“Well, you know I don’t like being in the heat and sun like you do.”
“Won’t be but a minute. I need to decompress, get Pasadena out of my blood.”
As we eased into the area, families looked at us. They looked at us, but no alarms went off. If I was still in my twenties, this same crowd would be uneasy. A black man in his twenties was always seen as a threat. We were all Trayvon or Mike Brown. I’d lived long enough and aged out of that group, but a black man never aged out of being seen as trouble from sea to shining sea.
Jake Ellis got an ice cream cone, smiled like a two-year-old kid, and I copped a single-origin espresso. We copped a squat on a bench outside of Blue Bottle Coffee, watched the heat-loving young Europeans and their spouses and seeds living in the absence of too many brown- and black-skinned minorities. They were as at peace without us as we were without them.
Jake Ellis said, “This is my secret chill-out spot. Calmer than the Grove. I used to chill at the Villas at Playa Vista. Real nice down there too, especially if I take a date to happy hour or to the movie theater; real impressive down that way. Actors and Clippers and Lakers live down there.”
“Sounds like gold-digger central.”
“You know it.”
“Why are we here?”
“Because being around you is stressful.”
I asked, “How long you been peeping this spot?”
“I’ve been coming here a month or so.”
“Lot closer to the house. Small. Few shops. No crowd. Perfect.”
“Cool to have a couple of chill-out spots to choose from.”
“It’s quaint and sterile. All the businesses face inward, so from the streets you can’t tell what’s up. My bet is that they don’t want everybody knowing this spot is here.”
“It’s like leaving the world I know and sneaking into the basement heaven.”
“The basement?”
“In my heaven, Ghanaians are on the top level. In the penthouse eating Jollof.”
I asked, “How much rent over this way?”
“Same as the Villas at Playa Vista.”
“Which is?”
“Between three and five thousand a month to rent a cracker box.”
“Makes sense. We’re in a saltine bubble.”
“But it’s a nice bubble. So nice people should talk with French accents.”
“Birkenstocks and fat wedding rings.”
Jake Ellis said, “Don’t hate. They dated smart, married money.”
“Bet they married without a prenup.”
“You know what I see when I look at these people?”
“Success?”
“Felons. Criminals. People don’t look at this crowd and think criminals, but they are. We assume they are clean, but they have DUIs and felonies on their records, and they get second, third, and fourth chances. Even with a prison record they can get a better job than a black man with no record and a college degree. These men file for bankruptcy every chance they get, shake off debt, and I bet they have more than one baby momma and are behind on child support.”
“The neo-Nazis have taken over Twitter.”
“Most of those hooligans are violent criminals, but the police let the thugs wear masks and gloves and do their thing from Berkeley to Charlottesville. If you use or sell Silly String on Halloween you can get a thousand-dollar fine and/or six months in jail, but these goons can wear masks and attack you and nothing happens. You get rounded up for small things. For anything. They are stupid criminals, unemployed, selling meth, selling opioids, selling cocaine, drinking and getting high, on probation for robbery and theft, DUIs up the ying-yang, lost their licenses for failure to pay child support, and are inbred, herpes-spreading, HIV-ridden lunatics who have turned racism into a cult fueled on their low self-esteem and unwarranted anger directed against my people.”
That assessment got a slow clap from me.
I said, “Jake Ellis, you are the most interesting man in the world.”
“Bruv, you know I look at them the same way they look at us. They know nothing about me, yet judge me. I know their history, have read of their global massacres. Their religious leaders are pedophiles, or pedophile-adjacent. They’ve never scared me. I can look in their eyes and they know I have seen their souls and know their truth. They’ve learned nothing about us and expect us to know everything about them. They cheat their way to the top and use nepotism as a crutch. They are put in charge of Africans much smarter and get to take the credit for African American excellence. I speak eight languages, and they talk to me like I’m the stupid one.”
“And they still call you nigger.”
“Bruv, that is the only bullet they have in their gun.”
“Silver bullet.”
“And the silver was stolen from the mines of Africa.”
I nodded. “And they manage to hit us in the heart every time.”
“What do you see when you look at them, bruv?”
“I see people who used to hang out on the Sunset Strip, drinking, popping pills, waking up with strangers, people who loved to have three-ways and orgies, then grew up.”
“They still have three-ways. They still cheat on their spouses. They are unhappy.”
I said, “And they have low credit scores.”
“That part. Bet most of them have credit scores below six hundred. They are struggling.”
I asked, “Your conclusion?”
“Told you. They are no different from us, yet they think they are superior.”
“No different. But in reality, they have police departments and a military, and one percent of them have more financial power than all the blacks in this country will ever have.”
“If they have power, it is only because you give them power.”
“We didn’t give them shit. They had guns and kept them away from us.”
“Guns. Take away their guns, the tables turn, and the colonialists run. You heard Esmerelda talking about RAM. They are organizing, buying up guns, have training camps, and are planning a war. The way black people have been treated, I’d think you’d be doing that.”
