The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  There is one split second of deafening silence, and then the park explodes with the laughter of the white sophisticated Englishpersons. And Jimmy Johnson laughs, thinking to himself, as Daff and he walk away to still another, What would happen if a Black man in the USA spoke of the American First Lady in terms such as Deighton Johnson spoke of Her Britannic Majesty? He squeezed Daphne Armstrong’s hand and she responded squeeze for squeeze, as if they were Indian wrestling. Was London really the place he had been looking for? Would he at long last find himself in this place? He wanted desperately to believe it. He wanted to believe that Daphne Jack-Armstrong could help him find himself. Oh! the deviousness of self-deception!

  That night in bed she would change into another woman as she always did, especially when the city atop the mountain came into view. “Give me all of it! Every bit of it! Give me all of the beautiful black thing! I love it!” And then she shocked the hell out of him with—

  Dear one, the world is waiting for the sun—rise—

  Higher, higher, higher, higher. He fought hard to keep from cracking up with angry laughter.

  Every rose is covered with dew—

  And when they had ultimately reached the highest peak together, almost, because Charley Horse had made his presence felt at the very last moment, paining, griping, cramping, she lay there quiescent for a moment, purring and quivering, luxuriating in the sweet and salty taste and smell of the love already made, and then back to the wars again. She smothered him with kisses all over his “sweet and salty” body, and fondled him, till she saw that things were no longer crestfallen but on the up and up again, and she coaxed him back into the saddle, at which point she watched the action for a moment as if she were a Peeping Tom. Daphne Jack-Armstrong was definitely voyeuristic.

  “I love your big black penis in the soft pink tunnel of my sex,” she murmured. “And I love your black curly grass at the roots of your big black thing and I adore your black grass intertwined together with my own black silken threads.” He lay there pissed off, for eternity, he and his fucking charley horse and she and her divine contentment. He figured the Man Up There was saying something to him. Perhaps He was opposed to interracial fornication.

  But after it was over, he lay there beside her, rubbing the pain from the calf of his leg, listening to her quietly snoring, inhaling all the sweet and pungent sea-like love smells, and wondering about her always shouting of his blackness every time they made their love. Was this blackness of his a big thing with her? And did it matter if it were? And he finally put it out of his mind, not really out, just set it aside in some far-off corner of his consciousness where it rested, but uneasily.

  He got out of bed and walked the floor, shook the painful tension from his leg. Then he stopped at the bed and stood there staring down at her with the help of the moonlight that came in through the window. She was snoring loudly with her mouth loose-jointed, hanging open, and her wide dark eyes unshut, opaque, and full of vacancy. There was no beauty in her face now. Asleep like this, relaxed, she wore an idiotic expression. He felt guilty, as if he actually spied upon her. At the same time he was glad he’d seen her like this. Ugly almost, unintelligent-looking, vastly unsuperior, her great eyes openly vacant, all her defenses gone cherry-bye in the great depths of her snoring slumber. He told himself that he was glad. He stared so hard he must have stared right through her guileless sleep, and he awakened her.

  When her eyes first became aware of him, there was that brief moment of panic in them. But then the comeliness of the woman came back with her wakefulness. It was miraculous. She smiled complacently at him, as if he actually belonged to her. “I’m truly fond of you, dahling, but I just cawn’t help this very very slight contempt for you. After all, you are enchanted by my alabaster body. I mean, certainly, you know I’m not prejudiced, but you are a Black man, duck, and I am a white woman. Aren’t you? Aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” he agreed sarcastically, as he dressed. “And you just can’t resist my fine Black frame and my prodigious Black penis. Right? My legendary big Black dick!” He had put on his shirt, but he was naked from the waist down. He walked toward her with the awesome Blackness of Him dangling. “This is what it’s all about, isn’t it Daphne dawling? Well, what’s the verdict? Myth or reality?”

  “Oh, no-no-no-no!” Daphne Jack-Armstrong protested. “I told you already, duckie. I am not that way at all.”

  “Lying wench! I could tell you it’s not your white virginal body, it’s your great intellectual capacity. That’s some Black dude’s lame excuse for fucking pale-faced women. That the sisters are intellectually incompatible. Bullshit!”

  “But, duckie! You’re being positively vulgar. Please!”

