by Touré
“Can you believe her?” Mahogany said.
He could. And he wanted to say so. Mahogany was a bitch. At first he’d excused it. He’d thought she was justified because she lived in Soul City. By now he wanted to say something to put her in her place, but Mick Jagger started crowing about the sweet taste of brown sugar, then Mahogany stood and the exquisite shape of her ass made him forget whatever it was he’d been thinking. She ordered him to dance with her. If she was a bitch, suddenly he was a puppy.
Most of the meager crowd leaped up to dance, too, and on the small dance floor they were pressed into each other, almost face-to-face. Then someone bumped them close and his lips made contact with hers for a single electric second. He was kissing her. She was not kissing him.
Mahogany’s cellphone vibrated. It was her brother. She listened a moment, then yelled out. Heads turned. “My mom’s having Epiphany!” she screamed.
Precious came running over. “The big moment’s finally here!”
“What’s that?” Cadillac said. They ignored him.
Mahogany had to get to her mother’s side. Precious’s excitement quickly dissipated and she calmly said she’d catch her later. Cadillac could see she was just waiting to go do more B. This was getting bad.
Mahogany ran to the Billiemobile. Despite her telling him no, Cadillac jumped in and refused to get out. He could see this was not something to be missed. His pen was in hand. Mahogany told him she couldn’t take him with her. Her parents would be furious with her for bringing a boy from The City to their home. He told her if she left him with Precious the girl would try to get him high again. They zoomed off to the Sunflowers’ house as Billie blessed the child that’s got his own.
The Sunflowers lived in Honeypot Hill on Bluestone Road, number 123, in a tall, oval house that was shaped like a giant birdcage. Mahogany told Cadillac to stay in the car, then zipped into the house. She opened the door and for a moment he could hear a din, as if a tornado were inside the house. He listened to Billie for a moment, then crept from the car and peeked in through the mail slot.
There was no tornado inside, but if there had been it wouldn’t have added to the raucous, riotous, clamorous, cacophonous scene of Mahogany’s little sisters Magenta, Henna, Sepia, and the twins Pistachio and Cinnamon, and her little brothers Groove, Peasy, and King, leaping around the house as Chickadee screamed from her lungs and contorted her face and spilled birth juice all over, while Mahogany’s dad, Sugar Bear, held Chickadee’s hand and led her in Lamaze, and the midwife, Cocoa Serendipity, yelled at Chickadee to “Push!” as a head, two arms, and a belly slowly squeezed out of Chickadee’s center: Mahogany’s newest little brother, Epiphany. Sometime in the afternoon Sugar Bear had put on “A Love Supreme” in hopes of welcoming the boy with sounds of peace and love, but now all you could hear was a flurry of exalted saxophone notes flying around the room, scoring the moment’s chaos.
The children were wilding, Sugar Bear was breathing, Cocoa was yelling, Chickadee was wilding, breathing, and yelling, and Epiphany—tiny, yellow, shivering, bald, wet Epiphany—was opening up his lungs and letting out a world-class glass-breaking scream that sliced the cacophony into silence. For one second. Then everybody went back to their madcap orgy of sound and fury and Mahogany zoomed in to join, crossing through the chaos of children to land at her mother’s side as Chickadee and Epiphany struggled to separate themselves. Then Cadillac noticed Epiphany was more personally involved in the process of freeing himself from his mother than he’d known a newborn could be. With his bottom half still inside his mom, the little guy had opened his eyes and bent his arms down onto the stretched lips of Chickadee’s vagina and was pushing himself up out of her, as if attempting to rescue himself from quicksand. He pushed, she squeezed, she breathed, he screamed and seemed more determined to get out with every passing moment, the centimeters separating him from freedom dwindling as his waist became visible and then his hips, Chickadee spitting him out as if she were creating him right then and there. When he succeeded in extricating one foot from her honeypot, Cocoa reached in and eased his other foot out. But then he wriggled away from her, grabbed his umbilical cord, and ripped it in two. “Grab him!” Chickadee yelled. But before anyone could, Epiphany stuck his flabby little arms out in front of his head like a swimmer, bent low, and zoomed up into the air. The boy was flying!
