“We’re gonna be okay,” I say.
“I don’t know.” Her voice is soft, sinus-clogged. “Tyrone, I don’t feel good about this. I can’t stop shaking. We’re not burglars.”
“We are now.” I open a bottle of Bordeaux we’ve been saving to celebrate, filling up our only wineglass for her and a large jam jar for myself. I sit down beside her and pick up one of the wigs. Its texture between my fingertips is fluffy. I say, “You can blame Frances. She should have stood up for you. She owes you. What we need to do now is think about our next step. Where we can sell this stuff.” Ieesha’s head jerks backward when I reach for one of the wigs and put it on her head, just out of curiosity. Reluctantly, she lets me place it there, and I ask, “What’s that feel like? A stocking cap? Is it hot?”
“I don’t know. It feels . . .”
She never tells me how it feels.
So I ask another question. “What makes this hair so special? Where does it come from?”
Hands folded in her lap, she sits quietly, and, for an instant, the wig, whose obsidian tresses pool around her face, makes her look like someone I don’t know. All of a sudden, I’m not sure what she might do next, but what she does do, after clearing her throat, is give me the hair-raising history and odyssey behind the property we’ve stolen. The bags, she says, come from a Buddhist temple near New Delhi, where young women shave their heads in an ancient ceremony of sacrifice called Pabbajja. They give up their hair to renounce all vanity, and this letting go of things cosmetic and the chimera called the ego is their first step as nuns on the path to realizing that the essence of everything is emptiness. The hair ceremony is one of the 84,000 “dharma gates.” On the day their heads were shaved, the women had kneeled in their plain saris, there in the temple naos, and took two hundred forty vows, the first five of which were no killing, no lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, and no drinking of alcohol. They didn’t care what happened to their hair after the ceremony. Didn’t know it would be sewn, stitched, and stapled onto the scalps of other people. But Korean merchants were there. They paid the temple’s abbot ten dollars for each head of fibrous protein. After that, the merchants, who controlled this commerce as tightly as the mafia did gambling, washed the hair clean of lice. From India, where these women cultivated an outward life of simplicity and an inward life free from illusion, the merchants transported the discarded, dead hair halfway around the planet, where, ironically, it was cannibalized as commerce in a nine-billion-dollar hair-extension industry devoted precisely to keeping women forever enslaved to the eyes of others.
As she explains all this, Ieesha leaves her wine untasted, and I don’t say anything because my brain is stuttering, stalling on the unsyllabled thought that if you tug on a single, thin strand of hair, which has a life span of five-and-a-half years, you find it raddled to the rest of the world. I didn’t see any of that coming until it arrived. I lift the jar of wine straight to my lips, empty it, and set it down with a click on the coffee table. When I look back at Ieesha, I realize she’s smiling into one cheek, as if remembering a delicious secret she can’t share with me. That makes me down a second jar of Bordeaux. Then a third. I wonder, does the wig she’s wearing itch or tingle? Does it feel like touching Justin Timberlake’s unfinished French toast? Now the wine bottle is empty. We’ve got nothing on the empty racks of the refrigerator but a six-pack of beer, so I rise from the sofa to get that, a little woozy on my feet, careening sideways toward the kitchenette, but my full bladder redirects me toward the cubicle that houses our shower and toilet. I click on the light, close the door, and brace myself with one hand pressed against the wall. Standing there for a few minutes, my eyes closed, I feel rather than hear a police siren, and our smoke alarm. My stomach clenches.
Coming out of the bathroom, I find the wig she was wearing and the weaves that were on the coffee table burning in a wastebasket. Ieesha stands in the middle of the room, her cell phone pressed against her ear.
“What are you doing?” Smoke is stinging my eyes. “Who are you talking to?”
