The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  Yet at this moment he somehow longed for London. He never thought that in this life he would regret leaving jolly England.

  8

  London Bridge is falling down

  Falling down, falling down

  London Bridge is falling down,

  His fair lady—

  Jimmy Johnson simply had had to find himself. From ’Sippi to the army and to Vietnam, to Los Angeles, he’d sought himself, and desperately. From LA to the Apple. New York, New York, a city so nice, they named it twice. He fled so damn fast from himself, and from New York, he ended up in London Town. To find himself all over again.

  On a thick and misty London evening he’d landed at Heathrow airport in a jet airliner via beautiful, soft-faced, dark-eyed-stewardessed Air India, and when the soupy fog had lifted, he’d found the living much much easier. And far less frenetic. Now at long damn last, he would surely find himself, Jimmy Johnson told himself.

  London City was old and firmly established, and yet it had a certain youthfulness about it. Vast gray limestone edifices stood their ground with the dignity of elderly statesmen among the modern streamlined whippersnapper buildings and the erstwhile Beatles and the Teddy Boys of yesteryears and the revival of the more than many miniskirts. It was a country where people stood for election rather than ran for it, as they did in the good old USA. That was London as Jimmy saw it. Changing even as it remained the same. And he could really get to like this place, he decided with unseemly haste. No one seemed to push him here, racially or otherwise, he thought, at first. Not even his homely Welsh landlady, who bugged him only when she talked too much, which was every time he didn’t see her coming and get the hell out of her way. Her cooking was atrocious, but be that as it may.

  He had saved enough money on his last singing gig in New York and the only album he’d recorded to tide him over for a time. And time was the only thing he’d ever needed. That’s how he always conned himself. Only time and breathing space. The thing he liked especially about London was it was a city that didn’t need to work overtime at being a city. It was a great city, Jimmy thought, and it knew it was, and that settled the matter, period. You didn’t even need an exclamation point! The difference between London and New York, Jimmy thought, was the difference between a truly gifted artist who knew he was truly gifted and one whose profoundest gift was his artistic temperament, Jimmy Johnson thought. The difference, if you please, between self-confidence and desperate kind of egotism. London did not have to throw fits or temper tantrums or things at people. In a word, London was “cool,” as far as Jimmy was concerned. “Cool!”—that is—most of the time.

  For the first couple of weeks Jimmy Johnson took it easy. Checking out everything and everybody. He walked the streets, goggle-eyed, like a country boy he was, essentially, haunted the restaurants in Soho, African and Indian cuisine and otherwise. He frequented the bawdy burlesque houses. Despite the superabundance of weather, which was always there, prodigiously there, he breathed the free and easy air of London. And evenings, dark and large of eye, tall, profiling, assuming postures, brownish-black with reddish hue and knowing of his macho handsomeness, he got caught up in the mad labyrinth of Piccadilly Circus, rubbing elbows, seeing shows, drinking Scotch and shouting Bravos!

  Piccadilly Circus was Times Square with a vengeance, almost. This was where miniskirts must have been invented, he thought, and reinvented in the eighties. He got a crook in his neck from staring fore and aft at perambulating skirts that reached up beyond the navel. It was disconcerting. Moreover it was embarrassing even, since he seemed the only member of the male species that took notice of the sparsely decorated scenery.

  Two bully boys followed him one day for half a block huckstering their wares. “Two quid for an unblemished white woman, myte. Only two quid and she’s yours for the awsking.”

  “An honest-to-goodness virgin, myte.” From the other bully boy. “Pure and white as the driven snow. She’s yours for only two quid.”

  While our hero was fascinated with the scenery and its feminine backsideness, he was not that interested in the sampling of the merchandise. He did not believe in “lay for pay” or “pay for lay,” whichever. He got bored with the bully boys very quickly. “Come on myte—a lousy two quid for a pure white virgin. She’ll do anything your heart desires.” One of them tapped him on the shoulder. Jimmy turned and squared off at them. “Get lost, motherfuckers!”

