O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

“Shh!” Rose stifles him, working on a pornographic strawberry. “Talk to Arthur’s wife. No one’s spoken to her all night.”

  “You’re right,” he says, turning to face Masha Marblestone like a knight charging headlong into battle. “I will speak to her!”

  Micah had met Arthur’s wife on just a few other occasions but had never before really engaged her in conversation. If his blinkered eyes weren’t deceiving him, on this night the mogul’s wife had attended the banquet outfitted in her wedding dress—a yellowing Miss Havisham number, festooned front and back with fish-scale sequins. The intervening three decades having done little to alter her heavily built, round-shouldered figure, she sat next to him beaming like a mermaid bride.

  “I was a seamstress and washerwoman,” Masha begins after Micah asked her to describe how they met, “at the house Artie would frequent.”

  “The house?”

  “Where deh women make deh V,” she says, spearing an entire new potato with a fork, lifting it, and nibbling at the vegetable as she twirls it clockwise. When she is finished, she drops the utensil into her handbag, where it joins a smuggled soup ladle, a pair of lobster forks, a set of linen napkins, melting pats of butter wrapped in aluminum foil, and a shattered champagne flute. “This is where I trained Artie in deh tenderness.”

  “The tenderness?” Micah repeats, a man in solitary imploring a jailer dangling a key.

  Mrs. Marblestone, encircled in a nimbus of light, blows out a candle and drops the waxy staff into her bag. “Deh tenderness, deh sweet stuff, was like the rising sun to him.” With dancing medieval fingers, she paints for Micah an entire world of pictures, a world of the Ostjuden, the Eastern European Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a benighted world of peddlers and cobblers and apothecaries and poisoned wells and lanterns that clanked together as children walked along forest paths. The dumpling bride paints spun-sugar pictures of their wedding day—an occasion that in her telling of it had burned away the clouds, had brought knotted, dormant trees to bloom, had sent the first locomotives whistling through the valley. A union that had, through its revelation of love, foisted modernity onto the shtetl. “They still celebrate our anniversary there,” she relays with modest pride. Adventurers shot from their own cannon, their love could propel them but one place. To America! America! America! Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, all those battles and parchments and monuments mere prologue to the Marblestone marriage, backdrop historic pageantry for the main-stage event of their union.

  “It’s all true, everything she said,” Marblestone concurs. “There exists in Germany a turn of phrase for America that was bandied about by the military during the Great War: Das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten. ‘The land of endless possibility.’ ”

  “With Artie,” says Masha, her sixteen-year-old’s face shining through her old-woman’s face as she looks at her husband, “everything was possible.”

  Settings are cleared and coffee is served. From across the hall—as Lewis Milestone picks up his trophy for Best Comedy Direction for Two Arabian Knights, the category that had brought Micah a nomination and all of them to the ceremony—Rose watched one of the colored waiters framed in the oval porthole of the swinging kitchen doors. The waiter is now dressed in street clothes, wearing a fantastic brown checked suit with yellow paisley tie and matching yellow derby, and when their eyes meet through the windowpane across the ballroom, Rose cannot help but think how handsome the young man looks. The night is winding down—there are only one or two more awards left to be presented—and Rose figures the waiter is being let off work early. She continues thinking about how elegantly dressed the young man is, how fine, until he mouths in silence a vile two-syllable word, a word that travels across the length of the room and lands like an ice pick in her heart. As the hall envelopes Milestone in applause, the young man leers at Rose, licking his chops like a fairy-tale wolf. He points a spindly finger at her and mouths the word again, only slower this time, to make unmistakable that the odium is intended for her, to let it be known that he is not fooled by her secret identity, and to confirm that Micah is, impossibly, correct in his suspicion that they are in no small danger.

  “We should leave now,” Rose says, squeezing Micah’s hand, glancing at the watch he’d given her, registering the time as five minutes before the witching hour.

  “I know,” Micah says, resting his fingertips atop the boss’s hand, Marblestone’s once-massive mitts now priestly thin with fine bones risen too close to the surface. “I’m sorry I couldn’t win one for you.”

  “I won’t need it where I’m going, boychick.”

