Mosquito

by Gayl Jones

  What do you mean, Monkey Bread? asked the manager of the bookstore.

  I mean, maybe it might be best for us to continue to watch Oprah doing us meetings or even Sally Jessy Raphael, because it will inspire the FBI and CIA to think our mission is to be a social club. I’m glad you’ve got some music in this bookstore, though, ’cause I can’t even buy me Oprah’s Favorite Books unless I got the opportunity to buy Erykah Baduh, Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, and Anita Baker. Did you see the video where Mary J. Blige is dressed up to look like all the womens of color in the world, looking like a Cherokee and then like one of them Indians from India and then like one of them Asian women and then like her own natural self.

  While Monkey Bread and the bookshop manager are talking, I open some of the Not for Members Only Literature. I gets their Not For Members Only Membership Card:

  The Daughters of Nzingha

  Not for Members Only Membership Card

  Membership Name:

  The above membership card is valid only if unsigned and guarantees that the above unlisted member is a card-carrying Not for Members Only Member of the Daughters of Nzingha. Full members of the Daughters of Nzingha are not required to carry membership cards, because they know who they are.

  Then there is a licensing agreement that allows even Not for Members Only Members to start their own Daughters of Nzingha Bookshops, Banks, Computer Stores, and Guerrilla Law Centers.

  Part of the agreement reads: The Daughters of Nzingha is an unregistered trademark of New Africa Incorporated. It may be used only by descendants of the victims of the African Diaspora Holocaust.

  That kinda surprised me, ’cause at first I thought they were going to allow just anybody to use the trademark, and it seemed to me that they would register that trademark if they didn’t want just anybody to use it, but only descendants of the victims of the African Diaspora Holocaust. I also thought that they would say only those people who were the true Daughters of Nzingha. You know, the spirit of Nzingha. Nor did they limit the use of that unregistered trademark only to the women descendants of the victims of the African Diaspora Holocaust. I also noticed that they did not simply say African American or New World African, and I supposed by using the term African Diaspora that they meant Africans everywhere. I hoped as I scanned their literature that no one would mistake me for being with the FBI or CIA. In fact, I was wondering that when I looked up and noticed a book called A Bear for the FBI. I wanted to purchase it, but I didn’t want anybody to think I was so interested in the FBI. Then I went over and purchased one of the books from Oprah’s Favorite Books. One of the books by Maya Angelou. Then after I purchase the Maya Angelou book, I felt a little more comfortable in who I knew I was myself not to care if I was mistaken by someone else as being who I wasn’t that I purchased the Melvin Van Peebles book A Bear for the FBI which someone had filed among the noncanonical books, although I had always thought it to be one of the canonical books myself. I also purchased I Am a Spy for the FBI which was actually a satire about someone at a small New England college during the 1960s who is mistaken as being a spy for the FBI because rather than majoring in Sociology, Anthropology, or Political Science is taking the following courses: Theoretical Chemistry, Botany, and Environmental Journalism. I ain’t sure if those are the subjects, but it seemed as if the person signed up for all the courses that weren’t considered socially relevant, so that somebody decides that she must be FBI. The novel turns out to be written by one of the leading campus revolutionaries who is also a former member of the FBI. Then we discover the novel itself is a fiction, written by a Theoretical Botanist, who is being followed by the FBI while working on the Cactus Project in sub-Saharan Africa. Then we find out that the novel is not really a novel but a journal. Then we find out that the journal is really the journal kept by the spy following the theoretical botanist throughout sub-Saharan Africa and who has only been quoting from the theoretical fiction to prove that the theoretical botanist is a modern-day subversive who is still a true believer in the revolution, and that the Cactus Project isn’t really a botanical project at all.

  They’s got a lot of rooms that’s got books and papers in them, ’cause she took me into yet another room and give me some incorporation Papers and said that I should consider incorporating my trucking company. I thought that the papers would request that I pay the Daughters of Nzingha thousands of dollars and that maybe that was their ruse, but it said I didn’t have to pay them no upfront fees to fill out and file the incorporation forms; however, to incorporate the fee was less than $100 and I would be provided with my own guerrilla business lawyer and financial advisor. It also listed other Not for Members Only members who had incorporated their businesses via the New Africa Corporation on Turtle Island a.k.a. America, although the forms themselves were reprinted by the Daughters of Nzingha Press in association with the Garvey Center, with which they were supposed to be linked, although the Garvey Center was maintained by African-American men, and they were also linked to another organization which consisted of both African-American men and women. The latter organization sounded to me more appealing, but when I asked Monkey Bread the name of it, she refused to tell me who they were, except to say that they weren’t any of the organizations that I would read about in the newspapers. And unlike the Daughters of Nzingha, they didn’t recruit. You got to already know who you are.

