Their marriage was never the same again. It took some time, but Katherine Marie decided to hang on with him mostly for the sake of the children, and because her life was devoted to the Black Warriors preschool and the Black Warriors walk-in clinic. She chose to continue to work tirelessly at his side in the world, but at night in their bed she was stiff and cold. She was hurt, disappointed in him that he had succumbed to the machinations of Dume and Matata. No matter what else happened in their lives, she’d always believed in Mombasa, believed in his character as much as his causes. Ever since that day in front of the village whorehouse, when he’d made his first vows to her, she believed that he’d take care of her, protect her. When Bubba Ray did what he did, it wasn’t her husband’s fault he wasn’t there to pound him into the ground and save her. But this time, this time she couldn’t help herself. She blamed him. Some part of it was his fault in her mind. Mombasa’s lack of trust, his anger, Dume’s violence: it got all mixed up together in her mind and she could not break away from any of it no matter how often they knelt together and prayed to Jesus.
In the greater community, she was in control. Once she had her strength back, she held a powwow with Dume’s men, demanding apologies and loyalty oaths, which they offered. But because her innocence and Dume’s guilt made them co-perpetrators of the worst crimes, they hated her more than when they’d thought her guilty. Since Dume had disappeared off the face of the earth, one or the other of them daily suggested to Mombasa in either a veiled or direct manner that what they all needed more than anything was to even the score, to take revenge upon the man and town who had come between him and his wife, him and his warriors, to take revenge upon Bubba Ray Sassaport and Guilford, Mississippi. On a dark and pitiless day fresh on the heels of a long, dry night when his wife had turned from him in their bed once again, he agreed and asked his men to create for him an opportunity. They came up with a plot to blow up the draft board while Bubba Ray was there running paperwork in and out. The timer on the bomb failed. The plot was uncovered.
The day the federal agents came to arrest him, Mombasa was home helping his wife bathe the children. When the SWAT team knocked down his door, they were dressed in full battle gear with vests, helmets, shields, the finest rapid-fire weapons the year had to offer. The two boys screamed. The baby wailed. Mombasa stood up in his running suit, all soapy from the splashing of the kids, and without resistance offered himself up to the police as quietly as a lamb, saying: Please, please put down those weapons. My babies are here. They shackled his hands. They shackled his feet. Just before he was led out through the broken door, he turned to look at Katherine Marie. She was holding their youngest, Njeri. Her eyes were full of tears that did not flow. What have you done now, she asked. What have you done? I’m sorry, was all he said. I’m sorry.
He certainly was. Sorry enough to plead guilty. Every day before his trial and every day after, that look of cold tears refusing to fall burned into his soul. That and the eyes of his children, largest to smallest, rounded by fear. He sought redemption. He sought punishment, without which he knew redemption could not come. And punishment the federal court was happy to provide. When the time came for him to say his piece, he spoke openly.
A madness overtook me, he told the judge. An anger and a madness. I saw that all my teachings were for naught. For there was a country I’d envisioned, a country of black men and women proud and strong, steeped in their African heritage, living apart but equal from their white neighbors, living apart but with Christian love the river between them. I saw them black and white fording that river that its currents might guide them in all their relations, I saw that river feeding the crops of righteousness on the banks of both sides. For then the black man would no longer be the thorn of infamy in the white man’s foot preventing him from walking blameless into the future nor the white man the sword of intimidation and dependence over the black man’s head. Each would become what the Lord Jesus intended: perfect men, loving each other without sin, without anger. Oh, the day came when I saw that all this was a shibboleth, a sham, the ridiculous dream of a ridiculous man. I was betrayed by my loved ones and made blind by a world that fostered their betrayal. And all the thoughts I had thereafter were thoughts of revenge.
