Lady Debby turned toward the back of the brightly lit hall, adjusted her lorgnette to stare at the owner of the high-pitched voice, a light-skinned freckle-faced elderly woman, five by five, very heavily gotten together.
“Well, I know my pretty light-brown eyes haven’t got that bad, and these people here do not appear to be of Caucasian ethnicity.”
“You ladies are out of order.”
Mother McCree said, “That’s all right about that, we still ain’t no Negroes. That’s what the white folks call you, but we ain’t that. Let me break it down for all of y’all.” She pronounced the word lingeringly, contemptuously. “Nee—gro—Nee’gro! ‘Nee’ means never and ‘gro’ means grow, and ‘Negro’ means we ain’t never gon grow.”
Some of the brothers and sisters didn’t have any better sense than to laugh out loud.
Lady Debby retaliated. “Well, I must say, you don’t seem to have had any trouble in growing. The trouble is, you grew frontwise and sideways. You didn’t ever grow straight up.” She turned around and looked up at the chairman. “Now as I was about to rhetorize, when I was so crudely interrupted.”
Some brother shouted from the Amen Corner, “‘Rhetorize!’ Go ahead with your bad self. Talk pretty for the people!”
Lady Debby continued, smilingly. “Who married to the white man?” She paused. “Me!”
“Who got the Cadillac car?—Me!”
“You’re out of order, madame.” The chairman rapped his knuckles on the table. With dignity. Judge Rivers Jordan of the New York County Criminal Division was the chairman and had dignity he had not used yet. A lot of colored people had, and had not.
“She is very much in order!” a Black man shouted. “Rhetorize your ass off, Sister!”
“Who got the Cadillac car!” from another bourgeois brother.
“The question is, madame, who is going to be in charge of the Welcoming Committee—and who’s going to plan what program. These are the knotty problems.” The judge was patient with the lady. Give him credit.
“Who got the sable coats and the diamond rings?” As if the good judge had not spoken. “Me!” She smiled patronizingly. “So you know who the white folks going to be listening to. And that’s how come you nee-grows better listen to mother.”
The judge rapped again for order. “We are not discussing white folks, madame.”
The lady stared at the chairman with deep indignation and incredulity. “Are you for real, buster? Who invited that African to our country? White folks! Who’s he coming particularly to see? White folks!” And then the deluge.
Well? All right—they worked it out ultimately. With enormous dignity. But now—on to Washington. The following day. Out at the airport in good old Virginia, which State was known as the Mother of Presidents (this was not meant in a derogatory sense), the then-beloved President, whose mother was not from Virginia, by the way, the then-Secretary of State, whose mother also was not from Virginia, and the Secretary of Commerce, whose mother was, and of Treasury and of Defense and some Underecretaries and some big-businessmen and labor leaders, and last and very very least and way in the back at the end of the line were some happy nervous Negro leaders. They had status this day, and, By God, they knew it. And thousands of roped-off government workers waving flags and banners, welcoming the young Prime Minister and his entourage. From the many and different national flags being waved, a cynical mind might conclude that there was a bit of confusion on the part of the happy wavers as to which African country was being welcomed. Flapping gaily in the breeze was not one flag from Guanaya, but there were flags a gracious plenty from Guinea, Ghana, Niger, Egypt, Togo, Chad, Kenya, Ireland—and never mind. The wavers all had good intentions. We must not be hypersensitive. Colored folks’ flags do look so much alike. And yet one does wonder just how Ireland got into the act. Black Irish? Oh, never mind.
The President’s cherubic face was glowing with expectancy. He loved to meet new friends and particularly at airports. It gave him a feeling of faraway exotic places. He was probably the friendliest most openhearted President the USA had ever produced up to that time. He was shy and at the same time terribly gregarious, bashful and outgoing, an introverted-extrovert or an extroverted-introvert; he could never figure out what was what and which was which. He never was much good at that kind of semantic introspection.