  He walked out on Birdcage Walk one balmy day, exceptionally balmy for old London, to the west end of Saint James Park, and he could not believe his eyes, as he jolly well witnessed the pomp and circumstance of the changing of the guard before that great symbolic fortress of a castle known as Buckingham Palace. Grown men on their pretty horses in their brilliant-red jackets and their brightly colored hats and plumage, playing “soldier” like little boys at Christmas with their toys Santa had left them. This was not “cool,” not “laid back” as he imagined London. He window-shopped in Mayfair, he rode the marvelous underground with its upholstered seats and noiseless wheels; stared open-mouthed like a proper rustic at one of the most renowned addresses in the whole wide world, a simple red-bricked building on a narrow unpretentious street by the name of Downing, with the famous number “10” above its entrance. This was “cool,” again as he imagined London.

  After a few weeks, his money suddenly grew shorter than his close-cropped Afro, à la Stokely, but he was lucky as he somehow knew he would be in jolly England. He got a job singing in a restaurant in Soho, and he sort of had it made, despite the fact that he had to fight off a few obnoxious selfish ones from time to time. Likewise from time to time, he passed the early before-day morning hours away with a few innocuous Anglo-Saxon women. (Not all at the same time, of course, but singly, since Jimmy Jay did not believe in orgiastic happenings—he was not that sophisticated.) He hardly knew their names, these women, nor did he care to know them, really. Lest there be a horrible misunderstanding here, let us set the record straight. These women were not courtesans! Categorically. They just loved to make the scene every now and then, and they never passed up a morsel, large or small, that came into their POV, within their purview, so to speak. They hung around the place where Jimmy worked, and they worked their desperation out on him, with him, quietly, matter-of-factly, therapeutically, in the spirit of international togetherness, as quietly they became more desperate. He told himself, these affairs would have more meaning if only there were more “sisters” in this place. But foxes were still in short supply, relatively, though the numbers were increasing. Jimmy figured it had to have something to do with the fact that the fox hunt had been, anciently and historically, a national pastime. Perhaps, he thought, mi lords and mi ladies had tallyhoed them almost into extinction. Then again, perhaps they’d always been a rare commodity in the homeland of the old You-Kay. It was a vicious circle, which often found our man Jimmy in the middle of it, a backbreaking thankless bit, but he smiled and suffered quietly, heroically, and bore the Black man’s burden like the stoic that he was. Then the mood hit him again.

  He got fiercely lonesome for the real thing, whatever the real thing was wherever it was. He wearied of the hurried sounds of clipped accents. He tired of the one-night stands with the nameless faceless women, with the silken locks, some harsh and dry as hay in haystacks, he told himself, and halfly he believed himself. Especially did he tire terribly of fighting off the constant pixies, who, seeing him with no women in particular, figured him for a great long tall piece of beautiful Black ambivalence up for grabs to the highest bidder, and the mother-muckers bidded like proper mother-muckers.

  He had made half-hearted guilt-ridden gestures toward clusters, here and there, of his kind of people, darkly hued, West Indian–West African–and East Africanly accented. Sometimes East Indians and Pakistani. He’d hung out briefly in volcanic Brixton. But he had not come to jolly England looking for a fight. He’d done his share of fighting in his homeland of the brave and free. That was in the young days of his raging
angry innocence. He could have stayed at home for that. Oh! the great days of his embattled youth! It was common knowledge back home where he came from that the Black man was an endangered species. Sometimes at the “colored” gatherings in London he’d encounter East Indian and Pakistani accents, black-straight-haired, dark-eyed and dark-to-light-skinned men (fewer of the so-called weaker sex) who talked bouncingly as if their mouths were filled with agate marbles. Their tongues seemed to him to dwell on roller coasters.

  He attended all the “colored” meetings and cheered them as they damned the damnable British. He went to several of their parties, and they welcomed him, at first. But when the few women always present (very very few they were, usually) gravitated toward the handsome “rich” American, he began to feel their dark and masculine hostility. Back home in the States the situation was entirely different. Directly opposite. Women always were in such great abundance at the parties and the get-togethers. So that men would just stand around profiling, assuming much macho postures. You didn’t even need a rap to get over with the ladies. Black men were in such short supply.

