The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  * * *

  Suddenly now he was back in Bamakanougou, and the vibes became too much for Jimmy. He was overwhelmed with premonition. A prickling feeling at the nape of his neck. A frothing perspiration lathering his entire body. Breathing now was difficult. He suddenly yelled, “Jump!” And jammed the brakes, and pushed the little Guanayan driver out of the right side of the jeep, as he jumped from his side, all in one motion. The jeep went unattended for no more than fifteen yards and detonated. As if to blow the night apart, even as it blew the jeep apart.

  * * *

  He came back from death in a strange place in an unfamiliar room. He knew not where he was or why he was or even who or when he was. Perhaps he was in Heaven. Perhaps he heard an angel’s voice.

  “How do you feel, Your Excellency? You had, how you say in your country, a much close call.”

  Hers was the first face he saw as he came back from death. It made him glad to be alive. Then he saw the other cabinet members as they stood around the bed. His handsome bearded double told him, “The African gods were watching over you. As Maria Efwa said, you had a very close call. The only way we can explain what happened is that God saved you for the mission you are destined to perform for Africa.”

  “You must have had some powerful protection,” a voice asserted. He was not sure who spoke the words. He was not sure who said what.

  “Perhaps the gods were warning me of the danger of this mission.” This crazy madcap escapade, he thought.

  As if he had not heard Jimmy, His Excellency said, “Of course we had to postpone the trip for several days. Meanwhile get yourself some rest and strength, and if you want for something you have only to let us know. Anything at all.” The Prime Minister was beardless now.

  Jimmy thought, I want to get the hell out of here as soon as possible. His Excellency said, “We’ll be looking in on you from time to time. The doctors have assured us you will be all right and fully recovered within a week or two. A slight concussion. Sleep well, and Her Excellency Miss Maria Efwa will be in to see you tomorrow morning and begin to work with you on Guanayan history and folklore.”

  They were gone now and an overburdening sense of foreboding descended heavily upon him. His mind was filled with images of escape and flight away from Paradise suddenly lost never to be regained, he thought. It had been his custom since his arrival in Bamakanougou to go to the window of his hotel room every morning and stare out at the breathless beige and green and feral-flowered beauty of the landscape and marvel all anew at his incredible good fortune. He would stretch and sigh and thank whatever gods there be and softly shout, “Peace! It’s truly wonderful!” He knew by now that he had been brought back to the Executive Mansion, since obviously he belonged there as the Head of State. The Prime Minister had ordered him to get some rest. But rest would not come easily, that night. He had slept less than fitfully. He lay, at first, on his back, and could not fall asleep. He crossed his legs at the ankles and then remembered the nurse who tended to him in the hospital during his brief stay in the Nam. It was one time he had ignored his prescience, and he had paid the penalty. The big blond nurse had warned him that crossing his leg would cause him premature problems with his blood circulation. Whenever she caught him with his ankles crossed underneath the sheet, she would squeeze his feet. At first he’d thought she was getting fresh with him, which was before he found out definitely she was getting fresh with him, else why would she come and put the screen around them and when she bathed him, would fondle his member and giggle at it when it hardened, oftentimes against his will. Then one night long after midnight she came and got into his bed.

  He uncrossed his ankles and lay on his left side and felt a tension in the calf of his left leg. He turned over on his right side with no better results. When he did finally fall asleep for ten or fifteen minutes, he would dream of water holes and moccasins and Vietnam mess halls and bombings and blood and disconnected legs and arms and heads and feet. When daylight finally came he lay exhausted and frustrated.

  He lay there debating with himself and scheming as to how he would get himself out of this holy mess he’d gotten into. He felt like an extraordinary jackass with the phony beard hanging from his chin, which they insisted that he wear at all times so that he would become accustomed to it. He would just tell her that he’d changed his mind, especially after his “much close call,” as she herself had termed it. He’d tell her he was no hero and had never pretended to be one. He’d tell her and she could tell the rest of them. And that would be the end of it. He had a terribly ominous premonition and this time he would not disregard it.

