The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  “Your Excellency, Mister Prime Minister Jaja Okwu Olivamaki, please Sir, you are a great man. You have a black skin, but you have a soul as white as newly picked cotton!”

  Explaining Africans, Mayor Rufe of Lolliloppi, Mississippi, advises:

  “They look like our nigrahs, but they are human beans. You will know our nigrahs from the Africans by the long white robes the Africans will be wearing. They call them ‘boobies.’ If they should happen to visit our restaurants, the picture show, and other places of amusement, in their long white flowing boobies, they will not be members of the Klu Klux Klan. Heh-heh-heh.”

  Even with these White characters, they are not as vicious and vile and even subhuman as the Black characters created by White novelists, screenwriters, and filmmakers. ln The Minister Primarily, the Black characters come off as foolish and silly as the White ones.

  With The Minister Primarily, Killens takes aim at the corrupt leadership of an African country, members of an entourage who accompany the double of PM Jaja Okwu Olivamaki, James Jay Leander Johnson, on his trip to the United States. The country of Guanaya has become noticed because of the discovery of precious metal.

  Great inexhaustible beds of cobanium—a radioactive metallic element, five hundred times more powerful and effective than uranium—were discovered in Guanaya’s Northern Province. Then—Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Publicity—Popularity—Prosperity—Population Explosion. The capital city of Bamakanougou got crowded very suddenly. Everybody loved Guanaya and with a bloody ruddy passion.

  Other writers have written about Black middle-class Americans arriving in the homeland to find their roots, only to become disillusioned. Killens gives this cliché a twist.

  After kissing the ground, “James Jay Leander Johnson, colored, Negro, Afro-American, Black man, sepia fella, tan Yank (take your choice), folk singer . . . born in Lolliloppi, Mississippi, Near-the-Gulf, Southern USA,” finds himself in trouble after arriving in the Homeland. Shortly after Johnson commits his ritual kiss, he is detained and accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate the prime minister, Jaja Okwu Olivamaki.

  The man wrote furiously on the pad before him and then looked up again. Smiling a broad white smile in a proud Black handsome face. “I see—I see—You never heard of our great beloved Prime Minister, His Excellency Jaja Okwu Olivamaki. Yet you’re obviously here to assassinate him.”

  Unbeknownst to Jimmy, he is there to impersonate Jaja Okwu Olivamaki. Because the prime minister is under threat of assassination, it’s decided that it’s necessary to send Jimmy, from Lolliloppi, Mississippi, to the United States as the prime minister’s substitute!

  Tangi rose and took a phony beard out of his pocket and put it on Jimmy’s face, and Jimmy was immediately transformed into the PM’s spitting image. It was unbelievable. The PM stared at Jimmy like he’d seen a ghost, and the rest of the Ministers stared at the two of them open-mouthed and speechless.

  Jimmy protested. He was sitting again. “Whatever it is, it’s a lie, I didn’t do it. I was framed. I demand to see my lawyer. I’m for Africa all the way. Uhuru! Uhuru! Uhuru!”

  Tangi said quietly, “Half of us stay here with the Prime Minister,” pointing to Olivamaki, “and half of us go to the United States with the Prime Minister,” pointing to Jimmy Johnson.

  “Oh no!” the Ministers shouted, unanimously and in unison even.

  Maria Efwa, “the lovely peripatetic perambulating encyclopedia of Guanayan lore and knowledge,” is assigned to tutor Johnson about Guanaya, the fictional country of which he is assigned to be the fake prime minister. This ingenious plot development, that of a naive Black American folk singer becoming the double of an African prime minister, opens up a path for the writer to engage in endless hilarity.

