The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  Carson bowed and Frenchly replied, “Certainement!” for some peculiar reason, and with Southern accent yet, since Guanaya had never been a French colony. Carson sank into one of the club chairs with a sweet smile on his alcoholic face.

  Jimmy spoke in his potluck Hausa again, and Mr. Lloyd timidly explained to the two American gentlemen that when His Excellency the Prime Minister got very tired, he spoke in Hausa only. So please excuse him. And also, please excuse him until later this evening, at the White House reception, because they all were very tired. Whereupon Lloyd and Tangi very politely ushered the bewildered Americans out of their suite and into the hall and closed the door in their flabbergasted faces.

  They stood for a moment outside the door among the armed sentry and could not believe that it had happened to them. In those quaint days white people found it impossible to believe that people of color would under any circumstances not be honored by their company. White folks were paranoid in that respect. They took Black rejection very hard. Carson was fuming, livid even. He said, “Well if that don’t beat Bob-tail and Bob-tail beat the devil! Of all the black and uncouth arrogance!”

  Parkington said, “I don’t know about that. I assume they were really tired. They’ve had a hard day. Didn’t you ever suffer from jet lag?”

  Carlton Carson said, “I sure would like to see them when they think nobody’s looking. Trying to pretend like they’re not colored.”

  Parkington told him patiently but firmly, “Mr. Carson, you’re in charge of this security operation. It must go off without incident, or heads will roll, I warn you, Carson. The Secret Service must at all times be on hand, but unobtrusive. This is your most important assignment so far. Don’t goof it.”

  “There’s something fishy about them, especially that Olivamaki fellow. My nose don’t never lead me up no dark alleys. Some thing’s rotten in Guanaya. There’s a nigrah in the woodpile just as sure as old Rob Lee sitting up there in Heaven. We ought to wire the place again for sound, don’t care what the President say.”

  “No wiretapping,” Parkington said firmly. “The President just gave specific orders, that it be swept clean and kept that way. Africans have a loathing for wiretapping. They are plagued by so many varieties of bugs at home, they are terribly bugged if ever they find out they’re being bugged. So, forget your infernal nostrils this time. And another thing, in dealing with Africans you must overlook their color. You must never regard them as Negroes. You must deal with them as people. Dignitaries.”

  Carson said, “Oh—” As if he had just learned something of tremendous value and profundity. Something that would go with him and stand by him forevermore. One of these days he would be as smart as Parkington and join the State Department. Meanwhile something was fishy in the woodpile in Guanaya. He didn’t care what nobody said. He didn’t even care if he got his metaphors fucked up.

  Inside the suite Jimmy collapsed on a deeply softened silk-covered couch and almost submerged out of sight. A great nervous exhaustion moved through every limb of his body. Suddenly he leaped from the couch and looked under cushions, behind pictures, looked under toilet seats, flushed the toilet, and watched the flow. He put Mr. Lloyd’s hat over the telephone.

  Turned on the stereo, turned it up loud. Then he took off his beard and flung it without looking across the room and it landed in a wastebasket. He fell into an easy chair. He heaved sigh after sigh after sigh. He looked around him at his eager-faced cabinet ministers and he started to laugh loud and boisterously, and he couldn’t stop laughing. They laughed with him, at first, tentatively, but when he didn’t stop, they got worried. Mr. Harold Tobey, his personal secretary, brought him a glass of water. He shook his head. “I need something stronger than that.” And he continued to laugh with the tears spilling down his cheeks, as he lay full length on the sofa now.

  His secretary called room service and the anxious Mr. Lloyd retrieved the PM’s phony whiskers and stood over Jimmy shush-shushing him. Foreign Minister Tangi, the impatient one, came over to the laughing fake PM and shook him roughly and actually drew back to slap him. Whereupon Jimmy stopped laughing, abruptly, and sat up on the sofa. There would be no slapping of His Excellency. It was not that kind of a party, masquerade or otherwise. And Jimmy was all right as long as he kept his mouth shut, but when he tried to talk, to explain, he started to laugh again and then he was laughing and talking at the same time, mostly laughing. When the whiskey came, he took a drink, which seemed to help. Then he tried to talk again but instead went off immediately into peals and peals of laughter. He stretched out on the couch and held his stomach, as the members of His Excellency’s Cabinet gathered around him and above him and stared down at him and looked anxiously at each other. Maria Efwa took his hand and patted it and rubbed it, and finally he stopped laughing.

