Soul City

by Touré

  As children ran and played behind them, Spreadlove said, “Revren, I’d like you to meet —”

  “My God!” Jiggaboo cut him off. “Your hair is spectacular!” He circled behind the Revren to regard the Sanctified Doo from all sides.

  “Thank you.” The Revren beamed. “Yours, too.” He said this nonchalantly, not wanting to show how impressed he really was. The Revren was used to having the best hair in the room no matter where he was, and having Jiggaboo in his face was like having a second rooster in the henhouse. Is this guy a preacher? the Revren thought. If he’s read the whole Bible, I’m in trouble.

  “But,” Jiggaboo said, “I do notice a few split ends and a little less shine on the sides than the front.” The Revren’s heart raced. Stay cool, he thought, stay cool. Jiggaboo said, “I think I could help you look even better.”

  “What, what are you getting at?” the Revren said, defensively fluffing the Sanctified Doo.

  “I am John Jiggaboo, maker of the world’s greatest shampoo!” The Revren exhaled. “Nothing,” Jiggaboo said, “has ever been made that makes love to Black hair like Jiggaboo Shampoo!”

  He handed the Revren a bottle.

  “What the?!” he said, seeing the grotesque pair on the front. “Is this a joke? Don’t waste the Revren’s time. I have other people to see.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Spreadlove said. “This is some serious shampoo.”

  “I’ll make you a deal, my little friend,” Jiggaboo said. “Try my shampoo. If it doesn’t leave your hair softer and silkier than it’s ever been, I’ll come to your church this Sunday and put ten thousand dollars cash in the collection plate. But if you like the shampoo, and I’m sure you will, promise me you’ll let everyone know about it and I’ll give you free shampoo for a year.”

  “Is it no tears like Johnson & Johnson?” the Revren said.

  “I promise,” Jiggaboo said.

  After school Miss Delicate Chocolate drove the Revren home. He ran in the house, tossed his books aside, and jumped right into the shower. Miss Birdsong had scrubbed her hands and was ready to shampoo the Sanctified Doo. As she massaged Jiggaboo Shampoo into his scalp, the lather grew thick and the tingle was electric. He wanted to holler and stomp like he was in church. “I can feel the shampoo goin to war with the dirt and the naps!” he preached. “I can feel it workin and rumblin and rockin and rollin! This the Holy Rollers of shampoos!” When his hair was dry his doo had a glow. He’d never been more beautiful in all his life. He said, “I sure am foin!”

  That Sunday in church everyone noticed the extraordinary resplendence of the Sanctified Doo. To improve upon the Sanctified Doo was not thought possible, but the evidence was plain to see. The Revren spent his entire sermon on the miraculous new shampoo with the funny drawing on the front. When service ended they found Jiggaboo himself standing outside the church, selling shampoo for just $10 a bottle. After the Revren’s endorsement no one cared about the drawing. Jiggaboo sold ten large crates in ten short minutes. Friends told two friends and they told two friends and so on and so on and in just a few weeks Jiggaboo Shampoo was in the shower rack of nearly every bathroom in Soul City. The Devil’s plan had worked perfectly.

  You see, years ago, before he entered the shampoo business, Jiggaboo met the Devil late one night in a seedy motel in Vegas and purchased the brain of Stepin Fetchit. Fetchit was a nigger. A Hollywood actor who took his stage name from a racehorse, he played the coonish, buffoonish, perpetually perplexed, impossibly asinine, and unrepentantly ignorant farmhand, stable boy, or slave with slow speech and bugged-out eyes in more than forty films, most made during the 1930s and 40s, all virtually Klan propaganda. The first Black actor to become a millionaire, Fetchit once had sixteen servants and twelve cars, including a pink Rolls-Royce, but by 1947 he was bankrupt. In the 60s he was a charity patient in a Chicago hospital. He died in 1985.

  The Devil showed Jiggaboo how to clone the brain over and over, then grind the brains into pieces no bigger than a micron, and then put minute portions of the Fetchit mind into every bottle and thus into the brain of everyone who used Jiggaboo Shampoo. Of course, the bottles they made for the Soul City market were far, far more toxic than those for the rest of the country.