“Yeah. Well. We live in the mouth of madness, but we’re not the ones gone crazy.”
Jake Ellis sucked his teeth. “Weak men need guns in every room.”
“Weak men and gangsters. With guns in their hands, both are grave makers.”
“Bruv, if all black people ran out and bought twenty guns, laws would change.”
I nodded. “Well, yeah. From jaywalking to voting rights, they make the laws. They banned Chinese in 1882. Banned Indians in 1917. Banned Africans in 1924. Japanese internment in ’42. Now the Muslims. That’s not including Jim Crow and Black Codes.”
Jake Ellis said, “You know what a law is?”
“Educate me before your ice cream melts all over your hand, African.”
“Just some bullshit a rich, powerful colonialist writes down. He can write down any kind of immorality, and doesn’t have to be fair to nobody but the man writing it down, and if it’s unfair, that bullshit law doesn’t apply to him or his people. Whatever he wants, he can make legal. Whatever he is afraid of, he can make illegal. Whoever he despises, he makes laws that say they have to leave his country. His law said he could rape black women and it wasn’t a crime. I have read his laws, both new and old. He brought those same laws, writing on paper by his own hand, to Africa. The white man is his own god. He can use ink and paper, and people act like it’s just as good as the commandments your Moses allegedly brought from the top of some mountain in the Middle East. White man wrote down that everybody in Africa could be kidnapped and enslaved. He wrote down that the largest continent was a slave field, said that all the dark-hued human beings there were no better than cows, and men like him, men who could not bear the heat of his own god’s sun, men like him looked at what
he had written down, and because it was in the white man’s book, in the white man’s language, that was the law of the world. No one polled Africans. They stole people from West Africa. My people. The Dutch. The Spanish. The British. Your America. Like it was a contest. They stole your ancestors. My people. Because even though they knew it was immoral, they wrote down that it was legal. And wypipo from all over joined in.”
“Wypipo?”
“White people. That’s what they call them on Black Twitter. Wypipo.”
“I read that some pope went to Cameroon and stood up in front of everybody and apologized to black Africa for the participation of white Christians in the slave trade.”
“What does an apology from one man do? The systemic damage was done. What action came after the apology? What came with that apology? Did the pope go down into the basement at the Vatican and sell some of that African art they stole over the centuries and offer money to revitalize what they destroyed? Were diamonds and gold returned? Was a check sent from Europe to any part of Africa? Nah, bruv. Didn’t no butter come on that toast. That toast was dry and didn’t have no jelly or jam to make it sweet. It was a political apology, meaningless and never acted on, used to keep Africans in a white religion paying monetary tribute to a god who will never accept them. It was no better than the man who beats his wife, buys her flowers the next day, then beats her again the day after. White man’s apologies are as good as his treaties have been with the Native Americans. With Africans. With Haitians. With black Americans. The pattern is hidden in plain sight. When you apologize for your wrongs, after that comes actions. Where was the goddamn action? Who here got forty acres and a mule? I know slave owners were reimbursed for losing their slaves to morality. Slave owners were reimbursed. That is like paying the rapist, the burglar, the thief, because you made him stop his crime. Slaves received nothing for their free labor. Who did America value? And don’t get me started with the church. The church reinforced the establishment of colonial governments, especially through the destruction of societal, ethnic, and religious systems in Africa. One man apologized? Must be nice to be able to destroy other cultures, say you’re sorry, and walk away with reparations in your hand.”
“Jake Ellis, you should give a seminar at Eso Won. Or do a TED Talk.”
“Who would listen? Truth only works with those holding empty cups. White people, wypipo, why people, whatever you want to call them, have done the damage. They try and make themselves out to be the normal ones. They write the laws for others based on their point of view that everyone else is less human. Muslim, Native American, African, African American, all seen by them as less human. That’s why a man like Garrett can stand in my face and call me a nigger forty-eleven times. That word was his slave master’s whip today, and I felt every lash.”
“Motherfucker had the nerve to tell us what should insult us, and what should not.”
“White privilege mixed with deep-seated hate and ignorance and lack of a soul.”
I nodded. “Maybe President Abraham Lincoln was right.”
Jake Ellis licked his cone. “How so?”
“Racist Abe argued that blacks and whites should’ve been separated. Everybody’s favorite Republican said that the black man was inferior, would always be inferior, think he said we were incapable of learning, and stressed that blacks and whites should be separated.”
“We were separated. We were in Africa and they were over here raping, pillaging, and spreading diseases. We were apart until Mr. European decided he didn’t want to pay other white men a fair price to raise cotton, sugar, and tobacco. He partnered with Britain, crossed the Atlantic in ships named after their god and his son, kidnapped, killed, bribed with guns, and brought back slave labor to keep from paying his own people. We were separated. The good Christians stole Africans and made America great.”
“Outside of a race war, like you told Mrs. Garrett, how do we fix it?”
“Just like Nigeria, America needs purging. And the purging has to start first with the educational system and the religious establishments. You can’t depend on the oppressor’s god.”
