Jimmy feigned an unfelt boredom. “We’re going to be two mighty sleepy people if we wait that long to go to bed.” With her head again upon his lap, and her cheek in careless contact with his member (of the wedding), he felt a thumping in the middle of him. There was this tug-of-war raging now between his lively member (of the wedding) and his racial consciousness. His member vis-à-vis his intellect.
She laughed nervously. Her voice was getting froggy now. “You’re teasing me, dahling. But we really haven’t known each other long enough, you know, and I’m bloody well not like those women chasing the colored boys all over London because they believe the sexual myths. I don’t believe the myths at all.”
He wanted to like her, desperately wanted to like this comely woman-child of the American Mother Country, and he wanted to like London. Where else would he go to find himself? One of these days he was going to Africa.
He had read every book he could lay hands on about the Mother Continent, his Africa. In the eyes of his imagination he’d seen it all, had traveled from north to south, from east to west, had followed the fertile and sensuous Nile from Lake Victoria down north past Khartoum all the way to the sea. He’d seen Cairo, Lagos, and Johannesburg, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. He had traversed the great Sahara all the way to ancient Timbuktu. He’d drunk from a thousand oases, sat with Bedouins at their campfires, in their lonely tents along the way. He knew the old “countree” like he knew the back of his hand.
That he would really go there in person was a dream he knew one day he would actually fulfill. It was a dream he’d dreamed for years. But when he went, he wanted to go in style. He didn’t want to go simply because there was nowhere else to go, he told himself. He did not want to escape to Africa. So now, this moment, he wanted to like Daphne Jack-Armstrong, and he did like her, goddammit, but every time she talked like she was talking now, he heard the little pale-faced aspish innuendoes in what she said, and in what she left unsaid, and felt the danger signals flashing somewhere deep inside the darkness of him. He closed his eyes and shut tight the ears of his mind, and he cast out of him all the Afro-oriented suspicions that he wanted to be unfounded.
She said, too contentedly, “We could have a platonic relationship. Don’t you think so, Dahling? Intellectual and spiritual and so on. We could be like brothers and sisters. You do believe in platonic relationships, don’t you, duck? That’s what I should like for us to have—a platonic relationship, pure and simple and uncomplicated.”
“Yeah,” he said drily. “Me and old faggoty Plato.” And suddenly he was terribly bored.
“But—but what is ‘faggoty,’ dahling?”
“‘Faggoty’ is the adjectival form of ‘faggot,’” he said sarcastically and with a very very British accent.
“But—but what is ‘faggot’?”
He said, “A faggot is a queer fellow, a chap of very profound Oedipus complexity, and ambivalence. And you’d better get yourself another boy. I am not frantically looking for a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad.”
She said, “There are faggots in England in great abundance dahling.”
“I’m hip,” Jimmy said drily, in Afro-Americanese.
“The public schools turn them out by the thousands. The ‘public’ schools are ‘private’ here.”
“So what else is new?” Jimmy asked his platonic lover, in sarcastic Brooklynese.
Then he said, “It’s getting kind of late, old dear.” And he moved her tousled head from his lap and stood up to go, and she stood up and went into his arms very unplatonically.
He cracked, “I never knew brothers and sisters to be so ever-loving amorous. It’s like bloody well incestuous.”
A fine perspiration had broken out above her peachy slightly mustached lips.
“Don’t leave me, Jimmy. I’m so terribly lonesome, dahling.”
“Plato would definitely disapprove,” Jimmy Jay reminded her.
She said, “I have no desire to sleep with Plato.”
In bed, she lost all her inhibitions, even those she never had. She forgot they had known each other for only a week. Forgotten entirely was old faggoty Plato. She busily undressed him first. She turned the lights off and she undressed herself quickly and got shyly into bed beside him. She was soft and quiescent at the beginning of their journey. Jimmy felt her swollen softness all up against his hard manhoodness. He was not unresponsive as she nibbled at the nipples of his manly chest, which had now become tumescent. She touched him here and there and everywhere and finally took the growing hardness of Himself in her soft hands and fondled it. She squealed, “Oh, ducky! You do fancy me!” And a warm chill shook her body as she felt Himself vibrating. She guided Himself gently to the secret humid treasure of Herself, even as her body trembled, and he smelled her fragrant perspiration.
