Midnight

by Odie Hawkins

  Damn, what kinda shit is this?!

  He checked the time in a shard of light. 11:15 P.M. This motherfucker oughta be shot …, calling somebody to do something for him at eleven o’clock at night.

  Patience had tried to give him some idea of what her work consisted of and when she did it, but he lost track of the bewildering number of things she did.

  Ironing, washing, cooking, cleaning, gardening, shopping, serving Papa. She’s serving him now. Bop stood and stared out of the only window in the airless room. The large house, the “Big House,” was twenty yards away and loomed over the “boys’ quarters” like a threatening cloud.

  He stood there with his hands on his hips, silently cursing “Papa” and all that he represented.

  “Bop, you got to keep something about Africa in the forefront of your mind, ’specially ‘British’ Africa. Them funky chumps from that little weird-ass island got over there and got ahold of the brothers’ minds in a way that no one has been able to successfully explain to me. I mean, how could three or four little puny, pink-faced, constipated, semi-bi-sexual beaurocrats grab hold of fifteen million minds? I’ll be a hundred ’n a day before I understand it.

  “Right now, I swear to you, at this very minute, you got some Africans who would rather smell a white man’s farts than eat a full meal.”

  “Awwww c’mon, Chester, you gotta be kiddin’!”

  “Read my lips. I kid you not. But it ain’t just the Africans who were turned out by the English. It’s the same way with them fools on the Ivory Coast, in Senegal, with the French, and down in the Mozambique and Angola with the Portuguese.

  “You know something? I once did what I thought was a learned study on the subject. You know, why or how or what put so many of the African psyches into such a receptive mode for Eurocentric domination.”

  “But they dominated us too, ain’t that what you told me?”

  “Damn right they did! Or tried their damnest to do it with the whip, the branding iron, the gun. And they failed because we were not receptive. Dig what I’m saying? We were not receptive. It’s one thing to drag a funky chump out of his pad, ship him an ocean and a river away and force him to do what you want him to do. It’s a completely different thing for someone to come into your house and start telling you how to run things.

  “The English, the French, the Portuguese, the Germans, all of the Europeans have been so successful with the African psyche that a lot of the Africans have only one regret.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That they no longer have white asses to kiss. And don’t believe that all of the black folks in South Africa are happy about seeing the Afrikaner get his lumps.”

  “You sho’ is cold, Chester.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, youngblood, as Shango is my witness. You’ll see it when you get over there. The British are gone but you’ll see African brothers treat each other just the way the white boy treated them. And make no apology about it, they’ll just straight up treat the lower man like a piece of shit and keep on stepping.”

  Yeahhh, right again, Chester. He backed away from the window and lay back on the mattress.

  “And how did we manage to wind up being so different, so unreceptive?”

  “That’s been the subject for another one of my learned studies. My basic theory, supported by three sub-theories, is that the actual enslavement process took us completely into the belly of the beast. Like, you know, we went up through the funky chump’s intestines, took side views of his heart and liver, and discovered, yea verily! This is a dirty rotten motherfucker we got here.

  “Oh yes, we got a few among us who resent the fact that they ain’t fully white. But the majority have been unreceptive. If we hadn’t been unreceptive, we’d still be pulling plows through cotton fields right now.”

  Patience returned an hour and a half later, tired again. “Papa needed to have silver polished for the guests coming tomorrow.”

  The lovemaking that followed her return bordered on the purely mechanical. They both wanted to get it over and done.

  He couldn’t really figure out what made him do it, but he felt challenged to learn Ga from listening to the sound of the jokes that the brothers made in the Dew Drop Inn.

  “Hey, I could learn the shit if I had somebody to teach me.”

  “I will teach you.”

  The quiet guy with the pop-bottle-bottom-sized glasses spoke softly but authoritatively.

  Bop bought a notebook and had him over for an hour on Monday and Tuesday. He made an excuse for not being available on Wednesday, and by Thursday the project was permanently tabled.