I sipped my coffee and nodded. “My people have done a lot of marching and praying.”
“Your people are wearing out good shoes and begging an earless god.”
I took a breath, thought about my life, remembered all the black people like Baldwin who had left, found a place black people were treated better, and almost never came back. Josephine Baker. Nina Simone. Langston Hughes. Charlie Parker. Richard Wright. Paul Robeson. Wherever they went, it wasn’t ideal, but it was a different breed of white people, not that crowd that grew up and were brainwashed by Birth of a Nation. There was no Klan mentality. They were given respect.
“You’re right. I should have left here at least fifteen years ago.”
“You say that over and over and over and over. You are a scratched record.”
“I could have lived in Liberia, Switzerland, England, and Barbados awhile.”
“You could have gone to Ghana and met that beautiful Senegalese woman.”
“Just keep rubbing it in.”
“Am I lying?”
“I should have. She could have helped me forget an Ethiopian.”
“No woman could do that.”
“Well, she could have had fun trying.”
“You would have had African babies.”
“Yeah. Wanted more kids. But not by different women.”
“And now Margaux is pregnant and wants her father to give her fifty grand.”
“Seventy.”
“That’s criminal.”
“That bothers you.”
“It seems to bother me more than it bothers you, and that bothers me. And now with the trip to the Grove, we see someone else, another boy may be involved.”
“Yeah. That was why he ran away so fast.”
“If he knows you killed a man, that we killed a man, but he doesn’t know who I am as of yet, then our reputation was here before we were.”
“We killed one man. One accidental murder.”
“And no matter how it happened, that enhanced our status with San Bernardino. We moved up in pay grade. A man only has to kill one person to be seen as a killer the rest of his life. That is our reputation. Jimi Lee knew that. In the end, maybe she saw you as a killer, bruv.”
“I was her husband. I was her protector. Her provider.”
“You may have been her husband, but she saw you as a killer.”
“It was more than that. I was African American and she was African.”
“She told her family things. They thought you were a dangerous man. That was why a village came to ambush you. Forty men ambushed you, and I bet each one of them was afraid of you. You were a lion battling a pack of hyenas. Your daughter knows about Florida. We cleaned up the scene, but you never know about DNA. We didn’t leave a bloody glove, but you never know. Never know if a drop of blood was left behind. The dead man went missing and I know they searched his apartment. I know they looked for traces of blood. If Margaux says that man’s name, put it with yours, or ours, even if there is no dead body to be found, just based on circumstantial evidence, on the word from your child, a child who has no reason to lie other than the hate in her heart, we could be dead men walking. I need to know how many she has told about Florida.”
“She’s not after you. She’s been raised to hate me. I’m not human to her.”
“If she comes after you for fifty, she’ll come this way too, if she knows I’m in America.”
I said, “I want to convince myself that she wants that money to go away and have a big African wedding in Addis Ababa.”
“Don’t lie to yourself. That will keep you from lying to me.”
“I know. Pregnant or not, I know there’s more to it than that.”
“Your daughter is pregnant.”
�
�I think that part is true.”
“Why so certain?”
“Before she said it, she put her hand on her belly.”
“Before or after, as an afterthought?”
“Before.”
“A mother’s instinctive move to protect her unborn child.”
“From me.”
“From the world.”
“I wanted to hug her and she rejected me, was protecting her child from me.”
Jake Ellis was almost amused. “You’re about to become a grandfather.”
“Grandkid will dislike me as much as its mother and her mother.”
He paused, thinking. “How many people we done hurt?”
I shrugged. “Hundreds.”
“One job got out of control.”
“San Bernardino will never let us forget that.”
“One. That was a turd in the strawberry Kool-Aid of life.”
“And Margaux knows about that.”
Jake Ellis did an African finger snap, gruffed. “She knows the dead man’s name.”
I inhaled, rubbed my temples as I exhaled. “Never wanted her to know about this life.”
“Bruv, she has to keep her mouth shut.”
“I know.”
“If Margaux causes a problem, we both know San Bernardino has ice water for blood and won’t care if she’s your child.”
“I know.”
“San Bernardino won’t care if she’s pregnant. San Bernardino won’t give a fuck about whoever was in that red BMW, and won’t care about the pretty woman he had at his side.”
“I know. San Bernardino will protect the interests and reputation of San Bernardino.”
“You’d have to handle your own kid, bruv.”
“I know. Esmerelda will hit me back. Tomorrow we can make a house call.”
“If Margaux talks, if she gets mad because we tracked her to the Grove and the cops come for you, I will have to tell the boss what’s been popping today. San Bernardino will handle her. And while you are locked up, San Bernardino will pay people to get to you from the inside.”
We stopped talking, let the dry heat and smog sit on us for a moment. Overhead there was a rumble. A metro train passed by going west toward Santa Monica and the beaches; then another sped by going east toward downtown LA. I wished I hadn’t gone to meet my daughter.
Bad Men and Wicked Women Page 12