The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  Mr. Ani: “Somali children are suffering from autism—”

  (Mrs. Abdi’s left eye flinching again at the word.)

  “—in above-average numbers there. And apparently in also Stockholm and a few other places. That’s what I’ve read.”

  “Back home,” she said, “no one ever heard of it! No one! Now here, so many of our children . . . it’s a curse, because our other children are runningk wild!” She eye-blasted her JC, but he kept scanning the carpet.

  “Ma’am,” said Mr. Ani, “I just want to assure you that Jamal is a good young man. Demonstrating a lot of discipline.”

  She ignored the comment. “How do you know about working with these children?”

  “You mean like Ibrahim?”

  “Yes!”

  “I used to . . . in my neighbourhood in Minneapolis I saw a lot of parents struggling. Some figured out a few things that worked. You just pick stuff up, you know?”

  “But I am amayzid!

  Ibrahim, he’ll scream for half an hour or more some-a-times. I worry we’ll lose our apartiment! And you, a stranger, walk in here, and ten seconds later . . . . ”

  Rap, trying to decode her: dazzled… or jealous?

  “I hope I didn’t offend you by being too forward,” said Mr. Ani, “cuz I probably just got lucky . . . but if you want, I’d be happy to go over with you some of the techniques that the parents I knew used.”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Her eyes were wet. Even covered by her tent-dress, the woman’s chest was visibly shuddering.

  Glancing at Mr. Ani’s black-and-gold skullcap, Mrs. Abdi asked, “Are you Muslim?”

  Mr. Ani shrugged, “No, ma’am, afraid not.”

  She smiled a That’s okay—you’re still a good boy smile and went to the kitchen to return with a plate of Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies.

  9.

  Time to go, and Mr. Ani pulled JC into the hallway.

  “Young bruh, whole reason we came up here was cuz I forgot I had something for you. And, uh, sorry for getting you in Dutch with your mom.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. A,” said JC.

  Rap, surprised. Thought Mr. Ani was gonna wing chun JC into pieces for getting a ride and then turning into smoke.

  But maybe seeing JC’s home chaos, how mortified he was to have his autistic brother freaking out in front of him and Mr. Ani . . . maybe that’s all their teacher needed to give JC a pity-pass this time.

  Mr. Ani reached into his jacket pocket and took out a Zune.

  “It’s not new,” he said. “But I refurbished it. Rap told me how you lost your iPod.”

  “Really? For me? I can keep this?” whispered Jamal. “Man! Thanks!”

  “Yeah,” he said, slapping a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You earned it.”

  Now it was Jamal’s turn for wet eyes. He jabbered a thank you and a goodbye and scrambled back into his home.

  10.

  “Are you sure you’re not gonna be in trouble? Cuz I can talk with your folks if you like. I mean, I’m getting you here forty minutes late.”

  Mr. Ani and Rap were stopped at the intersection of 118th Ave and 141st Street, around the corner from where Hamdi’s had been (where a neighbour used to take him for goat and beef suqaar ), down the street from Lee Garden, whose sign announced that it had the best Chinese food in town. But Rap had no idea if that were true. He’d never eaten there.

  “No, it’s fine,” said Rap. “She’s probably still working.”

  “At ten o’clock at night?”

  “She works on a lotta cultural committees.”

  “Your dad?”

  Rap looked out the window. “He’s dead.”

  Mr. Ani paused. “Sorry, bruh. I didn’t know.” Another pause. “Did your mother remarry?”

  Rap, subtle as a prison shank: “Definitely not. No.”

  “Anyway . . . ” said the older man, reaching to the back seat. “Well . . . look, I didn’t want you thinking I had something for Jamal and nothing for you.”

  He handed Rap a CD, not in a jewel box but in a printed cardboard sleeve: Leon Thomas, Spirits Unknown.

  Rap flipped over the album, scanned: “The Creator Has a Master Plan (Peace)”, “Song for My Father” and “Malcolm’s Gone.”

  “This brother,” said Mr. Ani, “also performs supreme. And he does this crazy yodeling—it’s his signature sound. Weird when you first hear it, and then you think, ‘Wow. Wow.’”