  This shit is harder than Chinese arithmetic.

  Life in Osu was infinitely interesting on one level, almost boring on another level. It was interesting to see how people occupied themselves, boring to see them do it. The yarn lady spent the day frying and selling sliced yams, the kenkey lady spent hours selling kenkey, the little boys pushed makeshift cars through the rutted road, people washed their clothes and hung them out to dry.

  There was a flavor about it he couldn’t touch, a kind of satisfaction. He spent a half day wandering through the streets, surreptitiously checking out the full, tart breasts of the young women and the gorgeous hips of the mature ones.

  Sisters got some butter on these buns, f’real.

  And then back to the Vernon house for a cold gin and midday introspection. What makes this Africa? The people don’t really seem a lot different than they do at home. If it wasn’t for the language thang, I could be in Watts. Or the Westside of Chicago. The food is different, the way they eat it is different, but what makes this Africa?

  He fought with himself about questions that he knew he had no answers for. I shouldn’t be asking what makes this Africa, I should be asking why am I here?

  That question took him through two tall glasses of cold, meditative gin.

  Well, of course, there was Chester L. Simmons’ challenge to him. “Bop, I’d be willing to bet you a half dozen granola bars that you’ll be back in here this time next year.”

  “Bullshit! Chester, by this time next year I’m gonna be in Ghana, West Africa.”

  “Seeing is believing.”

  Yeahh, how about this, Chester, my man? I’m here. Yeahhh, I’m here, watching dudes in funky little bars pour some of their drink on the ground and say prayers before pouring the rest of it down their throats.

  He sprawled on the living room sofa, nipping his gin, tripping a bit. I wonder why they do that?

  He trickled a few drops of gin onto the floor beside the sofa and tried to think of something sacred to say. “I am now, I was then, and I will always be a Brick.”

  He swallowed a gulp of gin in imitation of the akpeteshie drinkers and gagged. Damn, I don’t see how they swallow that shit like that.

  The gin seemed to shroud his mind in a fine mist, making him feel as though he could come to grips with stuff he normally shied away from. Why would somebody take a knife and cut his baby’s face all up like that? They had to be babies when they got slashed up like that.

  He subconsciously frowned, recalling a trio of young faces that he had come across on a side street one afternoon. Three young boys, no older than twelve or thirteen, their faces incised with precise cuts. He couldn’t stop himself from staring. Damn, what chick would want a dude with his face all sliced to ribbons?

  One of the regulars in the Dew Drop Inn informed him, “Oh, these northerners, they do that a lot.”

  “But why?”

  “Ohhh, for different reasons, identification, whatever.”

  Why not get some ID bracelets or something? Why scar somebody up for life?

  He did a little stutter step away from the sofa to refresh his gin glass. Chester was right, Africa is heavy.

  “Bop, Bop, Bop, youngblood, Africa is heavvvyyyyy. I mean, heavvvvvyyyyy, like layers and layers and layers of heavy. There will be times when you’ve pulled back one layer and said to yourself—‘Uhhh uhhh, so thi
s is what we got under here huh.’

  “But then you’ll discover that that’s just the top layer for the other top layers. And it’s that way about everything—people, plants, animals, you name it. Just when you think you got a grip on something, you discover that it ain’t what you thought it was.

  “Africa slips in and out of you like that. There will be times when you’ll hate Africa and Africans. Yeahhh, your own people. You’ll go ’round asking—‘why y’all have to be like that?’ But then you’ll have moments when the love will come down on you so intensely that tears will come to your eyes.

  “I’ve had all of it and some gray stuff in between.”

  Bop remounted the sofa, a fresh dollop of gin in his glass. Gestures. The gestures always grabbed him, the way people seemed to be telling all kinds of stories with their hands. He had stood off to the side one day, watching Patience and a neighborhood woman talk, their hands fluttering like butterflies. If the hands don’t say it, I can’t imagine what could say it.