  Most Black men back home were lying neath the earth in Nam, or wearing out their welcome and the vaunted hospitality of the American prison system, or nodding in their endless sleep on the pretty white and deadly poppy.

  He met one pretty dark-eyed sister in London from the Island of the Barbados in hot pursuit of the legal profession. He was lonesome and he wanted to get close to her in an other-than-brotherly relationship. But her lovely head was full of legalisms, and quid pro quo and vis-à-vis and sine qua non and a whole lot of legalistic gobbledygook (to him) with which he had not even an ephemeral acquaintance. It was difficult for him to break down her automatic resistance vis-à-vis his rhapsodizing in which he prided himself an expert. Charisma yeah! He had a hard enough time following her swiftly clipped accents when she was speaking ordinary English. The good Queen’s version.

  But our man persevered, and ultimately they found themselves in her flat all alone together. But every time he hinted, delicately, at beddy bye, she waxed matrimonial, invariably, a situation from which he had recently escaped back in the States, an institution that he had no current enthusiasm for enrolling in. She seemed to think all Americans, Black and white, were as rich as Belafonte and Poitier, especially if they were athletes or performing artists. “We could work together,” she fantasized. “I could be your business manager. I could handle all of your legal transactions,” she heatedly proposed to him, excitedly.

  There was the other one he took out several times, dear sweet lovely Sandra with rich and full and sweet and curving lips, Black Beauty in the natural flesh all the way from Trinidad. She had known Claudia Jones. Proclaimed Claudia her patron saint. She was as militant as Angela Davis, and equally aggressive, perhaps more so. They would be sitting in a restaurant, and she’d point and say loudly, “Look at that red-legged buckra making eyes at me, getting fresh with me. Go over there and hit him in the mouth.”

  Like the man said, Jimmy Jay had not come to jolly London looking for a showdown with the Anglo-Saxon race. So, Jimmy would say, “Hunh?” Hesitatingly. And if he hesitated more than thirty seconds, she’d rise from the table. “If you’re not man enough, I’ll do it myself. I’ll slap him in his goddamn mouth.” And she’d always choose the biggest bastard in the house, King Kong with a permashave, hairless, at a table inhabited at the moment with his big plug-ugly buddies. Our hero was not that heroic. Though he could pass for twenty-five, he was, in fact, thirty-five. His barricade-storming days were over. He was at the moment a staunch believer in nonviolence. He’d already done his stints with Malcolm X and SNCC and those wonderful Black Panthers all up and down the wild and wooly western coast of North America. He figured he’d paid his Liberation dues. He’d sung his Liberation Blues.

  Just as he thought he’d finished with the “liberation” bit, the Brixton riots caused in him a reaction that was reflex conditioned. He found himself manufacturing, scientifically, cocktails à la Molotov (he preferred the kinds you sipped, complacently), speaking at rallies, running up dark streets with comrades he hardly knew, ducking and dodging, out of breath, ultimately the unwilling guest of Her Britannic Majesty’s constabulary. He felt old before his aging time. One or two or three or four or five or even six or seven ASPs (Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Who needs the “W”? Why be redundant in this case? Did you ever hear of Black Anglos? ASPs they were, and equally as venomous and deadly.) coalesced with them and helped rescue them from Her Majesty’s institution or incarceration. ASPY Jack-Armstrong was one of them. Missionaries, don’t you know. No matter, London to him was no longer jolly.

  Just as Jimmy had reached the conclusion that London Town was not his city after all, decidedly not his cup of tea, kept him eternally at sea; that London was even more of a fairyland than Hollywood, that picture-pixie paradixie, funky, fake, and phony all the way, he met a raven-haired, green-eyed, vivacious English woman by the improbable name of Daphne Jack-Armstrong. And suddenly he told himself he liked London all over again. And everything was cool again. Okay, she wore no Afro crown upon her head, she was undoubtedly an Asp, but who was he to pick and choose? He was lonesome among strangers. A lad who’d always loved to live dangerously, liked to play with sticks of dynamite, though he was utterly afraid of snakes. And repeat: Jack-Armstrong was an Asp. Let’s say, our hero was confused.