  Rap felt almost a giggle poking his gut. Other than his old school principal, the neighbour who took him out for goat, and his mother at Eid and on his birthday, which was also Christmas, no one’d ever given him a gift.

  “And I can, I can keep this?” Just to be sure.

  “Course,” said Mr. Ani. “You two’ve been working hard, and I never could’ve gotten the Hyper-Market ready to open without you two. So thank you. Now you go home and rest. And don’t forget to study your scrolls! Especially The Book of the Golden Falcon!”

  “Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh, Sbai !” said Rap, soul-shaking Mr. Ani’s hand and hopping out of the Sunfire.

  “Raise the Shining Place, bruh.”

  Rap walked away from the car in the orange and blue of dusk, and up into his empty apartment. He wouldn’t be lonely. He had new music, the scrolls and the World’s Great Men of Colour to keep him company.

  11.

  “Hello, Mrs. Abdi,” said Rap in Somali.

  The next day. She was standing at the door of the Hyper-Market, trooped with eight Somali mothers and their children standing on 111th Ave in the noonday sunshine.

  She smiled broadly, answering him in English. “Oh, you speak some Somali?”

  “I’m half-Somali,” he said in Somali.

  “Really?” she said in English. “You don’t look it.”

  He wanted to curse. He didn’t do it. “You’re looking for Jamal?”

  “No. I’m here to speak with your Mr. ’Ani.” Said Ani with an ’ayn, like ’Ali, the jabbed-in-the-throat a-sound that Arabic had in spades.

  Rap stepped aside and eight women and their twenty children ranging from age eight to twelve marched inside.

  Hot inside the Hyper-Market, maybe ten degrees more than outside, and no breeze. The day before opening, and the AC was blown. Rap was dust-patchy, and his armpits were dripping—last few days of cleaning and readying the place before it opened.

  The women were serene in their scarves and long dresses, like it could’ve been a spring morning.

  Mr. Ani straightened up from behind the carrels where he and JC were installing the cyber-café’s PCs.

  Glanced at the group: entourage, or army?

  Mr. Ani: “Whoah.”

  “But Mrs. Abdi, I’m not really a teacher,” said Mr. Ani. “I mean, not a Special-Ed teacher. I just know a few techniques for helping kids with . . . who’re like your youngest son.”

  “I know that, Mr. ’Ani,” she said, sitting in one of the twelve chairs. Eleven women and children used the others. Everyone else stood or sat on the floor. Some of the toddlers sat colouring; others played with action figures, dolls or cars.

  “But listen to me,” said Mrs. Abdi. “There are many families in the commoonity who neet your help. You caan’t abandon them!”

  Rap ground his teeth, tried eyeing JC to say something, but his friend wouldn’t even look at him.

  “I’m not abandoning anybody,” said Mr. Ani. “I’m trying to start a business here. We open in three days—”

  “You could just offer a woorik-shop,” she said, “for some techaniques—”

  “Look, I’d like to help, really, but—”

  “My son Jamal is working for you for free! And you can’t help us even a little?”

  Even the toddlers stopped moving at that.

  Mr. Ani frowned. Took a breath.

  “Mum, jeez! He saved my life. You know that. And he’s—”

  “Jamal.”

  “—he’s teaching us martial arts and culture and stuff, and you’re making it sound—” />
  “Jamal—”

  “—like he’s sweatshoppin us or suh’m! That’s totally—”

  “Jamal!” she snapped, holding up a finger.

  She turned to the man.

  “I shouldn’t have said that.” Gave a bow that was closer to a nod. Mr. Ani didn’t move.

  “I’m just . . . like many of my sisters in the commoonity, I’m very busy all the time, and so are our husbundts. We can never ressit here. We’ve come to this caantry—”

  Mr. Ani: “I understand.” Nodded his thanks at Jamal, who sub-smiled back at him before neutralising his face for his mother’s inspection.

  “If you caan’t woorik with our kids who have the, the, the condition, then at least woorik with our older boys.”

  “I already am, ma’am.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, more of them.”

  “How many more?”

  “All of them,” she said.

  JC, aghast: “Mum, c’mon—”

  “As many as will come, then.” She leaned forward, sighed like she was trying to put down heavy packages.