  “I could say Black women are the great male castrators. That’s another bullshit rationale. Or I could tell you that I’m getting even with the hunkie for taking advantage of our Black women during slavery when they could not defend themselves and neither could we.” He laughed. “Historic fucking retribution.”

  “But, duck—”

  “But why don’t we just blame it on the lack of Black women on this island? Or just say you’re easier and far less complicated and a fair-de-middling pretty good fuck, and let it go at that? I mean, we don’t have to deal with the questions of marriage and other long-range complexities.” He was enraged by now. “It’s like wham, bam, thank-you ma’am. And that means I don’t give a damn.”

  She said, “Oh dear me! I have hurt the big boy’s feelings. Come here, duckie, and let me make it up to you.” He was fully dressed now.

  She sat up in bed and the covers fell away, and she was naked to her waist, her gleaming breast tumescent and exposed to him, and her pale arms reached out to him, as he went out and slammed the door. She called for him, left messages and telephoned, but he did not return again until three or four weeks later when she gave a party in his honor.

  9

  Wine, women, song, men, and leprechauns. Sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference without a scorecard. He got there late. The flat was already crowded. Most of the women came escorted, which didn’t seem to make a bit of difference. Most of them were openly curious about the guest of honor, James Jay Leander Johnson, colored. Some of their male escorts were equally curious. Everybody got high very quickly. The watchword was ambivalence.

  When he arrived, a wasp-waisted, pretty faced, curly-haired, blonde and blue-eyed lad, when introduced to Jimmy, took him off guard, in his arms and kissed him loudly on each cheek, much much too close to his lips. “Like, man, you know, man, like welcome to the mother-mucking club. I’m hip, you know, man. Understand? I dig you the mother-mucking most. Dig it, baby.”

  His voice was an unlikely mixture of Harlem slang and Southern drawl with an unequal portion of Brooklynese and Number 10 Downing Street thrown in for good measure, or bad, depending on your point of view. A New York hippie with an Oxford cadence.

  “They called me Old Blue Eyes where I come from. Can you dig me where I’m coming from?” Old Blue Eyes stepped back from astonished Jimmy Johnson. “Gimme some skin, my friend, I mean on the Black hand side!”

  Before Jimmy knew what was happening, he’d held his hand out toward Old Blue Eyes, whose hand was already extended toward him. Blue Eyes slapped Jimmy’s palm and went into his greeting by the numbers, with audibles. “Left! Right! Left! Right! One! Two! Three! Four!” He ended his performance by bumping his sparse arse up against Jimmy Johnson’s.

  Jimmy looked around him in an act of desperation to see if any men in white from the funny farm were there with nets. He looked for Daffy Jack-Armstrong, or for someone, anybody to come to his rescue. Throw me a life belt, somebody quick! But no life belt was forthcoming, as if Old Blue Eyes’ conduct was common practice, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Old Blue Eyes stayed, smilingly, up in Jimmy Johnson’s face much of the night. If Jimmy sat on the brownish-beige goose-downed couch, he somehow found Old Blue Eyes seated next to him, coincidentally. When he moved to one of Daffy
’s chaise lounges, Pretty Boy seated himself on the floor beneath him, and back to the goose-downed couch again and on and on. Whenever Jimmy’s glass became empty, Blue Eyes would leap to his feet and disappear and soon return with a whiskey and soda in hand and exchange it for Jimmy’s empty glass. The first time it happened, Jimmy said, “Thank you very much.”

  Blue Eyes said, “Think nothing of it, my main man. After all, baby, you are the guest of honor, and like somebody has to look out for you, and I have appointed me, myself, and I to be your humble servant. Do you dig where I’m coming from, sweet daddio?”

  Blue Eyes made the strangest vocal noises Jimmy Johnson ever heard. A living human anachronism, linguistically speaking. Fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties in a cataclysmic collision with one another, idiomatically. An apocalypse, linguistically. Slang, brogue, dialect, Cockney accent, the whole shebang. Jimmy thought of My Fair Lady.

  Jimmy said, “Booby, with those weird funny noises coming out of your mouth, you’d give Professor Higgins a migraine he would never rid himself of in this life, or the next.”

  Blue Eyes broke up with laughter, slapping Jimmy on his knees and shouting, “I love it! I love it! I love it! You’re the mother-mucking most!”