  You mean who they are, I said. Don’t you mean the only way you can join them is if you already know who they are? One of them secret societies?

  She didn’t reply. She handed me a book of proverbs. I opened that book expecting to find some African proverbs in there like at least the one about it taking a village to raise a child or other often unacknowledged African proverbs but there weren’t no proverbs, ’cause she said you’s supposed to put your own proverbs in there. Then she lead me into that large living room where there’s more women. I think they’s all going to be dressed up to look like Africans, but they don’t. They’s got some African-looking women and them in African clothes, but a lot just looks like everyday women. Some is even wearing blue jeans. There’s old women and middle-age women and young women. Some of them women got little girls sitting beside them or sitting in their laps. Some is wearing scarves or got Afros or wearing braids or straightened hair. They’s every range of complexion. Some looks like they’s just got off welfare or out of jail, others looks like they’s everyday working women, some looks like professional women, schoolteachers and bankers. I say bankers ’cause Monkey Bread say one of them owns her own bank and is teaching some of them other women the banking business. I know one of them is in the computer business ’cause she the one taught Monkey Bread about them computers. Few of them looks like they’s in the entertainment profession. I’m wondering which of them is Nzingha. She’s introduced me to a lot of them. There’s that Cooter and Nyam-Nyam and her other friends that I recognizes from her descriptions of them in her letters. One of them women is named Asia and another is named Africa. I’m wondering how you can name a woman after a whole continent myself. There was one named Canada. I suppose because of the history of New World Africans fleeing to Canada. One of them women Monkey Bread say is named Kultur. Strange thing is these womens is also fussing over me and seem like they’s trying to please me, and fussing over each other and seems like they’s trying to please each other. They don’t offer me no Budweiser, though, ’cause they’s all drinking some kinda herbal-type tea, which Monkey Bread call they root tea and it supposed to have a lot of healing herbs in it. I don’t know what she call the name of them herbs, but the drink do taste good. Drinking it I feels like I’m having me some type of communion.

  Nzingha is here, someone says.

  And I’m looking around, waiting for Nzingha to enter, but she don’t.

  Nzingha is here, the women say.

  And I’m still looking around like a fool, waiting for Nzingha to enter. Now I know Nzingha a real woman, ’cause in all her letter Monkey Bread say she real and I even seen a pho
tograph of her. Ain’t I seen a photograph of her? But I’m the only one of these women looking around for Nzingha and they’s telling me she’s here.

  Where Nzingha? I ask, when Monkey Bread and me returns to the mansion. I was hoping I’d get to meet Nzingha.

  When you are one of us, you will, she said. She is shy to meet anybody. She does not meet just anybody. But she is very fond of you and I have told her all about you. She knows who you are.

  Why they saying she’s there.

  Because she is. She is everywhere. There is Nzingha and there is our priestess, Nzingha. She is everywhere.

  That night I slept in the African room. I was surrounded by African masks. I was surprised that the star would have an African room. Except for the masks, though, and the African sculptures, it looked like a modern bedroom, an American bedroom. Did I dream of Nzingha? I dreamt that an African-looking woman came into the room wearing a mask. I could not tell which of the women she was. Was it Monkey Bread herself? I only know that she began talking to me and that it was in a voice that was mightier than Monkey Bread’s. And she seemed to speak in the accents of Africa America, of Caribbea, of Africa itself.

  I salute you, Mosquito. I am Nzingha, warrior queen. Do not think of me as your leader. There are no leaders here. We are here to serve each other.

  I laugh because I think of the stereotypes. Then I think of a science fiction movie in which aliens come to each to serve man bringing a strange book written in their alien language, and it turns out the book is a cookbook. They take humans back to their planet, fattening them up while they’re on the spaceship.

  There are no leaders among us, she repeats. We may if we choose elect a leader among ourselves.

  I didn’t want to listen to what she had to say. I kept asking, Who are you?

