Soul City

by Touré

  “Oh shit,” Precious said.

  They watched Hueynewton emerge from inside a prison in The City. He was still in handcuffs, but his head was held high and his lips were pursed in a badass smile. Emperor Jones was by his side but shielded his face from the cameras. Hueynewton had been arrested in The City for the fifth time this year, this time charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault, after a daring solo daylight raid on a Kentucky Fried Chicken. He’d made off with a few thousand dollars from the store, seventeen wallets from the frightened customers waiting in line, and three buckets of chicken, which he calmly munched during a six-hour standoff with police. Thanks to some deft string pulling by Emperor Jones, just hours after the standoff ended the charges were dropped and Hueynewton walked right out of prison. When they took off the cuffs, Hueynewton turned to the media mob with the gleam of a crazy in his eyes and called out, “I ain’t want the money or the chicken!” A reporter yelled, “Why’d you do it?” Hueynewton said, “I did it for sport!” Then he disappeared into Emperor’s Satchmomobile and rode back to Soul City.

  Hueynewton Payne was born in a tough section of Soul City called Niggatown and grew up on Fuck You Road. He was the great-grandson of Nat Turner, who rampaged through Virginia in 1831, chopping sixty white people into pieces, the bloodiest slave uprising of all time. The urge to be insurgent, to rebel, to revolt was not in the Payne blood—it was their blood. In the Payne house barely a conversation passed without a yell and not an hour went by without a fight because none of them ever had a feeling they felt wasn’t worth fighting for. Hueynewton often found himself brawling with his parents over whether Soul City’s mayor should play more hiphop, whether dinner should be chicken or fish, or who would hold the remote control. The passion they showed for causes small and smaller was topped only by their love for each other. Every fight concluded with a group hug that set everything right until the next fight, which was usually about ten minutes later. For them, fighting was a subset of love: an intense interaction that included high-pitched emotion, abundant physicality, and the opportunity to lose yourself. The Paynes found an ecstasy in confrontation, and though most others in Soul City couldn’t understand the goings-on in their house, every-one knew the Paynes loved each other very much, despite copious evidence to the contrary.

  But one night things got a little out of control. In the middle of dinner an argument over who would pass the peas to Hueynewton became a shouting match, then a wrestling match, then the parents Payne were grabbing each other’s throats and squeezing so hard they choked off all oxygen to each other’s brains, ending all conscious thought processing, and two people who normally knew where to stop went rumbling right past the line of no return. They went on squeezing increasingly harder for the better part of an hour, arm muscles bulging, heads turning red, steam shooting from hair follicles, neither willing to give an inch in the deadly blinking contest until, finally, they simultaneously choked the last bit of air out of each other. Both died at the exact same time. When someone arrived to remove the bodies, a crowbar was needed to wrest fingers from throats. Their orphaned son ran away to Whatevaworld in the Land Beyond the Speakers, a place no one in Soul City spoke of, where he lived for eight battle-filled years. If Soul City was the beautiful daughter, Whatevaworld was the horribly retarded son locked away in the closet all his life.

  Years ago a small group of young Soul City boys decided they couldn’t stand bedtimes and vegetables any longer and sparked a revolution that led to an entire generation of Soul City boys running away to form their own society a few miles beyond the city limits. It didn’t take long for them to discover that creating an orderly city is extremely difficult, and in short time their world turned into a nightmarish, ravaged Mad Maxian land. Yet every year a few Soul City boys run away to live there, away from grown men or any females at all. It’s a land without intimacy, where survival is savored only by the fittest, fistfighting is constant, and hardcore hiphop booms through the speakers day and night. Hueynewton fit in perfectly.

  His first month in Whatevaworld he beat down so many boys so fiercely that the leader ran away and Hueynewton assumed the throne. Leadership meant little in that rogue state, except that when there was food he always got some. Through the years Hueynewton had many long fights and adventures, and his warrior instincts were honed and sharpened until he was as fierce as a wild wolf. But as he grew older he missed the sweetness of soul music. He also realized that the reason there was no one older than twenty-one in Whatevaworld was because in a place run and populated by boys free to do whatever, whenever, it was impossible to last. Whatevaworld was an endless, parentless romp where bedtimes, vegetables, brushing teeth, and playing nice were unheard of. After years of improper nutrition, irregular rest, and seven or eight fistfights a day, either you were killed or your body gave out. So when Hueynewton was eighteen, one afternoon, while everyone was asleep, he snuck out of Whatevaworld and went back to Soul City. The day he came back he immediately became the baddest man in town, Soul City’s human junkyard dog, which, by proxy, made him the only member of the Soul City Army.