  The language of the hands was a lot clearer than the verbal kind. Since his aborted Ga class, he had simply allowed the sounds to run into his ears and back out, without giving too much consideration for their meaning.

  Wowwwwww.… Ain’t this a trip. I’m surrounded by people who could say from one to the other, “Off him!” and I wouldn ’t even know that the order had been given.

  He was impressed by the quickness of the Ghanaian eye. It only took a moment for him to realize that they were on to him, to his total scene. It startled him when the realization first took hold. It wasn’t so much a matter of what he could see, it was a matter of what he could feel.

  He had the impulse a half dozen times to turn to someone and say, “I know you’ve scoped my shit, what do you think?”

  There was no need to do that. He could read in their body language that they dug him. There was a way that the waitress dug around in her nose while she waited for him to decide what he wanted to eat, the way the brother talked to him as he scratched his ass and pulled the cotton from his crotch.

  How many times had they joked with Skateboard about playing with his stuff? That didn’t seem to matter here. Women scratched and groomed their crotches as much as men. It just simply seemed to be the thing to do. Titties, noses, crotches, body functions assumed another dimension.

  He thought about it for an hour one afternoon, realizing that he had just walked past a naked woman taking a shower behind a pile of bricks. Wowwwwwwww.

  Ghana, Africa, was changing him, he could feel that. It wasn’t simply the gin and the beer. There was something else happening that made him feel strangely frustrated because he couldn’t find the words to describe it. It had something to do with how fluid people lived. There wasn’t that separation between art and life that he had always been taught (either consciously or unconsciously) to respect.

  Here, as the philosopher-poet Donny Hathaway put it, “Ever thang is Ever-thang.”

  Why do they stack the oranges like that? Damn, I didn’t know ripe oranges were green.

  He heard the Muslim call to prayer, nodded his head to the rhumba beat of the church drums down the street, and suspected that he was missing something when the drinkers in the Dew Drop spilled gin on the floor and mumbled prayers.

  The knocking on the door seemed far away for a moment. Who could that be? He pulled himself into a sitting position on the sofa, took a sip of his drink, and carefully strolled to the door.

  “Elena?”

  “Well, are you going to let me in?”

  “You are welcome.”

  “Well, are you going to let me in?”

  “You are welcome.”

  “You are drunk.”

  An hour later they were locked in a deadly sexual struggle.… “You are killing me! You are killing me! You are killing me!”

  A few minutes later they keeled over into a sexual slag heap, love-drunk and excited by it. He felt her body pressed against him and felt like crying.

  You’re killing me? Huh? That’s a big joke; I’m the one whose going to die. How could you do it to me, Elena, how could you? Here I come all the way over here to get AIDS.

  Dammit!

  The Vernons were due in a day or so, and he had nine more days to feel Africa.

  “Elena, you ’sleep?”

  “Yes please.”

  The next day he wandered through the rutted streets of Osu, alternately feeling sorry for himself—how the hell should a motherfucker feel with a body fulla AIDS?—and strangely elated. The Vernons were due any moment and he felt he had to stuff himself full of experiences before he would be forced to share his life with them again.

  The Children of Osu. The glossy photographs came to life in front of him, to the side, behind him. The little girls un-selfconsciously pulling the crotches of their panties to one side for an innocent pee.

  The hop-clap game that the girls played every time they stood in a circle. The little boys who used such ingenuity to create rolling vehicles; Ideal milk cans mounted on straight axle sticks, pulled by lengths of wire. Bottle tops punctured to make four-wheel drives, boys rolling bike rims, old car tires, whatever they could find that would roll.

  He couldn’t really put his finger on what it was about these children that made them so different, so attractive to him. He had never really paid children much attention; they were always underfoot, a necessary evil.

  These were different children. They weren’t as loud and rowdy as the little brothers and sisters at home. He had never heard one of them cuss, unless they were doing it in a language he couldn’t understand.

  They didn’t jump up in front of you, challenging you to beat them down, or act out of pocket in any way. They were children and they seemed comfortable with the idea.