  At first Jimmy resists the masquerade. Jimmy says, “Would somebody be good enough to tell me what this is all about? Anyhow and regardless I demand to see my lawyer first. Any lawyer! And I refuse to answer on the grounds—that—that—” He tries to back out of the deal as they approach Washington, DC, where they are about to be greeted by the president. Jimmy is afraid that he will be exposed. “Suddenly Jimmy knew that one of the gravest dangers of discovery was that one of his own people, some African American, would see through his disguise and give him away, unintentionally or otherwise.” His reception is marred. After the US and Guanayanese national anthems are played, the band plays the national anthem of the slave country that though defeated still hangs around:

  And then it happened. One of the bands felt real down-home good and started playing “Dixie”! And there was waving of hats and even throwing of hats up in the air this time, and boisterous rebel yells from the wonderfully responsive crowd, temporarily gone wild with their enthusiasm now.

  Jimmy begins to enjoy his role as a bogus prime minister. The state dinners and the women, including the president’s mistress, attempting to seduce him. She gives him a hand job in the Lincoln bedroom, pleading with him to emancipate her. Southern customs that have made life difficult for generations of traditional Black Americans are waived for visiting African VIPs whose resources might be pilfered by Western capitalists. The president, Hubert Herbert Hubert, warns the mayor of Mississippi about the bogus PM’s visit to Mississippi:

  “I don’t give a fucking damn if he marries all of your funky steamy-tailed daughters, Olivamaki is coming down there and there’d better not be no fucking racial incidents, or heads will fucking roll! His Excellency is my good fucking friend, and besides, he represents the richest fucking mineral output on this fucking earth. It’s more valuable than fucking gold or diamonds, or heads will surely fucking roll! Money! Rufus Rastus fucking Hardtack! Money! That’s what I’m fucking talking about, or fucking heads will roll.”

  Johnson gets five-star treatment everywhere he goes:

  Every time he came outside the Waldorf, there were thousands standing there in wait, just for a fleeting glimpse of Himself. Indeed, some actually sought and fought just to touch the hem of his garment. His immaculate boubou.

  White and Black, they dearly loved His (so-called) Excellency. The uncanny aspect of it was that they seemed always to know each time he had an appointment that would require him leaving the hotel. They would begin to collect about an hour ahead of time. They would begin to gather slowly, at first, then more and more, ultimately pouring from the buses and the subway, a feverish and disgorged humanity, flooding the streets across Park Avenue, jamming the traffic. Horn blowing. Shouted oaths. You could set your watch by it.

  As someone who will provide billions to Western investors, he’s even allowed to hang up on the president of the United States.

  A huge slice of the novel is devoted to his reception as a visiting head of state as he visits New York—where John O. Killens appears among other Black celebrities, including Harry Belafonte (Killens’s benefactor in real life)—Washington, DC, and Mississippi, inviting scenes that are meticulously constructed. Readers will stay with this novel because one knows that when the trickster is set up, inevitably, he will fall.

  The novel is sweeping, cinematic, epic. To write such a novel requires painstaking, backbreaking work. The fact that this novel was rejected by publishers while the genre dubbed “girlfriend books” by Elizabeth Nunez, or gangbanger books, about which Terry McMillan complains, glut the market calls for a reevaluation of the relationship between Black writers and publishers. If this kind of well-wrought novel is an endangered literary species, how are younger writers going to learn how to write? This novel is the only text that one would need in a novel-writing class to show how a pro deals with scene, dialogue, descriptions, and transitions. Though Killens derided the mechanics of fiction—he said he got all “screwed up” after taking a workshop—he is the master of angles of narration, points of view, objectivity, universality, composition, author intrusion, sentence structure, syntax, first person, second person. He excels at constructing interior scenes:

  Essentially a “country boy,” Himself [Jimmy] could not
help himself from staring, slyly, almost clandestinely, at the decor and the color scheme of gold and white, and beneath his feet, the deeply plushed and woven oval rug, also of gold and white and pale blue, with the emblems of the fifty states incorporated around the carpet’s border. He could not help from staring openly at the panoramic mural on the wall of Scenic America with Boston Harbor and Blacks in slavery-time attire and at what he assumed was Plymouth Rock. And the gleaming Regency chandelier above him.

