And he never awoke properly again.
Late in the afternoon of the next day, he learned that his son’s entourage had not reached its destination. Tribes living in the Congo Valley, sympathetic to the Wazimba, and eager for European weapons and whiskey, took Asoka’s party prisoners, then delivered them to the Wazimba for sale. This news cut off Shabaka’s wind. To sell a prince into bondage—it was the deepest of humiliations. The Wazimba knew that; it was their way of settling old scores. Shabaka plucked out his beard in handfuls and threw dust on his head. Then, meeting with his counsel, he declared war on the Wazimba and their allies. “Destroy them all,” he ordered when reviewing his troops. “Leave not one Wazimba alive!”
Like Shabaka, the Allmuseri warriors had loved Asoka. They carried their anger—and the king’s own—to the western tribes, and there they lost control, slaughtering 320 of the Damara, hunting down women and children and hacking them to pieces. They looted, they raped. In one Damara village they started to kill the elders, then asked for treasure. After they received all the Damara had, Shabaka’s troops put them to death, singing and dancing while beating the elders with clubs. And as they continued this carnage, spreading from one tribe to the next, the rage among the outlying tribes redoubled, and the fighting drew closer to Shabaka’s dream capital. “We have fallen too far now,” he thought. His son was in shackles, nothing would change that. His people were propelled toward a disastrous end. Then the enemy—all gleaming teeth and spears—swept thunderously, like a harmattan wind, inside the high, white walls.
Their strategy, Shakaba learned later when he was chained and waiting to be sold, was to form a semi-circle in the shape of a bull’s horn, with sixty warriors at each tip, all armed with assegai—short spears, and strong oxhide shields half a man’s height. They harried the streets of the city, butchering men and cattle both, and pushed on toward the palace. Along the side streets women huddled, knives raised above the heads of their children to save them from slavery among the Wazimba—or the foul-smelling sailors who waited at the barracoons on the coast. Toward the end, Shabaka was no longer a reluctant king but a warrior himself, beheading and skewering men when the Wazimba and Darama swarmed like an army of ants up the palace steps, until he collapsed, slicing the air with his spear and carrying away the arm of a man who’d struck him on his temple.
Conscious hours later, he found himself in a coffle, bound at his neck to thirty others, his queen among them, her flesh scarred and bloodied. Night and day, night and day, night and day they were marched to the factory town on the coast. When darkness fell his captors had their way with Noi until she went mad, suddenly leaping to her feet, broken, blathering insanely, and threw herself upon a spear. For a moment the King went mad too. Then something in him flimmered out; he felt nothing when they threw Noi’s body into the brush. Nothing when the rifle-bearing Wazimba pushed him and the others on toward the fort. And nothing when the coffle reached the barracoon.
The king slept a sleep like a drugged stupor. When he awoke, a Wazimba guard said, “Soon it will be over, Shabaka. You are alone now, like a grain of maize in an empty gourd. In a little while you will be sold. But if the white men do not want one as old as you, then you will die. Best to make yourself ready for the earth to receive you.”
He had, it’s true, given no thought to this; he was not ready. Shabaka sat, his dark hands dangling between his legs. Hours melted away. Where, he wondered, had he erred? He had acted to end hunger, need, want, and—behold—each act of the ego engendered suffering. But too late these reflections, too late even his grief. He could hear them. They were coming for him. He struggled for breath. It was time. Shabaka, for whom life and death now had no difference, watched the Wazimba forcing his people outside the barracoon and into the sunlight; then he looked up as strange men from across the sea beckoned him to rise—men with faces like metal, and no lips, as far as he could tell—who suddenly burst into honey-white needles of fire and light.
He was squatting in his hut, staring stupidly at the unmarked wall. Outside he heard Mahdi and Kangabar arguing. Rubbing his grainy eyes, the king whispered, “Inshallah!” He pinched himself experimentally—there were no scars; he had never married Noi, raised a kingdom, or a son. There were no slavers, no war, just the afterglow of these appearances in his mind. And this hut in the hot afternoon?—he reserved judgment for just now on this hut. Shabaka called in his sorcerers.
“It is well?” they asked together.