  “It’s that bad?” Micah asks, too young to be twice fatherless.

  “I shit my pants now like a baby, Micah. Yeah, it’s bad. Hey, Ben, pass the tinsel.”

  The Award of Merit, a foot-tall bronze knight holding a Crusader’s sword, glows like a gyroscope. The figure stands ramrod straight atop a five-spoked reel of film, each partition representing a different branch of the academy. The table falls silent as the totem is passed hand over hand.

  “He’s heavier than he looks,” Marblestone says, taking possession of the ready-made relic. “Seems like this town bought some prestige at last.”

  Hecht smiles grumpily. “ ‘And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray.’ ”

  “You know who he looks like?” asks Micah, amazed by the sensation of metal coolness and smoothness baptizing his fingertips, recognizing in the figure a resemblance to his fallen friend.

  “My God, you know, you’re right,” says Marblestone.

  Till passes it back to the boss. “What’s an award without a nickname?”

  “Well then,” Marblestone says, rising on wobbly legs to bless the table with the trophy. “To Spiro.”

  The tablemates raise their coffee cups. “To Spiro.”

  “No, wait a minute,” Marblestone says, correcting himself. “To Oscar.”

  TWO

  The lobby was large and dim and full of marble columns aflicker with the lickety lights of many candles, the mausoleum gloom heightened by Micah’s worry over Izzy’s flight, sadness about Marblestone’s imminent departure, and thoughts on the nature of his own sepulchral art. The insistent grip of Rose’s hand, too, spoke of the place’s eeriness. Fortunately, the effects of the drug were beginning to diminish, and with them came the lifting of his conviction that he had been followed to the opposite side of the country by an army of angry black manhood. Micah and Rose strode across the lobby, she pulling him, he pulling her, shadows casting long Dracula patterns over the black-and-white checkerboard floor.

  “We’re too late,” Rose says, squeezing Micah’s hand as she sees standing guard by the doors, his back facing them, a figure in a brown checked suit and a yellow derby.

  “What’s the matter, Red?” asks the wild-child dandy, revealing himself in full face and half smile, holding from his neck one of the night’s coveted gold awards. “Can’t recognize a colored person out of uniform?”

  The months spent under Stephanie St. Clair’s wing have been good to Bumpy, who seems cooler, more composed, less hopped up on his own rabbity youthfulness than before. He holds his head proud and high, a natural-born aristocrat whose every scrap of knowledge, every experiential gain, is spontaneously snatched. Even as a terrible threat hangs between them, Micah cannot help but find the gangland prince admirable.

  “The waiters?” Micah asks in wonderment.

  “That’s right,” answers Bumpy, and from the great twin marble staircases come strutting and waltzing and cruising six of his West Coast confederates, a gang of whistling, humming, terrifying Negroes brandishing razors, brass knuckles, cat-o’-nine-tails, and assorted medieval weaponry. All of them wear black slacks and white dinner jackets that make them look like the half-moon cookies Micah gets for the boys at Jewish bakeries on the Lower East Side. As poised as a gaggle of southern debutantes or Broadway chorines, they sail into position, descending the stairs, physical grace inseparable from physical threat. Maki
ng malicious show of their high-Kabuki strutting, two of them plant themselves in front of each of the entrance doors while the rest perch on the staircase, awaiting a signal. An oceanic mirror at the back of the lobby duplicates the room. In it Micah is able to register the entire orchestration of doom; in it he has trouble recognizing his own face.

  “Come to see my business partner pick up an award,” Bumpy says, thumping the base of the Oscar in his open palm like a policeman’s billy club.

  “I lost.”

  “I know. It’ll pass.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Dumb motherfucker left this in the kitchen,” Bumpy says dismissively, nodding at the award shining in his hand. He instinctively points at Rose’s belly. “Hey, I know you, you’re Early’s sister.”

  “No, you’re mistaking me for someone else.”

  “Sure thing, sis,” he says, tossing the trophy tail over head to one of the goons.

  “What’s this for, El-Ray?” asks the henchman—the shortest, most extravagantly conked and rabid-looking of the gang—catching the award with a metallic clap. “Someone win a race?”