  It was fortunate that Hueynewton would never commit a crime in Soul City because not only was he unstoppable but there was no one around to try. Soul City hadn’t had a town jail in decades. There was no need. Most everyone was either peaceful or scared of Hueynewton and Ubiquity. There was even confusion over whether or not they still had a sheriff. Doofus Honeywood had been appointed sheriff ninety-eight years ago but had never been called upon to do anything. When people asked him if he was still the sheriff, Honeywood would guffaw and say, “If I am, I’m the last to know.”

  Because it was so rarely called upon, few realized that there was indeed a crude justice system in place in Soul City. The last time it was employed was in 1847, when Bottle-Eyed Billy killed Gookie Dawkins.

  Them two ex-slaves were in a bar, half-past drunk, when some leftover rancor from their old plantation began to crop up. The shouting got loud, the punches drew blood, then Gookie broke a bottle in half. But that bottle ended up opening his own throat and he died. Nothing like that’d ever happened before and everyone wanted to make certain it never happened again. So the elders convened to consider what the punishment should be. Granmama was there and she said, “The Good Book say an eye for an eye. What that mean to me is: the other boy should fuckin die.” So, a few days later, when it came time to bury Gookie, they put Bottle-Eyed Billy in, too. Thing is, he was still alive. He screamed as they threw the dirt on him, but he was tied to Gookie’s coffin so tight he couldn’t do nothing but scream. His wife tried to save him, but they held her back. Hours after all the dirt had been shoveled on that grave you could still hear him calling out from beneath the ground. After a while the yelling turned to whimpering. Then it just stopped. And no one’s ever done much of anything in Soul City ever since.

  They had no sheriff, but they did acknowledge that some outsiders weren’t terribly enamored of Soul City for whatever reason, and someday they might need some sort of army to protect them. Few believed him, but Emperor Jones knew that even if the Devil had Soul City with its back to the ropes, Hueynewton would save them. The Soulful hated the way Hueynewton embarrassed them, made them a national laughingstock sometimes, but Emperor kept telling them that if they wanted Hueynewton as their army they had to tolerate him as their thug. So every time Hueynewton was arrested, Emperor Jones went running to save him. That was the cost of doing business with him.

  They had no idea, however, that his latest crime would cost them all a lot more than they’d bargained for. The owner of that particular Kentucky Fried Chicken was the vile, billionaire shampoo tycoon John Jiggaboo. As Hueynewton walked out of jail a free man and Precious shielded her eyes, Jiggaboo was riding through The City in his limo, watching the TV in dropped-jaw shock. “I hate Soul City!” he screamed out, unleashing acid bile that burned a little hole in his stomach. The blonde at his side patted his back. He yelled, “They’re just a bunch of nigger Muppets!�
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  Jiggaboo Shampoo was the bestselling Black hair product in history. In spite of itself. On every bottle was a picture of a jet-black boy wearing slave rags, his gigantic protruding lips about to bite into a slice of watermelon wider than his head while an overweight, handkerchiefed Aunt Jemima figure stood behind him, gleefully shampooing his pickaninny hair with a dialogue bubble over her head reading, “Jiggaboo make us happy to be nappy!” In the television commercials a pair of actors brought these garish images to life, and though the actors were physically and psychically repulsed by the work, they stayed because they were paid far, far above scale, getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. As they reluctantly said their lines, John Jiggaboo himself stood by saying, “Ain’t it better gettin bookoo dollars to be a nigger on TV than gettin jack to be one in real life?”

  A cartoon on the side of every bottle chronicled the misadventures of SuperNigger (penned by one Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas), a bumbling pseudo-superhero who always succeeded in screwing up whatever mission he set out to accomplish, tacitly proving the supremacy of the white superheroes. “Look, up in the sky!” the bottle’s side says. “It’s a crow! It’s a bat! No, it’s SuperNigger! Faster than a welfare recipient on check day! Able to leap the projects in a single bound! With X-ray vision that lets him see through everything but whitey!”

