Soul City

by Touré

  Carnality was a mist slithering through the streets. Lust engulfed and blinded them like fog. No one knew whose bed he or she would be magnetized to at any moment. Late one night during this free-love frenzy, Cadillac was at the Biscuit Shop watching Mahogany spin.

  In the three weeks since they’d met, they’d had no official dates because she refused to allow them to be called dates, but they’d gone to see Coffy at Bring the Noise Movie Theater, had had dinner at Roscoe’s, and had gone late-night vinyl shopping at Delicious Records. But this certainly wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t particularly like him. Besides, she was a Sunflower, and in her family you only dated others who could fly because only two flying parents could make a flying baby, and the Sunflowers had to keep the flying going. Mahogany was the oldest Sunflower of her generation, and for three hundred years the Big Mamas have said that if a firstborn Sunflower has a child who can’t fly, that’ll signal the beginning of the end of Soul City. Mahogany never believed the prophecy, but everyone else in town did and carefully watched her love life, groaning each time she dumped another flying guy. Everyone knew she would end up with a flyer, Sunflowers always did, but for the first time in years a Sunflower firstborn was having a hard time finding a flyer, and the town was getting nervous.

  But that Friday night Mahogany wasn’t thinking about all that. She wasn’t thinking much at all. She was unspeakably horny. Nearly every man in Soul City would’ve dropped everything to go home with Mahogany Sunflower, but somehow Cadillac was in the right Biscuit Shop at the right time. When closing time came she grabbed him by the arm and took him home. Yes, all of this started because of what they call a lucky fuck. She knew he knew she could fly. She’d seen him looking that night at her mom’s. So when they got into bed she climbed atop him, slipped her legs within his just so, and lifted up into the air, gliding in circles around her apartment like a child’s toy plane. She had to be on top, that was just her style, so as they moved through the air he clutched tightly beneath her as if clinging to the underside of a sweaty, naked, curvy missile, orbiting her place ten feet above the floor while Prince seeped in through the windows and the cracks in the door. When she was about to come she doubled her speed and it got scary for him. He got nauseous watching the room spin around him upside down, but he wasn’t complaining at all. She was riding the air while doing the same to him. He just had to try and hold on for dear life.

  It didn’t last long but was so amazing. Flying sex was incomparable. He had to do that again.

  “We can’t ever do that again,” she said, as if she were afraid of herself. She was lying in bed, exhaling smoke, her heart pounding.

  She’d loved the sex. His quick, rapid fear-filled thrusts had driven her over the edge in record time. But she was a Sunflower and a firstborn. They both knew it could and would go nowhere. So they did what young lovers often do. They did the least sensible thing possible.

  They had flying sex again.

  That’s when she got pregnant.

  15

  _____

  GRANMAMA WAS bitter. She was 366 years old, but she’d long ago forgotten her age and banned all birthday parties, because she was tired of living. She’d seen it all and life had nothing new left to show her. She wanted to be in Heaven with her friends, but, as she put it, she was “cursed with eternal life.” She knew she’d never see Heaven. Every morning she opened her eyes and grumbled, “This is fuckin bullshit.”

  Death has a certain smell that mortals can detect no more than they can hear a dog whistle, but Granmama and the twelve women who lived on T’ain’t Road, in the mansion called the House of Big Mamas, could pick up Death’s particularly putrid smell. With the head start their nose gave them they could run and hide or plan a trick and thus they all escaped Death over and again. Only way Death could even get near them was if their nose got stuffed up. That’s why Death had decided long ago to leave them old girls be. Now, the Big Mamas couldn’t avoid Disease, Pain, or Bad Fortune, so most of them were missing fingers or legs, were blind or deaf, were battling diabetes or cancer. But no matter how much the health of a Big Mama declined, she would not, could not, die. Thus, they were all well over 250 years old, Granmama probably the oldest, though Sweetness Serendipity was also past 350. Granmama couldn’t tell her sisters in the House of Big Mamas that she wanted to die, because she was their leader and her death would crush them, would crush all of Soul City. But secretly, every night, she wished Death would come and see her while she slept.

