The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  “Oh I see. Something is the matter with us now, is it?” the interrogator said to Jimmy, smiling patronizingly. “That’s an interesting approach—remarkable psychology.”

  He wrote, as he mumbled to himself now, more audibly. “Intelligent-looking without a treppence of intellect. Very shrewd though. Claims he never heard of our beloved Prime Minister. His tactic is obviously to put the interrogator on the defensive. An experienced malefactor. A hardened criminal of dangerous proportions. Undoubtedly a professional assassin.”

  “Do you have a gun, sir?”

  “A gun! What in the devil would I want with a gun?”

  “Do you have a dagger hidden on your person?”

  Jimmy thought he was out of his mind. His heart was pounding now way up in his forehead. His brain was on fire with anger and frustration. Perspiration pouring from all over him.

  He said, “What would I be doing with a dagger on my person?”

  The interrogator wrote on his pad, and muttered aloud, “Very clever the way he parries every question with another question of his own.”

  Jimmy said, “You people must be kidding!” But he looked around at the rest of the serious-faced Africans, and he knew they were not kidding. One of them was even gleefully not kidding.

  “What the devil is the matter with you people?” Jimmy asked.

  “What the devil is the matter with you people—” the interrogator repeated Jimmy’s question aloud, and immediately Jimmy wished he hadn’t asked it.

  “We’ll find out what the matter is and very shortly,” the interrogator assured our hapless hero.

  “Search his bags,” one of them suggested. “He probably has an arsenal in them.”

  “My bag’s on the plane!” Jimmy shouted. This couldn’t possibly be happening to him—in Africa! he told himself—without conviction.

  The interrogator smiled at Jimmy patronizingly and asked politely, “May I see your visa, sir?”

  “I don’t have one,” Jimmy admitted helplessly. “I don’t want to spend any time here. I just want to leave—”

  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. You don’t have a visa, because of course, you don’t want to stop here. Oh—not at all. Yet you’re the only one who got off the plane. You’re a very clever saboteur, sir, but it won’t work in Guanaya. You’re the worst kin of all, sir, because you come disguised as a brother.” The interrogator’s voice hardened and he was no longer smiling. “Take him away,” he said to the delighted policemen. It was their most exciting moment in an otherwise dull day. They grabbed him roughly by the shoulders. He pulled away from them.

  “I’m an Afro-American Negro!” he shouted to the men of Immigration. “I got some rights in Africa!”

  In unison they shouted, “Aanh—aanh! Oh-ho!”

  The interrogator turned to the policemen. “What the devil is this?”

  The big cop turned to Jimmy. “Why did you not tell us in the first place?”

  “I’m an Afro-American. A serious folk singer, and I’m here to find my roots.” He showed them his American passport.

  They all jumped to their feet. “Welcome home, American brother!” They shook his hands, they embraced him. They kissed him on each cheek. They said “Uhuru!” Relief flowed through his body like hot coffee in the cold wintertime. He could not help from weeping, shyly, slyly. The short cop said, “Excuse me, please. We thought you were a Black European, a bloody Bentu.” Jimmy stared through bleary eyes at the little Black man. What the hell was a Black European? A Bentu? Then the fog-of-London lifted, and he began to laugh and laugh and laugh some more, the tears spilling down his cheeks, unrestrained, into his mouth. He couldn’t help it. It bubbled up and overflowed and finally they joined him in the laughter. They had thought him a Black European saboteur assassin. Or something maybe even worse. An Uncle Tom! A Gunga Din! Oh wonderful African brothers! How could you? How damn ever could you? But he forgave them instantly.