  “Nah, man, out here they hand out trophies for getting they picture taken.” Bumpy smiles, plucking a familiar scent from the temperate night air. “You motherfuckers smell like reefer!”

  “It’s medicinal,” Micah says. “Where’s Waldo? I’ve not heard from him since I got back.”

  “He’s dead,” Bumpy says briskly, confirming the news in the reflection of his gleaming black patents. “He’s gone. I forget more in a day than that fool ever had to teach. Now, where’s my picture, Red?”

  “It’s not here. I think the footage is back in New York.”

  “No, no, no.” Eyes shunting back and forth like traffic signals. “I paid your little faggot brother a visit, only nothing was there. He wasn’t there. That’s why I come out here.”

  “Look, listen, Izzy’s not been himself since we got back.”

  “You think I give a rat’s ass hearing about your brother’s hemorrhoids? D’you understand who you’re indebted to now, Red?”

  “Yes, I had a meeting with Madam Queen.” Micah points to the red bruise on his forehead. “I understand we’re in this together with her now, I know that.”

  This whole time Rose has been making a careful observation of Bumpy, trying to determine just how different, and to what degree, he might be from her brother. “Why’re you listening to this chump?” she asks, testing a theory, using the exasperated tone of a schoolteacher presiding over a third-grade tussle. “It’s been a long night, fellas. Nice meeting you all and hope you enjoyed the party, but we’re going home.”

  The shard of toothpick Bumpy has been jostling between his two decks of teeth stills itself like the leg of an animal caught in a hunting trap. “Hold out her arms.” He shrugs, looking at the floor, almost doleful. With a nod from him, the two men guarding the door step forward, grab Rose’s hands, and pull her arms outstretched, crucifixion style.

  “Now, what do we have here, Red? Shut out your business partner, but look who you bring to the ball instead.” Bumpy begins stroking Rose’s cheek with his pointer finger, the tapered digit of an artist or a musician. “Hmmm, what big eyes you have! Better to see what can’t be scrubbed away, my dear.”

  “Don’t you touch me!”

  “Hmmm, and what big lips you have! Better to suck this cracker’s joint!” He presses harder now, leaving a fluorescent imprint on her skin as he drags the digit down her cheek. “And what fine banana skin and straight hair you have! Better to pretend you are what you ain’t. How do you see under all that pancake?” he says, smiling at the sight of his finger coated in chalky powder. “How does he see you?”

  “Get your hands off me, you black son of a bitch,” Rose says, kicking and whooshing like a kite in a windstorm as the goons struggle to hang on.

  “Let her go, Ellsworth,” Micah says, pleading with his voice to keep from cracking. “She’s got no part in this.”

  “Now you’re just talking foolishness, Red. What you think our script’s about, son? You steal that fine jelly from hardworking boys like us and then you going to tell me she got no part in this? Fucking her’s like eating a piece of Ebinger’s blackout cake—you’re going to tell me she’s got no part in this? Baby, everything you touch is mixed up in this. Everything you love is mixed up in this. Doesn’t that earn your acknowledgment yet?”

  “Yes,” Micah says, allowing the word of affirmation to envelop them like a passage of Talmudic text. “Yes, I understand. Just tell me what you want.”

  “Easy, Red. I want in. Ellsworth wants his piece of pie.”

  “And I’m working on getting it for you. With a slice of cheese.”

  “That fine American cheese, huh? Listen, Red, if you don’t want somebody writing the rules on your back,” he says, flashing an unopened switchblade as casually as a husband might reach across a nightstand for a pair of reading glasses, “stop saying stupid things.”

  At the sight of the strip of silver, some single, final, errant leaf releases its intoxicants into Micah’s bloodstream and Bumpy’s metaphor materializes before him. The mark of Cain. Hester Prynne’s crime ironed onto her breast. Your sins written on your very human skin, across one’s arms and breast and forehead for all to see. What an elegant and terrible system of retribution! The rules written on your back!

  “You know what tonight’s missing?” Bumpy asks, the polished instrument in his hand revealed to be not a switchblade but a mouth harp. “Nice to see Chaplin and Fairbanks and all—though they’re shorter than they look—but you know what the festivities been lacking? Party without music, t’aint a party t’all. Fellas!”

