by Gayl Jones
Do you know Jamey never saw me perform, she said. He doesn’t approve of me being a singer, you know. I don’t even keep any of my albums up at the farm, because I know he won’t listen to them. I’d be embarrassed for him to listen to me anyway, I mean, knowing he doesn’t approve. If someone doesn’t approve of you anyway, how do they know if you’re good? And if he came to one of my performances at one of the clubs or even a concert, how’d I know it’s really me he’s hearing singing, or if he’s just hearing the kinda singer he thinks I am? I don’t think the others’ applause would change his opinion, like that guy in that movie. He heard the others applaud the person he didn’t think any good, so that changed his opinion. He didn’t think the person a good singer himself, but he figured that so many people were applauding this person at this rock concert, that they must be good. Jamey would hear the others applaud at my concerts and be even more convinced I ain’t any good. He’d hear the applause at my concerts and it would even more convince him that his opinion that I’m not a good singer is right. Or maybe I’d start singing like the singer he thinks I am and not the singer I know I am, just knowing he’s in the audience. Like that time you told me you thought you saw Jamey in the club, and then I started singing like crap, like the singer he thinks I am, and then I realized it wasn’t Jamey in the club and then I sang pretty good, at least like the idea I have of myself. He thinks enough of us jigs are singers and dancers anyway. That I’m just another stereotype. Playing the Nigger Entertainer. Like that magazine I subscribe to, for African-American entertainers, he doesn’t think we need a magazine like that. How does he know I ain’t playing myself? Maybe that’s who some of us are. Maybe I’m the Archetypal Nigger Entertainer and not the Stereotypical Nigger Entertainer. Should I run from who I am? I remember we were watching this show and they had these so-called high achievers and when they got to the colored girl, they asked her what were her high achievements in and she said proudly, Singing, Dancing, Acting. . . . I think Jamey was expecting her to say something like Mathematics, Chemistry, or some of the other sciences, you know. Or even the languages, being some sorta linguistic prodigy. Russian, Chinese, Japanese. But she says Singing, Dancing, Acting. . . . one of the high schools of the performing arts, you know. Jamey just changed the channel. Nonsense. To tell the truth, I was kinda embarrassed myself, her considering those high achievements. Talents, maybe, but should they have included her among the high achievers? I mean, maybe I coulda understood her naiveté, to think those high achievements, but I know the folks who included her among the true high achievers weren’t that naive. I mean, when the whites and the Asian Americans were saying such things like Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics and then she says Singing, Dancing, Acting, They coulda brought a black girl or boy out there who said Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, you know, or some of Jamey’s students, like one of his former students’s a oceanographer in South Florida, and a colored girl, they shoulda had someone on like that, the real achievements, but instead they get someone who says Singing, Dancing, Acting, the stereotypes. . . . I was kinda embarrassed myself. So he’s never watched me perform. Never. Never listened to any of my recordings. Never wanted to encourage me in that shit. The only colored girls he’ll listen to are the divas, the opera singers. And only the best of the best divas. Jessie, Leontyne, Kathleen—is it Kathleen? All their different classical training, and the different languages they’ve got to learn. They’re like Renaissance women. They’re like Rembrandts. But me? Another Nigger Girl Entertainer. I was good, though, wasn’t I, girl?
Yeah, but how come you asked them about that Kama Sutra?
Ain’t you read the Kama Sutra?
Naw.
I’ll have to buy you a copy. James has a copy. When I was up at the farm I saw it. A present from one of his little infatuations. Maybe she’s a great infatuation. I don’t know. A woman who works with him at his think tank, I know that much. An Indian woman, I mean, an Indian from India. I’d forgotten all about the Kama Sutra, I’d read it once when I was in college. Well, I didn’t read it. I saw it once when I was in college. You know, the translation by Sir Richard Burton. Well, you don’t know, because you don’t know what the Kama Sutra is.
Richard Burton, the actor?