  There was a rumbling of thunder overhead. “My guitar is on that plane,” he said weakly, as he heard it winging noisily and southwestwardly over the building toward Lagos in Nigeria almost a thousand miles away. With his guitar and his luggage, all his clothing. The cops and the Immigration people couldn’t care less. But they did dig Jimmy Johnson. One of them was a folk singer himself in his spare time. It was mutual admiration all the way and at first sight, almost. Ernest Bamaku, Jaja Segu, and the two friendly cops and Jimmy Johnson. It was knocking-off time for the Immigration chaps, and the next plane for Lagos was not due for several hours. They gave Jimmy a twenty-four-hour visa, and Jimmy went with them and had a natural ball with them at Bamaku’s house. Others gathered for the party. Eating groundnut stew and singing and drinking Scotch and Schnapps and Palm Wine, with the women seated shyly on one side of the room and the men on the other. (He gibed them gently on the Woman Question.) They drank and sang and talked about Martin King and Malcolm X and Ben Chavis and the Wilmington Ten and the riots in Miami and in Harlem and the District of Columbia and Watergate and democracy and socialism and capitalism and Stokely and Gil Noble. And Robeson and Du Bois. Their mutual ethnicity.

  Jimmy had never felt better about anything in all his life, not since the day he made his great escape from way down yonder on the delta, where his people were so interminably happy. His head was reeling with the spirit of belonging, and much much palm wine, when Jaja said quietly, “We had better be getting back to the airport. It’s fifteen minutes before eleven.”

  Jimmy shook hands all around with the men and the pretty shy-faced women, who took his hand in both of theirs in a kind of ritual of farewell. They wished him “safe journey” and each gave him a gift of kola nuts and beads and amulets; one elderly woman gave him a live and cackling chicken, and then they went up the middle of the narrowest of tarmac highways to the airport in a cloud of dust and gravel, slowing down cautiously to eighty-nine kilometers an hour as they went around the many curves, carefully avoiding by the matter of the length of the hair of a short-haired camel’s shortest hair only about fifteen or twenty head-on collisions. When they reached the airport they ran Jimmy through Immigration with no formalities at all, and out onto the airfield they dashed with him, Jimmy with the cackling, frightened, shitting chicken dangling at his side, just in time to see the airplane at the other end of the strip leaving the ground and going off into the black black African night. Jimmy was tempted to say, “Muck it!” as the blokes all used to say in the old You-Kay. “Muck it all!”

  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. The smell of wood smoke from the villages along the countryside and into the forest assaulted Jimmy’s nostrils and his throat and reminded him of a thousand early washday Monday mornings in Lolliloppi when he was a little boy, before washing machines and detergents were available to the “cullud” people of his hometown, in the days of octagon soap and scrub boards, with the fire crackling and spitting underneath the black washpots. A funny but familiar taste in Jimmy’s mouth now and a quiver in his stomach, as a wave of pure nostalgia almost overwhelmed him. “Don’t kid yourself, Buster. You ain’t homesick for dear old ’Sippi. That’s for cotton-picking sure.” He laughed as he remembered it was cotton-picking time in dear old ’Sippi, where mechanized cotton picking had come into vogue.

  When they reached the capital city again they stopped at Club Lido and had more drinks and
watched the people do the highlife.

  Jimmy was drunk, or else he would not have insisted that highlife derived from calypso. What the hell did he know about it? “Like, I’m some kind of a Calypsonian my own self,” he said, in all modesty. “That is, in my spare time. I’m really working at it.” In all humility.

  Ernest Bamaku said, “It’s a question of what comes first, the mother or the chick. This music went to America and West Indies from Africa and you make it into calypso, and now it has come back to us and we make it into highlife.”

  Jaja said, “Actually, mawn, actually!”

  Ernest Bamaku said, “That is the thing. For example, you have an African heritage. No?”

  Jimmy said, “Yes!”

  Ernest said, “That doesn’t mean I have an American or West Indian heritage. Yes?”

  Jimmy said, “No—”

  Ernest said, “That is the thing. Mother Africa comes first. Always and forever.”

  Jimmy said, “Actually, mawn, actually!” Quite drunkenly.

  Jaja threw his arms around Jimmy’s shoulders and said joyously, “You speak with our accent already.”

  And they all cracked up with laughter. Palm wine could make you say almost anything.

