Soul City

by Touré

  Ubiquity crowed as she bounced out the door. The ladies looked at Mama Sunflower with pity. She’d been bombed by her daughter and her nemesis in her own home at the same time. But Mama Sunflower still would not break. She was too curious. How could Ubiquity have possibly known?

  Mahogany and Cadillac began dating officially and almost nothing changed. They went right back to being a youngish old married couple that fights all the time. Mahogany complained and bossed him around, but she didn’t dump him once a week anymore.

  As Mahogany’s ninth month approached Soul City grew increasingly nervous over what would happen to them after the baby was born. The Big Mamas didn’t know. No one expected an instant apocalypse, but what were they headed for?

  Fulcrum went to Heaven.

  All She would say is, “Have faith.”

  And the entire city sat on the edge of its seat waiting for this baby to come.

  30

  _____

  ON THE first day of her ninth month it rained so horribly people said another flood was coming, thanks to Mahogany. The couple stayed in her apartment all day. They didn’t go out anymore. People on the street said the nastiest things. The whole city was watching, but they felt alone. Even if the prophecy had been fake, by now it had become real. The city was so tense that if that baby didn’t fly it would indeed be the end of Soul City as they knew it. And there was no way the baby would be able to fly.

  Mahogany was so nervous she almost smoked. Only Cadillac’s faith buoyed her. She demanded they have the baby at home. It was due in three weeks, but as they’d find out, that baby would always do everything when it was good and ready.

  That afternoon Cadillac was making yet another attempt to construct the perfect first sentence for his book. Once he had the perfect first sentence he knew the rest would trickle out a drop at a time over many excruciating years, but at least the suffering would’ve begun. He thought of Márquez, Rushdie, and Ellison at their desks, struggling to bring life to Macondo, Bombay, and Harlem. He would keep fighting until he found the perfect first sentence.

  Then the baby let Mahogany know it was good and ready, coming three weeks early, as if it, too, could no longer stand the anticipation. Cadillac called the midwife and she started on her way, but in the heavy rain she got into an accident and died. Now they were really alone.

  A little foot popped out. The midwife wasn’t answering her cell and Mahogany was speaking in tongues, so Cadillac began gently tugging on the foot, trying to help the baby come out. Three hours later, the gentle tugging had become a tug of war, the room was exactly as wet and as wild as if the biblical rain outside was falling inside the apartment, there was blood and birth juice everywhere, and he could see only half of the baby, but enough to know she was having his son. His little hips gave Cadillac more to pull on. But then the boy stopped coming. He was more than halfway out, they were almost done, but his head was trapped, the cord wrapped around his neck. His little face was starting to turn blue. Mahogany ordered Cadillac to wait for the midwife. Certainly, she would arrive any second. He thought that was wise. But, full of hope, he reached in. Slowly, delicately, Cadillac eased the cord aside and smoothed his son out.

  “I can’t believe we did this at home,” she said as he cut the cord.

  He did not remind her that that’d been her choice.

  Hero Jackson began his life not by flying but by falling asleep in his mother’s arms as if he, too, were tired from the expectations. Cadillac and Mahogany stared at the wrinkled little creature, too in love to worry about anything. Hero slept for twenty minutes and then, with his mother’s sense of nonchalance about the amazing and his own need to do things when he was good and ready, he yawned. Then he lazily lifted up into the air. He was a little brown Baryshnikov, gliding backwards in the air as if to say, Of course I can fly. Then he landed in the arms of his mother. His shocked, relieved, proud mother. Then all three of them melted with the ardor that’s possible only with brand-new love.

  They would never know that for the first twenty minutes of his life Hero Jackson was unable to fly. He hadn’t gotten the flight gene, just as she’d known he wouldn’t. But Soul City needed that baby to fly, and when it really matters She always comes through for Soul City.

  31

  _____

  A YEAR LATER they got married. The ceremony was held at the Sunflowers’ home. More than three hundred were invited to come cheer on what was suddenly Soul City’s favorite couple. Mama Sunflower fell in love with those two the moment she saw her grandchild fly.