  Daffy had a flat in a fashionable section of the city, and he asked her no questions and she told him no lies. She was the intellectual type, a real book bug. She had a passion for them. Her commodious living room was in truth a library, with bookshelves everywhere and stacked they were and with books even. Jimmy loved books. He loved people who loved books, he suddenly discovered, especially when they were as handsome and as womanful as Daphne (can you believe it?) Jack-Armstrong. And far into the night of early morning, after they had driven to her place from the club, she would talk to him about her books and about the world and peace and Lord Russell and Freedom-Marches-in-the-States and GBS and O’Casey and Jim Baldwin and Lebanon and Palestine and Israel and Jesse Jackson and the schism between the Chinese and the Russians (she leaned like Pisa toward the East and China) and about socialism and the Labour Party. And love and sex and the awful awful prevalence of British leprechauns who were mushrooming all over the British Isles and were flamboyantly in season even out of season.

  Moreover Daff was possessed with a voluptuous body as well as a brain, and vice versa. And was full of life and wanted to live it to the brimming overflow and here and now. Hurry up, please, let us live this life before it bids us Cheery bye, she seemed to always be shouting, softly though excitedly. Daff was all woman, 125 percent. She could not possibly weigh more than a hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet. Five feet, five inches of Anglo-Saxon womanhood and in her natural state of birthday garments. She was gentle, she was generous. She was greedy but not miserly. This university professor born wealthy of the middle class.

  They had known each other a week when one night she showed up down in Soho where he was doing a gig, and he drove her home in her Volvo, early before day one misty dew-dripped Saturday morning. And when they reached her flat they had more to drink and had breakfast, and talked and talked and talked about the problems of the world, till there was nothing else to say. And then she lay her head in his lap on her long brownish-beige goose-feathered couch, too close to the Him of him for comfort and she said, “I bloody well do like you, Jimmy. You know I really do.” She didn’t beat around the bush. She came right to the point. She knew where the point was situated.

  He said offhandedly, “Likewise, I’m sure.” Feeling deeply now her aspishness. Resenting now her self-assurance.

  “I mean,” she said, complacently, “I’m truly rawther fond of you.” Daphne stretched and yawned, and he hoped she wouldn’t fall asleep, because she had awakened the himness of him. What was he doing in this aspish place? his conscience asked, rhetorically.

  “That is precisely
what I thought you meant,” he said, still offhandedly.

  She shook her silken dark head in his nervous lap. “No—I don’t mean that. I mean I like you because you’re you. Well, you certainly are the handsomest of lads, in any context. You know that. But I mean, I know that some white women in London are in hot pursuit of colored boys because they believe in this myth of their sexual powers and that sort of bloody poppycock. But that is not what attracted me to you at all.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Jimmy said sarcastically. “You were not attracted to me because of bloody poppycock.”

  “I would fancy you, my dear, even if you were not colored at all. I fancy you for yourself, the inner you, which has no color. I like you of course because you are terribly outrageously attractive, I mean even if we never went to bed together and we probably never will, because I’m not that facile. All the same I should still like you very very much. You must believe that about me. I am not facile or promiscuous. I’ll have to know you a dreadfully long time before I go to bed with you, and yet I feel I’ve known you for a dreadfully long time.”

  “An entire week exactly is how long we’ve known each other,” our hero added thickly. “That’s how long it’s been since I was incarcerated. I’m deeply grateful for the part you played in securing my release from prison. It was truly very white of you.” Jimmy relished his sarcasm.

  “Do you feel that you’ve known me a terribly long time, dahling?” she asked him. She caressed his sober face with her tender fingertips.

  He weighed his words before he answered, trying them out for size and heavy duty and endurance. Finally he said, “Yes—a long long time.” And he wanted to feel as if he had known this woman for a long time. He wanted so very much to feel at home in this place with her head in his lap. But she was making him nervous now.

  She laughed like she was truly happy, like a pretty little spoiled bourgeois girl with a delightful plaything she was playing with. She pulled his head down, his mouth to meet her eager misty mouth. When they came up for air, she said, “Nevertheless, it’s actually been only a week, and we must know each other much much longer before we go to bed.”