giant before her, and coolly, calmly said: He’s at work, Mombasa. He should be home soon, but until then will I do? It didn’t make sense, but something about her stopped him cold. He couldn’t tell what it was, she just did. He calmed just enough to tell her he needed to talk to Jackson about something important, very important. He shook. His words were accomplished with difficulty, torn from his gut between deep gasps of breath. A child could see he was near collapse under the weight of some wretched emotion. So she introduced herself, invited him in, offered him tea, employed every skill she had by nature, education, and experience to soothe him, to draw him out. Once this was accomplished and she understood what had transpired, she got up, walked over to the back of the chair in which he’d sat, and put her hand on the back of his neck. She couldn’t face him anymore. She felt she knew him already from all that Malaika and Jackson had told her, and her heart broke to see a proud, strong man, a leader of his people, leveled by misery. She wanted to help him. Whatever Malaika and Jackson were like, they were not like her. She didn’t believe in secrets. She thought one of the healthiest things Jackson had ever done was tell her the truth about the long-ago. He couldn’t have gone on holding all that in. Look at the tragedies those stupid secrets had spawned! Look at this ruined man, for example! So she stood behind Mombasa rather than be further tempted to tell him everything.
Yes, I agree. You really need to talk to Jackson. He could answer so much.
He does know things, then! He knows? He always knew?
She hesitated.
Well, he knows things. But not what you think he knows.
Mombasa jumped up, turned around, and seized on her shoulders.
It seems you know, too, girl! You know!
She turned her head. She couldn’t lie to that huge, suffering black face so close to her own. Not when her lips itched to tell him everything anyway because, in her mind, it was the right thing to do.
Tell me!
Oh, God, she thought, if Jackson doesn’t walk in here in the next thirty seconds, I’m telling him, I am. It’s up to you, God. Get Jackson in here in thirty seconds or it’s done.
Tell me! It’s my right to know!
Twenty-eight, twenty-nine... Stella felt a stab in her heart, a quickening of her pulse. She imagined this was the way heroes felt just before the great act that defined them was committed. She said: Yes, yes, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you.
Stella then corrected all the inaccuracies of Dume’s report by telling him everything Jackson ever told her about the past, including his vow to keep Bubba Ray’s attack of Katherine Marie secret all those years ago. That secret tortured him back in the day, tortured him mightily, she said. It destroyed his relations with his own family. She emphasized how he’d kept his vow out of loyalty, out of respect for Malaika, known to him as Katherine Marie.
But he told you, Mombasa said. His voice was a pale echo of the one that an hour before had barked at her front door, demanding her husband present himself. It was as if the truth had scooped out his muscles and nerves and left him in a raw, green shell, the kind a serrated spoon leaves after digging around the pulp of a ripe melon.
She shrugged. Yes, he told me.
They say that truth can set you free, but sometimes too much truth can bury a man. You might say Mombasa was laid in the grave that afternoon, sipping t
ea in the Sassaports’ living room, each word out of Stella’s mouth another shovel of dirt filling that shell, covering him up, and this was before he returned home, his anger dulled by shock, chastened, to find his wife battered by a psychopath who’d thought to do his leader’s dirty work for him.
Katherine Marie came to in her bed with her eyes failing to open more than a slit, yet through that slit she could see him, Mombasa, weeping at her bedside, begging forgiveness and behind him, Stella Sassaport, holding a stainless-steel bowl of ice chips wrapped in a terry-cloth towel.
Miss Stella told me, Mombasa said through his tears in a voice and manner that sounded very like Li’l Bokay in the old days, she told me the truth about Bubba Ray and I am so very, very sorry, my angel, my queen, so very, very sorry. If you don’t forgive me for failing to protect you, I will kill myself. I will take a rifle and stick it in my mouth, I swear.
Her head hurt. She could not think clearly. She asked him where the children were, and he told her they were ok, they were with her mother. Curiously, she did not ask next where Dume was. Instead, she said: What do you mean about Bubba Ray? Stella told you what about Bubba Ray?
He let the truth spill. He told her about Dume’s accusations, how they’d thrown him for a huge, disastrous loop. But he now knew everything, he told her, from the adolescent Bubba Ray’s rapine episode to his stalking of her, and she could only ask: But how did you know, Stella? How did you know all these things?
Jackson Sassaport’s wife raised her brows, grimaced, and shook her head. There was only one possible answer to that question, which she opened her mouth to deliver, only Mombasa interrupted, begging forgiveness again, promising the arrest and punishment of Dume once he found him, grasping her hand and covering it with kisses. Katherine Marie feebly drew her hand back, finding that her husband frightened her now, repulsed her as if he had been the agent of assault himself, while at the same time her heart broke at the sight of him destroyed by his own lack of faith in her.
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