While the story he told was only half the story, the judge believed the half he heard. He also believed every piece of evidentiary propaganda the feds put before him about Mombasa Cooper. He read transcripts of the famous speeches and radio interviews, whose centerpiece was the rage of the black man, Mombasa’s oratory métier, so to speak. From the birth of his movement, in the days after he fled from Parchman then rose up from the underground transformed, he preached loudly and on all occasions that rage was a phenomenon that came to the Negro as naturally as lilies came to the field, for the black man had neither to toil nor spin to experience it. From the moment he drew his first breath, he carried the seed of rage in his blood as the birthright of oppression. Only as a Black Warrior of the African Jesus could he find the balm of divine love to transform it, he further taught, but that part of his theology was redacted by the prosecutor.
Considering him an imminent danger to the community at large, the judge sentenced him to life in federal prison, where the Black Warriors of the African Jesus survived in chains as a prison cult. Out in the free world where it mattered, the Panthers and others absorbed those Mombasa left behind. Soon enough, Malaika Cooper went back to being Katherine Marie, returning to Guilford with her children in the company of Jackson and Stella Sassaport, who returned for their own reasons, an event that did nothing at all to mitigate Mombasa’s anger and no doubt enflamed it further, reviving in the man a constant fire of discontent, which he battled against every waking hour of his imprisonment. Many days, he was victorious and offered thanks in prayer and sacrifice. Other days, he failed, exploding into acts of brutality large and small to his great remorse despite the fact that the objects of his outbursts nearly always deserved a beat-down or worse, no matter what god sat in judgment.
Katherine Marie’s world was in shambles. She had her own set of unchristian responses to all that happened. She was furious with Mombasa for ruining his life, their children’s, and her own—angry enough to abandon the Black Warriors to their imprisoned founder, refusing to take on the role of surrogate for the movement, which hastened its demise. She was angry with the government that sentenced her husband so harshly after all the injustice he’d experienced in the past. She was plain angry in general, angry with a whole pack of people. She couldn’t work up anger toward Stella, though. Stella was an outsider. A wrongheaded, willful, but well-intentioned outsider. When she contemplated the catastrophe that was her life, she made diagrams of cause in her mind drawn crisscross with betrayal. Stella was off the page. Jackson was not.
One night during Mombasa’s trial when Jackson brought a gift of groceries and children’s toys over to her house after work, she lit into him for telling Stella what he had promised to keep secret forever. He had to bear some guilt, she told him, for everything that went out of control after that, including Dume’s beating and Mombasa’s bomb plot. If only he’d kept his vow forever, everything would have been alright. Nothing so irrevocably awful as what had happened would have happened. The vow, she said, had been sacred. The sacral power of the vow had protected both Mombasa and her. But once it was broken, bad juju had flooded them. Oh, why did he do it? Why did he betray her confidence? Why did he tell Stella? Why did he not see that his vow to her took precedence over what he felt for his wife? Oh, never mind, she said, don’t even try. She knew why.
You’ve been corrupted! Katherine Marie charged, stabbing a bony finger into his chest. It’s insane you can’t see what she’s done to you! Changed you into a lowlife weasel! My dear white Southern gentleman manqué. You are a fraud! No true gentleman would do what you’ve done! For what? For her!
Jackson begged her forgiveness until she granted it, groveled without understanding at all how she came to these conclusions, especially th
e one that made him the scapegoat, the bad guy of the whole debacle. He’d never forget the way he’d at last dropped to his knees in front of the couch on which she sat, her sweet chin pointed up, her arms folded across her chest, her mouth wrinkled up in disdain. Her right hand suddenly shot forward to just under his nose and he kissed it as if she were a queen or a pope, begging pardon one last time before she said: Alright. I’ll forgive you. Now, get up. You look ridiculous.
When he reported their conversation to his wife, expecting her to defend him, to wonder with him at the remarkable inconsistencies of Katherine Marie’s thoughts, Stella only laughed. Good! Good! She’s angry and fighting back! At first I thought she was headed down that sad road of victimhood when she chose to stay home with a man so easily convinced to betray her trust, but now I see: She is back to herself! She has the fire again! Oh, Jackson, can’t you see how wonderful this is? Well, yes and no, was his response, he could and he couldn’t.