Naw, Sir Richard Burton. Supposed to know twenty-some languages and even more dialects. An explorer of sorts, a translator, and a lord in Queen Victoria’s England who usedta travel around Africa and India, you know, the old British Empire. Anyway, he usedta translate what the Victorians considered nasty little books, you know. The Amorous Man and the Sensuous Woman, you know. But not just men and women, even the gods can be amorous and sensuous. The West can’t imagine gods who are sensual, you know. Because spirituality is supposed to transcend the sensuous, you know, because all the Western gods and holy men are supposed to be virgins. Or celibates. You can’t be holy and sexual. Anyway, the Victorians could only see the sensuality, you know, not the spirituality, or they couldn’t understand a spirituality where there’s. . . . to tell the truth I don’t understand it myself, spiritualized sensuality or sensualized spirituality. I’m too corrupted by Western thought, I suppose. Whenever I look at the Kama Sutra it just makes me horny. Did I tell you when we first met, Jamey thought I was an Indian from India? The way I wore my hair, and the sorta clothes I wore then, those madras blouses, you know, and long skirts, and when Cathy told him I was in the sciences, for some reason, he thought I was Indian. Then, of course, he found out I wasn’t. The accent he thought he heard was in his own mind. I told Jamey he forgot his Kama Sutra, that I didn’t want it at my farm or in my possession. How could someone have a book like that in their possession and not just stay horny. . . .
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Back in the hotel room she sat with her legs thrown over a crimson chair. She was looking through an order form of paperback books she’d been working on: 100 Best Songs of the 20’s and 30’s, Test Your Own IQ: How Smart Are You? (she wanted me to take the test, but I refused), several Dorothy Sayers detective novels featuring Sir Peter Wimsey, Caligula: Emperor of Rome, another Jim Thorpe biography, Mao Tse-tung and His China, Brontë Country, Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, The Adventures and Misadventures of Peter Beard in Africa, Lupe Velez and Her Lovers, D. H. Lawrence: The Story of Marriage, Il Duce’s Other Woman, The History of “The Gingerbread Man.” She tossed me The Jockey Club’s Illustrated History of Thoroughbred Racing in America and kept looking through the other books: O’Keeffe, Iva Toguri, Dictionary of the American Indian, The Cherokee Nation, The Counterculture, Concise Encyclopedia of the American Indian, Vamps and Tramps, Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: The Americas Before Columbus, Anansi the Spider, Frederick Douglass, Black Americans: The FBI Files, Malcolm X: The Speeches, Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War, Ultra Intelligence: How to Make Fake Identification Papers and Become Any Nationality You Want to Be, Resistance in Hitler’s Germany, The New Superpowers: Germany, Japan, the U.S., and the New World Order, International Politics, The Amanda Wordlaw Reader, The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay, an anthology of African-American literature edited by Clarence Major, The Moby Dick Project, Private Security Systems, Smalltown Girl Big City Notions.
You don’t have the name of the anthology edited by Clarence Major, I said. I can’t order books without the name.
I don’t know what the name of it is. I just know it’s edited by Clarence Major. Not The New Black Poetry. I got that one when I was in grad school. I mean, one of his recent anthologies. You know, I’d like to record one of his poems. Maybe I could get Jimmy Cuervo to do the music. You know, one of his early poems, or one of the jazz-type poems. Do you think any of his poems have been put to music? Can you imagine making a musical out of one of his novels? Avant-garde, you know.
Then she told me to call him.
Call who? I asked. Clarence Major? I don’t think he’d want you singing one of his poems. Who’s his agent?
Call him, she said. I don�
�t mean Clarence Major, fool.
Call who? I asked. Norvelle?
