Soul City

by Touré

_____

  FULCRUM NEGRO is one of the three living people who knows there’s a portal into the path to Heaven located in Soul City. It’s found inside the Lake of Roses, which, by some geological miracle, is over twenty times saltier than the ocean. When the sun is high the water takes on the color of a red rose. Because of the high salt content everyone floats in the lake, but Fulcrum alone can swim deep into it. Here he begins his journeys to Heaven.

  Fulcrum’s body can squeeze through the nodes that separate this plane and the others because he is a breatharian. Some people are vegetarians, some are fruitarians, and a rare few absorb all they need for sustenance from the air. The more solid food you eat—the more dead things you bring into your body—the more difficult it becomes to get your physical form through the nodes separating the planes known as Heaven and Hell and Here. Still, most breatharians cannot travel between the planes. Fulcrum was rare even among breatharians: he had never eaten anything in his entire life.

  He dove in and stroked his way to the bottom of the lake, where he found a hole that he swam through, and soon the magical red of the Lake of Roses gave way to the ethereal blue of the River Jordan, which lies on the outskirts of the afterworld. Fulcrum swam for half a day until he came to the river’s end. There he found the Desert of Doubt, a vast, windy wasteland that surrounds Heaven that you cross in minutes or millennia, depending on God’s plan for you. This is where Death deposits souls bound for Heaven, but everyone doesn’t make it all the way. The Desert of Doubt is a test every new soul has to face, a journey of spiritual endurance. There is no physical path out of the Desert of Doubt. God just wants to see you continue pushing forward despite the absence of any reason to have faith. With no clues, no roads, and no help, the weak of faith come to believe the journey is endless or pointless and give up and spend eternity there. But the faithful continue on even after there seems no reason to do so, and eventually God smiles on them and they discover Eternal Road and a plush chariot, a sweet-looking low-swinging chariot that’s chauffeured by an angel who takes them straight into Heaven. And when they reach Heaven they find a gigantic flat field filled with happy, naked souls and nothing else. A beautiful, sunny, pastoral, open space—just a light sprinkling of grass, but no trees, no flowers, no hills. Heaven is a sort of spectacular nothingness, notable for what it is not.

  Fulcrum, a veteran of The Path, usually needed five days to get to Heaven, but he was burning to see Granmama and completed the trip in under three days. Fulcrum stepped from the chariot and into the field. An angel pointed out Granmama. Her long life and deep faith had led God to speed her through The Path. She’d arrived just moments after her death and was now laughing with Dizzy Gillespie. When she saw Fulcrum she burst into tears.

  “When I first got here, I thought, there’s nothing here,” she said. “This ain’t no Promised Land. But as I walked through the field I realized I was naked and didn’t want clothes. And then I realized I didn’t want anything at all.”

  “There ain’t nothin here,” Dizzy said, “cuz there’s no need. We’re all happy with what we have. That’s what you call peace.”

  “Have you met God?” Fulcrum said.

  “Yes,” Granmama said. “Wow.”

  “That’s the only word that fits,” Dizzy said.

  “Anything like what you imagined She’d be?” Fulcrum said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Was it a short talk?”

  “Yeah, but it was right on time.”

  “Amen.”

  18

  _____

  SEVEN DAYS after her death, as the sun began to rise, Granmama’s slim coffin was wrapped in silk cloths of turquoise and magenta and carried slowly through the streets of Soul City by young men bookended by a brass band playing the bright jazz of a New Orleans funeral march. A teary muted throng of thousands lined the streets. Granmama had been a mother to Soul City and it was painful to know they would never again see her behind the counter at the Biscuit Shop or trembling down Freedom Ave. Yet Fulcrum’s transeternal travels had made the Hereafter not an abstraction but a real place. Thanks to him, She was real to them, and when they spoke of Granmama being in a better place they didn’t need faith to make themselves believe it. The Soulful had no more understanding of how the soul could continue on without the body than anyone. Yet to them, Heaven was a tangible place. The existential dread that grounds so many souls had no power in Soul City because of their crystal certainty that some afterlife was assured them. Freed of that spiritual gravity, their souls lifted into the air of rare possibility like liberated balloons racing into the sky. As they said good-bye to Granmama’s earthly form, they knew she was watching them. They knew they would hear from her through Fulcrum. And they all knew, as they knew the sun would rise tomorrow, that if they got to Heaven they would see her again.