  “Their fathers are woorikingk all the time. The boys don’t want to go to the mosque. Some of them don’t even go to school. What are we supposit to do? Jamal looks up to you. So does this one.”

  Nice: This one.

  “Who can we turn to? The schools? They don’t care. Right next to your own store, you saw what happened when these boys are corruptedt.”

  “Listen, Mrs. Abdi,” said the man, stepping towards the door with I’m about show you out body language, “I’m just a small businessman. Not a social service agency. Try the Mennonite Centre, or Catholic Social Services, or the Boys and Girls Club, or CCACH—”

  She stood up.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  Stepped towards him. “Jamal is right. You saved his life and his friendt’s life and you didn’t even know them. You’re not a man who walks away when you see people in neet.”

  He put a hand on the door’s lock-toggle.

  “Help our sons,” she said. No longer ordering him. Voice, shaking. “Many are far worse than he is!”

  “Jamal’s a good young man.”

  “Help him be a better one, then,” she said. “And the others, too. Our commoonity will be grateful. And we’ll bring our business here, to you.”

  Mr. Ani chewed the inside of his cheek, shook his head.

  “What?” she said. “You think we won’t bringk our business to a non-Somali?”

  “It’s been said. And frankly, I see it right here in this neighbourhood. Ethiopian restaurants, Nigerian shops, Vietnamese drugstores, but the Somalis aren’t shopping there unless they have to.”

  She turned to the other women, then back to him. “Just watch,” she said. The rest nodded. So did their toddlers, and they didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  Rap, freestyling on the mental mic:

  Would Somalis let Ani sing in their chorus?

  And if Ani should fall inside a Somali forest

  Would any Somali hear him? Go near him?

  Or fear him? Or up and try to smear him?

  12.

  Everyone was about to converge on Mr. Ani’s place. But for just forty-five minutes, Rap and JC were the only guests.

  Rap’s skin singeing while he watched the clock tick down. JC was quiet, too, but he was helping in the kitchen.

  They’d tripped out seeing the inside of Mr. Ani’s crib for the first time, this hidden place directly above the Hyper-Market. No, “crib” didn’t seem right. His nest? His aerie?

  Both boys, stunned at the size and scope of his archives: two walls of books, milk crates full of LPs, framed portraits of Cheikh Anta Diop, Thomas Sankara, Wangari Maathai . . . .

  But what sent them into orbit was the force of knowing they were going to sit in a shenu—a circle—with all the fighters from back in the day, legends Mr. Ani’d told them about from when he was a fiery young university student and whose sbai had inducted him and his friends into the knowledge of lead, pyrite and gold.

  Crackled through Rap’s mind. Like picking up a DC after three years of reading nothing but Marvel: exploring this alternate, mysterious realm, this cosmic continuity, a glittering, unknown history of heroes, villains, victories and powers supreme.

  The burn, down his throat, like lit kerosene on the walls of a well.

  Distracted himself by touring Mr. Ani’s archive. Ancient Sudan . . . Ancient Egypt . . . Axum . . . Mali and Timbuktu . . . African religions . . . the Maafa. Liberation movements, the Caribbean, the Americas, Canada. Women’s liberation . . . scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs . . . novels . . . poetry . . . plays . . . .

  And DVDs, too. Here was everything, not just Africentric titles. Three DVDs on somebody named Tesla. Chuckled to himself at the sight of comedies such as Mystery Men, The Royal Tennenbaums, and Anchor Man. Mr. Ani, fuh real? Just didn’t seem like him. And yet there there they were.

  Jacob’s Ladder?

  Jumped at the sight of Mr. Ani coming back from the kitchen, carafes of tea and coffee in each hand. “What? You look spooked. Oh, Jacob’s Ladder? Yeah, great film. Scary. American vets going crazy—”

  “Oh,” he said, finally breathing out. “It’s something else, then.”

  “What’d you think it was about?”

  JC joined them, hefting a tray of diced cheese and fruit.

  “Well,” said Rap, “when I was ten I lived in a refugee camp in Kenya, and there was this group of mlungus who came in—”

  “Like, an NGO? A charity or something like that?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what they’d say, anyway. Yeah.”