  But then she would come and all his uneasiness would be forgotten. Each morning he would be mesmerized by her unearthly beauty, which was physical and intellectual and especially was it spiritual. She was indeed a triple threat. He put up all kind of defenses against her, and to no avail. He was too experienced and sophisticated to be taken in by a pretty face, he told himself. He’d known faces just as pretty, perhaps not as beautiful as Her Excellency. There was the exquisitely lovely brown one back in the nation’s capital. There was his high school sweetheart down in Lolliloppi, the high-hipped one with sweet construction. Her facial features eluded him, maliciously, but he remembered she was beautiful. There was devastating Debby Bostick. There was Daphne Jack-Armstrong of his recent London days, the coloratura soprano, and there were the crazy ones in Hollywood. None of these defenses helped him, because he knew that there was no woman on this earth as beautiful as Her Excellency Miss Maria Efwa of the slimly rounded structure, the eyes so wide and brownly dark, now dark brown and now entirely deeply ebony and slanting, them there eyes!, the high cheekbones, the ample and curvaceous mouth. All that beauty plus a quiet dignity eloquent in its manifestation. Perhaps it was the slight concussion they said he’d suffered from the explosion that made him so susceptible and vulnerable to a lovely woman.

  He knew only that when she spent the day with him, teaching him Guanaya’s lore and history, all his forebodings were entirely swept away. But then at the end of the day, when she was leaving him, she would take his hand in a sisterly gesture of farewell-till-morning, but when he wished to make the much much more than that, and he would squeeze her hand too warmly, she would gently and firmly take her hand away from him and leave him in a mild despair, which would deepen as the darkness of the night came on, and especially the loneliness. And then would come the doubts and fears and sleepless nights.

  But finally a combination of the enchantment of Her Excellency’s beauty (a triple-threat woman she), his sense of challenge and adventure, his deepening sense of his Africanness and his racial pride, his almost irresponsible uncontrollable sense of humor, the exciting idea of putting one over on his Uncle Sam; all of this put to flight his persistently deepening and ominous premonitions.

  He was ready for the grand impersonation and to hell with premonitions.

  Actually, he had always been a wild one, a taker of outrageous chances. Even as a young lad back in ’Sippi, he was never one to take a dare. Six and seven and eight years old, he’d loved to hang head-downward from limbs of trees with nothing to keep him from falling on his noggin except his barefooted toes wrapped around the limbs. When he was ten and eleven and twelve years old, he and one of his buddies would go into a neighborhood grocery store (white-owned and managed), and while one of his buddies engaged the clerk in argument or conversation, he would be lifting cookies and other goodies from the bins and filling up his pockets. Sometimes he wouldn’t even eat the goodies. It was the doing it that counted. The name of the game was escapade and daring. He’d always been the kind of boy who took shortcuts through ’Sippi graveyards at midnight, because he would not take a dare. Before he ever learned to swim, he jumped into a ten-feet-deep swimming hole and splashed his way to the other side.

  Nevertheless, you might have thought that his experiences with prescience would have taught him greater caution, but as they say in Paris, “C’est la vie,” or perhaps more a
ppropriately, “Cherchez la femme.”

  * * *

  For fairly obvious reasons, the trip across the ocean had to be postponed for several weeks. Even after Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson was released from the hospital, he remained in comparative seclusion in the Executive Mansion at Robeson House for a couple of weeks before takeoff time. He was attended daily by a steady flow of executive physicians, staring down his throat and through his ears and up his nose and up more embarrassing and unpleasant places. And he was attended each day by his teacher, Maria Efwa, and by another brother, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister Barra Abingiba, who, like the Prime Minister, had spent several years in the States getting a college education at Howard University in the District of Columbia, then to Harvard and to Yale. “Whatever Maria omits, perhaps Barra can fill the gap for you. You’ve had mutual experiences,” the PM counseled him.

  At Jimmy Jay’s insistence, Jaja Okwu also spent at least an hour a day with the phony-bearded Jimmy Jay. “If I’m going to impersonate you, then I must get to know all about you, your ways, your traits, your characteristics, your reading habits, your family background, your beliefs, so that I’m able to speak with some authority and with your voice and with your nuances and especially your intelligence.”