  Now the Devil was inside the minds of the Soulful, with thousands of his tiny soldiers running amok, smashing mental windows. Now we would see the legendary Soul City self-esteem do battle with the pernicious microscopic enemies embedded in Jiggaboo Shampoo. The war for the soul of Soul City would be fought on scalps all over town. But, at the end of the day, don’t it always come down to the hair?

  22

  _____

  JIGGABOO SHAMPOO hit hair with a vengeance, providing the distraction of premium hair care. It massaged and strengthened the hair while adding volume, body, and shine, and of course there was that malevolent tingle. But while it empowered the hair it unleashed a few malicious molecules from Fetchit’s brain that moved like burglars sneaking into a bank. They slid into the brain through the holes of the hair follicles on a mission to get deep inside the gray matter, where they could cut down some of the ballyhooed Soul City pride.

  The outer layers of the brain were easy to navigate for any cell small enough. But getting into the inner sanctum of a brain required ingenuity. Fetchit molecules swam through the blood-brain barrier and showed up at the gates of the gray matter dressed like an emergency cleanup crew. They tricked gray matter-guardian molecules into thinking they’d come to clean up a mess in the limbic lobe, where emotions are modulated.

  Once they reached the limbic lobe they began to lick the axons with their toxic saliva. This often took lots of time because in a brain born and raised in Soul City the axons for pride were often quadruple normal size. But each time the Soulful shampooed there was a little more brain licking, or washing. After just a few weeks Jiggaboo could feel his shampoo working, could see people looking great while flying a little lower to the ground. Wash by wash the civic pride that electrified the city was draining away. Wash by wash Soul City was coming apart.

  23

  _____

  IT WAS a bonfire blaze stretching up into the night, the crackling so loud it sounded like cackling. Hundreds stood by in shock. Watching was so hard that only paralysis from the shock kept them watching. Their city was having a heart attack. A crucial little muscle powering the city was collapsing, bringing them all to their knees. Revren Lil’ Mo Love’s church was on fire. Revren Lil’ Mo Love and his most ardent followers stood to the side, holding hands, praying silently. Some threw buckets of water, but it was a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The fire ate all of Baby Love’s and then went out. No one was hurt that night, but the fire ended up burning all of them. Long after the flames stopped, that fire was still burning away at Soul City.

  The Soulful felt Baby Love’s burning down was a death in the Soul City family, every bit as difficult to swallow as Granmama’s passing. The wood of the landmark could be replaced, but it would never be the same, wouldn’t explain who’d done this and why, wouldn’t protect them from another attack. In the weeks following the burning no evidence emerged. The Soulful began quietly pointing fingers at one another. The trust and friendship that united them began to corrode.

  The underground White Music Party became a suspect. It was rumored they had terrorist leanings, though they swore they were all about peace and love. Their leader, Oreo Feelgood, told reporters, “Can’t we all just get along?” Then the spotlight turned to Jiggaboo. Despite his staggering shampoo, few in Soul City cared for him personally. But he had an airtight alibi: he’d been in the mayor’s mansion, introducing Spreadlove to absinthe. This was not some clever trick. Jiggaboo had had nothing to do with the fire. At least not directly.

  The broken-window theory holds that minor signs of civic decay are a gateway to serious crime. One broken window signals civic neglect. Leave it untended long enough and you end up with all sorts of nefariousness. Well, because of the shampoo, lots of windows had been bro
ken inside lots of minds in Soul City. The air was thick with symbols of decay and no one had even noticed. First, a few people had danced off beat and no one said anything. Slowly, the proud peacock strut you saw everywhere became a lazy shuffle. A three-card monte hustler set up shop in the city square. In Honeypot Hill someone saw a rat. But Soul City was too anesthetized by the shampoo to do anything. Then came the fire.

  Who done it? Was it the White Music Party? Jiggaboo? The Devil? Maybe it was the bad karma cloud that’d descended on them and life was responding to the symbols in the air. No. It was Granmama. She was trying to get their attention.

  Life’s big moments are watched over and sometimes managed by God directly, but God is not Big Brother. She is not constantly surveying every little thing. We are not under twenty-four-hour divine surveillance. (We were a few centuries back, but nowadays human civilization is at the age, and maturity level, of teenagers and She can’t be chasing after us every single moment anymore.) Thus, many Heavenly souls exercise their will over earthly moments beyond Her immediate concern. However, unlike God, with Her infinite power, souls sometimes find their abilities hard to control.