  The coffin reached the city cemetery and was laid beside its final resting place. The crowd that filled the cemetery was sad but smiling, tears falling down toward grins. Everyone was resolutely colorful: people wear bright colors to Soul City funerals—yellows, reds, blues, greens—colors of hope and life. The band played a few of Granmama’s favorite songs. When they finished, Fulcrum came to the front and took a microphone.

  “My friends, the moment I learned of Granmama’s passing I went to Heaven to check on her,” he said. “She’s doing very well. She sends her love. She made the journey quickly, assumed a beautiful form, reunited with friends, and adapted well. I am very happy to say that Granmama has met Her.” A sigh came from the crowd. “She is blessed and she is watching us right now. Let us celebrate her memory and let the knowledge that she’s happy be a buoy to us. We miss her, but our sadness will be contagious to her unless we allow her happiness to be contagious to us.”

  The coffin was laid into the grave and each of the twelve living Big Mamas took a handful of dirt and tossed it onto her coffin. Thousands followed, tossing dirt into the void until it was filled. Then they all went to Paradise Park for a party. There was singing and dancing and chanting and laughing long into the night. It was a party not in her memory, but in celebration of her new place in the Soul City community. They had not lost someone. They had gained a friend in Heaven. She had not died. She had begun a new life.

  19

  _____

  IT WAS early Sunday evening when Mama Sunflower sat down at the head of the table. As Sugar Bear carved the turkey, Mama cut her eyes at Mahogany. She’d been waiting all week to have a sit-down with her oldest. It was Wednesday in the rest of America, but in Soul City it was the Month of Sundays, so, once again, it was Sunday. It was actually the final Sunday of the Month of Sundays, which meant grand family gatherings throughout Soul City. Mama Sunflower had all ten of her children at her table. She also had a guest from The City. She didn’t mind him so much. He was polite and well-spoken. But even though Mahogany was only two months along Mama Sunflower could see her oldest daughter was pregnant because moms can read minds, too. She was none too pleased. After dinner she and Mahogany would finally have that sit-down.

  Across town the Revren Lil’ Mo Love was fed like a king by four women, two of whom forsook their own families to cook for him. Ubiquity was alone, at Lolita, reading all the men’s minds, feasting just the same as she did every day. Precious, however, wasn’t doing so good.

  Her addiction had turned monstrous. She was twitching every few seconds now and hearing what people meant behind what they said. Her eyes had begun to droop and she constantly wore a hat to hide her ears, which were getting more brown and more brittle all the time. She was still seeing Hueynewton, but, like her ears, their relationship was getting sicker as time went on.

  A few weeks earlier Fulcrum had discovered it was Kilimanjaro who was selling bliss to his daughter and told Hueynewton to throw him out of town. (The official message that Fulcrum gave Hueynewton to deliver was, Leave now or we’ll convene the elders and decide whether or not to bury you alive.) As Hueynewton marched off to the Raggamuffin Projects, a distra
ught Precious called Mahogany.

  “Are you afraid of what your father’s gonna say?” Mahogany asked.

  “No, I’m worried about where I’m gonna get my shit from now on!”

  “You’re really sick.”

  Mahogany didn’t know the half of it. Shortly after Hueynewton expelled Kilimanjaro and confiscated his drugs, Precious found out she could get bliss from Hueynewton. She quickly ran out of money buying from him, so he started giving her bliss in exchange for sex, even though they were still going out. Sick. Mahogany had invited Precious to come for Month of Sundays dinner as a gesture of friendship, but she knew Precious would probably spend the night in some alley, dropping and listening to passing cars.

  Mahogany didn’t mind spending the day with Cadillac. He was cool. But the main reason she brought him to dinner is she thought it might somehow help her avoid the sit-down she felt coming on. It didn’t.

  Dinner went on for hours as the family argued and laughed, talking at the same time and telling stories on one another. Three-month-old Epiphany played with his food in his high chair, strapped in like an astronaut in his cockpit. He had so much energy he had to wear a seat belt in his crib at night.