Not that either woman cared. They had bonded and their bond was fresh, tight, it innervated them. Like all women who feel finished with seeking the love of a man, whether because they are supremely secure in their attachment or supremely disenchanted, this bond took center stage in both their lives while Jackson and Mombasa became ancillary, taken for granted.
After Mombasa went to prison, Katherine Marie needed the Sassaports as much as they needed her. As the man left standing, Jackson was doted on by each of the women, his attentions fought over on occasion, but in a way that threatened no one. Although he remained in the carnal sense absolutely faithful to his wife, he could not help but sometimes feel as if he had two wives, one of whom he lived with and another for whom he ran errands, dispensed professional advice, and whose children he chauffeured from school to sports to dance lessons and sometimes, when it could not be helped as their mother was busy, to the prison to visit their daddy. Until the women argued, Stella was content. She had her work, her friend, her friend’s children to foster and lobby for. Under her wing, Katherine Marie got the education she’d always longed for and started her nursing career in earnest. Everybody’s lives were busy, productive. Stella led the local fund-raising drive for the new temple Rabbi Nussbaum built over in Jackson, but the building was bombed not six months after its dedication. Two months later the front of his home was blown off too. Nussbaum wanted to leave Jackson after that but couldn’t find another job. He remained depressed, despite Stella’s best efforts at cajoling him, until 1973 when he finally retired to San Diego. Six months after Beth Israel was bombed, Dr. King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy joined him in the afterlife shortly thereafter. Stella, Jackson, and Katherine Marie might have fallen into a deep depression themselves over all this death and mayhem, but a war was declared on poverty and there was too much to do to mourn for long. They moved back home where the South was slowly changing while essentially they did not, a fact that made them all delirious with a sense of purpose, achievement, and happiness—all of them, that is, except Mombasa, who moldered in prison, stewing in his anger and regret.
THIRTEEN
Summer, 1995
JACKSON SAT IN A GRIMY wooden chair trying to keep his elbows off a grimier wooden table in the attorney’s consultation room at the penitentiary in Yazoo City. He felt conspicuous, like a child stuck alone in a classroom while all the other kids were outside playing, a child spied upon by a teacher who had eyes on the back of her head, eyes that could see through doors and walls. Katherine Marie told him that in conflict with the law on the matter, she was positive that everything he said to Mombasa would be observed and recorded, so he got up and looked around, studying the vents and the lighting fixtures for microphones and tiny cameras. He found nothing suspicious.
He sat down again. His nose itched from the musty, sweaty smell of the place. With great effort, he stifled a sneeze, since the only thing he had to blow his nose was the handkerchief he’d used to wipe down the chair’s seat when he got there. The door opened. He whipped around in his seat. An officer ushered Mombasa into the room. Jackson stood, wanting to reach out, embrace him, but Mombasa saw that, shook his head infinitesimally in warning, and stretched out a hand for him to shake instead. They gave each other a strong, heartfelt shake of two hands each and sat down on opposite sides of the table. The officer left. They were alone.
Each man murmured greetings and grinned. No matter the circumstances, they were happy to see each other again. Aged just a little bit, didn’t you, son, Mombasa said first. You’ve got your daddy’s hair and jawline I see, and just a hint of your mama’s belly. Then he laughed his great booming laugh of long ago, and Jackson laughed too, saying: Well, look at yourself. Looks like the snow has fallen on the mountaintop. He meant of course that Mombasa’s hair had gone completely white. To be honest, it was the only sign of age he could find in the man, which struck him as odd in one who’d been incarcerated for near thirty years. Mombasa’s muscles bulged like a young man’s through his prison shirt, and there were no wrinkles or sags on his face.
Their laughter faded into sighs, and there was silence. Jackson dropped his head and shuffled his paperwork about. Forgetting about the table grime, he put his arms on its top and leaned forward.
I want to help you at your hearing, Mombasa, he said. I want to bring you home to Katherine Marie.
The other man blinked.