  Granmama had seen the change that’d come over the city. It was a city in the midst of a quiet revolution. A devolution, really. They were slipping into blandness, which, for a place as dynamic as Soul City, was death. Heaven is teeming with Soul City fans who are always pulling supernatural strings on the city’s behalf, but Granmama was so enthusiastic about saving her favorite city that the more experienced souls agreed to stand back and let her deal with the problem.

  Before the fire Granmama had been talking with Moses about the burning bush. She thought perhaps a fire like that one would send Soul City a powerful message. But her aim was off and she missed her bushy target and hit the church instead. And more than that, the burning bush that Moses witnessed did not consume its host. Creating that sort of fire is exceedingly difficult. It took three experienced angels to put out Granmama’s fire before it spread beyond Baby Love’s. (Needless to say, She was not pleased.) Thus, with Baby Love’s just a pile of ash, the city that’d been on the fence between the doldrums and the blues was shoved right into collective depression.

  After the fire Soul City became a city of downturned eyes, where people were perpetually grouchy and stared off into space while meandering through the streets with a vague sense of purpose. They stopped saying hello as they passed. They stopped dancing through the day. They met the morning with a ho hum, as if they’d awoken in Albuquerque, or Cleveland, or even, God forbid, Boston. At first it was excused. It was said the city was in mourning. But two months later the city was still mourning as intensely as if the fire had happened yesterday. Their inner weeping simply would not turn into Life Must Go On. One night at the mansion, as Spreadlove and Jiggaboo sat drinking absinthe with their women, someone kicked out a power cord and the city’s music stopped. It was an hour before anyone in Soul City noticed.

  24

  _____

  WHEN HUEYNEWTON looked across the field and saw gigantic Emperor Jones running slowly toward him, he wearily dropped his bag of cotton. His back was as tight as steel, his wrists ached from the weight of the chains, and his feet screamed from the miles of walking from cotton fields to rickety slave quarters. It’d been four days since his last whipping and he could still feel exactly where the lash had landed. He’d been a slave for four months and he knew he couldn’t handle a lifetime in slavery. He would’ve killed somebody. The Slavery Experience had made him understand why Nat Turner had gone on his killing spree, but he sure didn’t know where he’d gotten the energy.

  Emperor explained that they needed John Jiggaboo thrown out of town immediately. Soul City had drunk the Kool-Aid of the new Black Jim Jones and the mayor had gleefully swallowed the most. Hueynewton tried to run, but he sludged his way into Soul City followed by a raggedy mob of slaves in dirty rags, hunched over or limping from aches and injuries. They had the spirit of crusaders storming in, but the look of zombies scraggling in.

  Inside the city limits he could see they were in the midst of a meltdown. Drummers in the city’s square were slouching idly against one another, their dusty drums silent. Teenage boys stood on street corners openly selling bliss. The flowers in the sidewalk were withering. The Vinylmobile had a flat. The scent of Heavenly biscuits was gone. Everyone stumbled through the city in a stupor as if suffering from mental leprosy, their minds falling apart as they moved along. Soul City was fading into dull sepia despite everyone’s glowing dream hair.

  The raggamuffin cabal reached the mayor’s mansion and tried to break down the door, but their efforts amounted to little more than a firm push. After a few tries Hueynewton knocked. Two scantily clad blondes opened the door and asked if they were delivering the buffalo wings. It was late morning but the room was dimly lit and strewn with bottles and clothes and food and drugs and bodies conscious and unconscious. It was so messy it seemed a party had been going on for months on end, twisting time into a knot. The drapes were pulled tight and the air was stagnant and soupy and the clocks were broken. It seemed they’d been so wanton and feckless so long that even this had begun to bore, and complete spiritual inertia had set up shop. Hueynewton climbed up to the third floor, opened a door, and found Spreadlove lying on the floor, sucking on an opium pipe, his eyelids below half-mast, being massaged by a pair of nearly naked blondes. “Boo, is that you?” the mayor gargled. “I need some more shampoo.”