  On the morning of July 5, the Day of Flight, Granmama awoke pissed off about still being here. She dressed and made her way to Fulcrum’s. The Day of Flight Festival would begin at noon and go on for twenty-four hours and the Biscuit Shop needed extra butter to deal with the surge in business. Fulcrum had gotten butter for her when he went to see Dizzy Gillespie.

  Each of Granmama’s biscuits took less than one-sixteenth of a teaspoon of butter, just a teeny dot, because the butter in Granmama’s biscuits came from Heaven, brought back by Fulcrum. Fulcrum Negro could travel freely between Heaven and Hell and Here, a man with a multitemporal passport and an understanding of the very secret passageways linking the planes of existence. He called it transeternal traveling. Fulcrum made periodic trips to Heaven to see important souls and get things for his store and for friends in the city. He went to Hell far less often because the Devil always tried to trick him into staying. He went only for emergencies, like the night in 1980 when Richard Pryor was freebasing and set himself on fire. Pryor went to the hospital and died. After all the drugs, womanizing, and sin, Pryor went straight to Hell. But within an hour Fulcrum had negotiated a furlough that allowed Pryor a few more decades on Earth.

  When Granmama got to Fulcrum’s store he was standing out front waiting for her. His trip to Heaven had been fruitful. He’d brought back one of Dizzy’s trumpets, five pounds of butter, some thread for the Teddy Bear Repair Shop (because sometimes they had to perform miracles), and, of course, hair for his wife so she could do more weaves. Course, Dream wouldn’t be doing any weaves today. She was inside, in bed, under the covers, the sheets and pillows soaked with tears. Three weeks had passed, but she was still distraught over the embarrassment of Ubiquity’s gossip bomb.

  “Ubiquity’s so impolite,” Fulcrum said.

  “She’s a fuckin bitch,” Granmama said. “How’s Diz?”

  “He’s having a great time.”

  “Lucky fucker.”

  She took her butter and trembled over to the Biscuit Shop. As she walked a playful gust of wind that’d been born out over the ocean a few days earlier saw her alone on the deserted street and flew down to dance with her. As she angrily shooed the breeze away a germ floated into her immune system. By the time Granmama got to the Biscuit Shop her nose was a little stuffed and her supernatural sense of smell was clogged.

  The Biscuit Shop was a beehive then, young women in dowdy uniforms racing around mixing flour, milk, baking powder, and the special butter, following Granmama’s secret recipe. Mahogany was standing beside the turntables, yawning and smoking, slurping coffee, trying to get ready to spin for the early-morning crowds. In the commotion Granmama didn’t even realize her nose was stuffed. But Death noticed. He was at a flood in Bangladesh collecting a bevy of souls, but he dropped them all, leaving behind five people slated for Heaven and eighteen scheduled for Hell, because after 366 years it was time to get Granmama. When he floated into the Biscuit Shop she didn’t even notice. He laid back and prepared to finally do his job.

  Now, Death is not the heartless guy that Hollywood makes him out to be. Listen to them and you’d think he was an agent of the Devil. This is not so. He takes people across and drops them wherever he’s told. He doesn’t have much discretion in the matter. He’s basically a freelance soul courier. He doesn’t even like Pain. (She’s a bitch!) And he never understood why everyone loved his sister Life so damn much. She only had Earth to offer. After you saw him you might get to Heaven. So why’d he get such a bad rap? Sure,
he seemed cruel at times, but just as often he was merciful. At the end of the day, he was just a working stiff.

  Once, Death considered hiring a public relations firm to change his image. He scheduled a meeting with the high-powered publicist Lizzie Benzman and floated into her office in The City right on time. As he moved through the office women ran shrieking and dove for cover. One woman called security, sobbing horribly, telling them Death was stalking the halls. Security left the building. Lizzie was in her office in a red power suit, talking rapidly into a hi-tech headset. She was a platinum-bottle blonde. Her hair made him think, She’s trying too hard.

