by Paul Beatty
I opened with a powerful two-hour raga-ode to Nicholas entitled “Barrio Bangladesh,” throughout which the audience rocked in their seats, wailing with my rhythmic recitation. When I finished, I looked into twenty thousand faces in stone silence. The audience was anesthetized, unable to move. A review of the night’s festivities stated that the poem brought every listener in the house to “the zenith of comprehension. Not since the New Testament has the death of morality been so eloquently eulogized.” I announced my next poem, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Crib Death.” After I read the last few stanzas—
Remorse lies
not in the consciousness
of a murderous parent
who rocks a child born into slavery
to divine sleep
with jugular lullaby
sung by sharp blade
and suffocating love
applied with pillow and pressure
Remorse lies
in the slave owner’s anguished cries
upon discovering
his property permanently damaged;
a bloody hieroglyph carved into flesh
the smiling lips swollen and blue with asphyxiation
after he calculates his losses
forecasts the impact on this year’s crop
he will notice the textual eyes of murder/suicide
read “caveat emptor”
let the buyer beware
—Hillside erupted. Niggers lost their fucking minds. When the huzzas reached their climax, I prepared for my encore, a small sacrifice and show of appreciation to Nick Scoby, to any niggers who cared.
I launched into a solemn monologue explaining how through painstaking research I’d unearthed proof that President Truman’s threat to drop a third atomic bomb on Japan was not, as he later claimed, merely an idle boast to intimidate the Land of the Rising Sun into a speedy surrender. Elongated cries of disbelief rang out from the bleachers: “Noooo.” “Yessssss,” I replied, holding up photos of grinning Manhattan Project scientists casually leaning and squatting around three bombs, Fat Man, Little Boy, and the newly discovered Svelte Guy, each with cute slogans like “Flatten Japan” and “Sorry for stepping on your toe, Joe” chalked on the metallic hull. “You may pass these photographs around. I have the negatives.”
As the photos circulated through the audience, I produced a white handkerchief and a shiny carving knife from my back pocket and placed them on the rostrum. Carefully smoothing the hanky out toward the corners, I issued a challenge to the United States government. “When I was a child, my dad—before he left us, the fuck—whenever I did something wrong, he used to say, ‘I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out.’ Well, Big Daddy, Uncle Sam, oh Great White Father, you brought me here, so I’m asking you to take me out. Finish the job. Pass the ultimate death penalty. Authorize the carrying out of directive 1609, ‘Kill All Niggers.’ Don’t let Svelte Guy lie dormant in the basement of the Smithsonian. Drop the bomb. Drop the bomb on me! Drop the bomb on Hillside!”
I placed the pinky of my right hand on the handkerchief. With my left hand I picked up the knife and sterilized it with a couple of passes over my pants leg. Before someone could ask, “What the hell are you doing?” I brought the knife down over my finger and hacked it off with one strike.
I’d prepared myself for the pain, but I wasn’t ready for the amplified sound that pounded out of the monitors. One hundred thousand crunching watts of stainless steel cleaving through bone followed by the solid kachunk of the knife into the mahogany lectern, followed by my gasp, the audience’s gasp, and my deep inhalation in shock. The first thing I heard was the familiar voice of Coach Shimimoto yelling from the front row, “Suck it up, Kaufman!”
I reeled for a moment, then meticulously wrapped the speckled red-and-white handkerchief around the severed finger, exactly as I’d seen Robert Mitchum do in some American yakuza movie. Staring at the space where my finger used to be, I held my hand high above my head. The blood ran down my arm, and what didn’t pool in my armpit puddled next to my sneakers. I lowered my head, then exited stage left, the soles of my blood-soaked shoes sticking to the floorboards as if I were walking in yesterday’s spilled soda.
*
That night cemented my status as savior of the blacks. The distraught minions interpreted my masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy. The more I tried to deny my ascendency, the more beloved I became. Spiteful black folk and likeminded others from across the nation continue to immigrate to Hillside, seeking mass martyrdom. They refurbish the abandoned houses and erect tent cities on the vacant lots, transforming the neighborhood into a hospice.
