LeRoy took a seat and Sovereign did too—not behind his desk but in the second visitor’s chair, next to his superior.
“The CEO called down to ask about you, Mr. James.”
“Oh?”
“He’s worried about the assault charges pending against you.”
“I wasn’t aware of any pending charges,” James said.
“Our legal department called the city prosecutor. He said that they were considering charges—assault, attempted murder, and if this Johnson dies, maybe manslaughter, maybe worse.”
“Oh.”
That bumblebee sprang to life in Sovereign’s chest.
“What do you intend to do?” LeRoy asked.
“My intentions are pretty much meaningless. What you do is more the question.”
“It was suggested that we let you go,” Martin LeRoy said. “But I told them that you’ve been an exemplary employee for decades and that we should at least wait and see what the lawyers have to say.”
“Really?”
“You sound surprised.”
Sovereign thought of Solar disowning Drum-Eddie. He wondered at the war waging in his own heart and mind.
“If it looks like things are going to get bad, Mr. LeRoy, I’ll quit on my own. You can tell the CEO that.”
At one thirty Sovereign left for lunch. He called a Red Rover car and had it take him to 86th Street, where he encountered the plump, freckle-faced doorman—Roger.
“Are you all right, Mr. James?” Roger asked.
“Yes. Fine.”
“I was reading about you in the papers. They were trying to say that you faked your blindness, that you tricked that guy. If they take you to court you have them call me, sir. Have them call me and I will testify.”
Instead of answering, Sovereign just held out a hand. He was deeply moved, and even more confused, by the emotional tone of the redhead.
“I’ve been remembering the story of Odysseus,” were the first words he said to Seth Offeran.
“Lost at sea,” Offeran said in a knowing way.
“The story of a man lost at sea told by a blind man so that others could be entertained and history might be passed down.”
“You see yourself as a historian?”
“As a blind man.”
“But you are no longer blind, Mr. James.”
“Maybe not,” Sovereign said. “I mean … you ask me how I see myself and I think that what I’ve seen has not been true. My mind is full of misinformation and that can’t make up for lenses that cause me to think I’m comprehending a world that I have no true knowledge of.
“Homer saw his world better than I do mine. What I’ve done is to make everybody up and then attach so many meanings to the words coming out of their mouths that almost everything I think I know is really a lie.”
“I don’t understand, Sovereign,” Dr. Offeran said.
“In the words of the poet, ‘I’ve wasted my life.’ ”
Sovereign could feel himself breathing and again he was transported to the wharf his grandfather talked about, looking down on the boat that he’d never seen.
“The snake is possibly the luckiest of all creatures,” Offeran posed.
“What makes you say that?”
“He sheds his skin, goes into hiding because his new scales are sensitive, and then comes out into life, leaving behind his old bonds and pains.”
There came a shooting pain in Sovereign James’s side. He winced and then glowered.
“What?” Offeran asked.
“Talking to a black man about shedding his skin and you ask what?”
“Asking a man to let go of his misperceptions,” Offeran corrected. “This is not about race.”
“Maybe not, Seth. But here you sit on your brown chair talking to me like you were a textbook deciphering symbols. Your words are deader than a snake’s husk.”
“My mother died three weeks ago,” the psychoanalyst said. “She had suffered for six years. My sister and I took turns staying at her apartment, sleeping on the sofa, so that she wouldn’t have to experience the dislocation of the nursing home. At the funeral I could see the relief in my sister’s eyes. I was happy for her and I felt relieved too.”
“You mother was your skin?”
“The snake doesn’t look at the husk and call it a waste. He simply feels the exhilaration of freedom and the strangeness of transformation.”
“So you’re saying that I’m dragging the past with me.”
“I’m saying that there comes a time to let go.”
Sovereign intended to go back to work after the session but instead he wandered the streets of Manhattan, thinking about what lay beneath his dark skin.
After many hours and no answers he found himself at the entrance of a hospital named after the patron saint of the poor and infirm. Going to an official window he asked a question and received an answer. The woman behind the information counter hadn’t even looked up at him, hadn’t seen him, he thought.
The upper hallway smelled of chemicals and sweat infused with the faint odor of urine wafting from doorways. There came sounds of meaningless clicking, and television sets reverberated on the hard surfaces of the walls, ceilings, and floors.
The door to his room was open. He lay in the bed and she sat there next to him holding his limp, insensate hand.
“Toni,” Sovereign whispered.
She was startled and stood up from the metal chair.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I was just walking and I remembered my doorman saying something about him being brought here.”
“Why would you come to see him?”
Sovereign glanced at the man in the hospital bed. There were bruises on Lemuel’s face and tubes in his mouth and nostrils. An IV needle connected to a clear drip bag was stuck in a vein of his right arm, and various electrodes and wires ran from the bedside to a large, many-screened monitoring device. The lights in the machine throbbed like the electronic representation of a heart.
“I didn’t mean to cause this,” James said.