Then she purred and simpered, as she began to get the message from her African camel rider all across the vast Sahara. Pure, hot, arid, endless. Then they left the desert and she went absolutely wild when she reached the outskirts of the city that was high above Mount Everest, and now she glimpsed the peak and sought to scale it. How on this crazy earth could the heat be so severe at Everest?
“Baby! Baby! Baby! Ducky! Lover!”
She shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
She was the frenzy of a jet airliner, after it has cavorted out to the other end of the strip and has turned and faced the runway, and now it has warmed up and throbbed and panted and has finally reached the moment when it is ready to take off for the wild blue yonder, because it just can’t wait a second longer. “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” It seems to almost shake apart from sheer excitement and the greatest expectations. And just like jet propulsion, Daphne literally took off.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Emphatically yes! Forever yes! Indubitably! Up and down, from side to side, her thighs, her gleaming buttocks, she lunged, she bucked, she climbed the air. She rode bicycle upside down. She almost threw our hero from the saddle, but he held on for dear life; he dug in for the duration and drove her home. She bit him, her rough-and-ready easy camel rider, who got rougher as the going went; she dug her nails into his flesh and drew his blood. She screamed many many muffled screams, bit her own lips, her face lost color, then regained it. She shouted like she had religion. She exhorted.
“Oh! I knew it would be like this! I knew it would be good and big and black like this! Give it to me! Give it to me! Oh! I’m dying! Give it to me!”
Then the dear one realized she had completely lost her cool, as her Jimmy would have termed it in his quaint Afro-American idiom; she’d lost her nonchalance, her legendary British poise. To show that she was ever in control, she suddenly began to sing.
Oh! sweet mystery of life at last I’ve found you—
Oh! at last I know the secret of it all—
She startled him at first, and he didn’t want to hear her singing or her exhortation, so he smothered her dear voice with kisses. He tongued her tongue and she whimpered pitifully. And when they scaled the peak together, and it was together that they scaled it, almost, she shook like a palm tree in a typhoon; then she simmered and slowed down to a small gale, then to the quiver of soft summer breezes on some blessed and “discovered” island where the sun would never set, till eventide, then complete tranquility, they rode out the storm together, almost. She began again to sing in coloratura soprano.
For it is love alone—
lyric, florid and high-ranged—
That rules the world—!
Almost goddammit, because the storm still raged inside our calisthenic hero, gymnastic lord and master of the bedchamber heroics. Because, as he was coming with her from the desert to the city, gathering all before them for the final joyous celebration, he experienced a visitation from a long-forgotten buddy, old Charley Horse, himself, in person. It started grabbing, gripping, griping in the calf of his right leg and moved up through his thigh and would not let go. The pain hit him so suddenly, he could not restrain a muffled screa
m, which she, of course, interpreted as a primitive expression of ecstatic unabashment. He had not known a charley horse since his college football days. It was like he remembered growing pains, like a cramp he had once when he went swimming in old ’Sippi.
“Goddamn! Goddamn! Goddamn!” he shouted softly to her. And tried to straighten out his leg, but she wrapped her long legs about him more tightly than ever. She started to giggle at his happiness, which caused him to shout again, “Goddamn! Goddamn!” He was so natural and uncomplicated when he made his love, she thought, and she loved his wild abandon, as her giggling went to laughter. She could sing to him no longer. He was hurting, she was laughing. She envisioned him in “savage” loincloth somewhere south of Timbuktu. East and West the twain had met. He was her black and wild Arabian knight. She was his oasis on the blazing-hot Sahara. He was the great avenger, she the human sacrifice.