He was an ambivert but didn’t know it. Many Western newspapers insisted that it had been the sheer warmth and magnetism of the President’s personality that had made the difference between whether Olivamaki paid his first respects to Washington or to bighearted heavy-handed Moscow, which had also put out the welcome mat, the Red Carpet, so to speak.
Hubert Herbert Hubert had not sought the presidency of the United States. He did not run for office. He “stood” for it like they do in jolly England. A modest man of simple taste and mind and even simpler beginnings, he had been caught up in the jet stream of a national fervor. Left to his own devices he would have probably been much happier as a chicken farmer (he said jokingly to a news commentator one day), or president of the Willing Workers Club of Friendship Baptist Tabernacle (his own dear mother’s church), or a private eye or head coach of the local football team, semipro, he said jokingly one day.
Albeit he was a man at one with his times, for he had double vision and always saw two sides to every question, and always walked unerringly down the middle of the road, which might not have made much sense in heavy traffic, but politics was different. Everything about him of importance was symbolic of his great ambivalence, always had been. He was a southpaw pitcher and a right-handed batter. He was born in a state of great unrest that was neither North nor South, East nor West, but right smack dab in the middle of his country. A state that made a liar out of honest Abe, for days, since it existed half free and half slave, for days—and years. White folks free and Black folks, well, but I’m sure you get the point, darling readers. His father’s folks had been slaveholders, his mother’s folks had been rabid raving abolitionists. His mother was a hard-shell feet-patting bench-beating Baptist, his father a proper Presbyterian. As a boy he joined both churches. His parents called him a “Nothinerian,” affectionately. He was a joiner as a little lad, joined both the Baptist and the Catholic church. In his lisping years, he called himself a “Bafflic.” His mother’s folks were staunch Republicans, his father’s were not so staunchly Democrats, and Hubert Herbert Hubert was a member of a party in his state known fondly as Republicrats. He looked like a combination of Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman rolled into one, and was often mistaken, even as a boy, for both and either, and sometimes neither, and therein was the rub.
It was a time of great ambivalence; politically, socially, economically, sexually. Western man could not make up his mind whether he was going to hell or Heaven, and whether he was on AC or DC current. But now it must be stated here categorically: The President had definite ideas about sex. He was old-fashioned. He knew the difference between a boy and a girl, and he liked his whiskey straight, neat! No martinis or Manhattans for him. He was strictly heterosexual, an oddball in the Space Age, no two ways about it, as far as many Western men were concerned. Two damn many! the old-fashioned President opined. Some Western men didn’t dig the Africans with all those wives. It wasn’t civilized, they thought. Even one wife was getting unpopular out here where the West began. Notwithstanding, the President staunchly refused to appoint any of those type of ambiguous undecided fellows to his cabinet, if he had the slightest suspicion. Hubert Herbert Hubert was a man from head to toe. You would have thought him macho had he not be so tenderhearted.
If he indulged himself in one obsession it was fornicating. He wearied of playing with himself very early in his uneventful life and sought other means of satisfaction and gratifications. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was a twelve-year-old and older cousin who spent a vacation with his family in the tenth summer of his youth, and sensing his profound frustration, caught him several times playing with himself behind the barn. Fe
eling sorry for him, she took his matters in her capable hands and taught him all the facts of life he needed to know at that terrifying moment. But summer came to an end and Sue Ida went away and left him more frustrated than before. He was crazy for it, dreamed about it, wet and sticky dreams he dreamed. He would shine his black shoes to a sparkle. He could see his homely face in them like a mirror. He could also look up the little girl’s dresses. His schoolmates called him “pussy happy.” They said he had “it” on the brain. It began to pervade his conversation, every sentence. Every other word was “fucking” this and “fucking” that. As a congressman he had a reputation of chasing his secretaries around desks and even up and down the corridors. Red faced, chubby, out of breath. “What d’ya mean, you ain’t gon give me none? I’m the fucking junior congressman.” He didn’t really want to be President and the only way they got him to run was to tell him that, if elected, he could get all the pussy there was on this earth. “Look at Jack Kennedy,” the fun-loving national chairman of the Republican Party cajoled him. “Look at all the pussy he got. And he had a bad damn back!” That clinched the matter, as far as the junior congressman from Mid-Americana was concerned. The only problem was he had to learn to keep the “fucking” adjective out of his vocabulary every time he made a “fucking” speech. It was never easy. In his inaugural, he almost pledged to uphold the “fucking” Constitution of the United States. He began to substitute the word “fabulous,” just to be on the safe side.
