The Portable Promised Land

by Touré

  “Is there any consideration,” Mojo said, “of love?”

  The doctors looked at each other and rolled their eyes. They came to a room where men were seated in a circle. One of the men stood and in a halting voice said, “Hello. My name is Malik and I have B.O.”

  “Hello, Malik,” the group said in unison.

  “Three years ago I saw a Heather Locklear commercial. You know that one where she says, ‘ And I’m worth it.’”

  “We know, brother.”

  “Ever since then it’s been all about blondes. For the past three years I’ve dated only blondes.”

  “Bottle or natural?”

  “I didn’t care. Then I started reading Town & Country. I started watching the Today show just for Katie Couric. That made me late to work so many times that I lost my job. I wandered the streets, lingering in front of hair salons just to see women becoming blondes. I once sat in front of Sarah Jessica Parker’s apartment overnight in the freezing cold. I wish someone had told me they don’t film Sex and the City there.”

  “Join the club, bro,” someone said. There were understanding laughs around the room.

  “I read Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, Candace Bushnell’s Four Blondes, and Liz Smith’s Natural Blonde. I stood outside the gates of Spence and watched the parade of blond moms and daughters.” His eyes welled up. “I saw every movie Gwyneth Paltrow ever made.” He paused. “Even Bounce!”

  The room answered with a chorus of oooohs as in, That’s gotta hurt.

  “She wasn’t even blonde in that one,” one Black man said. “Yeah,” Malik said, as dejected as a fresh-dumped man. “I know.”

  They moved on to a room the doctors called the Repro room. “Men who have accepted their B.O. and worked through group therapy come here to study Black women,” Dr. Furthermucker whispered. It was a large open room, a beehive of action, where small groups of Black men were clustered everywhere — learning to cook, watching a tape of a Delta Sigma Theta step show, reading Alice Walker, learning how to braid hair and massage feet. “Those are the ones that are the closest to recovery,” Dr. Ziggaboo said, pointing to the hair braiders and foot rubbers. “They’re doing what we call Friendship Training. They’re being taught how to successfully relate to Black women.”

  “Now we’ll show you,” Dr. Furthermucker said, “how we deal with the more resistant strains of B.O.”

  They walked down a long hall. “This is what we call the C.O. room,” Dr. Ziggaboo said. Inside there were four Black men strapped into chairs, their arms immobilized, their eyes held open by little metal fingers. They were struggling to turn away from Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown.

  “C.O. stands for...?”

  “Clockwork Orange.”

  “You guys are sick.”

  “We used to start by showing Fatal Attraction, Dr. Further-mucker said, “to get the image of the crazed blonde in their head. But B.O.s watch a film like that and don’t understand how a blonde could be a villain. Now we start by overdosing on Pam Grier films. After a while we’ll throw on For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and take turns reading the Nikki Giovanni poem “Ego-Tripping.”

  “And when that doesn’t work.. .” Dr. Ziggaboo said.

  “Yes, when that doesn’t work there is one more step we can take to fight B.O. I warn you: what you are about to see is gruesome. We only use this as an absolute last attempt.”

  They walked down another long, sterile hallway to an all-white padded cell outfitted only with a bed. There was a Black man lying on the bed in a thick robe. “This,” Dr. Ziggaboo said, “is the S.T.D. room.” A door on the far side of the room opened and in came a beautiful blonde with straight, sunlight-colored tresses cascading down her back. She was completely naked and smiling sweetly. The man sat up quickly. There were wires attached to his chest and head. The blonde walked right up to the Black man and began kissing him softly on the lips. Suddenly, he jerked a little. “The point today is the same as in Pavlov’s day. We get them to associate blonde sex with pain.”

  “S.T.D. is.. .” Mojo said.

  “Shock Therapy Deterrent.”

  “What?!”