  Hueynewton found the Black Jim Jones in the DJ booth, behind the turntables. He had a Barry Manilow record in his hand. Hueynewton shuddered at the thought of his city hearing that ultrawhite man warbling about the goddam Copacabana. At a time of spiritual vulnerability like this, a moment of Manilow could ruin Soul City forever. Hueynewton tried to lunge at Jiggaboo, but he sort of lamely jumped up and chest bumped him into the wall, knocking the turntables to the floor so the sound of the needle screeching across a record ripped through the city. Jiggaboo wriggled free from Hueynewton’s weak bear hug and swung at him, but missed. He steadied himself, then swung and missed again, losing his balance and falling to the floor. He was really high. They were men of unbreakable will, but neither was in any condition to fight. Jiggaboo had the Devil instructing him telepathically while Granmama urged Hueynewton on. It was a miniwar over the future of Soul City, played out in front of Heaven and Hell. Yet the fighting was pathetic.

  Jiggaboo threw a turntable at Hueynewton. He aimed for his head but hit him in the shin. Hueynewton fell back from the pain, hit his head on the wall, and fell out cold. The Devil was embarrassed for them both. Jiggaboo took a moment to catch his breath, then grabbed a bottle of shampoo from the floor. He poured half the bottle on Hueynewton’s hair and began furiously working the shampoo into his head, scrubbing as if Hueynewton was his dirt-caked son, until his hands were invisible beneath malevolent lather. He was trying to push the Fetchitness into Hueynewton’s scalp with his fingers and hasten the zombification of Soul City’s last hope. But Granmama would not let her boy lose. She yelled into the ear in his mind, “Git the fuck up!”

  Hueynewton came to and felt the wild tingling on his scalp. He pushed Jiggaboo off of him and said, “What is wrong with you?” Hueynewton would’ve attacked him, but he was spent.

  Jiggaboo struggled to balance himself like a toddler. “I can’t stand you Soul City niggers!” he said, spitting while he spewed. “You’re just a bunch of dancing, boppity boho Black nigger Muppets with funny names and stupid cars.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “You flying Negroes make me sick!”

  Hueynewton took hold of the wobbling Jiggaboo as if to help him stand. He said, “Nobody calls our names funny.” Then he pushed him toward the window. It was actually an attempt to throw him out the window, but Jiggaboo’s head hit the top of the windowsill and he fell on the floor and lay there drooling. Now the Devil was really embarrassed. Hueynewton pulled Jiggaboo off the floor and lamely dumped him out the window. Jiggaboo fell two stories
and landed on the windshield of Spreadlove’s Princemobile. He went straight through the glass and broke his neck on the steering wheel. Death was right there to scoop him up. “I know where I’m goin,” Jiggaboo grumbled as Death led him away.

  Hueynewton stumbled out of the mansion and fell asleep on the Great Lawn. He was bloodied and bruised, but he had great-looking hair.

  When Spreadlove sobered up he had a meeting with Fulcrum.

  “If you resign now,” Fulcrum said, “you can go on living in Soul City. If you refuse to resign you’ll have a hearing where you’ll be judged by the city’s elders and you’ll be able to argue your side. We might agree to let you continue being mayor. Probably not, but you never know. We may exile you from the city forever. Or we could opt to bury you alive in the cemetery. Probably not. But you never know.”

  Spreadlove’s hasty resignation was accepted. He was mayor for all of six months. Fulcrum picked Emperor Jones to finish out Spreadlove’s term. He assumed that Jiggaboo had burned down the church, but they never found any proof. He always thought it very curious that even though Granmama had been looking down from Heaven when it happened, she had no idea who’d done it.

  The next night there was a Jiggaboo Shampoo bonfire in Paradise Park. Most threw in their bottles happily, but a few were reluctant to give up theirs. Fulcrum asked Hueynewton to help them change their minds. He was persuasive, as usual. It was a glorious night. The drummers returned to drumming, the sidewalk flowers began blooming, and Ecstasy Jackson prowled the park hugging everyone for free. She was sexy and offering her number to all the men, willing to sleep with anyone, but nobody would go to bed with her. She was theoretically Soul City’s easiest girl, but she was a virgin because the whole town knew her family’s secret. Finally, Hueynewton was brought to the front of the crowd and hailed as the man who beat down an agent of the Devil and saved Soul City. Revren Lil’ Mo Love proclaimed, “Hueynewton, you as bad as Shiftless Rice!”