  He patted Jimmy briefly on his knee again. Jimmy stared very hard at Old Blue Eyes and drew his knees away. Each time a funny cigarette was passed around, Blue Eyes inhaled it long and deeply like he was in the throes of orgiastic ecstasy. “Ooooh—aaaah!” and passed it on to Jimmy, who passed it to the next man, or woman. Our hero was a natural square.

  “Dull! Dull! Dull! Dull!” Old Blue Eyes murmured to Jimmy, patting a soft hand gently on Jimmy’s knee this time, for emphasis. “The English truly do not know how to party, dig it? Check it, you should come to my pad for a party. You should be my guest of honor.”

  When Pretty Boy’s hand lingered, tentatively, Jimmy deliberately took the hand away from his knees. Jimmy did not dig playing kneesy with another man. Like the man said, Jimmy was square, perhaps rectangular even.

  Jimmy said, “But you are English. I mean, aren’t you?”

  “My little old mama birthed me here on this little old island,” Blue Eyes grudgingly admitted. “But I grew up in the Big damn mother-mucking Apple, baby, actually just a few blocks from your Harlem. I mean, like man, I bit some great big hunks out of that apple, baby, believe me when I tell you. Like I did my stretch at Columbia U. I mean I even graduated. The West End was my natural habitat.”

  Blue Eyes closed his eyes and nodded, then opened them again like he was coming out of a daydream in the nighttime. “Far out!” Blue Eyes leaned close to Jimmy’s face and whispered, almost nibbling Jimmy’s ears. “I was so far out I never did get back in, man, baby or baby man, whichever, what’s the difference?”

  Jimmy agreed. “You never did get back in is right. And hey, my ears may be big, but I hope you’re not mistaking them for apples.”

  Old Blue Eyes cracked up again with laughter. “I love it! I love it!” He put his hand on Jimmy’s knee and squeezed it, gently, perhaps even boldly this time. Testing-testing. He said, “One of the biggest problems facing the world is—people are afraid of touching one another. Man, you dig where I’m coming from?”

  Jimmy thought, If this cat squeezes my knee one more time, I’m going to really have to touch him up and hang him out to dry. Jimmy took Blue Eyes’ hand away from his knee. “Touch somebody else for a change. Why should I have all the fun, even if I am the guest of honor.”

  Pretty Boy shouted, “I love it! I love it!” Roaring with laughter.

  What was he doing in this goddamn madhouse? What was he doing on these British Isles? Among the crazy people, who thought they were the most civilized throughout this earth?

  Meanwhile and furthermore, there was a certain super-mini-skirted, blond-haired, gray-eyed hyperactive distraction seated on the floor across from him on the couch engaged energetically in myriad variations of exhaustive calisthenics. She was perpetual motion and seemed proudly and desperately determined to show off her pink-and-blue-and-flowered panties. She executed push-ups. She sat primly before bashful Jimmy Johnson with her skirt up to her elbows. Then she sat Buddha-like with her rubescent ankles plumply crossed. He averted his embarrassed eyes. Immediately she moved once more into Jimmy Johnson’s POV and shyly smoothed her mucho-miniskirt down to cover her gleaming thighs, only to seconds later rearrange her skirt in such a way as to give him a fleeting glimpse of her skimpily-bikinied arse. He would have blushed had the Good Lord previously endowed him with a pigmentation equal to the execution.

  Old Blue Eyes began to mumble. “The brazen bitch! The shameless harlot! Bitch! Whore! Slut! Trollop!” As the saying goes in ’Sippi, our hero, Jimmy Johnson, didn’t know “whether to shit or go blithely blind”!

  Jimmy leaned toward Old Blue Eyes and whispered, “Do you imagine she’s attempting to attract our attention?”

  Miss Shameless Harlot got to her feet and began to dance back and forth in front of them, belly dancing to begin with, then jumping up and down as if her dainty drawers had been suddenly invaded by a host of ants and grasshoppers. Now she danced around in circles, pirouetting, her whirling skirt flung up so high it was difficult to see her eyes, even as Jimmy did his damndest to pretend that the lady was invisible, with apologies to Ellison. But she would not despair or be discouraged. Suddenly she fell upon the floor and did a split that was perfection, and upside down already. So perfect was her upside-down execution of the split, you could see edges of the curlish down of her pubescence extending shyly around the perimeter of her flowered-pink-crotched panties. At which point she made a foul and unpardonably antisocial noise that would have made a camel blush with shame. And did not even say “excuse me.” Again, at which point Jimmy split the scene.