  Bumpy snaps, and with that command the two smallest of the goons, each poised on opposing spiral staircases, leapfrog like the Nicholas Brothers over the heads of the hoodlums standing in front of them, landing in full splits on the cold tile floor. Bumpy reaches into a pocket and sends a handful of sand to the floor, the better to scat and slide, initiates a reedy C chord, and begins to sing:

  “THE RULES”

  [To the tune of Ma Rainey’s “Misery Blues.”]

  I love my brown skin, indeed I do

  No use playing by other people’s rules

  I’m gonna tell you, just what I done

  To live my life and have my fun

  [On one knee, arms open wide in supplication, like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.]

  Busboy or a porter or a shoeshine boy

  How’s that mean niggers ain’t slaves no more?

  Ellsworth’s screaming, he’s almost cryin’

  Because the world, it isn’t mine

  [The award is tossed back to Bumpy, who presses it close to his cheek for the chorus.]

  [CHORUS]

  Learned me some rules

  Ain’t in no school

  Got to be versed in them

  Miserable rules

  [The trophy is passed between the dancing gang members, who lob it among themselves, pantomiming stickups and prison rapes, accosting Micah and Rose.]

  You serve up that gruel

  N work like a mule

  World spins to the tune of

  Miserable rules

  The kind and the cruel

  The burnt and the cool

  Will brand on your back them

  Miserable rules

  [Bumpy laying hands on the award for the final verse.]

  So protect your jewels

  [smiling wickedly at Rose]

  And sharpen your tools

  [nodding to his enforcers]

  Be on your guard ’gainst

  Miserable rules

  Gots to rebel ’gainst those

  Miserable rules

  “Nice song,” Micah says at the conclusion of the first Academy Awards musical number.

  “What song?” Bumpy asks.

  “Look,” says Micah, no longer convinced of the actuality of what is transpiring, the concrete reality of events unfolding
around him, “this is a very unusual way to conduct business.”

  “Conduct business?” Bumpy repeats, face corkscrewing around the phrase, speaking with his mouth but translating through his body. “And how exactly would you have me conduct business? What’d you have a nigger do? Make an appointment with your secretary? Visit the bank, ask to take out a loan? Go off sniffing drainpipes? I see you and the fat man at dinner together, but where’s the seat at the table for Ellsworth?”

  “Things change,” Micah says, giving voice to a thought he hasn’t until this moment articulated to himself. “It takes time, but things change.”

  “Motherfucker, change is what goes jingle-jangle in my pocket. Know what doesn’t change? Every time I look in the mirror expecting to see someone like you, I see someone looks like he crawled out the ass of America. That don’t change. That’s what you motherfuckers never understand; hos, hootch, and horns are the only things you left us. Talk to me about conducting business—that is my business. I’m in the stay-black-and-die business.”

  “Bumpy,” Rose spits, “you’re just a common crook.”

  “Don’t call me common.”

  He winds up the award from its base like a batter at the plate and delivers a roundhouse to Rose’s pregnant stomach. A sickening flat thud, the sound of a sandbag dropped from a great height onto a haystack, sends Rose crumpling to the lobby floor.

  “I am’s what I am,” Bumpy says, sending the award sailing across the room again then snapping together the loose night air with the click of a popped-open switchblade. “That’s more than I can say for you.”

  Darting in like a varsity-team fencer, Bumpy punctures the uppermost part of Micah’s right arm. Even during the phenomenally slowed moment in which he is attacked, Micah appreciates the fierce athletic splendor of Bumpy’s form, the cloud of electricity he carries in the air that huddles around him. A portion of Micah’s white dinner jacket begins turning deepest red, a red that, in its spill and spread, announces all previous incarnations of the color to have been impostors.

  Swooning, Micah consults the lobby mirror to confirm the occurrence of all these events. It registers upon him that his site of injury echoes that of King Mishi. As he kneels to the floor, thick drops of blood begin patterning tile like sauce on a plate; the pain comes flooding in, but at a remove. Yes, this is excruciating! shy nerve endings scream into the cool night air. But brace yourself, because worse might be in the offing.