  I am who you imagine me to be, she said. Perhaps I’m your own exemplary self.

  I knew what she meant. She didn’t mean that I was exemplary. Monkey Bread had said in one of her letters that Nzingha believed that everyone had many selves and that one of their selves was an exemplary self. A self that contained one’s exemplary nature. Monkey Bread said that her philosophy of selves rather than a self was from African philosophy, though I didn’t understand shit about it myself.

  But you know who I am, she said.

  Who?

  I am Nzingha. I am here.

  So I didn’t know if I had dreamed her or if Monkey Bread’s security person had let her into Monkey Bread’s entrance and she’d actually come to meet me. Or was it Monkey Bread herself? I didn’t think it was Monkey Bread. Well, she was taller than Monkey Bread. I cannot tell you if I merely dreamed her. I don’t know for certain. Sometimes even now I think I hear her. But if it is her, it is in the form of my own thoughts talking to me. Nzingha? I ask. I am here, she says. We know who we are, don’t we, Sojourner? I should not tell you this. For some among you will think I’m a nut.

  Except Delgadina. When Delgadina came out to visit me when I had my restaurant in Cuba, New Mexico, I tells her about Nzingha.

  I thought you said you never got to meet Nzingha, she says. I thought you said you went out there to California and met everybody but Nzingha. I got to tell y’all that Delgadina has started her own private investigations company, that she got her own private investigations company. Maybe I shouldn’t tell y’all that, ’cause that’s beyond this story. But I gots to tell y’all she weren’t no bartender when she come out to visit me in Cuba, New Mexico. She don’t look like no private investigator, but that’s what makes good private investigators. She comes bringing me a copy of a new novel by Charlotte Carter, an African-American woman mystery writer, a novel called Rhode Island Red. And one of her own published stories written under a pseudonym. The editor of the little publication calls her a subversive intellect. They don’t know I’m Chicana, she said. If they knew I was Chicana, they wouldn’t say nothing about my intellect, even subversive. When I write as a Chicana, the closest they come to saying anything about intellect is to say I’m witty. She don’t look like a private investigator, though, like I said. It ain’t like in the movies where you just looks at them and knows they’s a private investigator. And she don’t just private investigate for anybody. She’s got to believe in the people.

  You can’t believe in that many people, I says. I don’t see how you can stay in business.

  I ain’t like you, Mosquito, is all she’ll say.

  I ain’t sure what she mean. Maybe she mean I’m more stingy with belief than she is. ’Cause to tell the truth if I were a private investigator and used Delgadina’s rules of private investigator, wouldn’t be many people at all I’d investigate for. Not many people at all. Maybe Delgadina be one of them. Maybe Ray. Maybe Monkey Bread. Maybe a few others.

  But you learn more about people, especially predatory types of people. I try to keep my wit, but you know, you get to learn about the evil passions. I mean, you learn about them being a bartender, but it ain’t the same. But I’ve got a pretty good reputation as a private investigator. Like when I tended bar. People know me. They know I don’t take nobody’s shit. But there’s a lot of devils in the world, Nadine, and a lot of them is the so-called people in authority. I always knew that. I mean, I knew it intellectually. Well, I didn’t just know it intellectually. But now I’m learning so many new ways of investigating these bastards. There’s rogues everywhere, Nadine. Rogues everywhere. But I’m learning all kinds of new means and methods of investigating the bastards. If you ever need you a private investigator, you come to me. I can investigate all classes and types of people. And they don’t even know I’m investigating them. All I got to do is play who they think I am. I usedta think there wasn’t any real virtue in being who I am. But this is the perfect profession for me. Even when I’m amongst them that don’t favor Chicanas, I can still do my work.

  Of course I couldn’t imagine ever needing no private investigator. Then it seemed kinda contradictory her saying that she played who other people thought she was, and then at the same time had the virtue of being who she is.

  So then I’m sitting at the table in my restaurant with Delgadina and I’m drinking some root tea that Monkey Bread sends me sometimes from out there in California—I’d like to serve it in my restaurant, but it’s especially blended and ain’t really supposed to nobody drink it but members of Nzingha’s group—and she’s eating some of our restaurant’s famous pancakes. They’s more like tortillas, though, ’cause they’s thin pancakes wrapped around apples or cherries or peaches or other types of fruit.