  She pushed him down onto the bed and began writhing on top of him. He shook uncontrollably for a moment, then went back to kissing her. Finally she reached down between his legs and took him in her hand. She seemed to be lining him up with her center, but as she guided him toward her he began to convulse as if having an epileptic fit. For a long moment he seemed possessed — eyes lost back in his head, jaw loose, legs rigid. When he stopped shaking he breathed heavily and seemed worn out. The blonde got up and sauntered out of the room. He lay on the bed alone, trying to catch his breath. “I think he needs to go through that again,” Dr. Ziggaboo said, a touch out of breath. “Don’t you, Doctor?” But the Doctor wasn’t listening. He was hypnotized.

  “Why am I here?!” Mojo yelled. “I’m just a guy on a fucking date. I just wanted to get to know her.”

  “You’ve completely swallowed the propaganda of the beauty mafia!”

  “What? I saw you looking at her! Are you guys paying attention to yourselves? Where do you get off acting like love is part of some political program? Why are you feeling you have jurisdiction over my love life?”

  “Look at you. So typical. Ten minutes with a blonde and you’re already talking about love.”

  “I’m not fucking saying I love her! I’m just saying I want to give her a chance. Why can’t I give her a chance?”

  “God you’re lost.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s fucking lost!”

  “You’re the one fighting over a woman you don’t even know!”

  “I’m just interested in the chance to know her! Can’t I just get to know her before we condemn her? Why am I even talking to you? What I do with my heart is my business.”

  He pulled away and began running through the corridors of insanity, running the long hallways at sprinter speed, running with the sound of rumbling footsteps behind him and the words, “You’ll damage your self-esteem!” in his ears, running without losing breath or energy, gaining speed as he went. His heart pumped as it never had before because his heart had felt the bars of the Love Dogma’s prison closing in and his was one of those hearts that needs to roam free, a wild horse of a heart that would not be politicized, controlled, or caged. He ran until the rumbling footsteps could not be heard and he found a window he could break and went through it and landed hard on the ground outside. He knew not what time it was or where exactly in Soul City he was, but he chose a road and ran, feeling the wind in his ears, feeling stronger with every step. He would run until he found a phone. He didn’t love her, but he wanted to know if he could.

  MY HISTORY

  • Mumia is freed and completely exonerated

  • The bullets aimed at Biggie and Tupac miss

  • Malcolm X’s birthday becomes a national holiday

  • All those times you watched the news and heard about some horrific or stupid crime and prayed the perp wasn’t Black and he was, well, he wasn’t

  • The Million Man March has a lasting impact, spreading the message that it’s a sin for Black men to prize jail time over education, to hit a woman, to leave behind a child they fathered

  • Amadou Diallo, Eleanor Bumpurs, Edmund Perry, and Michael Stewart survive the New York Police Department

  • NBA ballplayers strike again, demanding an ownership stake in the teams they fuel and an end to the player-massa relationship they have with owners. The NBA refuses to grant players the right to own teams. The stars break away to form their own league: Da BBA, Da Brothers Basketball Association. In Da BBA’s first championship finals, player-owner Allen Iverson leads the Harlem Hellfighters to the title and a hefty profit, defeating player-owner Kevin Garnett and the Kingston Kings

  • Stevie Wonder is named poet laureate of America

  • Kris Parker, formerly known as KRS–One, a one-time homeless teen and longtime pioneerin
g MC, defeats incumbent Rudy Giuliani to become the mayor of New York City

  • O.J. never happens. The whole damn thing

  • Spike’s career doesn’t wither after X, but he grows into a subtle and pioneering artist, our Martin Scorsese or film’s Marvin Gaye

  • Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust is a massive commercial hit, sparking a wave of artistically challenging Black films and sounding a death knell for the coon shows otherwise called Black Hollywood pictures

  • Anita Hill’s word matters and Clarence Thomas is embarrassed back into anonymity

  • Magic never gets AIDS

  • Paul Mooney gets his own prime-time TV show and creative carte blanche, scaring white Americans silly once a week