“No!” He pegged his chalk stick at Mahdi, bouncing it off the hard bone of his forehead. “You wizards,” he asked, “why is it you have never used this fabulous toy to advance yourselves?”
“You joke.” Mahdi rubbed his forehead. “Why, it ill-befits a sober man to swell the world’s agony by adding his own desires to it, King. He fares best if he has maximum concern for life, but minimum attachment.” The sorcerer studied the chalk, and asked, “You did not like our gift, King?”
Shabaka said, “It has made a perfect fool out of me. It’s on your lips, Mahdi, to say I do a fine job of that myself, but I shall never know for sure whether all I do is substance or shadow, or whether history is naught but the nightmarish dream of a sleeping god who hasn’t digested his dinner.” Shabaka shambled to the large jar in his hut and poured three bowls of zythum. By evening these three crinkly heads were heated, for zythum, a beer of Egyptian brew, is 90 percent alcohol; and they soon were sleeping—after pouring a little beer on the floor for Allah and ancestors—slumped together on the floor.
Executive Decision
Act as if the principle of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature.
—Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
PUT SIMPLY, your task is impossible.
There are two names shortlisted for the position your company has advertised. These two have surfaced as the most appealing candidates after a six-month search that left you and your Seattle staff red eyed and exhausted after sifting through the files of more than eight hundred applicants and phoning dozens of references, some of them as far away as southern France and Osaka. You’ve met their spouses, their children. Read their personal statements. Called them back for second interviews. Probed into their after-hours interests, taken them to dinner, and now you, and you alone—as the grandson of the company’s founder—must decide. Naturally, both are being wooed by other businesses and by government. If you delay the decision any longer, you will lose them to a competitor. So by nine A.M. tomorrow the six-figure job, with its benefits and stock options, must be awarded to either Claire Bennett or Eddie Childs, and the other given an apology.
It is the most troublesome decision of your life.
Imprimis: You are a man who, though quite radical in your youth, has come to see the wisdom in not rocking the boat overly much if advocacy means the ship might take on too much water, its hull give way, and its many passengers—employees, stockholders, and their families—disappear beneath the briny. If nothing else, a life in business has so instilled in you the value of prudence that even your closest friends from college remark on how dull and safe, portly and bald you’ve become since the days you marched arm in arm with civil rights workers through the streets of Cambridge. Yet and still, in your personal and professional affairs alike, you have always believed in fairness, though on some occasions precisely what is fair seems elusive. The question was so much clearer in the black-and-white time of youth. Not long after your father became ill and the company passed into your hands thirty years ago, you insisted in board meetings that the personnel department aggressively seek out blacks and women.
It was an outrageous thing to do in 1966, but then you were fresh out of Harvard, with a degree in philosophy (partly to spite your parents), having focused on epistemology, the problems of appearances versus reality; two arrests for demonstrating on campus, with the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr.—“Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice; justice at its best is lo
ve correcting everything that stands against love”—still echoing in your ears. At first your only supporter was old Gladys McNeal, your father’s personal secretary, factotum, and possibly his lover as well. She is your secretary now—a precise, never-married woman who could pass for actress Estelle Getty’s sister, though Gladys won’t talk about her age and has never uttered a word about her family. She’d called your fight to hire more minorities and women “brave.” And eventually, the company acquiesced to your wishes, placing more blacks on the custodial staff and women in the secretarial pool in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and a sprinkling of both in middle management during the ’80s.
Lately some of the black employees have been grumbling to you and Gladys about the absence of African Americans in the firm’s administrative wing. (Gladys only nods when the subject comes up and looks away, knowing they’re right.) You can see them at their desks through the glass walls that separate their tiny, cluttered workstations from your spacious chamber (with its carpeted floors and plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero) and those of your two chief executives, old friends whom to this very day you still affectionately call by their fraternity nicknames, Turk and Nips—it’s dyspeptic, eccentric old Turk who’s retiring due to poor health and whose position Bennett and Childs hope to fill.