  He excels at dialogue such as the hilarious conversation taking place among customers at a barbershop in a scene from The Cotillion. He can do exteriors as well:

  When night has fallen, it has really come down all over Mother Africa. And with a beautiful-Black awesome bloody vengeance. You can hear night falling everywhere. On the ride back from the airport, the countryside leaped with the sounds of African night. A jam session of ad-libbing crickets and locusts and all kinds of bugs, but the honking frogs with their basso profundos upstaged every living thing in this crazy African orchestra. The fruit bats swooped down toward the headlights and quite a few got wasted.

  Killens saw this crisis for quality Black fiction coming. In 1959, according to Gilyard’s biography, Killens called for a permanent National Black Writers Conference and writers’ union and the forming of an amalgamated Black press, “to ensure that black myths, legends, plays, and films were disseminated.” Dr. Elizabeth Nunez and Dr. Brenda Greene have continued his legacy and through C-SPAN have given his mission international exposure. We never got the amalgamated Black press, but this novel is being published by a company founded by one of his comrades from World War II, Charles Harris.

  While the younger generation leans toward fantasy and science fiction and prefers graphic novels, Killens’s generation might be the last print-literate generation.

  As a Killens’s persona says, “Like some infants reached for toys and lollipops, we reached for books. We loved books. We cut our teeth on books.” There are enough books cited in The Minister Primarily to create a Black literature syllabus. This is the rare novel by a writer’s writer that could be used as a text in writing classes and appeal to the general reader as well. Norman Mailer, who, like his eurocentric contemporaries (small “e” because they don’t get Europe right) favored by an equally eurocentric critical fraternity, never wrote a novel with the range of Killens’s in its variety of characters and places—Africa, London, and Mississippi. Among the famous eurocentric writers, some might have written novels speckled with French, but weren’t able to bring off a multilingual achievement that we find in The Ministry Primarily where the narrator discusses Hausa.

  Using a boxing term, Mailer called Killens a “journeyman.” No, Killens, John A. Williams, and William Demby were number one contenders whom the champions avoided. Demby, a World War II veteran like Killens and John A. Williams, saw his final novel, King Comus, rejected by publishers. His son James Demby gave me permission to publish it in 2017. Jeff Biggers in the Huffington Post called it the “rediscovered novel of the year.”

  I arrived in New York in 1962. I was in my early twenties. I soon learned that it was not enough to write pretty, but it was what you said that brought you fame or obscurity. The content. Members of the older generation were divided between those who mentored the younger writers and those who competed with them for a place in the White-controlled establishment. Like Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, including Gloria Oden, who listened patiently as I read her passages from my first novel, Killens was a teacher and a mentor. He could have achieved mainstream acceptance if he’d played nice and lightened up. Offered redemption to racists, portrayed merciful slave masters, or sent up one-dimensional Black bogeymen as the source of America’s social problems. Instead, from his first novel, Youngblood, Killens announced his mission as that of adumbrating the racist evil that dogs the American soul.

  —Ishmael Reed

  Introduction

  DEAR READERS:

  Our name is Henry Greenleaf Emerson Longfellow Shakespeare Washington Irving the Second. Quite obviously our mother and father divined, and accurately, that we were a genius, born to the pen, destined to write incredible literature. At three we knew our ABCs, before we left our diapers for our BVDs. You have by now discerned that we have the habit of referring to ourselves in the first-person plural instead of singular; hence “we” instead of “I.” It is our literary style.

  In any event, like some infants reached for toys and lollipops, we reached for books. We loved books. We cut our teeth on books. We nibbled greedily at the edges of Tom Swift and the Rover Boys and all of those Horatio Alger success stories, ad infinitum, Rags to Riches, etcetera, etcetera. We began to write our first novel at the age of seven, our second at the age of eight, our third at the age of nine. We were a beginner who never finished anything. We were frustrated. Disgusted with ourselves by the time we were eleven. “Why can we never finish anything?”