  Jimmy said, “I got a Great White Father and you people got a Great White Mother, and they don’t know us one from the other.” He started to laugh again and this time they all joined in the laughter. As the laughter slowly died away, he was still holding Maria Efwa’s hand. But when his grip began to tighten a warmth crept into Maria’s face and she firmly took her hand from his.

  His eyes had been closed but he opened them when he felt her withdrawal. He felt it sharply and he stared up into her lovely face. “How did I do today, my colleagues? My brothers and my sisters? How was my performance?” He knew the question was for her especially. She also understood. He wanted her approval.

  Mamadou Tangi said, “You did a bloody good job, Your Excellency, especially considering the few days you have been in office.”

  “Thank you very much indeed,” Jimmy said to Tangi.

  His Wife’s Bottom agreed. “An excellent job, except that you overdid it with your ‘Brown John’s Body’ and the Soviet ambassador.” And Lloyd would have been off on one of his inevitable talkathons, had not Jimmy held up the palm of his hand like a traffic cop and turned from him and addressed himself directly to Maria Efwa. “And what did you think, my illustrious teacher?”

  “You did rawther well,” she answered, “except that your accent was more British than Guanayan. You talked as if your nostrils were clogged. Do you have an allergy?”

  He made a face and said, “By Jove! It was those blawsted ruddy months I spent in England being Londonized. Everybody knows the British speak the way they do because they stuff English peas up their bloody nostrils to keep out all that horrendous weather.”

  Her lovely face creased in a dimpled smile against her will.

  “Whose fault is it if I talk Britishly? You and you alone have the patriotic duty to make me over, and moreover, make me more Guanayan than any other Guanayan including His-one-and-only-Excellency, Jaja Olivamaki himself. And you must teach me all at once and everything about your country. No?”

  The lovely dimpled one said, “Yes.”

  He rose from the couch with an obvious effort that was just as obviously exaggerated, and he took her hands in his again.

  “Your success with me,” he told her, “is crucial to the success of our venture, which is crucial to the success of Guanaya, which is crucial to the success of Pan-Africanism, which is—”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes-Yes-Yes!” He could not tell whether she was angry or pleased with him. He would not believe she was indifferent.

  “I know you don’t approve of me, your-lovely-ladyship. I don’t blame you. I don’t approve of myself, but I’m the best that you can do until the real thing comes along. So, you must spend every minute of your pretty precious time with your bogus Prime Minister. No?”

  She said, “Yes. But I’m not your-lovely-ladyship. I am the Minister of Education.”

  He laid it on with a heavy trowel. “I have never in all my life undertaken a venture fraught with such great danger and at the same time such magnificence. No?”

  She agreed. “For the magnificent cause of African freedom.”

  Jimmy countered with, “For you and Africa. For beauty and magnificence.” He was h
alf bee-essing and half serious. He himself did not know where one stopped and the other began. Nor did he want to know. Maria Efwa, like Africa, was beautiful and magnificent. Their eyes held each other’s momentarily.

  She liberated her hands from the pressure of his warm hands, getting hotter every second. “For Africa,” she said firmly. “We must not lose our perspective. We must not confuse our mission.”

  “There’s no confusion on my part, Your Ladyship. You and Africa are one and the same.” He was suddenly sharply aware of the others watching them now, watching anxiously. He turned to them and said cavalierly, “Come on already. Let us drink to our noble venture in this Western jungle.”

  “I am neither your ladyship or my ladyship, or his, hers, or its ladyship,” Her Ladyship insisted, as Mr. Tobey poured up the booze. Jimmy held his glass toward them, particularly toward Her-Lovely-Ladyship, Maria Efwa. “To Her Excellency Maria Efwa and to African freedom. To the symbol and the reality!” And before there could be protest, if any, he added the magic word, “Uhuru!”

  And they all joined in and said, “Uhuru!” This time with feeling.

  He took another drink and said, “Up the Republic of Pan-Africa!”

  They said, “Uhuru!” And once again with feeling.

  He took another drink and shouted, “Up the Pan-Africanists—Up the PAs!”

  And he reached for another drink, but Tangi moved the booze from out of his reach.