Her eyes are quiet. Everything about her seems quiet when she says, “911.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
I stare at her in wonder. She’s offered us up, the way the women did their hair at the temple in New Delhi. I rush to draw water from the kitchen sink to put out the fire. I start throwing open the windows as there comes a loud knock, then pounding at the door behind me, but I can’t take my eyes off her. She looks vulnerable but not weak, free, and more than enough for herself. I hear the wood of the door breaking, but as if from a great distance, because suddenly I know, and she knows, that I understand. She’s letting go of all of it—the inheritance of hurt, the artificial and the inauthentic, the absurdities of color and caste stained at their roots by vanity and bondage to the body—and in this evanescent moment, when even I feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, she has never looked more beautiful and spiritually centered. There’s shouting in the room now. Rough hands throw me facedown on the floor. My wrists are cuffed behind my back. Someone is reciting my Miranda rights. Then I feel myself being lifted to my feet. But I stop midway, resting on my right knee, my voice shaky as I look up at Ieesha, and say:
“Will you marry me?”
Two policemen lead her toward the shattered door, our first steps toward that American monastery called prison. She half turns, smiling, looking back at me, and her head nods: yes, yes, yes.
Publishing History
“Sweet Dreams,” “Better Than Counting Sheep,” “Cultural Relativity,” “Dr. King’s Refrigerator,” and “The Queen and the Philosopher” were originally written for Humanities Washington, which commissions local Seattle writers to read new stories. The yearly readings have become a major Seattle literary event.
“Sweet Dreams” was first published in Story Quarterly 36 in 2000. It is also included in Dark Matter II: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, which Warner Books published in January 2004.
“Better Than Counting Sheep” was published in Callaloo in 2001 and broadcast on radio station KUOW in Seattle.
“Cultural Relativity” first appeared in the Indiana Review in 2002, then a few months later as the lead story in After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men (Plume, 2002). This story was adapted as a short film entitled “In His Kiss” by David S. De Crane.
“Dr. King’s Refrigerator” was published in the fall 2003 Story Quarterly.
“The Queen and the Philosopher” has not been published before.
“Kwoon” was originally published in Playboy and is one of the O. Henry Prize Stories. The story was reprinted in Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction, and in two high school textbooks, A Multicultural Reader and Choosing to Emerge as Readers and Writers, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.
“Executive Decision” was originally written for Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America (Beacon, 1997). It was the only work of fiction in the book. Johnson thinks it’s quite possibly the only published short story that dramatizes the issue of affirmative action.
“The Gift of the Osuo” was published in the issue of the African American Review that was entirely devoted to Johnson’s work.
“The Weave” first appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of The Iowa Review.
About the Author
DR. CHARLES JOHNSON, a 1998 MacArthur fellow, is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. His fiction includes Faith and the Good Thing, Dreamer, and Middle Passage—for which he won the National Book Award—and two short story collections, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Soulcatcher and Other Stories. His nonfiction books include Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, and two collections of comic art. In 2002 he received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in
Seattle.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
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authors.simonandschuster.com/Charles-Johnson
ALSO BY CHARLES JOHNSON
FICTION
Soulcatcher and Other Stories
Dreamer
Middle Passage
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Oxherding Tale
Faith and the Good Thing
PHILOSOPHY
Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970
NONFICTION
King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. (with Bob Adelman)
I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson (edited by Rudolph Byrd)
Africans in America (with Patricia Smith)
Black Men Speaking (with John McCluskey Jr.)
Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing
Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson (edited by James McWilliams)
DRAWINGS
Half-Past Nation Time
Black Humor
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Charles Johnson
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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe
Text set in Fairfield
Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral
Jacket art: Untitled (1981) by Jean-Michel Basquiat © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Author photograph by Mary Randlett
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Charles Richard, 1948–
Dr. King’s refrigerator and other bedtime stories / Charles Johnson.
p. cm.
Contents: Sweet dreams—Cultural relativity—Dr. King’s refrigerator—The gift of the Osuo—Executive decision—Better than counting sheep—The queen and the philosopher—Kwoon.
I. Title.
PS3560.O3735D69 2005
813'.54—dc22
2004056642
ISBN 978-0-7432-6454-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8549-7 (eBook)
Dr. King's Refrigerator Page 9