  The Revren Hallelujah Jones officiated. King Sunflower flew in with the ring. The girls from the Biscuit Shop served as maids of honor. Fulcrum and Granmama watched together in Heaven. Jiggaboo watched from Hell. “A nigger who sticks by his girl when the chips are down?” he said to the Devil. “Now that’s magic realism.” The Revren Lil’ Mo Love diddled Miss Delicate Chocolate in the closet. Lolita handled the catering and sent three of their top people: Invisible Man was the manager because he was a good thinker and a good leader, Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God was a bartender because she was always a good worker, Irie Jones from White Teeth was a waiter, and Doc Craft from the legendary “A Solo Song: For Doc” absolutely had to be there because he was a Waiter’s Waiter. And Emperor Jones took a break from his duties as interim mayor and DJ’d the event. The Sunflower backyard rocked until five in the morning. The Inquirer was not allowed in, so they hovered above in a helicopter.

  Cadillac was so happy he smoked half a box of Cubans by himself.

  Mahogany was tired, dying for a cigarette, so pregnant she was showing, and constantly complaining about how her Jimmy Choos were killing her. But she smiled all day.

  Hero didn’t cry once during the service in which his parents jumped over the antebellum broomstick used in all Soul City weddings for more than a century. But no one could keep the rambunctious and stubborn boy from flying over to the DJ booth. Some said, He’s just like his mother. Others said, Maybe he’ll be mayor someday.

  Ubiquity Jones was, of course, not invited. She’d let it be known that she was determined to make Chickadee Sunflower cry. But Mama had a bomb of her own. She’d gotten a hunch, made some long-distance calls, and uncovered Ubiquity’s secret. She was hoping Ubiquity came. She told the guards, If she comes, let her right in.

  True to form, Ubiquity slinked in during dinner and hid in the back. She must’ve had a whopper of a bomb to drop because when she bounced up to the microphone she said, “Eve-nin, Soul City!” She’d come to ruin everyone’s night. “Ain’t it a shaaame . . . !” she sang out with rare glee and the entire city braced itself for a nuclear gossip bomb.

  Then Mama Sunflower stood and began walking toward her with one thought in her head. Ubiquity turned to Mama and read her mind and found her own secret. She was horrified. She couldn’t have everyone know. That would never do. So as Mama stared her down, Ubiquity backed away from the microphone and quickly bounced to the door. Without a word Mama Sunflower had made Ubiquity Jones run and cry.

  32

  _____

  NOW, MANY years later, Cadillac and Mahogany are an old married couple that fights all the time. But they’re happy. One Sunday morning they were at a café in Honeypot Hill. Stevie was on the city speakers talking about paradise when she took a drag and said, “I hate this place.” Cadillac didn’t have to remind her that she’d chosen it, but he did ask if there was someplace she’d rather be. They could move to The City, Paris, Jamaica, wherever she chose. She was offended. “I would never leave Soul City,” she said coldly. She loved her hometown. But she loved complaining, too. She would’ve hated paradise.

  Cadillac became a columnist at the Soul City Defender. Mahogany used her reputation as Soul City’s best babysitter to launch a day-care center. It was very successful and now she also owns the Biscuit Shop. She still DJs on Friday nights and they still don’t have cornbread. They have two children, Hero and their daughter, Diva. They all live in a nice
house on Juneteenth Boulevard in Honeypot Hill. After considerable argument, they bought a Marleymobile because it’s a great family car. They still have great flying sex, and though it doesn’t always seem so, they love each other.

  After his term as interim mayor ended, Emperor Jones ignored the pleas of his doctors and girlfriends and ran for reelection. He won easily and held office for twenty years until the night he died in the DJ booth. He was ninety-four.

  Precious Negro kicked bliss and got new hi-tech ears.

  Fulcrum Negro reluctantly got Lizzie Benzman a temporary furlough from Hell.