Except for a black janitor, the top-floor office in your downtown building on Fifth and Pine is empty at ten P.M. You have stayed behind to review the candidates’ qualifications and your notes one last time. Their files—thicker than the white pages for Wenatchee—are spread out on your desk beneath the glow of the handcrafted lamp given to you as a birthday gift from your wife, Emilie, a painter who could not resist this high-end item that translates Monet’s Water Lilies into five hundred multicolored glass panels on its triangular shade. In the light of this lamp, you pore over these pages, looking for the one fact or feeling that might edge one of these candidates ahead of the other. To your great perplexity, both look equally qualified—or, if not exactly matched, what you see as deficiencies in one are balanced by a strength the other does not possess.
But except before the law, and in the eyes of God, are any two people truly equal?
Claire, you recall, was forthcoming and full of wonderfully funny stories during her first three-hour interview. She was a graduate of Boston University. Even before you, Turk, and Nips sat her down in the conference room, with its breathtaking view of snowcapped Mount Rainier in the background, the four of you were swapping stories about your undergraduate days and New England associates you had in common. It was as if you’d known her all your life. She felt at home in the Northwest, having grown up in Portland, where her parents sent her to Catlin Gabel, a private school dating back to 1870 and one of the best independent academies in the region. Her parents, both professionals, provided her with private tutors, a course in modeling when she was fourteen (afraid she was awkward and unlovely), and trips with her father to Barcelona, Paris, and Tokyo when his work required that he travel (her Japanese was flawless). Despite an early struggle with epilepsy, which she controlled with Klonopin, Claire graduated from college near the top of her class, accepted her first job with a firm in Chicago, and, after several early promotions, found herself positioned as the assistant to the company’s CEO when disaster struck in the form of a class-action suit against the firm. That, she explained, taught her more than anything she’d learned in college. Claire put out fires, she controlled the damage, and learned firsthand the meaning of a saying she’d heard when traveling in the Far East: “In chaos there is also opportunity.”
During her interview she was relaxed, laughed easily, and scored points when she said, “I see my first job as being the protection of the company.” She was twenty-eight years old, six-feet-two in her heels, and wore her corn-colored hair to her shoulders. And did she have faults? Nips felt Claire had slightly more nose than she needed. And he noticed that rather than completely agreeing with the things he said, she prefaced her replies by saying, “Yes, but . . .” and “Oh, it’s more than that, of course . . .” Furthermore, she had done her homework and was aware of the company’s history, its strengths and weaknesses, and guided her interview to such an extent that it seemed they, not she, were being looked over and scrutinized. That Nips didn’t enjoy. On the other hand, Turk liked it just fine.
Claire’s husband, Bill, a shaggy, bearded, Old English sheepdog of a fellow with hair falling into his brown eyes, came along for her second interview; he was self-employed—a moderately successful sculptor (“conceptual artist” was the term he preferred)—and could relocate with no difficulty if she got the job. He’d surprised you when, after shambling into your office in a corduroy jacket and jeans, he shook your hand firmly (his palm was rough, toughened like that of a carpenter), then paused to look at the lamp, and nodded in approval. “Nice, that’s a reproduction of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s work, isn’t it? The bronze patina on the base places the design somewhere in the twenties . . .”
That you hadn’t known—the lamp’s history—but you and Emilie were pretty sure of this: You liked the Bennetts. Emilie called them “people persons.” And so they were. Their ten-year-old daughter, a bright, brown-skinned girl named Nadia, was Filipino—their own child, a boy, had died from SIDS—and Nadia was the first of two or three children the Bennetts hoped to adopt. If you hired Claire, you knew she would not only protect the interests of your business as if it were her own, but her family and yours might become the best of friends. Added to which, and perhaps most important of all, she would be the first woman to break through the company’s “glass ceiling,” which was definitely a plus in the present, gender-charged political climate.
But then there was Childs . . .