* * *
The pain subsiding now, he said sarcastically, “If this is what is meant by platonic love, then I say to hell with Plato.” He slapped her not too gently on her comely arse.
Then she wanted to rationalize it. She must put it in perspective, as she lay there beside him, surfeited and complacent, like she was basking in the sunlight at the seashore. He must not think she was promiscuous.
“Shit!” he thought, and, “Double shit!”
Never think she was promiscuous. Truly he must never ever.
She said, half serious, “Dahling, this is one way to solve the racial problem—through love. If everybody could feel like we do this precious moment, there could be no more antagonisms, no hostilities, socially or otherwise. No wars in Vietnam or Beirut, no sit-ins, no demonstrations or racial upheavals, no nothing.” She vibrated like a vacuum cleaner.
He was annoyed with her for feeling the need to create a whole ideology around a fairly good orgasm.
Jimmy explicated, sarcastically, as he rubbed his calf and the back of his thigh, “A good orgasm may very well be a thing of beauty, but it is not a joy forever, sixty seconds at the very most, and it is not why Jason sought the Golden Fleece. It is not what really makes the world go around. Power and money, baby, is why Whitey went to Africa and Asia to ‘civilize’ the ‘natives.’ Not to have a great orgasm.” He grew angrier as he verbalized, and the color drained from her lips and cheeks, as she paled before his anger.
She said, “Dahling, I didn’t mean—”
He said, “If all the human race got together for one great worldwide therapeutic orgy of a couple of billion people, we might all have one helluva good time, but the white problem would still be here after the funk had cleared away.”
Her eyes were filled with awe now. “I didn’t mean it like that, Dahling. You bloody well know I didn’t.”
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Of course, and on the other hand, if this international orgy were without the benefit of diaphragms or any other birth-control devices, nine months later there wouldn’t be any white problem, because there wouldn’t be any more white folks. We would have fucked y’all out of existence. After all, we are a powerful people. One drop of Black blood and you have been joined up to the human race.” He laughed harshly to himself. “Maybe that’s another thing that’s scaring Whitey.” He laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. “Mayhaps that’s the deeper fuller meaning of this interracial fucking. A long-range program of nonviolently screwing the white race into extinction.” He laughed now without restraint and she laughed, but she was horrified.
He said, “Substitute the phallus for the gun. My English lit teacher at the university said the gun was a phallic symbol anyhow.”
* * *
And Sundays they went everywhere together.
“There’s the Cadogan Hotel,” she told him, “where Oscar Wilde was arrested for buggery.” And he laughed and squeezed her hand more tightly.
“And here’s the pub that Sherlock Holmes frequented.” And they went into the pub and drank much ale and stared at ‘authentic’ Holmes memorabilia and antiquities including a taxidermic job of the famous hound of the Baskervilles himself in person. Jimmy imagined he could hear him bark. “And this is where Sir Conan used to sit,” the publican assured them. “And Watson over there—” And so forth and so on and especially etcetera.
One Sunday they went to Saint Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and to a pub where people stood outside queuing up for opening time, which was twelve thirty p.m. on the Sabbath. They drank many gins and tonics, and they went to Hyde Park and the fabulous Speakers’ Corner. Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner made his 125th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem and Washington Park in the Windy City look like an American Legion Loyalty Day celebration. His first time at the Corner there must have been at least twenty-five different meetings going on simultaneously. And thousands of people drifting awfully and aimlessly from one harangue to another. The “Authentic Anarchists” were there and holding forth, the Worker’s Workless Party, the Black Nationalists, and the inevitable “Irish Revolutionaries,” damning the British everlastingly. And scores of other groups and causes. You name them, they were represented.
With the green flag flapping angrily now beside him on his soapbox, a black-haired Irishman is giving England her comeuppance, and a redheaded freckle-faced Irish heckler shouts at him. “If you don’t like it here, you can bloody well go back to that ruddy place where you came from!”