  Mama Sunflower and Mahogany didn’t look at each other and didn’t talk to each other and in this way came to realize that both of them knew that Mahogany was pregnant. Ten-year-old King Sunflower took advantage of the conversational void left by the two quietly steaming women and he talked on and on about his flying youth basketball tournament. He swore that this year Honeypot Hill would not lose to the bad boys from Niggatown. Mahogany promised to come watch him play in the tournament, but she would end up regretting going there for the same reason she already regretted coming home. “I hate being pregnant,” she whispered to Cadillac.

  After dinner Mama Sunflower and Mahogany had their sit-down. In Soul City there were other families who could fly, but somehow, long ago, the Sunflower daughters had come to be looked upon as a bellwether for the city’s future. At the House of Big Mamas they’d long prophesied that if ever the firstborn of a firstborn Sunflower couldn’t fly, then that would portend the end of Soul City.

  Mahogany had heard the prophecy all her life and always dismissed it as a silly superstition. But nearly everyone in town believed.

  “I don’t wanna be the town talisman,” Mahogany said sadly.

  But she already knew her baby wouldn’t be able to fly.

  20

  _____

  WHEN HUEYNEWTON Payne rumbled into the town square that morning, for once they were happy to see him come. Hueynewton had finally decided to do the Slavery Experience, and today he was shipping out. A thousand Soulful were on hand and both the Soul City Defender and the Inquirer covered the event, which played out like a military send-off, with crowds waving the Soul City flag, nervous, tearful wives, and Hueynewton standing beside twenty-six men and three women as stoic and scared as young soldiers heading off to war.

  They had volunteered for a year of dawn-to-dusk labor under the nose of a sadistic, whip-happy massa in a field on the edge of Soul City. For the next twelve months their lives would be exactly the same as a slave’s. Exactly the same except that Neo-Slaves knew it would only last a year. All thirty knew they were marching into Hell, ready for an odyssey that would change them forever.

  Most of the Soulful were glad Hueynewton would be off in the fields and not on their streets, but they were also impressed to see him show such reverence for his slave ancestors, like a good Soul City boy should. Hueynewton had just felt it would be a hardcore thing to do, like joining the Navy SEALs for fun. “I wanna see if I’m badass enough to have made it as a slave,” he told a reporter from the Defender. Then someone clamped a thick, rusty chain around his wrists and he was linked to twenty-nine others. The massa yelled, and as Soul City cheered wildly, they trudged off into slavery.

  Fulcrum called the mayor’s mansion and said, “What’ll we do if something comes up?” But Spreadlove had a shower running and twins from Honeypot Hill in there waiting for him. They were all gonna wash each other’s hair yet again with the strangely addictive shampoo with the malevolent tingle that’d been sent to him before the election (but shortly after Hueynewton’s KFC heist) by John Jiggaboo.

  Across town pregnancy was making Mahogany bitchy, though it was difficult to see the difference between her prego bitchiness and her normal everyday bitchiness. She was complaining all the time, bossing Cadillac around, and missing her cigarettes terribly. But the morning sickness, afternoon sickness, and evening sickness weren’t affecting her as much as people turning away when she walked down the street. Soul City had been waiting for her to become pregnant since she was born, expecting that she, like every other Sunflower firstborn before her, would get pregnant by a man who could fly. But now she was having a child that would never fly, and the Soulful were as scared as if she had a time bomb in her womb. Cadillac tried to help by running all her errands, rubbing her feet day and night, and allowing her to take her frustrations out on him. He wondered why she was so demanding when she was only three months along, but he kept this thought to himself.

  Meanwhile, Jimmy Hustlemore, a photographer with the Defender, had his telephoto lens focused on the DJ booth in the mayor’s mansion. Hustlemore, a beanpole-thin twenty-seven-year-old virgin, had heard the raucous rumors about what went on inside the mayor’s mansion and could stand it no more. He had a case of sexual jaundice so advanced his brown eyes were turning green. Hustlemore blamed his pathetic pristineness on neo-Hefners like Spreadlove. He believed that sex, like money, was a zero-sum commodity, and for every erotic Rockefeller like Spreadlove, the Seducer in Chief, there had to be at least three sex-starved males missing out on their fair share of the action. Hustlemore watched Spreadlove spin records as a bevy of busty women sat around him giggling. Then, during a Barry White three-play, Spreadlove’s eyes rolled back in his head and his jaw fell far open. Hustlemore quickly moved to another spot on the hill, zoomed in as tight as he could, and fortuitously snapped a single photo showing Spreadlove engaged in the sacred act of DJing for Soul City while receiving fellatio from an eighteen-year-old intern named Coochie Poontang.