  There were rumors that the shampoo that made your scalp tingle like no one’s business also had a secret ingredient that made the shampoo addictive and seeped down into your brain and eroded your pride. This urban legend was repeated as often and given as much credibility as the stories that St. Odes malt liquor contained rat piss, Nixon Fried Chicken had an additive designed to sterilize Black men, the government once conducted a forty-year study on the effects of untreated syphilis on Black men in which the government withheld penicillin from the suffering men, and managers at Benny’s were counseled by corporate to refuse to give Black children the free birthday meal the restaurant promised every child. (All of these, by the way, are true.)

  But Jiggaboo Shampoo flew off the shelves because the product was actually astoundingly good on all types of Black hair, from Afros to dredlocks to Heaven-sent weaves. The streets called it “Kentucky Fried Chicken for your doo” because there was simply no shampoo that met curls, kinks, and naps of African descent and left them fuller, softer, and smoother. Jiggaboo even worked wonders on hair that was lyed, dyed, and laid to the side. The shampoo was a concoction that included aloe, beer, a dab of heroin, a touch of Kool-Aid, and a bizarre secret ingredient. It came in two types: for Good Hair and for Bad Hair.

  Jiggaboo Shampoo was a success in spite of Jiggaboo himself, who made no bones about his contempt for Black people. He was born in Los Angeles, the spawn of a Black Hollywood superstar and a Black Hollywood prostitute. He was adopted by a pair of unemployed white actors who groomed him for the screen, and at age six he made the film that would define his life. In Happy to Be Nappy he played second banana to child star Nimrod Culkin, son of Macaulay Culkin, in a story about, well, who knows. The script was a mess, but basically, Culkin played cute and constantly rescued Jiggaboo, his semiretarded tap-dancing sidekick, a routine so grotesque even Hattie McDaniel turned in her grave. The script was actually written in the 1930s by a Ku Klux Klan grand dragon who shelved it because he felt it over the top. His great-granddaughter, a development executive at Fox, found it, tweaked it, and watched it make $100 million its first weekend. Happy to Be Nappy II and III did such boffo business that Jiggaboo never had to work again. Unfortunately, after years of playing that role, there wasn’t enough money in the world for the amount of therapy needed to unscrew his twisted little head. By age twelve he was taking an antidepressive cocktail every morning and sniffing cocaine every night. His parents tried to reverse his growing self-loathing by getting him into the Hollywood branch of Jack & Jill, but “watching Nigroes trying to act white,” he recalled in his autobiography, The More I Like Flies, “showed me that deep down Blacks just wanna be white.”

  Jiggaboo’s personal unctuousness didn’t significantly hurt sales because Black hair is a deeply personal cultural crucible. Faced with a choice between OK shampoo backed by good politics and great shampoo backed by bad politics, thousands of Black folk opted for Jiggaboo Shampoo. Too bad they never knew Jiggaboo never used his own product.

  Jiggaboo had never forgiven Soul City for banning him. Hueynewton robbing him and escaping punishment was the last straw. Jiggaboo was a man accustomed to getting whatever he wanted, and now he wanted revenge. He knew just what to do.

  Cadillac, Mahogany, and Precious were beginning to wonder if their food would ever come. They looked around the restaurant for Dolores Haze, but it appeared she’d slipped away. They asked Holden if he’d seen her around. He said, “If you want to know the truth . . .” Then Humbert ran up, frantic. He cried out, “What has become of the light of my life?” He had no idea where she’d gone, and it was driving him even crazier than he’d already been. “I told her do not talk to strangers!” In the commotion Holden slipped away from the host’s stand. He had something to get off his chest.

  Stupid old Potter was always sitting there, acting like he was all earnest and humble or something. He acted so earnest he looked like he had a poker up his ass. But he was such a prostitute. Way more than D.B., and he lives in Hollywood. You never saw a bigger prostitute in all your life. Holden hated fistfights, but the bastard was always in the goddam movies, and if there’s one thing Holden hated it was the movies. God, how he hated old Potter.

  Holden walked across the room and socked Potter right in the jaw. The wizard collapsed in a heap on the ground, out cold. Holden stood over him, feeling good for a change. He said, “Goddam phony.” In the commotion Cadillac noticed a young Black man in the corner trying to write, failing to come up with a word. The man looked strangely like him.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Cadillac said. “This place is giving me the creeps.”

  “It’s like living in a book,” Mahogany said. “Who would wanna live in a book?”