  Jimmy learned that the PM had been a flaming radical in his younger days, had spent a year in London, and another year in Moscow at Friendship University, a.k.a. Lumumba University, went to the States for four years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania near the Mason-Dixon Line, walked the thronging streets of Harlem for another year, soapboxed and demonstrated. He’d read Das Kapital and the Manifesto. He’d read Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes, John Maynard Keynes and Bernard Shaw. “I’m a Pan-Africanist Black Nationalist,” he told Jimmy, “with a socialist perspective.”

  “What the hell is that?” Jimmy asked the learned PM.

  “With all due respect to Professor Marx,” the PM quietly explained. “We, in Guanaya, are admiring this Karl Marx man very much indeed for his important contribution to universal thinking, but we were living in a very sophisticated society of communal being long before Professor Marx was a being in this universe.”

  All Jimmy Jay could say was “Come again? Run that one back by me one more time.” He felt like the biggest ignoramus he himself had ever heard of.

  “Come again?” the PM queried. “Run it back? Oh I see.” Then Jaja Okwu complied patiently almost word for word. Jimmy thought it sounded like a tape recording.

  Conscientious Jimmy Johnson tackled his homework scrupulously. Tried to make up for lost time, relentlessly. He had them bring him all kinds of books. He almost read two books a day. Erudition was coming out of his ears. Between the books and Maria Efwa’s information and Barra Abingiba and Jaja Okwu, the dear fellow almost lost his bearings. Most nights he finally went to bed with a headache of the migraine denomination. Where in the hell had he been when all this was going on? Being written, spoken, happening?

  Jimmy Jay and Barra Abingiba hit it off immediately, from the “get-go,” a term Barra loved to use, and frequently.

  One evening they sat together in the PM’s study sipping mucho palm wine and laughing and joking, rhapsodizing in the hip idiom of Afro-American-ese. Barra seemed bent on proving to one and all that Whitey’s hifalutin Ivy League education had not cut him loose from his Black roots. Some nights Barra sounded so “down with it,” Jimmy Jay suspected him of actually being an Afro-American posing as an authentic African. Perhaps that was why the PM had put the two of them together. They were “birds of a feather.”

  “You’re going to be going out there in that other world,” Barra told him in his hipper-than-hip Afro cadence. “Sometimes you’re liable to find yourself between a rock and frigging hard place. Somewhere out there by your lonesome between the devil and the deep blue great big drink. You’d better get yourself some protection. Hey, and I’m the cat that can get it for you wholesale.” Barra Abingiba was so hip he couldn’t stand himself.

  “Protection?” Jimmy Jay questioned, uneasily, as the skin began to crawl across the middle of his back. He hadn’t heard “protection” since that first morning in the hotel with Cecil Oladela, the hundred-yard-dash man. Then he remembered the unidentifiable voice at the hospital.

  “What do you mean, ‘protection’?”

  “Protection, baby. Hey, that’s some heavy shit you going to be into. Believe me when I say so.”

  Jimmy sobered up immediately, completely even. “I haven’t the slightest idea what the hell you’re talking about. What in the hell is this ‘protection’?”

  “You need some help to carry out there with you from a heap bad Juju man, the motherfuckering witch damn doctor. And your boon buddy, Barra Abingiba, knows the baddest motherfuckerer in all Guanaya.”

  “But you, I mean, you’re too intelligent,” Jimmy Jay protested. “You’re too educated. I mean, you got your PhD from Harvard and another one from Yale. I mean, you can’t actually believe in Juju and-and-and in witch doctors, I mean, you don’t, do you? You’re a clinical psychologist.”

  “What’s intelligence got to do with it? And education? I mean, you show me an African that doesn’t believe in Juju, or witchcraft, or whatever you want to call it, and I’ll show you an African who is off his cotton-picking rocker.” Sometimes Barra got his idiomatic metaphors all screwed up and bass backward.