  “Called Jacob’s Ladder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Think I heard something about them in the news a few years back. Didn’t they—”

  Knocking. The guests.

  Mr. Ani flicked on the stairwell light, and with it, Rap’s destiny.

  “So that’s the situation, and that’s what I wanna do,” said Mr. Ani, two days later. “Are you down?”

  Ten of Mr. Ani’s old friends, six men and four women, looked back at him.

  The remaining sambusas, cool by then, sat on platter on a table in the centre of the living room. JC glanced, having waited long enough, and piled the remaining ones on his napkin.

  Rap grabbed a sambusa, crunched it, dropping pastry flakes all over his collared black shirt. JC suppressed a laugh.

  “You called this an emergency in your email,” said Martin Joseph. The man had pipes. Rap figured he’d have to go to the gym five days a week for twenty years to get arms like that. “Where’s the emergency?”

  “Maybe you just don’wanna see it, Martin,” said Sister Seshat, the social worker. Her braids were coiled up on top of her head so she looked like one of Mr. Ani’s ebony statuettes. “I see it every day out there. And not just the Somali kids, either. Rwandans, Congolese, Sudanese kids—”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said Martin, arms crossed, like a cop. “You see it every day . . . so why now? What you’re talking about, Moon, we’ve gone down this road before. And it’s nothing but heartbreak in the end. You know that!”

  Rap and JC eyed each other.

  Moon?

  Mr. Ani: “Look, if we give up just because it’s difficult—”

  “Big difference between difficult and impossible,” said Martin. “And we all paid the price to learn that.”

  Sister Seshat said, “That was twenty years ago, Martin.”

  “And Imhotep built the Step Pyramid forty-six hundred years years ago. Doesn’t make it less true.”

  “I’m afraid I have to agree with Martin,” said Kojo, the brother with cufflinks and sleek glasses with tiny diamonds set into the arms. “Everybody knows there’s a need, Moon. But there’s what we want, and then there’s what we can actually do.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” said Mr. Ani, shaking his head. “So we just sit back—”

>   “Do you actually have a plan, Moon?” asked Bamba Diabate, the lawyer who’d gotten Mr. Ani out of police custody after the Somali store massacre. Bamba kept his tie tight, and he, too, wore cufflinks. But his jacket was off. “Because what you’re talking about means resources: time and money. And nobody here has much of either.”

  “Aren’t you a lawyer?” asked Martin.

  “C’mon, now,” said Sister Seshat.

  “We’ve got enough gold in this one room,” said Mr. Ani, “to build a fortress.”

  “The Golden Fortress?” said Sister Seshat. “Moon, you didn’t say anything in your message about—”

  “Yimun, where’d the Fortress get us back in the day, huh?” said Martin Joseph, standing. “And where d’you expect to take us now? If Bamba hadn’t sprung you, you’d still be in the Remand Centre right now. And you chose to walk in on some Somali gangsters? I mean, I’m sorry—that’s crazy. I ain’down for any suicide missions, man. Not again. Hell no!”

  Martin straightened his glasses and left the circle, eye-smacking everyone in it.

  “We aren’t kids anymore. I have a family. I don’t have time for fairy tales or saving the world.”

  “Wait a second,” said Bamba. “Don’t be—”

  “You all wanna do this? Fine. But listen to me,” he said, holding up a warning finger, “it cost us then—all of us. And it’ll cost you now.” He backed over to the stairwell. “I can show myself out. And Moon—”

  Mr. Ani didn’t look at him.

  “Moon, goddamn. Same old Moon. Take my advice. Forget all this shit so you don’t end up dead, too.”

  The stairwell made his every step echo. They heard the door close below.

  Mr. Ani scanned the room, saying nothing except for the Who else wants to abandon me? look in his eyes.

  13.

  “Boys,” said Sister Seshat. “Let me ask you. How many of your friends do you think would actually come, if we helped Brother Moon set up a programme?”

  They looked at each other. Rap had exactly one friend, and he was already in “the programme.”

  JC said, “I know a bunch. A lot of my cousins. And my mum’s friends’ kids.”