  In their haste to get out of Lolita, Cadillac, Mahogany, and Precious failed to notice Ubiquity Jones sitting in the corner all by herself, vacuuming up an entire turkey along with greens, grits, candied yams, black-eyed peas, stuffing, collards cooked with fatback, and a whole peach cobbler pie. She’d been reading Cadillac’s mind since the three walked in and didn’t think it at all proper for Chickadee Sunflower’s oldest child and Dream Negro’s only child to be running around Soul City doing drugs with a trifling reporter from The City who spent most of the meal envisioning himself and Mahogany in all sorts of filthy sexual positions. No, this would not do at all. She filed the news away and went back to her feast, waiting patiently for the moment she would drop her next gossip bomb.

  6

  _____

  BLISS WASN’T a polite little drug. It was some nasty shit. It took you on a journey into your subconscious, each drop warping your soul a little more. It was OK to dance with it once in a while, but you couldn’t do bliss consistently. It was so new that no one was sure just what would happen to you. There were whispers that if you did a lot of it, your ear would fall off. No one had ever seen that happen, but bliss hadn’t been around very long.

  Precious knew they could usually find her dealer, Kilimanjaro, in the Raggamuffin Projects over in Niggatown. The Raggamuffin Projects were four tall, thin buildings that curved into one another at the top as if they were in the middle of a hug-a-long. It was originally intended to be a visual reminder of the power of teamwork or something, but the arrangement managed to block off all the sunlight, casting ominous shadows over everyone and everything inside the Raggamuffin Projects. The buildings were so old that they were in the midst of crumbling, and without warning a brick could shake loose from the top of the hug-a-long and come flying down, as if the sky were falling, one brick at a time.

  Precious led Mahogany and Cadillac quickly through a tricky maze of darkened project hallways. Sh
e navigated as assuredly as a mouse through a maze that it has already learned. She knocked on a door and said, “It’s me.”

  “You’re back already?” Kilimanjaro said with an alarmed tone. If your dealer thinks you’re buying too much, you have a drug problem. He knew bliss wasn’t built for the constant use that Precious had fallen into. And he knew selling drugs to the daughter of the legendary Fulcrum Negro was dangerous. He gave her a look like he wasn’t sure if he should sell to her or not. Then he let her and her friends in. He was a drug dealer. He couldn’t help himself.

  Precious paid for two bottles and asked for credit on a third. Mahogany pulled her aside and said, “Your ear’s gonna wither up like a leaf in the fall.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Precious said. But her ear had already begun to look a little more brown than normal.

  They got back in the Billiemobile and eased down Freedom Ave until they came to a green light and stopped. As they waited for the red light, Fulcrum Negro pulled up beside them in his Mahaliamobile. Precious waved to her father. Fulcrum wore long, flowing white robes. His dark, cracked, ancient skin was thick like burlap from Jesus’s day and he seemed to have angels floating behind him, singing hymns. Fulcrum was a founding member of Soul City and still a central figure in town. Emperor Jones was the mayor, the one the people voted for, but Fulcrum Negro was Da Mayor, the one the people listened to.

  Mahogany and Fulcrum turned down their stereos. “I’m off to a meeting with Dizzy Gillespie,” Fulcrum said. “I’ll be back in a few days. Go by the store, your mother wants to talk to you. And what’s wrong with your ear? It looks infected.”

  Wait, Cadillac thought, Dizzy Gillespie is dead.

  When they turned onto Funky Boulevard, Cadillac saw the sign: FULCRUM NEGRO’S CERTIFIED AUTHENTIC NEGRIFIED ARTIFACTS. Beneath it was a smaller sign saying, DREAM NEGRO’S DESIRE OBLITERATING WEAVES. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Inside was a large, dusty, dimmed warehouse filled with glass cases. Cadillac walked around the room, and as he read the gold plaques beneath each case, he realized this was no ordinary warehouse. There was Charlie Parker’s saxophone, Langston Hughes’s notebook, Biggie Smalls’s rhyme book, Arthur Ashe’s racquets, Jacob Lawrence’s brushes, Robert Johnson’s guitar, Jackie Robinson’s glove, Sugar Ray Robinson’s gloves, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s dancing shoes, Harriet Tubman’s running shoes, Marcus Garvey’s plumed officer’s helmet, James Van Der Zee’s camera, James Baldwin’s typewriter, Malcolm X’s AK-47, Huey P. Newton’s leather jacket, Frederick Douglass’s comb, Ralph Ellison’s pen, Daddy Grace’s throne, Stephen Biko’s death shirt, Bob Marley’s ganja pipe, and Richard Pryor’s freebase pipe.