  Barra was laughing now, hysterically, as he stared at Jimmy’s quizzical face. And Jimmy felt a sudden dizziness. He said, “Surely you don’t really—”

  Barra stopped laughing, momentarily. “Is the fuckering Pope Catholic? Was the Messenger Islamic? That’s like asking an African is the sun going to rise tomorrow morning anywhere on this earth, or is there sand in the Sahara.”

  Jimmy mumbled, “But surely, I mean, somebody like Jaja and Maria Efwa don’t actually believe in that kind of shit.”

  “That’s because you haven’t been here long enough to be Africanized. You’re still an African American.” He stared at Jimmy Jay. “You’re a white man with a black skin.” And he erupted with laughter again, the American kind of “colored” laughter. Jimmy Jay felt like a fool.

  “Yeah,” Barra went on, laughingly. “Like Hugh Masekela said, ‘The Americanization of Oooga Booga,’ right? I was sure as hell Americanized, when I first got back, but it didn’t take long to get that shit out of my system. I mean Juju, I mean witchcraft. A rose by any other name. I mean that shit is pervasive throughout the Mother Continent. Every living ass is a solid true believer. It’s some shit that you can’t live without. It’s in your blood.”

  The lovely image of Maria Efwa came, against his will, before Jimmy Jay, and he felt a sudden nausea, and he didn’t want to think about it—Maria Efwa and witchcraft! He didn’t want to believe it. He wouldn’t ever believe it. So he steered the conversation into other more familiar waters, where the sea was calmer, because he didn’t like seasickness.

  For a couple days afterward he thought of little else. Perhaps his friend Barra was pulling his leg, he hoped fervently. Having a joke at Jimmy Jay’s expense. Sometimes these Guanayans showed the weirdest sense of humor. But then what if his good buddy wasn’t joking? Every day and all day long, when he was with Maria Efwa, he was usually distracted. Trying desperately to figure out how to broach the subject to her. He knew he was bewitched, by her. He was charmed by her unearthly beauty. He was surely mesmerized. Undoubtedly she had cast a spell on him. Perhaps she was in fact the Juju Queen, High Priestess of the Guanayas.

  Ultimately he couldn’t live with it any longer. He could not bear the strain of wondering, not knowing. The agonizing doubts and fears. He bolstered up his courage, and he asked her. “Do you think I need a little protection before I go out into that other world?” He laughed, to make her think he was only kidding—just in case—

  She stared at him, seriously, out of those deep and large and dark and mesmerizing eyes. Wide and mysterious and knowing and almond shaped, diagonal. Jimmy Jay felt
immediately Jujued and witchcrafted.

  She stared intently at him, through him. “You believe in it already?”

  He laughed weakly, then uproariously. “No indeed. Of course not. Heh-he-he. Like I was only kidding. I mean—”

  She said only, though emphatically, “Stay away from it. Do not get involved in it. God will give you adequate protection.” He’d figured already that she was a Christian. She had told him she’d attended a Catholic secondary school, before she went to the University at London.

  The next time he was with his palm wine drinking buddy, he brought the subject up again. “You were kidding, weren’t you, with that Juju and that witchcraft stuff. I mean—”

  Barra laughed his funny laugh again. “Did or not old bad Denmark Vesey believe in Gullah Jack?” Barra was a heavy dude in Afro-American history and folklore. He was perfectly at home with Vesey and Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser and David Walker. And he loved to show off his Afro-American erudition.

  Jimmy Jay countered with “All that Juju Gullah Jack possessed didn’t save his and Denmark’s asses from getting strung up.”

  “Perhaps his Juju wasn’t powerful enough.” He went off into his demonic laughing jag again. When he stopped he said, “I told you, that Juju shit is pervasive, I mean, all over Africa. Some of these ordinary everyday motherfuckers can put a natural hurting on your ass. One of the most revolutionary presidents of an African country is reputed to be the baddest Juju man on this earth. He can put you on a plane headed for Accra in Ghana, and then he’ll get into his Land Rover, and by the time you get there by air, he’ll be out there at the Accra airport waiting for you when you arrive. I know a couple of dudes he did that to.”

  Jimmy Jay was almost out of breath. “What’s his name? Who is this revolutionary Juju president?”