He flew directly toward the wall, banged into it, ricocheted off, and kept on flying, out of control and way too fast, zooming and bouncing off walls with the speed, spring, and elasticity of a racquetball, as his soft little penis flapped in the wind. Chickadee yelled, “SUGE!” and Sugar Bear took off into the air trying to grab little Epiphany like a loose rebound, but the kid was far too fast and flew too wild and whenever Sugar Bear was about to grab him, he bounced away. The chaos of children took off into the air and it looked like an aerial invasion and simultaneous counterattack, with children zooming through the air at every angle, colliding in midair and flying on. Epiphany was faster than everyone and happily scooted through everyone’s grasp until finally Mahogany flew slowly into the air, watched the baby’s path, bisected an angle, caught him, and calmed his restless soul in her arms. She floated down to her mother’s side and the children began dancing in the air, doing flips and 360s and loop-de-loops, celebrating not so much the swelling of their ranks but the freedom the newest one allowed them. Chickadee took Epiphany in her arms and looked into his little brown eyes and told him she loved him, and he melted with the boundless ardor that’s possible only with brand-new love.
Now Dad turned his attention to the chaos of his older children, and with just one look from him the anarchy ended, for though this was a happy home, it was also a dictatorship where the wishes of the czar and czarina were backed up by an army called The Belt and an elite force called A Switch From The Tree In The Backyard. Mom and Epiphany fell asleep and the house began to quiet and Cadillac walked back to the car dumbfounded, trying to make sense of the scene he’d witnessed: an entire family of normal-seeming wingless Black folk who could fly even at birth.
11
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LATER THAT night Cadillac was in bed in his hotel room when he smelled something burning, the smell snaking in under the door. He got dressed and followed the smoke a few blocks to find a man standing in front of a burning Cadillac, flames leaping freely about the ride. He was shirtless, sweating, and playing guitar so intensely he seemed to be trying to cleanse himself. It was the JimiMan having a baptism.
JimiMan was born with the soul of Jimi Hendrix inside of him. He was a young guitar god who owned no shirts: all he ever wore were his leather pants and his guitar. A half-smoked, always-lit cigarette lived at the edge of his mouth. No one ever saw him touch it. He talked with it there, slept with it there, was even said to make love with that cigarette dangling there at the edge of his lips. He was the best guitar player in town, with an axe so cold he could freeze Soul City in its tracks. But he never knew if they were applauding him or the soul inside of him.
Earlier that day he was alone in his dark apartment, slumped on the floor beside a pile of marijuana as big as a newborn. He’d been awake for days on end attempting an exorcism by weed, hoping to smoke enough to forget who he was, but he’d smoked so much he just couldn’t get high anymore. He’d spent an entire day soundproofing the walls of his place, then gluing another layer of soundproof foam onto the first one, then nailing up a third layer, only to discover that the sound he was trying to escape—the sound of Jimi talkin bout purple haze all in his brain—was coming from inside his head. But while Jimi was kissing the sky JimiMan was stuck on the ground, channeling someone else while longing for freedom. He loved Jimi. There was no one else in history he’d rather have had inside him, but it was his twenty-first birthday and what he really wanted was to be himself. But Jimi had consumed him so completely he didn’t know who he was.
He jumped into his Jimimobile but turned off the stereo. In silence he drove to the corner of Freedom and R
hythm and began drenching his old friend with gasoline. The only thing tougher would’ve been drenching himself. He wanted to kill himself, but not to die. He wanted to be reborn. The car had defined him for the city, and for himself. Now it was completely soaked. He took one last drag, plucked the perpetually lit cigarette from his lips, and flicked it into the convertible. In a blink flames erupted with a stunning roar and a wall of heat sprung up. The car would die so that he could live.
The burning paint and leather fumed into an overwhelming odor and the smoke swirled as the flames danced upon his ride, that flaming convertible, that Cadillac flambé, and then he pulled his guitar into place and said something awful with that axe. He began to play with the abandon of a man leaping into a canyon with his eyes closed, unsure if he would live or die, relaxed as if either fate was fine.