  The next day the photo ran on the front page of the Defender.

  By nine a.m. the front door of the mansion was a swarming beehive of reporters. Spreadlove emerged from the mansion sometime after eleven a.m. wearing a scarlet robe. He said he loved music, loved Soul City, and had the utmost reverence for Soul City’s music. And, oh yeah, that picture was doctored. “I did not,” he announced, “have sexual relations with that woman while spinning!” But his pants were on fire then for two reasons: he’d lied and he’d been interrupted by the media mob in the midst of making whoopee. You could see the carnality in his eyes. You could smell the pussy juice on his lips. You could’ve scrambled an egg on his crotch.

  The scandal sparked an investigation that dragged on for an entire month. It was revealed that his affair with Coochie had begun just a week after he took office, when she’d said hello by showing him her thong, then allowed him to play a game that involved hiding a Cohiba in her lower lips. They called this game Human Humidor or the Panatela and the Pudenda. Thirty other women came forward to say that they, too, had serviced him during that first month he serviced the city. Then, an aide with verbal diarrhea told a reporter that Spreadlove enjoyed about four or five women every day. The final report read like the Best of the Best of Penthouse Forum.

  The people were enjoying Spreadlove’s music, but concerns about his character and his lack of respect for the office of mayor reached fever pitch. He tried to stem the tide by introducing a new dance. No one liked it and he plunged even deeper into trouble. He’d been in office just over two months and already there was talk of impeachment. The Defender ran editorials demanding he resign. Spreadlove, backed into a political corner, told the Defender that constant sex was essential to the quality of his job performance. “The Soulful should take a lesson from the Parisians
and take at least one sex break per day,” he said. “Children need naps, adults need quickies!” Soul City didn’t buy it. Spreadlove needed a big-time distraction to get people’s thoughts off his penis, because as long as the whole city was on his penis, he couldn’t put it wherever he wanted. His dick had put his neck in the guillotine, and he needed something to save them both.

  Then John Jiggaboo called. He said Jiggaboo Shampoo was the number-one-selling shampoo in Harlem, East St. Louis, Detroit, Watts, and Chocolate City. Why wasn’t it available in Soul City? He promised that launching Jiggaboo Shampoo in Soul City would revive Spreadlove’s popularity.

  Spreadlove said he loved Jiggaboo Shampoo so much he shampooed even when his hair wasn’t dirty. He’d been using it obsessively for months and his hair looked incredible, but his brain was completely washed. One of his girls had told him some stupid rumor that if you used too much you’d turn into a bumbling boob like Stepin Fetchit, but he knew that couldn’t be true.

  Jiggaboo told him the rumor had been started by Johnson & Johnson as an attempt to kill his little Black-owned company. Besides, Jiggaboo said, how could a shampoo possibly do that? If Spreadlove had read Jiggaboo’s autobiography, The More I Like Flies, he would’ve known Jiggaboo’s personal motto. “A Black mind is an easy thing to waste.”

  21

  _____

  JIGGABOO ARRIVED at the mayor’s mansion the next day, bookended by a pair of underage blondes in flimsy dresses who reeked of sex so much that the three seemed to travel inside a smell-of-sex cloud. He was six-foot-four with a meticulously groomed, silky, shiny, young Michael Jackson-size Afro-of-life. Counting the fro, he was around six-foot-nine. It was a fro that froze you into dazed wonderment like the first sight of all the presents under the tree at Christmas, or your first look at an immaculate diamond. His nails were long and sculpted, his cane was carved and ivory, his cape was hellfire scarlet. Spreadlove and Jiggaboo had lunch, had each other’s women, and then had a tour of Soul City. As they walked through the city Jiggaboo gave away a few bottles of his shampoo, but the Soulful who saw the bottles were too repulsed by the watermelon-munching pickaninny and the beaming Aunt Jemima on the front to do more than crinkle their brows and throw the bottle back at him. Then they headed over to Revren Lil’ Mo’s office. It was time for afternoon recess, when the Revren was allowed to entertain guests in the corner of the school yard.