  He sat down and calmly explained that he was looking to make a radical shift in his global image and was interested in hearing any ideas she had about getting people to think outside the box about Death. But she wasn’t listening. She was trembling. She didn’t want him as a client, but if she rejected him, would he kill her? If she accepted him as a client, would that mean she’d die at the end of the project? She fell to her knees and sobbed, “I don’t wanna die! My daddy just bought me a Mercedes!”

  He realized she wasn’t listening. He was so pissed off, he took her across even though she wasn’t supposed to go for another twenty-three and a half years. Goddam phony, he thought.

  At the Biscuit Shop, Death watched Granmama in the kitchen, building balls of uncooked dough, hand molding them into shape, and feeding them to the oven, working elbow to elbow with girls a fraction of her age. But it was the Day of Flight and people kept coming back into her kitchen, interrupting her as she was trying to bake. Whether they knew her or not, the Soulful just wanted to come back and kiss Granmama. She was annoyed but she would let them kiss her and then she’d nod and make a quarter of a smile and say, “Now get the fuck outta my kitchen.”

  Even though Granmama wanted to die, Death could see this was a delicate situation. If she died something would die in all of Soul City. But if she didn’t die today, she might never get her chance. He didn’t have to take her. She wasn’t on the list St. Peter had given him for today. Course, she would never be on St. Peter’s list and that was why he’d come. He considered giving her a pass, but it could be another 366 years before he had this chance again, and there were others being born every minute and anyway, he was Death. He couldn’t help himself. He looked into her soul and saw she desperately wanted to meet God. Then he floated over to touch her. He was just an inch away when she finally smelled him. Granmama turned around and faced Death and said, “It’s about fuckin time.”

  She whispered, “Not in front of the girls,” and they walked back to her office. She sat down on the couch and closed her eyes. He touched her as lightly as he could. Her 366-year-old heart slowed and then stopped.

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  _____

  MAHOGANY WENT back to Granmama’s office to awaken her from a surprisingly long nap. No amount of shaking could stir her. Mahogany considered checking Granmama’s heart, then banished the thought. Big Mamas don’t die. But when more shaking and rubbing and coaxing failed to revive her, Mahogany began to wonder. She put her ear to Granmama’s chest and heard nothing. She would’ve screamed but her mind rejected the idea that Granmama was dead like a bad transplant. When she finally dialed Fulcrum’s cellphone, tears were pouring down her face, but she still couldn’t believe it.

  No one ever expected a Big Mama to die. You couldn’t rely on the crutch of inconceivability, couldn’t tell yourself the convenient platitudes we use to comfort ourselves in death, that everyone’s time must come, that everyone’s date is written somewhere. Death, the Soulful knew, visits everyone but the Big Mamas.

  It took Fulcrum ten long minutes to pull a single coherent sentence from the tear-ravaged girl. When she finally choked out the words, Fulcrum was as shocked as she was. Then he ran off to Heaven to make sure Granmama was alright.

  Meanwhile, the city was exploding with the Day of Flight Festival. People danced and drummed in the streets. There were step shows, stilt walkers so bad they were really stilt dancers, and the Shit-Talkin Clown with a punching bag for a nose, a role played with relish by Ganja Johnson, who bounced around getting in people’s faces and on their nerves, talking shit about your nose, your clothes, and your mama. “Yo mama like a doorknob!” he’d call out. “Everybody done had a turn!” He embarrassed you publicly and pointedly, going on and on until you buried a fist in his big old honker. Then he moved away to pick on someone else.

  Little girls collected wildflowers to place under their pillows that night in hopes of a dream that would reveal their future love. Most of the Big Mamas sat together under giant sunbrellas, healing disease for five dollars and broken hearts for ten. “Tomorrow, when the sun begins to set, make a moist warm towel,” Big Mama Sweetness told Amber Sunshower, who was still devastated over her years-old breakup with Coltrane Jones. “Place inside it a sprinkling of baking powder, some bark from a favorite tree, and the dried leaves of a red rose. Take a long shower to cleanse yourself, then when you’re dry, pour this holy water over your head. Let it flow over your body and do not wipe it off. Very important. Then hold the compress to your heart while you sip this John the Conqueror root. Then go to sleep. When you awake your ache will be gone, your mind will be clear, and your heart will be open to new love. But the healing will happen only if you believe. If there’s an ounce of doubt inside you, it won’t work. Faith is crucial to the healing. As with all things, if you believe it, it’s yours.”