I still can’t believe that you’ve been to Africa. I can usually tell people who’ve been to Africa. I don’t mean they get Africanized, I mean I can just usually tell people who’ve been to Africa. I almost been to Africa. My friend Cathy Shuger, the sculptor and her husband Ernest were going to the Sudan, and they invited me after I got my divorce from Jamey, you know. But they’re weirdos. Ern’s okay. He’s the one wrote a nice article about Jamey for one of those popular science magazines. But Cathy’s a real weirdo. But they been to Africa, though. Cathy heard about that so-called new slavery in the Sudan and wanted to go over there. I think there was some sort of advisory for American tourists not to go over there to the Sudan, though, so Cathy says, I ain’t an American tourist, I’m an American artist. So I think they went to Canada first and then went to the Sudan from Canada. I think they got as far as the Ivory Coast, though. Is it still called the Ivory Coast? I’m sure Jamey’s told you about Cathy and her husband? She sometimes tries to kill him. Now she’s seeing this Chinese allergist, I think he’s Chinese, who thinks she’s got an allergy to wheat. And’s put her on some kinda allergy medication. Jamey’s interested in that himself. You know, if her so-called lunacy might just be biochemical. You know, Jamey’s interested in shit like that. I hadn’t seen Cathy for years and then she writes me telling me she heard about my divorce and wants me to go to the Sudan with her and Ern, and telling me about how they think that her insanity might be an allergy to wheat. Her and that Amanda Wordlaw are friends, you know. That novelist I read. I haven’t met her myself, though. She usedta run around the globe with Cathy and Ern, you know. A lot of rumors that they were some kinda ménage à trois, you know. I don’t believe that shit myself, ’cause I know Cathy and Ern. I think Amanda got fed up with their bullshit, I mean Cathy’s bullshit, so Cathy hears about my divorce, you know, and wanted me to go to the Sudan on some expedition to find out whether it’s true that there are still slaves in the Sudan, so Cathy’s on the freedom trail thinking she can buy some of their freedom, you know. I mighta been interested in going with them to the Sudan, you know, but not with Cathy over there singing another one of her freedom songs, or her equivalent to freedom songs, you know. Another freedom song, you know. She don’t like my music either. I mean, she likes my voice, unlike Jamey, but she thinks I oughta just be singing freedom songs, you know. Just music with meaning, you know, the music of ideas, the music of revolution, the music of revolutionary ideas. Then I saw her again in New York, that’s where I met you, and she told me that this Chinese allergist they met in the Ivory Coast, I think, says he thinks she might have an allergy to wheat. They were sitting in this café and he noticed how she started behaving when she started eating this wheat loaf. You know, he’s sort of an expert witness, you know, as well as an allergist, whenever allergies cause criminal behavior, you know, and so he saw the way she was behaving after eating this wheat loaf, and how when the waiter put knives and forks on the table, Ern returned them, and put out plastic knives for Cathy, you know, and then after she ate this wheat loaf Cathy reached toward Ern with one of those plastic knives. Every woman’s fantasy.
Not mine.
I think it’s a game with Cathy, though. People say she’s a lunatic, but I just think it’s a game myself. Of course, if they prove it’s an allergy, then it ain’t exactly a game. But I think it’s still a game with Cathy, though, allergy or not. ’Cause I remember in New York, Cathy was telling me about this woman she went to art school with, some bitch, who said that she wouldn’t let anyone kill her art, that she’d kill them first, some shit like that, so I think it got in Cathy’s imagination, you know. Whether a lunatic’s imagination or pure imagination, I don’t know. They were talking about women and art, you know, this friend of hers and Cathy, and about the relationship between men and art, and how most women don’t usually behave like Gauguin, you know, that women artists don’t pull a Gauguin, you know, not most of them, like if Cathy had to choose between Ern and her art, her sculpture, you know, she’d choose Ern, you know, so maybe she imagines that Ern does things, you know, to kill her art, to sabotage it anyway. That he’s always doing these things to make her choose between her art and him, and she’s always choosing him, but then what this bitch told her kinda got into her imagination anyway. So she doesn’t like the fact that she can’t pull a Gauguin, you know, that she can’t devote herself to Art the way that male artists do, and people still consider them good people, you know, or good artists, if they’re good artists. That how they treat their women doesn’t mean anything usually. They’re still great artists. I mean, if they’re great artists. But women can’t be good women and good artists. Something like that. That’s why she admires Amanda Wordlaw, sorta in a perverse way, ’cause she abandoned her husband Lantis and her daughter Panda—Panda usedta be one of Jamey’s students when he taught at the university, so he knows all the dirt about Amanda Wordlaw, you know. I mean she abandoned her husband Lantis and her daughter Panda for Art and her Art ain’t shit. I mean, if you’re a woman and you’re gonna pull a Gauguin seems like to me you gotta be pretty sure your Art is Art. Well, some of her stories in The Amanda Wordlaw Reader are pretty good, almost Art, but seems like to me if you’re gonna be a fool for Art, you gotta be pretty sure your Art is Art. I read Amanda Wordlaw ’cause she’s entertaining, but the shit is still shit, I don’t know. Some women are fools, I’ve met Ern, and he seems like a nice guy to me. Sorta like Jamey. But Jamey ain’t that nice. Maybe Ern ain’t that nice. I think he just takes that shit from Cathy, though. He ain’t the sorta man just to take anyone’s shit, you know. Jamey neither. But Jamey don’t even take shit from me, though. Jamey don’t take shit from nobody, least the Jamey I know. That’s why I call him sweet. He knows what I mean. Why, if I behaved like Cathy, least as rumor has it, Jamey and I’d’ve been divorced even before we even got married. I mean, I didn’t even pull a Cathy and we’re divorced. Well, I can tell who’s been to Africa, though. And you don’t look like you been to Africa or even almost Africa. You don’t even look like you been to Detroit, Call him.