  • Chocolate City, a magazine founded by W. E. B. DuBois and once called The Crisis, is the most important magazine in Black America. It’s a national intellectual town hall on paper that eschews the cheerleader tone of Ebony, Essence, and Jet, as well as the high-falutin tone of academic publications, to be a critical and thought-provoking journal recording the rise and fall of Blacks in all formulations of the Black aesthetic, mixing an appreciation of high and low culture with a language aimed at the bourgeoisie and the boulevard, and all filtered through a soulful eye. A typical issue includes a photo– essay on tennis in Harlem by Roy DeCarava, a new short story by Toni Morrison, a report on kingpin-icon Nicky Barnes, a fond remembrance of Bill Bojangles Robinson, a hard-hitting exposé on the misdeeds of former Illinois Senator Carol Mosley-Braun, a report on the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, a fashion spread featuring supermodel Vanessa Laine-Bryant (wife of Oaktown Showstoppers’ player-owner Kobe Bryant), an essay by Cornel West limning the aesthetic similarities in the work of Jacob Lawrence and Jay-Z, a report on the newest hairstyles, handshakes, and slang words across the nation, a travel piece on vacationing in Nairobi, a recipe from B. Smith, and a review of the new neochitlin circuit play God Don’t Love Ugly but fuh Some Reason He Love Me

  • Hiphop never becomes materialistic and commercial, and continues as Black America’s CNN, putting knowledge on the street, building the political consciousness of a generation to a fever pitch, creating an army of hiphopified people who invade the tables of power

  • Black people get more angry at being disempowered than direspected, and getting their shoes stepped on becomes less relevant than not having many Black senators and federal judges, and locking down the block becomes less relevant than locking down Wall Street, and gettin mine by any means necessary becomes less relevant than us moving as a concerted block up the ladders of power in America, each one teaching one

  • Black leaders emerge in times of crisis, men and women complex enough to unite most of Black America, electric enough to inspire all of America, established enough to never be discredited, clean enough to never be smeared, committed enough to never be bought, and smart enough to never fall into the trap of screaming Cracker! at Mister Charlie to win us over while sacrificing their place at the national table of power

  • Jesse is successful in building a massive international economic boycott of Apartheid South Africa and De Klerk is brought to his figurative knees. He takes the national airwaves to tell his white countrymen that the time to concede has arrived

  • Michael Jackson’s savaging of his face, his invitation to plastic surgeons everywhere to snatch the Africanisms from it, is seen as a national tragedy with potentially devastating impact on the Black self-image. His face is named a national landmark reigniting the Black Is Beautiful movement

  • Speaker of the House Barbara Jordan writes legislation that leads to reparations for all Black Americans who can somehow prove at least one slave relative. Millions learn about their past in greater detail than ever. The government grants $10,000 to thousands of African-American families in the form of cash, food stamps, or an education voucher. Reparees also have the choice of a one-way plane ticket to Ghana, coach class

  • Marvin Gaye does not go to his father’s house that day, is not shot, and goes on to look at the crack-infested world of 80s America and open our eyes with a new What’s Goin On

  • Curtis Mayfield and Teddy Pendergrass sidestep their tragedies

  • Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Geronimo Pratt are never caught

  • Roberto Clemente’s plane never goes down

  • Miles never beats Cicely

  • Marley never dies

  • Basquiat survives heroin

  • Sly survives coke

  • Pryor survives himself

  • Muhammad Ali wins a Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-Vietnam-War efforts. At his ceremony he play fights with the Swedes

  • A disillusioned Black CIA operative becomes a double agent and directs Los Angeles street gangs on a mission to infiltrate and destroy COINTELPRO

  • James Earl Ray’s bullet just barely misses Dr. King. King goes on to beat Nixon in ’72 and becomes the second Black president of America. President King leads us out of Vietnam and into a new era of national unity and equality

  • Ralph Ellison publishes his fourth novel, Cadillac Flambé

  • James Brown finds the perfect beat

  • Klan sympathizers in Birmingham, Alabama, plant a bomb in a Black church. Four little girls file in, as do a few hundred others, but somehow the bomb never goes off

  • Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, Negro-League superstars, get their chance in baseball’s major leagues and quickly show they’re playing on a level far above everyone else. The popular question of the day shifts from would Negro-League players cut it in the majors to would Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig have survived in the Negro Leagues?