  Daffy’s flat was beginning to smell all over like a pothouse. Her living room was like the Mississippi, long, deep, and very wide. There were little gatherings of pot smokers here and there around the room, small wigwams of people sending up smoke signals, prayerfully, to the holy Gods of Grass. Jimmy was getting high from inhaling other people’s smoke.

  Old Blue Eyes followed Jimmy across the room. He was getting loud and wrong. “Let’s have a mother-mucking party! Like, man, I mean a party party! Come on ’round to my crib, baby. Ain’t nobody home but me! Like have a party party! Jimmy’ll be the guest of honor! Like whooo—weeee!”

  Jimmy’s football experience came in handy at the moment, as he executed, niftily, a combination of double-reverse-and-flanker maneuver together with a bad flea-flicker. He could still hear Old Blue Eyes on the other side of the room. “Where is Jimmy? What happened to the guest of honor?”

  Which is when he ran smack into another honest-to-goodness soul brother, a cinnamon-colored, powerfully constructed angry cat very obviously from home. In this endless sea of whiteness, he was so visible and pretty, he brought tears to Jimmy’s eyes. Jimmy was so glad to see the brother, he wanted to take him in his arms and kiss him. Perhaps Old Blue Eyes was contagious. The brother pulled away from Jimmy.

  “Ain’t no hiding place down here, baby,” he told Jimmy, apropos of God knows what. “It’s the same damn thing all over Europe and I’ve been all damn over, baby. I’ve been the Black playboy of the Western world. You better believe me when I say so. I’m from the Windy City.”

  The cat from Chi Town was as high as a Georgia pine and as loud as a public address system. Jimmy looked around him nervously and back to his soul brother from Chicago. “Believe what, man?” Every party produced at least one loudmouthed one. You could make book on it. Jimmy felt like a dude who had leaped happily from the fire onto the brimstone, never mind the frying pan.

  The cat got even louder. “You can get all the pussy you want, but you can’t get no jobs, unless you can sing nigger folk songs, or calypso, or buck dance, which is the same bloody thing, only different.” He laughed at the expression on Jimmy’s face and with an angry vengeance.

  Jimmy said,
“Aw come off it, with that colored propaganda be-ess. You’re not in Mississippi now.”

  By now they had attracted a crowd, and Jimmy laughed at his soul brother. He wanted to pretend that his brother was joking, even though he had a feeling he was dead serious. Correct that, deathly serious.

  His brother went on and on. “A spook is a spook is a spook all over the Western world. Ain’t but two roles he can play. He got to be a stud or a eunuch, which is the same damn thing only different. Black manhood is against the law here, just like it is any-goddamn-where else in the whole damn Western world. And that also goes for Black womanhood. You don’t see no foxes at this party.”

  Jimmy tried to move away from his newfound brother. “Lay off the booze and grass, buddy boy. I mean, you’ve had it.”

  “Go home!” the soul brother philosopher from Chicago was shouting at him now. “That’s what I’m talking about! Go home before it’s too damn late! Go home or go to Africa!”

  Jimmy stared back into the soul brother’s eyes, and the pure and righteous madness he saw scared him half to death. He turned away, but the brother grabbed hold of him as if to throw him off the British Isles. “Look at me! It’s already too late for me! I’ve been in this shit for nine damn years, France! Spain, Sweden, Denmark. You name it. I’ve been there. I’m a pimp or a stud or a eunuch. Take your mammy-fucking choice!” Then suddenly, without warning, the brother from Chicago broke into tears and sobbing. His shoulders shook as if his insides were erupting. “Go home, baby! Go home, brother!”

  Jimmy went out into the hall where some of the party had spread to, by then. Near the end, he wandered into the kitchen, and there was Old Blue Eyes with a bottle of Scotch down inside the front of his trousers with the neck of the bottle protruding from his fly. Another dude was on his knees drinking neatly from the bottle, making gurgling noises.

  Old Blue Eyes shouted at Jimmy. “He’s taking the Fifth! Like man, he’s taking the mother-mucking Fifth.” He gestured to Jimmy. “You want to take the Fifth too, Jimmy baby? You want to take the Fifth?”