He was thirty-one, from a large Atlanta family—four boys, five girls—and the first member of his family to graduate from college (Morehouse) after serving in the navy. On the day of his interview he looked trim and fit in his three-piece suit: a dark-skinned man with close-cropped hair, a thin mustache like movie star David Niven’s, and nails more neatly manicured than your own. When he answered a question, or a series of them put to him by Nips and Turk, Childs always turned to look directly at the person who’d asked it, never forgetting who’d originated the query. But unlike Claire, even when he appeared at ease, you saw that Childs never completely relaxed. In high school, he confessed, a white teacher told him that he’d never be college material and directed him toward a blue-collar trade. “That woke me up,” Childs said. “He made me so mad I guess I’ve been fighting to prove him wrong since I was fifteen years old.”
You saw in Childs the attitude of a man who believed nothing would ever come to him easily, that he had to work twice as hard as others to get half as far—and four times that to break even. And so he had. He’d made his own opportunities. His record showed he’d worked full-time as a nightwatchman while attending Morehouse, studying and saving and having, he said, no social life at all. After college, he returned to Atlanta and started his own business from scratch, one he later sold, but not before Childs paid off the mortgage on his parents’ home, and put one of his siblings through school. He was actively involved in his church, the NAACP, and a community group dedicated to helping at-risk youth. His references included half a dozen names in Atlanta’s city government and two black congressmen. He had nothing to say about the lamp on your desk, but what he and his wife, Leslie, an elementary school teacher, knew firsthand and through research about this country’s marginalized history—the contributions from people of color—stunned you, Turk, and Nips into respectful yet nervous silence.
You listened carefully to what he said.
You learned that blacks suffered twice the unemployment rate of whites and earned only half as much (56 percent); that a decade ago they comprised 7 percent of professionals, 5 percent of managers, 8 percent of technicians, 11 percent of service workers, and 41 percent of domestic workers. There were, he told you, 620,912 black-owned businesses, but 47 percent of them had gros
s annual receipts of less than $5,000. For every 1,000 Arabs, 108 owned a business; for every 1,000 Asians, it was 96; for every 1,000 whites, 64, and for every 1,000 blacks, the number was 9. Worse, the typical black household had a net worth less than one-tenth that of white households. AIDS among black Americans was six times the rate it was for whites, and every four hours a young black male died from gunfire. Seventy percent of black children were born to single mothers; 57 percent were in fatherless homes, which was more than double the 21 percent for whites. This was the background of poverty and inequality Eddie and Leslie Childs had survived—a world in which black men in the early ’90s accounted for half those murdered in America; they had less chance of reaching age sixty-five than men in Bangladesh. One out of three was in prison (the number was 827,440 in 1995) or on parole. It was a world where, as Childs put it, quoting Richard Pryor, justice was known simply as “just ice.” Given these staggering obstacles, you are amazed this man is even alive.
Little wonder then that during his visit he never seemed to relax, or let his hair down, or get too comfortable. You, Turk, and Nips were not sure he would ever completely trust you or, for that matter, much of anything in this world. But despite his admiration for this couple, Turk had reservations about Childs. After dinner he’d asked the candidate over to his home to join your Friday-night poker game, and Childs politely declined, saying, “I would prefer not to. I don’t play cards.” He confessed, “My wife is always saying I’m not much of a fun person. All I do is work.” Yes, he was formal, guarded, and, even after two interview sessions, opaque. He was—what word do you want?—“different.” Sometimes you did not understand his humor. You certainly did not know his heart—that would come slowly, perhaps even painfully if you presumed too much about him, and it might be hard at first, a challenge, with you tripping lightly, walking on eggs around him until everyone in the office eased into familiarity. Was one candidate worth all that work? In his interview Childs outlined two strategies for improving diversity in personnel and ideas for better marketing the firm’s product to minorities who, he emphasized, would be in the minority no longer after the coming millennium. Nips felt he was right, but naturally he would, being never satisfied with the way things were in the world (including the desk in his office, which he was forever rearranging and replacing). In the morning he was always a little dull, possibly hungover (for Nips still enjoyed visiting nightspots where he met, he said, people from numerous walks of life); but as the day progressed, and he slowly sobered, his disposition generally improved. The country’s demographics were changing, Nips said. All you had to do was walk out your door to see that. If the company hoped to survive into the twenty-first century, a multiracial arrangement was needed. He cast his vote categorically for Childs, and asked you and Turk to do the same.
Dr. King's Refrigerator Page 4