Sometimes when I’m with Joan I gotta look around to remember where we are. The generic hotel room. Oriental carpet, though—plush, silky, flowered.
Norvelle? You said you didn’t get the number or the name of his hotel. I can’t call all the hotels in Zanzibar. Plus, he’s probably not in Zanzibar now, knowing Norvelle, He could be in some little African village that don’t even have a telephone. I think he’s still with that Masai woman I told you about anyway, He’s writing this big book about her healing. He wants it to be a big book as comparable to the books on Western medicine, you know. They ain’t lovers or nothing, at least I don’t think so, ’cause I think they got a tradition that the healing women are celibate or something, I think it’s their tradition, I know it’s one of the traditions among some of the healing women that he’s written about among the shaman women and healing women, you know, but he wants to write this big book about her healing, I got a note from his editor who wanted permission to use some of my photographs. You know I been to Africa, ’cause how could I take photographs of Africa, but ain’t been to Africa.
You ain’t been to Africa.
I couldn’t take photographs of Africa and ain’t been to Africa, I got photographs I took in Africa. I mean, they’re in Norvelle’s possession, but the credits is still me. He can’t use any of those photographs without crediting them to me and paying me for them. I tried to get his address from that editor, but he claim he don’t know it, that Norvelle secretive about his address. Seem like if Norvelle really wanted me, he could just give that editor his address and telephone number. I don’t know, he musta called you when he was drunk or something. Too much palm wine. ’Cause, if he wanted me, he knows where I am. It’s me who don’t know where he is. Well, I know he’s in Africa, but Africa’s a bigger continent. You know, Africa’s a bigger continent than’s on the map. When you see
a map of the world, they got it so that Europe and America is the center of the world and the biggest continent, but Africa’s a bigger continent than it is on the maps. They just do the maps like that, ’cause they want you to believe in Europe and America, and we’s supposed to consider them more important, you know, in the history of the world. But none of the maps you look at is the true maps of the world. Norvelle he got him a true map of the world, that shows Africa as big as it is and it dwarfs them other continents. That’s the true Africa. And I been there.
Naw, you ain’t. I look like I been to Africa and I ain’t even been there. Call him.
Call who?
Call Jamey, you fool, she said. Naughty Jamey. His real name’s Naughton James, you know. If I didn’t call him Jamey, I could call him Naughty. He just calls himself James, though. He prefers James to Naughton. He prefers James to Jim. Sometimes I call him Naughton. I ain’t never call him Jim. Naughty Jim Savage. That sounds like one of them gamblers, don’t it? You know them gamblers on those riverboats. You know those movies about the gamblers on the riverboats. Naughty Jim Savage, Probably the sorta role Clark Gable might play, one of those riverboat gamblers, you know. Who else could Jim Savage be? A riverboat gambler. Call him. We can tell him to give up smoking. We can tell him that smoking ain’t a habit worth having. Maybe we can convince him to give up smoking.
Don’t be an ass, I said.
Call him, she said.
What do you want for breakfast? I asked.
Let’s fly to the farm, she said, and have breakfast with him. Surprise him. See who he’s with. What new little infatuation. How’d you like to see our Jamey screwing some new little infatuation? Or maybe the Kama Sutra woman, you know, the one who gave him that copy of the Kama Sutra, I mean when I caught him with you that was nothing to catch him with you. . . . And you’re still chewing on that old chestnut. I mean, you’re a girl scout you’re a schoolgirl compared to what’s in that book, the Kama Sutra, I mean. You’re still in grammar school, girlfriend. You’re still in elementary school when it comes to sex. Maybe you’re in junior high school when it comes to love, I bet the only position you know is the missionary position. Do you know how the missionary position got its name? You been to Africa. Or do you just think Jamey’s up at the farm peering into his primitive little microscope or working on some new chemical formula? Do you know something? I think Jamey’s too good for the both of us. I think Jamey’s too good for the likes of us. Sweet Jamey. I’m glad he’s got a great infatuation. A woman worthy of him. Maybe he’s got a great infatuation now, do you think? A woman worthy of him. Maybe he’s in love again. Do you think he’s in love again? He’s some man, ain’t he?