I Can Transform You

by Maurice Broaddus

  “I don’t have time for social niceties.” She ignored his proffered hand.

  “Cooking stuff up in the lab,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Just like ‘Yacuub,’ good sir.”

  Unabashedly vital, her high cheekbones framed an Aquiline nose against her sallow complexion, tea with too much milk; just light enough to be on the fringe of polite society. With a rigidity of face and a hardness in her hazel eyes, she possessed a noblewoman’s airs. She probably had an A-level education, which meant her parents had money or connections. The mirth of aristocracy barely masked an anarchist streak. Her terrible impertinence of dressing like a man covered a repressed gaity to her Victorian effect. She polished her spectacles in a handkerchief.

  “Bout time we got some ladies representing,” Sleepy said.

  “He rises in my estimation. Deaconess Blues.” She shook his hand.

  “It’s nice to see not all of us had to struggle.”

  “Do not talk to me about struggle while you thoughtlessly squander what money you manage to scrimp together on instruments and automobiles worth more than your hovel.” Her wan smile soured to a grim line. “My mother had been a governess, a high rank for Negroes, though she tried to program me with how it was unbecoming for a lady to fill her head with designs and equations. Though no mother would phrase it as such, she wanted me to be vapid and colorless. I had other ideas.”

  Though now he whiled away his days as a coal shoveler rather than as an artist or poet, Sleepy never fancied himself an anarchist by any stretch. Not like her who decided that she, if not the rest of society, was past the male supremacy’s notions of womanhood. Her body and mind were hers to do with as she would.

  Sleepy pulled a hair from his chin, closing his eyes at the fresh sting of pain; a nervous habit, anxious to remind himself that he could still feel. He didn’t know who he was; a man out of place, a crowd of one. Jamaican born, but England-educated—through C-levels, the bare minimum for a citizen, appropriate to his station—and America employed; a one man Triangle trade. His father was a man of dreams and ideas. And causes. Sleepy joined the struggle in his youth and paved the way for the F8 through civil disobedience. “Life ought to be lived outside of yourself,” he often preached. But Sleepy’s passion for music provided release from his miserable existence, imbued with anger and vitality of the dwellers of the undercity; not the staid tones enjoyed by the ranks of nobles. Sleepy tapped percussive melodies lost in the rhythms of his thoughts.

  “Am I boring you?” Deaconess Blues asked.

  “Nah, I’m just waiting to hear the deal.”

  “All in good time.”

  Funkin’ Lesson

  Deaconess Blues led them back to the library where her automaton had spread out the accoutrements of high tea. A silver teapot poured a heady brew, the aroma-filled the room. A tray of crumpets and other delicate pastries lay before them, as the blank-faced automaton attended to etiquette in Deaconess Blues’ fragile dance of civility. Going through the motions of refined breeding, protocol—appearances were paramount—despite being excluded from upper society.

  “Are we all that’s left of the F8?” Sleepy asked. He stifled a rheumy cough, slipping a trail of gray sputum into his napkin.

  “I do not know, sir. We compartmentalize ourselves so that no one person knows too much about our organization.” Deaconess Blues tilted her head with a glimmer of maternal concern.

  “You look troubled.”

  “I just don’t know what we’re doing and…” Sleepy paused. “What’s the point?”

  “Has it ever struck you that we aren’t as ahead technologically as we should be?”

  “Knowledge and the reflection of knowledge equals wisdom,” Knowledge Allah said. “Knowledge and wisdom equals understanding.”

  “Then if you knowledge my wisdom, you will understand what I’m saying.” Deaconess Blues said. He nodded as if they shared the same gibberish wavelength. “Knowledge is built on the back of itself. Those who come along later stand on the shoulders of those before them. That great capitalist machine called slavery robbed mother Africa of generations of scientists, artists, and creative minds. Think of where we’d be without that holocaust.”

  “We’d have flying cars,” Sleepy said “and show tunes.”

  “We have show tunes.”