“It’s like a dream or a movie,” Toni Loam murmured. “Like something that happens, that was meant to happen even though you nevah wanted it.”
“You love him,” Sovereign stated.
She looked away from both men and Sovereign felt a faint smile etch itself on his lips.
“I should go,” he said.
She returned to her chair.
“Are you coming later?” he asked.
“I … I don’t think so.”
Late that night the phone rang. Sovereign was aware of being alone in the bed. He was thinking, as the phone was ringing, that he’d had unprotected sex with the woman who was no longer in his bed—not the night before but in the morning. It had seemed so natural that he didn’t even question it—at the time.
“Hello?”
“Sovereign.”
“Drum, I didn’t expect to hear from you for at least a year—if ever.”
“I looked you up online, Brother. Damn. You’re in big trouble, man.”
“Could be.”
“Maybe you better come on down, JJ. Down here a man can get lost. At least, he’ll never be found.”
“I don’t have any trouble getting lost.”
“You know what I mean, Sovereign. Once the man is on your ass he gonna stay there like a dog on a scent.”
“Is that why you never came back?”
“We talkin’ ’bout you, man.”
“Why don’t you come home, Eddie? Come on home. You said you always wanted to live in New York.”
“That boat has sailed, brother.”
“The world is round. That boat could be coming back to harbor.”
The laugh in Sovereign’s ear was familiar, half-forgotten. It brought him all the way back to the threshold of childhood.
“You changed, Sovy,” Drum-Eddie James said. “You sound like you lettin’ the world in.”
“Will you
come?”
“Mama said that you haven’t seen her since two weeks after the FBI came lookin’ for me.”
“You come here and we’ll go see her together.”
“Take care a’ yourself, JJ,” Drum said before breaking the connection.
At eleven twenty-seven that morning Sovereign James was at his desk deep into the applications of potential employees. Just one day back and his desk was already piled with work.
He enjoyed leafing through the résumés. For some reason his job seemed easier and clearer than it had ever been before. There was challenging information to decipher but no longer was he scrutinizing the words for secret codes about gender, race, and revolution. The forms were filled with truths and lies, hopes and hapless fatalism.
Hardin Pope had attended high school in Virginia and college in Atlanta. He ended his bout with higher learning at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. There he started out as a mathematician but changed his course to modular systems design. When Mr. Pope came in for his interview, Sovereign decided, the proper question to ask would be why he changed his major.
He scribbled that note on the form, placed it on the interview pile, and was reaching for another folder when someone knocked on his door. He wondered if Shelly was away from her desk. The young receptionist often was in the toilet or down at the staff kitchen flirting with the men from the mailroom.
“Come in,” he said.
The phone rang.
Darius Maynard opened the door and entered, followed by six other employees: Donna Price from accounting; Lola Alifah, who managed the new accounts in the marketing department; Winston Shatz, the security supervisor; Warren Chisel; LeAnne Moore; and finally Bob Simon, assistant to the vice president in charge of operations. Four of the men and Lola carried plastic red folding chairs.
Sovereign smiled. He had never before seen the seven African-American employees, handpicked by him, gathered together. And even though he now questioned the validity of his actions he still felt a parental kinship.
“Mr. James,” Darius began.
“Shelly?” Sovereign called out.
The phone rang for the third time.
“Shelly?” No answer.
Sovereign held up a hand to Darius. The others were settling in.
“My receptionist stepped away,” James said. “I’ll just take this and then switch it over to the automated system.… Hello?”
“Sovereign.”
“Hey, Toni. I’m surprised to hear from you.”
“Lem’s mother called my moms last night. She was cryin’ ovah him,” the young woman said, bulling her way headlong into a speech that she had obviously practiced. “She said that he was dyin’ and that it was because a’ me. So that’s why I went down there. And when I saw him it hurt my heart. I know that he jumped you. I know that you went crazy because he attacked you in your own house. But when you walked in that hospital room and he was lyin’ there I felt so bad that I couldn’t even think about bein’ wit’ you. That’s why I didn’t come ovah.…”
“Toni, I—”
“I know I shoulda called you or sumpin’,” she said, cutting him off. “But I was hurtin’ and I didn’t know how to talk. I mean, I was only thirteen when I first started seein’ Lem. It’s like I’ve known him since the first day I was a woman. But I don’t wanna let you go, Sovereign. I don’t want you to change the locks and tell the doormen to send me away. I know I should have called but I couldn’t, but I can’t just stop seein’ you neither.…”
“I’m in the middle of a meeting,” Sovereign managed to say. “Come on by tonight and we’ll have dinner and talk about it.”
“You not just sayin’ that?”
“Come over at seven and we’ll go out for a nice French dinner.”
There was the pressure of tears behind his eyes, but Sovereign held them back. The group had settled in their chairs. He wondered what they were doing there and why the child’s words moved him so. These thoughts blended together, strained for unity, but failed.
“Mr. James,” Darius said again.
“I’m all yours, Mr. Maynard.” He hung up the phone and hit the buttons necessary to channel future calls to the answering system.