  These are good. Mosquito. And then I’m telling her about Nzingha, that I think I met her and that I sometimes think I hear her voice in my thoughts. Am I a nut? Do you think I’m a nut?

  Naw, Mosquito, you ain’t no nut. That’s sorta like a mystical experience that you had. You ain’t no nut. Well, you might be a nut in America, but in some people’s worlds what you had is normal. In some worlds people have mystical dreams all the time. I know sometimes when I travel through Mexico, the tales I hear. Not just the tales for the tourists, but the true Mexican stories. Why some of them would seem like fantasies to most Americans. Most Americans read Latin American literature like they’re reading fantasies, but a lot of that is reality. Naw, you ain’t no nut, Nadine. I wish some Mexican Nzingha would talk to me. Of course, she wouldn’t be an Nzingha. She’d be somebody else. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but the man that owned the cantina, Mr. Delgado, he didn’t want you in his bar. He just had it in his thought that you were a drunk and a nut, and he didn’t even know you. I told him you weren’t either one of them. After a while, he figured you weren’t. ’Cause he knows I don’t suffer fools. Naw, you ain’t no nut, Mosquito. Don’t let nobody try to tell you that.

  Some of y’all listeners confuses me when I’m talking to you. You wants me to clarify this and wants me to clarify that and wants me to clarify where I am and wants me to clarify who I am. And many of y’all don’t know who Mosquito is from Nadine, and who Jane and S
ojourner is when I’m telling y’all I’m all of them. Ain’t I told y’all that? Contradictions in reality don’t mean it ain’t real. Maybe it’s some of y’all who don’t know who y’all is and needs to clarify yourself. I’m just kidding with y’all. I don’t mind clarifying what peoples needs to know. Maybe modern stories just looks at theyselves, but I always prefers the storytellers that looks at them they’s talking to, and acknowledges what other peoples needs to know. I ain’t gonna tell y’all all my business, though. I don’t play that. Even Nefertiti Johnson don’t play that, and she’s writing true confessional romances. Here they are. I’ve got the whole Nefertiti Johnson collection, but y’all got to read them for y’allself. Naw, I ain’t gonna loan none of y’all that one. But Nefertiti Johnson can be bought anywhere.

  CHAPTER 13

  YOU’RE A STRANGE BIRD, DELGADINA SAY, WE’S in the cantina. This the real time of my conversation, ’cause I know there’s a lot of y’all that ain’t used to hearing conversations that jumps back and forth between real time, the past, the future, and virtual time, it be Monkey Bread be telling me about that virtual time, ’cause this the modern world, and that virtual time could be any one of them times. I think them Nefertiti Johnson romance novels is written in virtual time, ’cause they reads kinda like jazz in they rhythm, and sometimes I don’t know where I am in them novels, or where the reader’s supposed to be. To tell the truth, I be wondering how they publish them novels like that. ’Cause a lot of them novels you reads, them narrators always explains to you where they is. I mean, I’m explaining to y’all where I am myself, though I would really prefer to converse with y’all like in them Nefertiti Johnson novels. Even explaining to some of y’all where I am, y’all’s still asking me where I am. Y’all claims y’all understands everything you read in them Nefertiti Johnson novels, but I guess that’s ’cause she’s telling y’all only what y’all wants to hear. When I ain’t reading Nefertiti Johnson, who I like to read, I likes to reread that book I told y’all about. I gots me a tape of Ernest Gaines reading that Monkey Bread sent me and who she say her favorite writer, though I think he probably reminds her of one of them men she were in love with myself. Or maybe after she heard that rumor say he suppose to like fast womens. Ain’t no rumor, say Monkey Bread, ’cause I read it myself in a book where he says himself that he likes fast womens. Man got a right to like a fast woman without being a bad man. Y’all know all that mythology y’all self. Some men says I’m a fast woman, some men says I’m a slow woman, but I ain’t met a man that ain’t told me who they thinks I am. And I lets them tell me who they thinks I am. ’Cept I heard Delgadina say, Don’t you tell me who I am. You don’t know who I am. But me I likes to hear them tell me who they thinks I am. Well, I ain’t going to say that. I don’t always likes to hear them tell me who they thinks I am. ’Cause most the time it ain’t who I think I am myself. But I lets them tell me. Delgadina say that a flaw in my character. Seem like to me if you know who you are, you can let people tell you from time to time who they thinks you are. And I told Delgadina that.