The government’s reluctant confirmation of the existence of Svelte Guy spurred a massive letter-writing campaign asking the government not to waste the uranium and to test the antiquated A-bomb by dropping it on “those ungrateful passive-aggressive L.A. niggers.” Ignoring the Japanese claim of dibs to the bomb as a keepsake of war, Congress passed a motion to quell our insurrection by issuing an ultimatum: rejoin the rest of America or celebrate Kwanzaa in hell. The response was to paint white concentric circles on the roofs of the neighborhood, so that from the air Hillside looks like one big target, with La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat as the fifty-point bull’s-eye.
Epilogue
It’s been a lovely five hundred years, but it’s time to go. We’re abandoning this sinking ship America, lightening its load by tossing our histories overboard, jettisoning the present, and drydocking our future. Black America has relinquished its needs in a world where expectations are illusion, has refused to develop ideals and mores in a society that applies principles without principle.
Past movements in the black struggle seem to have had the staying power of an asthmatic marathoner with no sense of direction, so I suppose as movements go, this one is better than most. No more pleading for our promised forty acres and a mule only to have some hayseed Dixiecrat respond, “These people wouldn’t know a switchback from a switchblade.” No futile attempts at organization. No “Help fold, staple, and label” parties. No one asks for donations. You never hear words and phrases such as “grass roots,” “mobilize,” “subcommittee,” “Who has the phone tree?” and “COINTELPRO” bandied about with counterinsurgent smugness. Best of all, in my humble opinion, I’m not the type of leader to promote self-help and self-love with put-downs and vituperation. You’ll never hear me say, “Scientology is a gutter religion.” I didn’t satiate our sweet-tooth cravings for respect and vengeance like a Sunday-school teacher rewarding good behavior with Uncle Tom White Chocolate, Sneaky Hebrew Butterscotch, and Empowerment Peppermints.
Who can take a rainbow, drop it in a sigh,
soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie?
The candy man, the candy man can.
Mostly I stay at home, Suite 206, the La Cienega Motor Lodge and Laundromat, bathing Naomi while Yoshiko and my mother watch Zatoichi movies, the blind swordsman plowing through his unlucky foes like a wheat thresher. Sometimes Psycho Loco comes to visit, wearing his silver radiation suit, just in case the feds decide to annihilate us ahead of schedule. I dip Naomi in the Jacuzzi and rub baby oil into the creases in her arms, and my best friend and I talk, death-row prisoner to visitor.
“You know, Gunnar, with all this suicidal madness, you taking the easy way out. Why don’t you fight back? Go out like a hero. Dirt on your face, guns blazing.”
“Psycho Loco, everyone who’s ever challenged you, what have you done to ’em?”
“I waxed that ass.”
“So it’s useless for an enemy to challenge you, right?”
“Si, claro.”
“Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction. The trippy part is that when you really think about it, me and America aren’t even enemies. I’m the horse pulling the stagecoach, the donkey in the levee who’s stumbled in the mud and come up lame. You may love me, but I’m tired of thrashing around in the muck and not getting anywhere,
so put a nigger out his misery.”
I pile the suds high on Naomi’s head like a wobbly Ku Klux Klan hood and tell her the Kaufman history. I begin with the end—Rölf Kaufman, her grandfather, my dad, who died last week. The only officer in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department to commit suicide by eating his gun, choking on the firing pin and leaving the following poem in his locker.
Like the good Reverend King
I too “have a dream,”
but when I wake up
I forget it and
remember I’m running late for work.
A Oneworld Book
This ebook edition published in the United Kingdom and Australia
by Oneworld Publications, 2017
Copyright © Paul Beatty 1996
The moral right of Paul Beatty to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78607-225-2
ISBN 978-1-78607-226-9 (ebook)
Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material quoted in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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