“We all got together last night after work and talked about what you told me yesterday,” Darius began. “But just to get it right … You said that you held us black job applicants to a higher standard.”
Sovereign took in a deep breath through his nostrils. He gazed around at the various shades of his secret army, wondering if maybe this was a coup or a betrayal. Then he considered the inflated nature of his thoughts. Regardless … events had taken him beyond caring about Techno-Sym and his future, or his past, there.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”
“Why?” Lola Alifah demanded. She was dark skinned, forty, with ringlets for a hairstyle, two children at home, and no husband. She’d gone to Columbia but Sovereign hadn’t held that against her.
“Because I thought that if I hired only the best people of color, one day you guys would take over the company.”
“Isn’t that crazy?” Warren Chisel, the biracial data editor, asked. He was from California and had to go to a junior college before he was prepared for UCLA.
“The world is crazy,” Sovereign said, not looking directly at Warren. “Most people work for the system knowing that the cards are stacked against them. Mostly they don’t do anything about it. I figured I would.”
Bob Simon, blunt featured and brown like apple butter, stared, not intending to join the conversation. Bob was Sovereign’s gamble. He had talent and ambition. There was a chance that he’d end up identifying with the bosses, but, Sovereign thought, even if he turned against his fellows his example as a leader might outweigh the drawbacks.
None of this mattered anymore. He didn’t care if Bob reported the meeting, if the people in that room, or outside of it, turned against him. He was wrong for leaving his ailing grandfather with a loaded gun, wrong for never telling his father that he was the product of an infidelity, wrong for abandoning his mother and failing to come to his own father’s funeral. Wrong—but he never knew it, as innocent as a tarantula feasting on a baby chick.
“But, Mr. James,” Donna Price said, “when were you going to tell us about this … this conspiracy of yours?”
Donna met all the secret criteria Sovereign had made for his ideal employees of color, but that wasn’t why he’d hired her. She was voluptuous and beautiful. Her clothes fit her like skin, not tight but effortless in color and motion. He’d even asked her out to dinner once, but she said that it wasn’t proper for an employee to date her superior.
“Never,” he said, answering her question.
“Never? Then how was it going to work?”
“It’s working right now,” Sovereign said. “The fact that you lodged a complaint against me proves that you are talking. The positions you have achieved prove that I was right about your abilities.”
“But you gave us an unfair advantage,” Bob Simon said. “How can we trust in our own abilities if you protected us from real competition?”
Sovereign was surprised and pleased that Bob entered the conversation. It gave him, the old him, hope that his gamble was won.
“Before the turn of the century—the twenty-first century, not the twentieth—I would have said that I had to give you extra points because the playing field was tilted against you, Bob. I would have said that and I would have been right too. But the millennium changed and I wasn’t paying attention. My mind, my brain is living in the past but our bodies are here and now. You have to forgive me for doing what I’ve done, because I’ve disrespected you, but I didn’t know. That’s why I told Darius about what I did. I wanted you people to understand that I wasn’t working against you the way you thought but in another way, a more insidious way. I took actions that were correct at the start, but now the battle lines have been redrawn and you are the victims of friendly fire.”
; This speech ended in silence. The people he’d hired had mildly befuddled looks on their faces.
“This is crazy,” Lola said.
“It’s like I went to sleep in America,” Sovereign agreed, “and I woke up in the world.”
“Now let me get this straight,” LeAnne Moore said. “You’ve been here more than twenty years, smiling at the white boss and hiring so that all the black people would have an advantage.”
“Not just blacks,” Sovereign said. “So-called Hispanics, one Native American, and some Asians too. Mostly it was blacks, though, mostly so.”
LeAnne was tall for a woman, five-ten, and round. She had the happy nature of a big person—what Sovereign thought of as natural humor. But she wasn’t smiling in that room, on that afternoon.
“From the first day you were here?” she asked.
“I studied political theory in college,” he explained, “Marx and Bakunin, the socialists and revolutionaries. It came to me that conscious revolution in the new world was impossible because it was idealistic. A workable revolution could be designed, but the people doing the work shouldn’t have to shoulder the expectations. Everyday working people have to raise children and pay the bills; they don’t have the time to worry about the reorganization of society. The professors and students lived in an ether removed from the exigencies of the everyday.
“That’s when I decided to go into human resources—I thought that I might make a difference without slogans and false optimism.”
“You decided that in college?” Warren Chisel said, as mild astonishment spread across his face.
The question nipped at Sovereign like an unexpected animal bite. What had he been thinking all those years? Could it be true that he felt he was guiding the future of an entire international corporation inside a moment of self-perceived political clarity?
The conversation went on for nearly two hours. Shelly Monteri came back and was surprised to find the impromptu meeting in progress. Sovereign sent her away, asking her to close the door and not to allow any interruption.
His hires asked questions and he answered as honestly as he could. In his mind he was questioning himself, feeling both a failure and quite satisfied.
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