  • Duke Ellington, Gordon Parks, and Langston Hughes collaborate on a film about Black life in America. It’s called We All Is Genius

  • The gorgeous Lena Horne becomes the first Black woman on the cover of Vogue

  • Emmet Till is able to run away from the mob and is never lynched

  • Bird survives heroin

  • Zora Neale Hurston’s genius is recognized during her lifetime and she lives comfortably, able to do even greater work and not die poor and alone

  • The Tuskegee syphilis experiment never starts

  • Stepin Fetchit and Butterfly McQueen say no to the embarrassing movie roles they’re offered, preferring starvation to creating enduring images of Black buffoonery

  • Marcus Garvey sets sail for Liberia, taking one million people with him

  • George Washington Carver invents the automobile

  • Madame C. J. Walker’s hair grease and straightening comb are so popular that she sells to nearly every Black person in America and passes John D. Rockefeller as the country’s richest person

  • Harriet Tubman leads her one hundred thousandth slave through the Underground Railroad and into freedom

  • All those who went to tell massa of planned slave rebellions find their mouths magically glued shut

  • Nat Turner’s band of machete-clutching runaway slaves roaring through the South killing massas and their families grows and grows until he’s leading a full-blown army that plunges the United States into civil war. After six years of battle, with slaves and abolitionists versus proslavery Americans, Turner’s band wins. Nat Turner is installed as president of the United States. Reconstruction takes on a whole new meaning

  • As soon as the chains are removed from the arms and ankles of the first batch of Africans in America they turn to face the Atlantic, bend deep, lift off, and fly right back to Africa

  • When Europeans first try to take slaves from Africa they unknowingly go to the fiercest tribe of warriors on the continent. All but one of the Europeans are slaughtered and all of Europe hears of the ferocious and unstoppable warriors in Africa. They never again try to take slaves from the continent and right now you’re chilling in Africa.

  THE PLAYGROUND OF THE

  ECSTATICALLY BLASÉ

  You remember how things were last summer when Jamais was brand-new and like, the o
nly thing the city was talking about. The French bistro decor. The barefoot girl in the glass case behind the bar sitting on a pillow reading Paradise Lost, all night every night. The DJ, Mark Ronson, making people dance by the bar as they waited for their table, then dance at their table as they ate, then dance in the aisles long after the meal was done. The servers and hostesses all impossibly gorgeous, from the Brazilian dude with orange skin and green eyes, to the platinum blonde with a nubian rear, to the bald blue-black Nigerian brother with royal cheekbones, to the six-foot-three Lebanese chick with bone-straight black hair that stretched down past her tiny waist and just touched the top of her heart-shaped ass. One of them would saunter over to your table as if it were the end of a model’s runway wearing this look that said, I couldn’t care less what you want but tell me anyway, roll their eyes as you ordered, not write down a word you said, and return forty or fifty minutes later with some plates that were probably not what you’d ordered. But no matter what they set in front of you, you ate it because the place was always crammed, even at four in the morning, so you knew it could be an hour before you saw another plate, and the servers were so aggressively insouciant they were intimidating even to a New Yorker, but mostly, you knew, if you knew anything about Jamais, that whatever you were served would be incredible. The food was epiphanal. I don’t mean this in any hyperbolic way. I mean, if you ate there you had an epiphany. The food hit your palate and immediately reconfigured the molecular structure of your brain. Even the city’s most shallow and self-centered found the food altered your mood, calmed your soul, and delicately led you into a sortof meditation where you began considering your life, and by the time your plate was clean, you were on your way to figuring out a path toward inner peace and what you would do with the rest of your days.