That would be something, Jackson. But I don’t see how you can do that. I don’t mean to be critical. Unless things have changed more than I know, you’re not a criminal lawyer now, are you?
No, but I can tell them the truth. I can tell them the story that’s not been told. About what happened all those years ago. How your anger was about Bubba Ray, not the draft board. You’ve paid for your crime and you are no longer a threat to society. I can explain what life was like back then. How you saved my daddy’s life. You’ve had all the legal argument and manipulation a boatload of lawyers can think of, but no one’s ever told the human side of the story. Katherine Marie and Stella think that’s the one piece of the puzzle that’s been missing, the one piece that’ll find you mercy and release. I believe I agree. Or at least that it’s worth a shot.
When did those two get thick as thieves again?
Excuse me?
Our wives. When did that happen? I asked mine and she told me something about an awards dinner she went to. I don’t know, it all sounded like a supper party in Shangri-la to an old boy stuck behind bars half his life.
Jackson told him as many of the details as he knew.
Then they came out of the kitchen hand in hand, he said. I don’t know quite what went on between them in there. You know how they are. Got their little secrets.
It was Mombasa’s turn to lean forward across the table: You know, son, I never did hear the story of what separated them in the first place. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to tell me what it was now. I know you know. Think of all the trouble being quiet got us into in the past. I’ve asked my wife several times, and I’ve got every evasion from “I don’t want to waste our time together talking about that” to “I’ll just get depressed today if I tell you all that, let me tell you another day.”
When Mombasa quoted Katherine Marie, he imitated her sweet, dusky voice in a way that made Jackson smile.
Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.
No, it don’t. And I do believe I’m making your telling me a condition of allowing you to appear before the parole board. How do you like that?
Alright, alright. I’ll spill.
Stella was over Katherine Marie’s house helping her set up a sweet-sixteen party for their daughter, Njeri. They’d blown up about a hundred and twenty balloons, strung up streamers announcing the happy event, laid out the paper plates and cups in bold African colors, and made her a crown in the same scheme out of crepe paper and wire and tropical flowers. They were particularly pleased with that crown: It was a real work of art. It came time to prepare the food. They cleared off the kitchen table, which was full of papers: bills, appli
cation forms for the eldest Cooper boy’s assistance with college tuition, checking-account statements. Stella scooped up a bunch and asked Katherine Marie where to stash them for the afternoon and she said, in the break-front, top drawer, and it was there amongst a whole mess of other paperwork that Stella saw something that near stopped her heart.
It was an envelope with bank deposit slips falling out, it was so stuffed up with them. There were also two checks that had not yet been deposited. These were from a checkbook she recognized. They were welfare checks, and they were made out to Malaika Cooper. She examined the dates of deposit slips and checks alike. They were all recent. She grabbed up the envelope and marched back into the kitchen to wave it in Katherine Marie’s face.
What is this? You have not been eligible for welfare for nine years, Katherine Marie. I know that for a fact. Nor have you used the name Malaika for about that time. So what is this? You been cheating the government, girl? Have you?
Katherine Marie grabbed at the envelope and a fight ensued. A terrible, terrible fight with those two thrashing around the kitchen, banging into things since neither one was willing to let go of the evidence. They shouted at each other the whole time. Stella shouted: Thief! Is this where you wind up after all these years! Stealing from out of the mouths of those that need it! Thief! Katherine Marie shouted back: What do you know! How can you possibly know how I’ve needed that money, how my children have needed that money! What do you, Miss Silver Spoon in the Mouth, know! What do you, Miss Whitebread of Boston with the Husband in Perpetual Residence, know! You know nothing of what my life is like! What it’s been like! What the goddamn white world owes me! Stella shouted louder: Can’t do enough for you, can we? Wasn’t helping you through school and setting you up in a decent career enough? Is there a time we can all sit back and applaud while you stand on your own two feet? Katherine Marie gasped then shouted in a scornful patois: Oh, well, Missy Stella, youse sounds like youse thinks me ungrateful. So then why don’t you bend over so I can kiss your white ass!
Home In The Morning Page 23