His fingers danced over the guitar with the thrill of touching a lover for the first time. He wasn’t playing a song, wasn’t confining himself to a structure, he was just playing, improvising, exploring his guitar and himself, getting to know them both all over again. It was wild sounds full of questions and fear, sounds in search of a song from a man in search of a self. You could see the torment of discovery on his face as he played alone in the night, his fingers filling the air with the sound of his new life, his car aflame behind him, a meager curious audience in front of him. He was playing the autobiography of someone just being born. Playing not for applause, but to find himself, to define himself to himself, and he wouldn’t have cared if they booed or cheered or walked away indifferent because just getting to a place where he could ask the question, Who am I? was victory enough for now. He still didn’t know the answer, but he was on his way and he’d play til he found out.
12
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ON MONDAY the Soulful marched off to vote. Cadillac needed a break. Soul City was amazing, but it surely was not Utopia. He went out by himself and accidentally found a little place called the Hug Shop. It was exactly what he needed. At the Hug Shop you could get a three-minute hug for $5, a five-minute hug for $10, or a deluxe ten-minute hugging experience for $25. Hug-a-longs, that is, to be hugged by two or more huggers at once, were also available.
The Hug Shop was the first in a planned nationwide chain. Its owner, Giveadamn Brown, saw professional hugging as the fast-food arm of the massage industry. Brown was as eager to please his customers as Ray Kroc was back when the sign in front of the first McDonald’s said 1,000 SERVED. He’d run underground brothels and legitimate massage parlors, and his current venture delicately combined the two, hovering somewhere between the relaxation industry’s legal and illegal branches. His huggers were not call girls, but they weren’t trained masseurs, either. A sign in the window announced, HUGGER ON DUTY: ECSTASY JACKSON. He walked right in.
Ecstasy Jackson was dark chocolate with large pillowy breasts wrapped in a cashmere sweater. Hugging her would be like easing into a big brown curvy talking beanbag. Cadillac paid for a ten-minute hugging experience. She came from behind the counter and their bodies meshed. She put her arms around him, eased her breasts into him, tickled the back of his neck with her nails, let her perfume waft into his nose, squeezed his ass, and held him close and tight until he forgot where he ended and she began. When she finally let go of him, his body was jelly. He stumbled out promising himself he’d come back soon. But if he’d been a local he would’ve known why that was a bad idea. He would’ve known why a great hugger like Ecstasy was always single, why she was a sort of sexual quicksand.
He wobbled down the street until he regained his strength. Soon he found himself in front of the Museum of African-American Aesthetics (MoAAA) and stepped inside.
There was a new exhibit called “Black Is, Black Ain’t. The Visual Vernacular, the Vernacular Visual.” It featured art that, according to the brochure, “gives representations of Black culture through everyday objects, asking the viewer to look beyond the quotidian nature of the objects to see their cultural essentiality and thus artistic brilliance, which begs the questions: What makes up Black culture? What makes something Black? What does it mean to be Black?”
Video monitors were stationed everywhere. One showed a spry old man standing on a corner beneath a street lamp, but the film’s true subject was his cigarette, his Newport, and the camera followed it from the moment it left the pack in his pocket on up to his mouth, then down by his belt as his fingers flipped and dipped and zipped—an anonymous, soundless magician holding court on the corner. There was a series of young men’s lips, just large lips being licked in a bodacious, predatorily sexual way. In a separate room, all four episodes of The Richard Pryor Show ran back-to-back on a constant loop.