  Revren Lil’ Mo Love only got cuter as he got older. At eighteen he ran off to Hollywood. He now gets $10 million a picture. He never finished the Bible.

  King Sunflower is in the NBA. He’s a three-time slam-dunk champ.

  Ubiquity promised Mama she’d never reveal a secret again if Mama would keep hers. Mama never would’ve told Ubiquity’s secret. That wasn’t her style. But she made the deal anyway.

  One day, many years after moving to Soul City, Cadillac was washing the dishes when he noticed his neighbor Miss Delicate Chocolate’s garden was half roses and half weeds, but still beautiful because in Soul City even the weeds had style. He thought if he could write a sentence that included Soul City’s magic roses and its soulful weeds, he might have a sentence that would encapsulate Soul City. All these years he still hadn’t written a word of his book because he was afraid of getting it wrong and being branded a fool or getting it too right and being branded a traitor. He couldn’t possibly do a simplistic celebration of these complex folk. He knew too much. But he was afraid to reveal everything he knew and felt about Soul City. In the grasp of the claws of fear you can’t hit a jump shot and you certainly can’t write. If he was going to talk about these complex folk, he’d have to tell all he saw.

  He turned himself into a camera and framed Soul City as he saw it. He said a prayer as he began, for he knew not where his book would end, but he’d lived there for so many years he was one of them. He hoped they would know that even though it wouldn’t always be pretty, it would be a love letter.

  He picked up his pen and wrote a sentence:

  In Soul City they so bad they got beautiful ways of bein ugly.

  Finally, he was on his way.

  After that the book came to him in slow drips. There were long droughts and ten excruciating years in which he nearly lost his mind, but he soldiered on until one day, thirty-three years after he smoothed off the train, Cadillac finally published Soul City.

  Some called him honest, others called him a Judas. Some considered him an artist, others compared him to Fetchit. But he slept well at night because never once in the writing did he lie to himself.

  Hero grew up to become mayor. In fact, he was widely thought to be the best mayor Soul City had ever had until Ecstasy’s little sister, Foin, started to like him and Ubiquity uncovered a secret she couldn’t keep to herself and Death finally found a PR agent smart and powerful enough to help him. He told her he’d been feared too long. Now he just wanted to be loved. The crusade to change Death’s global image was launched with a book titled Don’t Be Afraid, It’s Just Death, a tell-all about dying that demystified the whole thing and apologized for centuries of fear and misunderstanding. Then he did the talk-show circuit. The book was an immediate monster bestseller, bigger than even the Bible. The demystification of death brought so much relief to so many that Death came to be loved around the world. In time he removed all fear of dying, which had the unintended effect of changing everyone’s relationship with God, which led to a mass worldwide conversion to a brand-new religion called Coolism. But that’s a story for another day.

  Thank You

  Mom, Dad, Dr. Meika, Rita, Minna Proctor, Nelson George, Sarah Lazin, Michael Pietsch, Reagan Arthur, Claire McKinney, Stanley Crouch, Eddie Lintz, Stephen Koch, il Bogliasco Fondzatione, and the wonderful Rockhouse Hotel in Negril, Jamaica.

  Also, Pryor, Bearden, Ellison, Nabokov, Rushdie, Didion, Hurston, Morrison, García Márquez, David Foster Wallace, Grass, Rand, Amis, Zadie, Amanda Davis, Basquiat, Mary Jane, the word nigga, and, of course, the people of Soul City.

  Soul City was written in Montauk, New York; Bogliasco, Italy; Negril, Jamaica; and Brooklyn, New York.

  About the Author

  Touré is the author of The Portable Promised Land, a collection of short stories from Little, Brown. He’s also a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, the host of MTV2’s Spoke N’ Heard, and a contributor to CNN. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Tennis Magazine, The Best American Essays 1999, The Best American Sports Writing 2001, Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004, and The Best American Erotica 2004. He studied at Columbia University’s graduate school of creative writing and lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. (www.Toure.com)