At the anarchist meeting, the speaker looks like he has slept in his clothes, for days, and some joker is giving the ungroomed uncombed one a very bad time. “Who is the president of your organization, sir?” the heckler asks politely. The speaker replies, with patient indignation, Cockney-accented, “Comrade, we don’t believe in presidents. We are true anarchists. We do not fancy any kind of organizations. Any kind of organization equals tyranny.”
“Where’s your office? I mean—where’s headquarters? I mean, how do I get in touch with you?”
“No offices—no headquarters, myte. Now, if you don’t mind—”
“What’s your address? How can I get your newspaper?”
“We’re the only true authentic genuine anarchists, myte. Not like those bourgeois bawstards who believe in political organization and planning. Hence no address, no office, no nothing. Now bugger off, will you, myte, and hire your own bloody hall.” The crowd loves this and laughs its approval, as Daff and Jimmy move on to greener pastures, or redder?
The bloke from the Worker’s Workless Party with his red flag flapping is giving the imperialistic United States and United Kingdom hell and giving the Labour Party hell for selling out the working classes. Jimmy is in the spirit of things by now, what with several ales and gin and tonics under his belt and the intoxications of Speakers’ Corner gone to his head. He heckles the short and squatty speaker.
“What did your blawsted working class do about colonialism in Africa and Asia? What about the Nigerians? The South Africans? The Chinese? The West Indians? You and your bloody working class—the greatest sellout artists of them all. You sold out your own damn class of people everywhere on earth. China, India, Africa, the Caribbean—”
And now they move toward the largest crowd in the park that Sunday, mostly white Englishpersons, a little Black middle-aged man on a soapbox, staring down at their pale British faces, contemptuously. He has a Du Bois-like goatee and his tiny eyes are smiling down at them sarcastically. He is Deighton Johnson from Trinidad, and he has been in London twenty years but he sounds as if he just got off the boat, the one that hasn’t yet arrived. He taunts the upturned faces. “You worried ’bout what’s happening in Zimbabwe? In Johannesburg? In Angola? You worried about the virtue of them precious nuns in Tanzania?”
There is worry in their pallid faces.
“You ain’t seen no miscegenating!”
The British have a sense of humor, and they laugh back at their Black tormentor. Give them credit. They are a very sophisticated people, this special breed, descendants of the original Anglo-Saxons.
The
little Black Trinidadian shouts at them. “Just wait till we take over this here little undernourished island. The president of Pan-Africa, His Excellency himself, has put me in charge of this minor operation, when the word is given. Then you will see some fornicating, mawn. And we’re bloody well going to fornicate Her Britannic Majesty, the dear queen herself, first of all! I shall see to that miserable chore myself, personally. And you know something? She’s going to enjoy every blawsted minute of it! She is bloody well starving for it! You tink the Ponce of Middlesex is consorting to her satisfaction?”
When the laughter subsides Deighton Johnson from Port of Spain starts to give them a serious lecture on the nature of colonialism. One of the awestruck Britishers interrupts him with a question. “Sir, where do you get all of your information?”
“From books, mawn. Where you tink? Doesn’t you Englishmen know how to read?”
The Englishman asks politely, “Will you give me a list of books on the subject, sir. I should appreciate it greatly.”
“Certainly,” Mr. Deighton Johnson answers cordially. “Now take pencil and paper in hand all of you and listen carefully, cause like Shakespeare I doesn’t ever repeat meself.” Several of them take pencil and paper in hand and await his pronouncements eagerly.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes,” they answer anxiously. “Yes,” “Yes—”
“If you want to understand any t’ing atall about colonialism, the very first book to read is—”
“Yes?” “Quiet!” . . . “Yes?”
He has them hooked now and he says with the gravest of dignity. “The first book to read is—‘Lady Shatterly’s Lover’ and the second book is ‘Jonathan and Lady Jane’!” He pronounces it Joe-Nathan.
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