  There were competitions where the winner was decided by the size of the crowd’s roars. First came the Neck Roll Contest, in which the ladies were judged on three criteria: velocity of the neck roll, width of the neck roll, and number of consecutive 360s they could pull off. In the final round Camilla Clothespony bested Sera Serendipity after an unbelievable ninety-six consecutive 360s, during which you could see only the whites of her eyes and her head orbiting her spine with such attitudinal force it seemed certain it would fly off. The Pimp Stroll champion was Revren Lil’ Mo Love, who used his pint size and his daddy’s rhythm to smooth-bop his way to the trophy. The contest for Sexiest Lip-Licker was over after Mojo Johnson took sixty seconds to moisten his top lip with his beautiful tongue, making women scream deafeningly and perspire profusely. And for the third year in a row, the Cocked Hat Contest was won by Willie Bobo, who strutted by the assembled crowd with his black Negritude U baseball cap at an angle so amazingly obtuse it would’ve made Sir Isaac Newton reconsider everything he’d ever thought about gravity.

  All this was to celebrate the founding of Soul City. Many years ago Granmama, Fulcrum, and Sweetness Serendipity were slaves on a plantation that had a giant party every fourth of July. Every slave’s stomach turned watching the whitefolks celebrate their mendaciously titled Independence Day. But in 1821 Granmama, Fulcrum, and Sweetness decided the insult was too great and that death was preferable to witnessing their fraudulent holiday even one more time. So after midnight, as the party roared on, they escaped on foot, running faster than they ever had. But a slave named Ignoramus Washington saw them getting away and screamed out. He ran after them, leading the search party, which chased them for miles. Granmama, Fulcrum, and Sweetness began to tire and their pace slowed. The three were just about to be caught, guaranteeing a grand lynching to help celebrate Independence Day, when suddenly a flock of Negroes emerged from the sky.

  The flying Negroes were led by Moses Djembe, an ancestor of Mahogany Sunflower, the former chief of an African flying tribe and a recent runaway, or flyaway, himself. Earlier that day Moses had been herded from a slave ship to an auction block and sold for a princely sum. But when they tried to send him off with his new owner, he grabbed a hatchet, cut himself loose, then freed six others who could fly and led them into the air. As they coasted above the trees considering a return to Africa, they saw a band of runaways and flew down.

  Hundreds of whitefolks saw Moses and six other Negroes fly down from the sky. They looked at these flying Negroes and tried to comprehend how inferior beings co
uld have magical powers. There were implosions in their minds. Them whitefolks ran. But Moses didn’t let Ignoramus escape. The entire group of runaways walked and flew together for weeks, all the while dragging him along. He kept yelling out for Massa in the same tone children use to call for their mommies. They finally found acres of secluded, uninhabited land, and though they didn’t know what state they were in, they decided to make camp. Granmama said, “It don’t matter none where we are. All that matters is the fuckin whitemare is over.” They named their new home Soul City.

  First thing they did was grab Ignoramus and hold him down. Fulcrum took a knife and opened the Judas’s throat. As his blood seeped into the earth, Moses said, “This blood will purify this soil and allow us to live confined only by the boundaries of our dreams.” They were free and so happy about it that they just sat still for an entire month, talking, laughing, and moving as little as possible. They’d been so hungry for freedom that their freedom was all the food they needed that first month. At the end of the month they began building a town, but they’d enjoyed a month of doing nothing so much that they decided they should do it every year. So they established July 5 as a holiday called the Day of Flight and designated the entire month a communal vacation. They called it the Month of Sundays.

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