  Tangi said unsmilingly, “It’s time for you to get some rest, Your Excellency. We have a reception tonight at the Executive Mansion, or do you chaps call it the White House?”

  Jimmy smiled at Tangi arrogantly. “What do you mean—you chaps? Don’t you recognize your leader? I am His Excellency Prime Minister Jaja Okwu Olivamaki of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya. And don’t you ever forget it, buster.”

  12

  1600 Pennsylvania was the address of the White House, which was no military secret. The White House was white, of course, and large and vast and pretentious, in a kind of modest context.

  The White House was also brilliantly lighted—that’s for sure—and most of the people were lit inside the White House in that fabulous East Room with its dazzling Bohemian cut glass chandeliers overhead and its oaken floor of Fontainebleau parquetry gleaming underfoot. Everybody was there that memorable night. They had eaten with the special chosen few in the State Dining Room, exactly one hundred of Washington’s elite, a room that sparkled in gold and white with the portrait of a brooding Lincoln staring at them from above the fireplace. Then into the East Room, where hundreds gathered and drank and talked and drank and talked. And Ebony and Jet took pictures. Along with Time and the New York Times and Look and Life and Newsweek, and so forth and so on.

  Earlier that evening when he’d arrived, with the admiring mob outside the gates, and as he went toward the big white mansion, he’d thought to himself that this was really the Big House, constructed, specifically and intentionally, in the antebellum tradition of the old plantation Big Houses, in all of its elegant and plantation splendor, with tall Georgian columns done in gleaming pinkish white, as was all the exterior. He remembered them as a boy, he’d seen them still there, relics of another time, deep in among the stately oaks deep into the ’Sippi bayous. It was an awe-compelling structure. The President was lord and mass’r. Even as a boy, he would imagine soft honeysuckled summer evenings in the “good old days” of slavery, with music floating on the air. Wrought by Black slave music makers, and field hands gathered in the front yards singing glad songs to old mass’r and his gentlemen and lady friends. He had never lived comfortably with these optical illusions of the days of sweet nostalgia, the good ol’ times of honeysuckled happy and contented slaves, gone with the wind in the Uncle Thomas’s cabin, him and little Eva, and sensitive Willie Faulkner and Hattie McDaniel. It had always seemed unreal to him.

  * * *

  Jimmy Johnson, the Fake, as he thought of himself of late, quite bitterly and introspectively, ate and drank and talked at length with the pleasant-faced President, Hubert Herbert Hubert, who was a living doll, plump and jolly and serious minded, and nearsighted and who could hold his whiskey with the best of them, and Jimmy Johnson (colored) was the best of them, when it came to holding his whiskey, or anybody else’s, for that matter. Lloyd and Tangi were ever by his side, especially when he was talking with the President. You might have thought they didn’t trust him; that is, if you didn’t know they didn’t trust him. The other cabinet members floated. Circulated?

  Later in the evening the President’s tongue got heavy, as he told Jimmy Johnson for the umpteenth time, “This is a social evening, Mr. Prime Meneceter, but I want you to know, we think of your fuh-fuh-fuh-fabulous country as the bulwark of democracy against godless communism, even though I loathe the renewal of the Cold War situation.”

  The more whiskey the President drank, Jimmy thought, the thicker his tongue became. His jolly red-nosed chubby face reminded Jimmy Jay of the friendly-faced Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

  Notwithstanding, Hubert Herbert Hubert continued unabated. “And with certain democratic provisional provisos and assurances and Free World commitments, but with no strings attached, we are ready, willing, and able to give all kinds of assistance, financial, educational, technical”—he cleared his throat—“and especially we are willing to help you get that cobanium out of the ground just as quick as we possibly can. But again, I want to rest assure you, I mean you to rest assured, this is a social party kind of party.”

  His Wife’s Bottom, Mr. Lloyd, was about to put his tuppence in, at this point, but Jimmy was faster on the draw, particularly due to the fact that His Wife’s Bottom usually cleared his throat before beginning, which put him at a disadvantage with a cat like Jimmy who had a faster draw than Sammy Davis Jr. Jimmy leaped into the throat-clearing vacuum feetfirst. “In the name of the great Guanayan people I want to thank you, Mr. President for your generous offer and your warm assurances, especially with no strings attached. This is the way nations must conduct themselves with one another in the spirit of equality and true democracy.”