  “We’d have had them sooner, you feel me? What? A black man can’t enjoy show tunes.”

  “He isn’t ready. He still needs verbal milk,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Then this meeting is premature. I am…resources. Not propaganda.”

  “Time is of the essence. The Cause demanded this level of meeting.”

  “My job is to oppose the state,” Deaconess Blues scowled. “I care about the liberation of my people.”

  “Your people? You a high yella, bougie dilettante.” Sleepy shifted, uncomfortable with how defensive he sounded. Deaconess Blues remained unflustered. Strains of classical music reverberated from the large horns encircling the room, surrounding them with sound. With another dollop of chiba, the pungent sting of burnt weed sent his mind adrift among the clouds and made him much more receptive to high flung ideas.

  An obviously delicate eater, Deaconess Blues drew a long sip then set her cup back onto its dish. “I’m black like you. I resist. I seek to end the chains and the extermination of all oppression.”

  “You don’t talk like a scientist.”

  “I am an anarchist, insurrectionist, and a scientist. A scientist searching for knowledge and proof. For truth and meaning.”

  “You’re a scientist of God,” Knowledge Allah chimed in with a tone of deference.

  Sleepy raised an eyebrow. He wondered if Deaconess Blues was one of the alchemist-spirit riders whispered about, those who combined science and the ancient ways.

  “With the revolutions in engineering and science and industry, we have yet to see any in our social systems. We might as well dress up the automata in minstrel outfits and paint them with bright white eyes and red bulbous lips for how we are seen.” Deaconess Blues poured herself another cup of tea. She stirred in milk and sugar as her words settled in their ears, their eyes anxious on her, though she was unhurried. “We’ve been promised universal enlightenment, an end to war, and a rationalist utopian…as long as everyone knows their place.

  “We are at the intersection of class and race, class and sexuality, and class and gender. Any class reduction will face critical resistance. We have sold our souls in the service of commerce. We toil in the embrace of the machine and become a concubine of industry. So we rage against the machine and we must take extraordinary steps to defend ourselves. There must develop solidarity among our people, a swell of anti-colonial resistance.”

  “I feel you. I’m angry and I know y’all are angry, too. So what’re we going to do about it?” Sleepy asked, not one for the intellectual stuff. “Civil disobedience?”

  “I’ve no interest in begging for scraps from our presumed master’s table.”

  “Let me lay it on you like this: blood for blood,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Now we’re talking,” Sleepy said, stirred from his settling ennui.

  “And you know that.” Knowledge Allah outstretched his hand that was received with blitheness by Sleepy, as if he’d finally earned a spot at the table.

  “You’d be happy with any militant action,” Deaconess Blues sniffed.

  “Blowing shit up is a plan,” Sleepy said.

  “I understand your anger and how you may think of blowing shit up—given your coarse leanings—as revolutionary. But it is the beginning of a plan, not one unto itself. There must be a greater vision. There must be a catalyst for change.”

  “Niggas are in a state of emergency. Got to start wilding out.”

  “You are a ruin to language,” she said with the exacting manner of a spinster aunt.

  Sleepy chafed against her civilizing influence. The discussion, though somewhat diverting, left him with the sensation of being o
ut of his depth. Maybe it was Deaconess Blues’ subtle condescension. Or perhaps it was the disconnection between the lofty ideas of the Cause and the practical reality of the people. Sleepy’s views boiled down to pragmatism: the theory of struggle was great only insofar as someone actually was helped. It wasn’t farther argument he wanted, but action. “You rebel in your way, I rebel in mine.”

  “I dream of different but similar worlds. I dream of one where we’re free, not under the heel of Albion. There is something profoundly unwell in their sense of entitlement.” Deaconess Blues shook her head as if the very act of reflection was wasted effort. Her stiff, stately bearing was the picture of restraint. “Eating their blood sausages and tripe, their raspberry tarts”

  “The Inventor has a plan,” Knowledge Allah said as if reading his reluctance.

  “Oh?”