When the White House got the news that the PM of Guanaya was coming to Washington first, it was considered to be the grand coup of the Twentieth Century, and they celebrated all night long. Tippling, sniffing, toasting, dancing, dipping snuff, and fornicating. Ms. Bessie Sue Zadilia Hubert, Our Beloved First Lady, was off for a visit with her ailing mama in Yamacraw, Arkansas, which was just as well, because when Hubert Herbert Hubert got happy, he invariably got horny. And Ms. Bessie Sue would have none of it.
Some said it was due to her Christian fundamentalist upbringing, that she believed devoutly and even fundamentally that fornication was for the Divine purpose of procreation only. Others said, maliciously, it was due to the fact that in his latter days, the Prexy had become afflicted with a very flaccid member (of the wedding). Apparently Miss Bessie Sue had a big mouth, or something. In any event, the word got around, and he became known in elite circles as “the President with the limber member.” For whatever reason, soon after she decided her productive days had ended, she insisted on separate bedrooms. Whereas Hubert Herbert Hubert was much macho and Him personified. Our Prexy liked them young. He was known in inner circles as the “cradle snatcher.” He craved his snatches infantile, he’d tell you jokingly. But he was serious.
He had been known to boast that “every now and then I have to have my battery charged for heavy duty, and only young boosters can assume the awesome task.”
Since he never knew precisely when the happy mood would hit him, he took his dildo in his private briefcase everywhere he took himself. It was guarded as “Top Secret,” and it was marked as such. A few of his cabinet members were playful pranksters and would spirit away his dildo and hide it from their President “with the limber member” whenever they were in a devilish mood. For old Hubert to be without his dildo was like being up a stormy creek without a paddle, or like being on the stool with diarrhea without a single sheet of toilet paper.
Which was what happened to our President, the evening he received the happy news. The drinking, sniffing, snuffing, singing, dancing had subsided, and all of his buddies had gone home or wherever it was they customarily went to sleep it off, or to do whatever. It was nobody’s business but their own. Meanwhile there was this Miss American Starlet in the Lincoln White House bedroom wearing nothing but a happy smile. She was almost as pretty as her counterpart, Vanessa Williams, who would certainly go down in history. Honey Bunch was rosy-cheeked and plumpish and nubile, the way he liked them, with scarlet ribbons in her hair.
“Come on, Honey Bunch. Let’s play mommy-poppy.” Miss American Starlet lay there purring. He burst into joyous song.
I peeked in to say goodnight.
He went now toward the four-poster with his avoirdupois in much evidence around the middle of him. He made sucking noises with his lips as if he were playing with a lovely kitten. His eyelids blinking, he went, “Pussy! Pussy! Pussy!”
And I saw my child in prayer—
When he suddenly remembered, as he stood limply above her near the bed. The song was gone from his heart and soul. He stumbled drunkenly in his birthday suit around the room, cursing to himself, looking first one place and then the other. He pulled out drawers, crawled underneath the bed (which was quite an athletic feat) and looked. “God-fucking-dammit to hell!” the Prexy mumbled. He began to sneeze outrageously. He wiped his dripping sharply pointed nose, which resembled somewhat a horizontal obelisk.
“What is daddy looking for, baby doll? Maybe Honey Bunch can help you find it.” She was purring like a kitty cat. Kitty cats could get impatient. “Your briefcase is right here on the foot of the bed, sugar pie.”