  Jimmy’s head was swimming and the women at the Lido were getting prettier and svelter and prettier and svelter. They were pretty enough to begin with. One particular long-legged swivel-hipped lady was dancing with a huge Guanayan who looked like he might have made it big with the New York Knicks. This couple was cool cool cool and could really do the highlife, and had danced everybody off the floor, excepting a Euro-American struggling valiantly with another lovely Guanayan woman, as if he thought the highlife was a prizefight or a wrestling match. He looked like a former college fullback long out of condition, as he went through the paces, his fists balled up, his face screwed up, and the perspiration raining from all over him, his pretty soft-eyed partner smiling patiently and indulgently through it all.

  Jimmy said, “Somebody should tell Whitey this is not Madison Square Garden.”

  “Can you do better?” Jaja asked him, mischievously.

  Jimmy was his own shy retiring self. (If you didn’t believe he was modest and even bashful, you could ask him.) “I don’t know, maybe, perhaps. I think I might be able to, if . . .” His voice drifted off somewhere.

  Ernest egged him on. “Come on, American brother. Give it ruddy go. In the name of Calypsonia.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t have a lady to dance with. And besides and furthermore—and whatnot—and after all—”

  When the music stopped Jaja went over and sounded out the tall shapely one who had been dancing with the six-foot-five Guanayan. He brought her back to the table and introduced her to Jimmy. And she was Linda Okwuchuku, and she was all woman, and all African unadulterated, unmiscegenated, and he could not keep his eyes off her, even as he also kept one eye on her scowling escort seated at a nearby table. The music started and she asked him if he cared to dance. And what could he say? He was chivalrous, he thought, always had been. He was like the reluctant African American, when they started, but after a while the music got to him, Africa called him as she always calls her own, and when the young Black and comely woman beckoned him to relax and open up, relax he did, and began to move, baby, move, and it was definitely first cousin to calypso, the music and the dance was. And Jimmy Johnson answered the call of Great Black Mother Africa. Linda smiled at him encouragingly. The Africans are so polite, he thought. They have “couth” to squander. But he wanted to believe her when she said, “You dance the highlife very excellently. Like a proper African.” And when he looked around him, everybody else was off the floor and he became self-conscious again. Everybody smiling at him. Perhaps they were laughing at him.

  The music stopped and the gracious lady stepped back from him and bowed slightly, and Jimmy had a feeling of behindedness, and turned quickly in time to see her partner coming toward him in a hurry. When the powerful Guanayan reached Jimmy, he drew back as if to knock our hero out into the middle of the Sahara. Jimmy ducked. Actually, he almost fell over backward, but not in time. The Guanayan’s aim was on target, and he smacked the now-reluctant African open-handedly and left a shilling sticking to Jimmy’s forehead, and also left Jimmy with a headache and a crick in the small of his neck.

  “Welcome, American brother! How did you learn to dance our dance so good?”

  Jimmy quickly regained his cool and drew himself up to the full length of his dignity. “Thank you, my brother. It must be my African heritage!”

  He heard the laughter all around him. They were laughing with him and not at him, he insisted to himself. It was the laughter of approval—Love—Acceptance—Admiration. Brotherhood and all that jazz.

  Many drinks and hours later, his brothers took him floatingly to the fabulous (expensive) Ambassador Palace Hotel and got him a room and poured him into bed and left him to die a plush and posh and proper European’s death.

  3

  He was awakened early that next morning by a telephone ringing somewhere in the buried recess of someone else’s mind, he thought. His head felt like it weighed a ton. He thought this could not possibly be his head that lay just beyond his neck upon the pillow. Somebody must have taken advantage of him when he was drunk and like a thief in the night made off with his head and left another in its place that was fifty times as heavy. How long had the phone been ringing? He reached out blindly from his bed and knocked the telephone off its cradle and the whole contraption to the floor. He stumbled from the bed and reached down for the damn thing, almost fell face-forward to the floor. Ultimately now, the receiver was in his hand. “Hullo,” he uttered vaguely, wondering where he was in time and space, who he was, and did it really matter anyhow?

  A strange-to-him accented voice came through from the other end. “Hello, Brother, Jaja hyah.”

  “Who?”

  “Jaja Segu, mawn. Not Olivamaki, Sah. Did you make it through the night successfully?”

  “Where am I?” Jimmy asked, stupidly.

  “Where are you? You’re home, mawn, in Africa, the land of your ancestry. You’re in Bamakanougou. Don’t you remember? You disembarked here.”