  “The plan is the paragon of simplicity. The local penitentiary…”

  “The Ave?” Sleepy asked.

  “The Allisonville Correctional Facility is a wretched place. Its serpentine bowels, and those of its ilk, incarcerate a third of our people. Little better than slave pens with us little better than beasts.”

  “Including Star Child and the rest of the F8.”

  “The Star Child is a powerful symbol of the struggle. Imprisoned for speaking of a better way. Of revolution.”

  “But the Ave is…”

  “Impregnable? No, its design bears the fruit of the very hubris of its designers. Think of it: a lone spire, defying the heavens like the tower of Babel. All the guards, knights of the realm, gathered there more as symbol than actual need. Were it to come crashing down, our brothers and sisters would be free.”

  “Oops upside their head,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Wouldn’t they be trapped?”

  “Don’t you see? The same underground shafts that entomb them now also protect them. All we would need is a group of folks to shepherd them to safety.”

  “And something to bring down the tower itself.”

  Deaconess Blues stood up and strode to the coat rack. Donning a hat and gloves—though Sleepy distrusted the cock of her hat—she announced, “Come on. We need to be armed with a bop gun.”

  Bop Gun (Endangered Species)

  “Citizens of the Universe, do not attempt to adjust your electro-transmitter, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control to bring you this special bulletin.” The attenuated pulse of Knowledge Allah’s voice echoed along the airwaves. “The Albion Empire bloated itself on its own myth—a proud, corpulent pustule of wealth—spreading across the land, a decadent cancer of corporate greed and industrial indulgence all in the name of national pride.

  “Washington aristocrats with vested interest in our eternal domination, governing to their interests not ours. The Empire is a corrupt federal leviathan, swollen and lazy, and we are the cheap table legs propping it up. Revolution is inevitable. We are the First Cause. In our tiers of rage, we call for direct action. We resist constituted powers through property damage. We impede the flow of goods and capital, using their system against them and making the cost of perpetuating domination prohibitive. And it is time to co-opt their instrument of military guarantor to break out the F8. There’s a party at the crossroads. Watch the skies. Freedom or Death.

  “I exist between time outside time. In the between places. I am the voice of truth in these troubled times.”

  Escaped the low ceiling of the undercity. No sunlight, only the arc of electricity from the tram. A city of shadows consuming their bodies as grist to drive the Empire forward. The trio rode in silence following the banks’ scenic greenway to the summer homes of the overcity. They quickly left the shadows of Atlantis to the sprawling suburbs of greater Indianapolis, careful to avoid the constabularies who might pull them over or otherwise detain them for not being where they were supposed to be. Deaconess Blues’ fair skin granted her passage to casual observers. Soon they reached an immense pole barn structure on property ringed with barbed wire. A mad grin danced on her face as she activated the lock controls via a sequence of numbers punched into an electro-chirographer pad. Gears winched and the doors trembled before parting. Inside the makeshift hanger was an airship.

  From the first day the sight of a bird in flight fired his fancy, man dreamt to one day take to the clouds; to conquer the air as easily as he conquered the land and the sea. Unlike the massive warships of Lockheed or Sir Halliburton, this one did not bristle with armaments. No mighty bombs would drop on unseen enemies or innocent school buildings, nor would the blood-soaked dreams of nation-states be enforced by it. A ridged watermelon with a hull of black with a red underbelly, gas filled tubes ran along the outside of the ship and burned to life to ring the ship in a brackish green. A gold ankh, like an uplifted key, emblazoned its side.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I am not a lady of unlimited resources…”

  “You stole it.”

  “We wrested it from the control of the military industrial complex who deemed this model a failure and relegated it to a barely guarded warehouse,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Haven’t you understood yet? We proceed on a need to know basis. You didn’t need to know.”

  “One man’s failure is another person’s treasure.” Deaconess Blues climbed a scaffold. “Coming inside?”