  We were brought up under the prosaic adage “If at once you don’t succeed, keep on sucking till you succeed.” Which had us sucking our thumb through the first twelve years of our life much to our parents’ profound embarrassment, “genius be damned!” And notwithstanding. We were a sickly child.

  The hero of this tender missive was our first and only cousin, our direct opposite, personalitywise. Though some folk oftentimes remarked upon our striking resemblance, it was instantly clear to me, even as a child, that our similarities were entirely different. He was tall, Black, and handsome, walked always with his head tilted toward the sun, shoulders back, feet apart, unhesitantly and directly into life, unflinchingly. All through our growing-up days, if he stumbled or fell, he would get up immediately to his feet, torn breeches, stubbed toe, bruised, bleeding knees and all, and head directly into the terrible hurricane of life again. Unruffled. He’d grab the bull by the horns, or his testicles, should you prefer the earthier metaphor.

  We envied him, his gregariousness, his greed for life, the women who always seemed to somehow be there near him, available. Glib our cousin always was, from birth, as if his dear tongue had been prelubricated in the womb. Even as youngsters, we assumed that he was destined to live an exciting and eventful life; that is, if he lived long enough. We knew that he would always live dangerously.

  This is a true story. Sometimes truer, yes, than factual, rendered in the novelistic style, but no less true or factual for all that. Our facts were gathered, firsthand, from the original and most reliable source, from H in person, James Jay Leander Johnson, exaggerated now and then, as was his style, which was unique and original, the Minister Primarily, the very one and only. These things could have happened only to our irrepressible Jimmy Jay.

  We have made use of tapes, recordings, TV footage, our own camera, newspaper items. We have taken the facts and attempted to deepen them into even profounder artistic and creative truths. This is the responsibility of the artist-writer as we perceive it.

  For any shortcomings in this humble endeavor, we accept full blame and responsibility. Any success of literary achievement, all praises, are due to the Minister Primarily HS, né James Jay Leander Johnson, and to the cabinet of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, with especial thanks to Vice–Prime Minister Jefferson Dwight Lloyd and Foreign Minister Mamadou Benabou Tangi, with extra-special appreciation to Ms. Maria Efwa, Ministress of Information and Education, for her incredible beauty—physically, spiritually, and intellectually. She was breathtaking. We could not bear to stand too near her, for our breathing would become loud and obvious, somewhat like an exaggerated stethoscope. Hence, we always kept our distance lest we make a fool of ourselves. We worshipped from afar. Her beauty was that devastating. As you may have guessed by now, dear readers, we fell madly, hopelessly, irretrievably in love with our divine Maria, but, alas, her attention was focused elsewhere. We were invisible to her. She had eyes only for another. And what eyes!

  For the few moments in this book when it exudes a little h
umor in the telling of this incredible tale, again I take no credit whatsoever. All praises, if you think they’re due, are due entirely to Himself, a man who always laughed at life, especially at the Black and tragic aspect of it. He openly proclaims that Black life must be looked upon from the tragic-comic point of view, and not to do so would be to risk every single one of us Black folk going stark raving mad. Quite obviously we agree.

  Sincerely,

  H. G. E. L. S. W. Irving the Second

  Lolliloppi, Mississippi (Near-the-Gulf)

  10 July, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Seven

  Prologue

  When our story began, more than twenty years had passed since that glorious moment in history when—IT WAS A GREAT TIME TO BE AN AFRICAN.

  A time when color was in vogue, even outside Africa. When everything was Black and beautiful. A rhapsody in ebony. The Duke of Ellington was going strong. The aristocracy of music was enthroned, it seemed, eternally. Repeat: There was the great Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie, and the Earl of Hines. Not to forget the late, lamented Lady Day and Lester Young, the Pres-i-dent. There was of course his regal majesty, the incomparable King of Cole, who was not long to linger with us.