  “Vaguely,” he mumbled. He had thought briefly he had dreamed the whole damn beautiful thing. Paradise Regained.

  “We are coming for you, shortly, today or tomorrow, and take you out of that European den of iniquity.”

  He said, “Thank you much and very very.” And tried to lift the phone contraption from the floor and got disconnected, just as someone rapped upon the door.

  A young Guanayan came into his room with a tray of tea and crumpets and placed them on a table near his bed.

  “Good morning, Sah. I trust you slept not too badly. I am Cecil Oladela, Sah.”

  Jimmy said, “Yeah.”

  “I’ll come back, Massa, and fix your room after you get dressed and make the little chop on the table there.”

  “Don’t call me ‘Massa,’” Jimmy said firmly. “I am nobody’s master. I am your American brother.” The young Guanayan said, “Exactly, Massa.” And he bowed and left the room.

  Less than a half an hour later he was back before Jimmy had a chance to get into his trousers. He made up the bed all round his American brother, as if he were in fact invisible, picking up here and hanging up there. Jimmy’s Mississippi Grandma would’ve called it “a lick and promise.” Now that he was finished he stood before Jimmy Johnson stiffly. “How long do you plan to be with us here, my brother?”

  He learns quickly, Jimmy thought. “I will probably be here no longer than tomorrow.” He wondered at the sad expression that suddenly encompassed the young Guanayan’s handsome face.

  “That is really too bad, Sah, my brother, since tomorrow will be my day off from this place. That is really too too bad. We will probably never see each other again.”

  Jimmy thought to himself, Then there really is something to this thing of blood between men and women of Afr
ican descent. We’ve known each other for less than a couple of hours, we’ve been together a few minutes only, and he’s so sentimental about the thing. He was ashamed of his own cynicism, his lack of sentimentality, of African fellowshipness. No matter, Jimmy said sadly, “That’s life, my brother, like c’est la vie.”

  The young man said, “Then perhaps you dash me now, since I will not be here to see you off tomorrow.”

  “Dash you?” Jimmy asked, inquiringly, and puzzled. There were images in his mind now of hundred-yard dashes and sprints and two-hundred-yard dashes, with the brothers always finishing first, second, and third, but what about the mile and the two-mile and the marathon?

  Cecil Oladela brought him back to the real world. “Dash me with—” Then Cecil hesitated. Then he said, “The currency is in pounds here in Guanaya, Sah. Did you get your dollars changed? If you only have dollars, Massa, there are places of exchange that I know about.”

  Jimmy hated him for the moment for destroying his romantic illusions, for he was, at heart, hopelessly romantic. Sentimental to a fault. Ask him. Then he began to laugh good-naturedly. He went to his trousers and gave the lad a couple of dollars.

  Cecil was ready to split now, and he did leave after wishing Mister Jimmy Johnson a “safe journey.” Wherever it was that his American brother was journeying to. The last thing Cecil mumbled as he went out of the door sounded like “Get some good protection.” But from whom and what? Jimmy wondered.

  Jimmy stood there for a moment staring at the closed door. Then he began to laugh and he could not stop laughing. He laughed until the tears spilled down his cheeks. These days he cried so easily. He fell upon the bed and went immediately to sleep and awoke less than an hour later. His head seemed twice as heavy as it had been before.

  Somehow he made his way down to the Ambassador Palace Hotel lounge. He was afraid to look into the mirror behind the bar. Scared he would verify his suspicion that he really wasn’t who he thought he was. Ooh! Oooh! His head felt like a jet prop airliner coming in for a landing and using the top of his poor head for an airstrip. The African sun already coming into the softly lit room in thick hot heavy yellow slices. Sweet and musty was the smell of last night’s great indulgences. Jimmy looked around him, but there was not one solitary recognizable bona fide soul-brother African club member in the lounge that time of morning, not even behind the bar. Not one club member. He made up his mind. He was going to move from this place tout-damn-suite into less fabulous less expensive and more indigenous living quarters. Yeah! He hoped his African comrades came for him today. He would not wait until tomorrow.