  George Jefferson Davis Huey Jr. was the senior senator from Alabama and he stood close by the President, even though he was short in stature. At fully extended height he was like a catcher squatting behind home plate. He always walked around in an attitude of bowel movement. He had a great red mop of hair atop his head so red it seemed to be afire. When he was a little boy other little mischievous devils used to ring fire alarms to put his hair out. His nose was as red and as incandescent as the beloved Prexy’s. He said pleasantly, “I believe in putting my cards on the table faceup, Your Highness. Are there any Commonists in your government?”

  Except for the clearing of nervous throats and coughs of embarrassment and shuffling of fidgety feet, it became suddenly so quiet you could have heard Mickey Mouse urinating on new-fallen snow in the Rockies just outside Denver. But the suave PM was unperturbed. He smiled charmingly down at the jovial senior senator. They also used to call the senator Shed-House Shorty that year he went to college. “Senator Hooey,” Jimmy answered, mispronouncing the Senator’s name accidentally on purpose, “in the name of the great Guanayan people I plead the First and Fifth Amendments and with no strings attached.” He threw back his head and roared with laughter, which was the signal for everybody within earshot to laugh, for after all he was His Excellency, the guest of honor. They were standing beneath a full-length portrait of the father of the great country. Old George stood there, his right hand extended, in frock coat and black knickers.

  The senator’s red face turned as white as a Ku Klux Klansman’s sheet.

  “The name is Huey, Your Highness. Senator George Jefferson Davis Huey Jr.”

  “Pleased to meet you Senator Hoo-ey.” The PM deliberately murdered the senior senator’s name again.

  His Wife’s Bottom, Mr. Lloyd, cleared his throat and said that he agreed wholeheartedly with Their Respective Excellencies. T
his was not the time or place to discuss business or politics. This was a social reception. “And now that the air has been cleared so notably and profoundly by you, Mr. President and you, Mr. Prime Minister, the exploration of details may be left to your subordinates.”

  The Prime Minister turned to Mr. Lloyd and bowed slightly. “I couldn’t agree with you more, Mister Lloyd.” He almost called the Vice-PM “His Wife’s Bottom.” Then with an aristocratic flourish, that did honor and great dignity to a man of his apparent station, the PM shook the President’s hand and the hands of a few others and excused himself and turned and moved toward greener pastures. He became bored very quickly with people like Senator Hoo-ey.

  He had always had a quick getaway in football, in track, in trouble with the police or with some woman’s misunderstanding husband. He moved so quickly this time he left Tangi and His Wife’s Bottom stranded with President Hubert Herbert Hubert and company, as he drifted through the vast unpretentious brilliantly lighted ballroom. Sparkling chandeliers and equally sparkling people of all colors and nationalities, even including Negro leaders. Jimmy’s eyes took in everything and every living human as he moved with grace and majesty in his long white flowing boubou. He moved past the raised platform where an orchestra was playing genteel music, softly, sweetly. He was aware of the tall stately windows with the white lace curtains and the golden damask draperies. In a way though his eyes saw nothing, because he was looking frantically for Maria Efwa, who, herself, was in the powder room. He stopped momentarily to take a drink from a tray of one of the African American waiters who were dressed in white coats and black trousers and were circulating among the guests.

  As soon as he stopped, he was surrounded by a group of admiring people, especially women, who shook his hand and talked with him about this and that and mostly nothing, and he was equally as eloquent. He remembered some of their faces because he had shaken some of their hands already when he stood in line with the President and the First Lady and his own entourage during the first hour of the reception. He stood there now, smiling charmingly, his mind wandering even as he stared at those worshipful ones around him, as if he were totally absorbed by them and with them, his adoring public. He was thinking about the thousands of people especially young ones and the middle-aged ones and the elderly ones, who had stood outside the Big House, pinkish white, for hours just for one glimpse of him, and had said, “Ooooooh!” in unison, as he had driven up in an open long black limousine. Some had even swooned, and he had waved for the briefest second, nonchalantly, three fingers turned down briefly, like the Queen does, and then there was another Ooooooooh even longer than the other one, and he had turned from them as he had been driven swiftly up the driveway to the Big White House. The same thing had happened when he’d left the hotel that evening. It was worse than Frank Sinatra or Harry Belafonte. It was ridiculous! It was simply terrible! He hated it. And he loved the hell out of it.