“God-fucking-dammit!” he said. “I fucking fabulously found it!” He grabbed it up and opened it, threw all its contents onto the floor, but his precious dildo could not be found. “God-dammit-to-fabulous-fucking hell! God-fucking-dammit to hell!” He fell on the bed and telephoned his personal secretary.
“Round up all the fu-fuh-fabulous members of my fucking cabinet and get them here within the fucking hour,” the Prexy ordered drunkenly. “Have the fucking bastards here by four o’clock.”
“But, Sir, you realize what time it is?”
“Of course I do. Now you get your fucking ass out of a fucking sling and get them here within the fucking hour.” He slurred his words. “Issa snatchernal smergency—”
“But, Sir, what’s happened? Have they pushed the Doomsday button?”
“It’s worse than that. One of them fucking bastards stole my fucking dildo!”
The personal secretary fell onto the floor and dropped the phone and began to roar with raucous laughter. He could not contain himself. What the President heard on his end sounded like Donald Duck in hysterics. When he could finally contain himself, he picked up the phone again. “But, Sir, it’s impossible. They’re all over the place all over the globe. Besides, we can buy another one.”
“This time of night?” the President was fuming. He was no longer happy. He was left with nothing but his limber member and his horniness and his scarlet-ribboned Pussy Pie.
“We could get one in the morning, Sir.”
“I want it now! I need it now! What’s the fucking good of being President if I can’t get it when I want it? Jack fucking Kennedy got it, didn’t he? You want to keep your fucking position, don’t you?”
“Very well, Sir,” his personal secretary mumbled, resignedly. And got dressed and went out into the night in a desperate search of dildos.
But despite the Prexy’s indecision in the country, it had been a time when more Americans voted in the National Presidential Elections than any other time in history before or after. Hubert Herbert Hubert came out of the Middle Belt like a Middle Belt tornado sweeping all before him. In a climate of good feeling, the country landslid him into office, because nobody knew anything against him, because nobody hardly even knew him. But he was accused by many far and wide of being absolutely incorruptible, and that therefore he could not be trusted. To repeat Jimmy Johnson: In those days nobody trusted an honest politician. But back to our story.
Out over the wide Atlantic in a great jet airliner, the lights had flashed to “fasten your belts” and the announcement had been made that “we are approaching our destination, the capital of the United States.”
The bogus Prime Minister fastened his belt with trembling hands and looked around him and out of the window at the great white clouds rushing by in the other direction, and as the jet lost altitude he wished vaguely that he was out there with that white fleecy stuff shag
ging it back toward Bamakanougou. And maybe not so vaguely after all. On the way over they had filled his head with Guanayan lore and history till it was coming out of his ears and other places less mentionable. They ganged up on him. They took turns. They worked in shifts, pounding knowledge into his weary brain. Now he knew what it meant to be brainwashed. It was more like being brain cluttered.
Guanaya is a country bounded on the south by such and such and on the north by so and so. It goes all the way back to the magnificent empire of Emperor Whatnot the Great, the illustrious second cousin to the king of Timbuktu, which built tremendous city-states and had highly developed civilizations when white headhunters were chasing each other all over the face of Europeland. Guanaya’s natural resources consist of such and such, etc., etc., and on and on and on and on, they had no mercy on the fake PM. A couple of times he fell asleep in self-defense, went to the toilet, but they still kept after him, not even knowing that he slept, or caring. He felt they had washed his poor exhausted brain and hung it out to dry. Sometimes he would try to absorb everything about Guanaya and all at once, so much so that he thought he heard his brain scream out in protest. Sometimes, he’d take frantic notes until his fingers ached and tingled. And other times, he would shut it out of the ears of his mind and take quick trips to his days of recent yesteryears. And relive all the millions of little white lies that he had heard and lived in London Town, where he had thought that he was finally free, just as he’d thought he was finally free in California and New York, and even thought it in the Nam. But it was in London that he’d found the ultimate truth; the Western Truth; the European Truth; the Anglo-goddamn-Saxon Truth, that every Black man must know ultimately, or else remain a noble savage; or in other words, a slave.
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