  The decks of the cabin divided into small rooms, tiny tombs in the greater sarcophagus, connected by tiny ladders Sleepy had little hope of navigating. A network of cables, ropes, and pipes ran throughout like capillaries. Pressure hissed from the valves of the Malcolm-Little engines. Mahogany bedecked the main cabin and retained the reek of stale cigar smoke. A luxurious box, a den of sorts, formed the sanctum sanctorum of noble breeding. A decanter of pear wine sat in the middle of a table spread with finger foods, as another blank-faced automaton whirred out of their way.

  Knowledge Allah reclined on a bench, a gentleman of leisure. Deaconess Blues stood before an array of membrane discs and tuning forks, lost behind the steady cadence of whirs and clicks. A wave of nausea swept over Sleepy as he imagined himself squeezing into the small window seat, staring out over the sea of land.

  “Wisdom is water. I’m about solar facts. God is the sun. It’s all about the elements,” Knowledge Allah said, a brutal curl to his lips.

  “You and your outlandish expressions,” Deaconess Blues remarked with admirable dispatch. “Your peculiar phraseology never tires.” She moved about the cabin, examining the controls with considered elegance.

  “The sundial speaks. We prepare to ride as Afronauts.”

  “So how does this all play out?” Sleepy asked. “We become the villains they assume us to be?”

  “One man’s villain is another person’s Star Child. Do you know how we’re seen? Human chimpanzees. Immature, in need of constant guidance. Emotional, not rational. Unreasonable and easily excited. Without religion, only superstition and fanciful mythologies.” She nodded to Knowledge Allah. “Criminals with no respect for private property. Filthy. Excessively sexual. We are niggers left to fester and shamble in the undercities.”

  “Us and the Irish.” Uncomfortable in the awkward pause left by his attempt at humor, Sleepy pulled another hair from his chin and examined the kinky strand against his fingertip.

  “Their blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus used to keep us in our place. We are but noble aborigines. Such is the result of their gradations of mankind. Here I am, too black for their tastes, too white for yours, trapped by their index of nigrescence.” Deaconess Blues manned a station, the controls warming the dirigible to a full-throated bluster, pulsing with steam. Baffles and stanchions, ballasts and air ducts pumped furiously. “Where is our justice?”

  “Justice? There is no justice, there is Just Us,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Aluminum and iron oxide are elements of the fabric doping. This zeppelin ought to be filled with helium or another inert gas. However, as our purposes are of a more
combustible nature, I’ve filled our little dirigible with hydrogen. I wouldn’t advise any more of your chiba indulgences.” Her stiff upper lip set to grim resolve, she remained unruffled by the chaos springing up about her.

  “I ain’t down with no suicide run,” Sleepy said. “This brother don’t go out like that.”

  “‘Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight!” Knowledge Allah recited with an evangelical fervor and a sneer of contempt. “Matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!”

  “Who’s going to fight for The Cause if our best keep taking themselves out?”

  “An arm, a leg perhaps. But not the Head,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “I am not one to shrink from such deviltry. Besides, it’s not suicide. We are meant to be among the stars, signals from the heavens, showing others the way home.” Deaconess Blues stepped from her perch to meet Sleepy eye-to-eye. “Nor are we asking you to come.”

  “What?” Sleepy’s sated gaze fixed on her.

  “We accepted you because we saw your potential. Ancient tribes had truth-tellers and history keepers and story tellers. You are like one of those ancient griots. We give you the space to tell stories. Our story.”

  “Vainglorious,” Knowledge Allah echoed.

  “I detest long good-byes,” Deaconess Blues said.

  Sleepy glanced from one to the other, tasked and dismissed. His lips parted to protest, but no sound escaped. He backed out toward the rear of the deck, ignoring his sense of relief while wanting to feign the injured party. As if he was deemed unworthy to partake in his own struggle.

  “You smell that?” Deaconess Blues called out, her skin like luminescent butter. A static charge hung in the air. “The air smells like freedom.”

  “Freedom or death,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “We fly into glory.”

  Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos

  “Citizens of the Universe, do not attempt to adjust your electro-transmitter, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control to bring you this special bulletin.”