In a peculiar piece called Whuppin by Zeitgeist Jones—a leader of the Experientialism movement—the artist, a grown man, goes to his grandmother’s house and asks her to whup him like she used to when he was little. At first she refuses. “Ya ain’t done nuttin wrong, bwoy.” He continues pestering her. “It would highlight the Black male’s perpetual child status in America,” he says. “And point out the sadomasochism inherent in the unrequitable love every boy feels for his first love, Mom, or, in my case, you, Grandma, a relationship that always ends in rejection for the boy because he can never attain the best girlfriend he’ll ever know. And it would add me to the long tradition of masochistic performance art. In the early seventies an artist assembled an audience, gave a gun to a friend, and had his friend shoot him in the arm.” She cringes at the thought. “Why don’t you go run along now and make another painting.” He says, “But that’s just it. Painting is no longer sufficient to express the feelings I have about the Black experience. Painting is flat and dead. The only true canvas that exists is the body.” She looks at him like he’s insane. “Ah used to tell yer daddy, You just askin for a whuppin. But ain’t nobody ever really asked me fer a whuppin.” He continues begging until finally she says, “Ah think all that art’s gone to yer head, bwoy. I wan’t gunna whup ya, but now ya startin to git on m’nerves askin and askin for a whuppin. So ah guess ah’ll whup ya fer gittin on m’nerves by askin a stupid question. Now go out front and git a switch and if ya bring back one too small, ah’ma go out there and find the biggest one ah can!” We see him walk outside, pick a switch from a tree, pull down his pants, and get whupped but good, for five, six minutes, until his thighs and backside are so red he can’t even sit.
There were photo essays on the hi-top fade, a ten-foot bottle of Afro-Sheen, a sculpture of boys playing Cee-lo, twenty-foot dominoes, video of Black Baptist sermons from around the country, and a thirty-foot-tall talk-to-the-hand hand. There was a wall of ornate gold medallions, from a gold Lazarus to gold lion heads, gold grenades, and gold turntables, the Arabic phrase “Allah U Akhbar,” all sorts of Jesuses in various positions and poses, and, the coup de grâce, an angel with exquisite wings clutching an arrow being clung to for dear life by a short-skirted angel who’s being kicked in the eye by the first angel. It was clearly a battle between a good angel and a bad one, though a little difficult to say who was who.
On the top floor was a multimedia tribute to the Black male strut, the Afro, the ultratheatrical shoe shine, and the hand greeting, from hi-fives to lo-fives, including fist pounds, tight clasps, and finger snaps. And in the last room, the exhibit’s finale, was the famous Steviewondermobile itself—a pristine money green 1983 Cadillac custom convertible with gold rims, neon green lights underneath, and a Harman Kardon sound system with sixteen speakers, wireless remote, thirty disc changer, and the clearest sound imaginable, a system that only played records by Stevie Wonder. This was the sexy beast that originally inspired the creation of the Museum of African-American Aesthetics.
The Steviewondermobile was previously owned by Huggy Bear Jackson, who’d donated it to the museum’s permanent collection a few years back. That decision, based on art as much as hubris, proved incalculably ennobling for Huggy Bear. His benevolence turned him into a far greater hero than he’d been in the days when he’d crui
sed around Soul City, known as the man with the Steviewondermobile. Of course, unlike most people who make significant donations, Huggy Bear was neither rich nor smart. Donating the car meant he could enter the museum for free anytime he chose. It also meant he was without a car. But that’s another story.
Outside the museum Cadillac sat on the lawn under a tree and pulled out his empty notepad. He still needed a spark. One good first sentence, a sentence that would encapsulate Soul City, a sentence with just the right tone. Then the path of how to write about this place would become clear to him. With one true sentence that combined Soul City’s beauty and its ugliness, the dam would break. But something Aunt Jemima had said had gotten stuck in his mind and was clogging up the gears. He’d tried to throw out the idea that ugly could somehow be beautiful, but the thought was so bizarre he couldn’t stop examining it, the way boys are magnetized by dead cats on the side of the road. But now the bullshit detector in his mind had broken down and even the manual hand crank wouldn’t work. If only the place had been a Utopia. That would’ve been easy to paint. It was easy to get the city’s style and energy on a page. It was much harder to find the courage to be honest about both the beauty and the ugliness of Soul City. Writing, he felt, was like intellectual athletics, but when athletes conquered their fears and hit the big shot, the crowd roared. His courage would be taken as a betrayal, an airing of dirty laundry. No one roars for the courageous writer.
He sat there until the sun set but still couldn’t write a word.
13
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MOST IN Soul City do not know how to fly. Only those with flying parents have that gene. Those who have a gift get it the same way others get their height and hair color. Sometimes, when people of clashing gifts get married, their children end up with strange hybrids. But on those rare occasions when a gifted Soulful marries an outsider, their children never end up with a gift. That is why marrying the non-Soulful is so frowned upon in Soul City.