  He didn’t feel the same ease with the brothers his own age. Wowwwww, these have to be some of the squarest brothers on the planet.

  They were drinkers. He checked them out in the Dew Drop Inn. They came into the place, holding hands (he thought that was odd at first), slugged down four or five tots of gin and brandy, and staggered back out.

  He couldn’t find a fix for them. They didn’t seem to pay the ladies a lot of attention, but it was quite obvious that they did like the ladies.

  There was just a gap between himself and them that he felt.

  It was like they hadn’t done anything or been anywhere or seen anything. He kept a cordial distance.

  The woman thing was something else. There was a potential girlfriend for him wherever he paused to do anything; the chick at the post office was always smiling at him. The girl in the kiosk with the big juicy lips winked at him constantly. The schoolgirls in their uniforms, who knew he was an American, dropped their voices whenever he came near.

  “Hi you young sisters doin’ this beautiful day?”

  They giggled and one, the boldest with the best command of English, would answer for the group. “Good afternoon.”

  Yeahhh, it was all flowing to some kind of conclusion: The funerals blocking off sections of the street while people got tipsy and did quiet little dances by themselves, mostly women, he noticed. The colors, always the colors. The old man in his red and green kente weave, the jet black woman in red and yellow stripes, the purples, shocking pinks, autumn russets, the ivory whites, turquoise, shades in between shades.

  And I thought my shit was going to be eye-catchin’.…

  One evening, after a two-hour session of sippin’ the local gin at the Shalizar Bar, he stumbled into a chop bar and pulled up on some banku and fish stew.

  Wowwww, this shit is good.

  He couldn’t really decide if it was good because he was semi-drunk, or whether it tasted better being licked off his fingers, or whether it was just good, period.

  Wowwww, this shit is good.

  He couldn’t really understand kenkey, that tamale-like ball of corn that was wrapped in an oil leaf. They oughta stick some hamburger off into the middle of this shit. He smiled, thinking of w
hat Chester Simmons would’ve said regarding his thought of having hamburger in the kenkey.

  “That’s the problem with the world today, Bop, too many hamburgers floating around. We got some funky chumps who would rather have a hamburger than have a woman. Hamburgers, to them, have become cigarettes. Maybe they oughta be called ciggieburgers, to give credit to their addictive qualities. But it’s not really the hamburgers, or ciggieburgers, themselves that cause the real problem; it’s the mentality that supports that kind of eating. It begins to intrude on every area—‘burgeremotions.’

  “You slap some pre-fab, pseudo-meat patty on a grill, singe a puffed-up piece of synthetic nerve endings beside it, a few dashes of salt and pepper, and everybody is ready to bullshit each other. The grilled onions lie to the ‘burgeremotions,’ the pseudo-bread buns collapse at the thought of a real grain, and when a piece of soap-sudsy cheese is mashed on the whole shebang, we’re ready to lie each other to death.

  “That’s the gist of it; we don’t want to go too heavily into what burgerization does to a so-called civilization. It’s impossible to truly clone extraordinary ideas, feelings, and emotions. Burgerization tends to make a lot of funky chumps believe that they are really on it because they’re doing exactly what the next funk chump is doing, either at a faster or a slower pace. They actually begin to think that they’re thinking new thoughts, swimming up new streams. Them burger sessions have completely flattened them out.

  “Some of them wander off into really bizarre bags: ‘What is an African’—seminars on the subject. Langston Hughes, using Simple, explained what an African in America is. But maybe he didn’t go well with the kind of mustard they wanted to popularize, so they didn’t listen to him too hard.

  “John Coltrane blew on ’em. Duke Ellington, with his elegant ass, God, how I love to see that man glide onstage in front of his instrument.… ‘Love you all madly, yes, madly.’ He could rap.

  “Billie Holiday, Miles, Piz, Bird, musical wizards, no cloning possible. Think of what we would have on our hands if they could’ve cloned Billie Holidays—Lady Day, or Pres?