The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  Jimmy was suddenly wide awake, and a fine perspiration broke out all over him and the disturbance in his stomach was a bubbling-over coffee percolator. He could still hear Barnsfield-Fifth’s voice like the quickened pace of a tape recorder, as he took the receiver from his ear and held it at arm’s length out from him and placed it quietly back in place. Jimmy wiped his face and took a drink. The phone rang again, and the lady explained to Mr. Tobey that they had been cut off, and would he please put Prime Minister Jaja Okwu Olivamaki back on the phone again? But when Mr. Tobey called to him, Jimmy told him to make the arrangements for the broadcast himself. “You’re my secretary,” he said shakily. “You work out the details for the third Friday in next month.”

  “But, Your Excellency,” Mr. Tobey protested, “we’ll be back in Guanaya by then.”

  “You sure do catch on quickly,” the PM told him. “Like you sure got swift perception, Mr. Tobey, Secretary to the Prime Minister of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya.”

  16

  Each morning as he got out of bed and went through his ablutions, he wondered if this would be the day when the whole charade would explode in their faces. The entire mansion of treasonous pretensions would come crashing down around them as if wrought by an earthquake of cosmic-like proportions. How would it happen? What should he be on the lookout for? Old Ambassador Palace Hotel Barnsfield from the USIA? A cover for the CIA? Would they come at him in the disguise of a soul brother? A foxy sister? A lady friend from out of his dissolute and wanton past? Was he becoming paranoid? Was it paranoia to be apprehensive while walking through a rattlesnake farm? Hell naw! The snakes are real, and they will bite, and they are venomous! The most powerfully malignant ASPs in all this earth. He had figured it out. Like he once said, “Why be redundant? Why call them WASPS? White Anglo-Saxon Protestants?” He’d never heard of Black Anglos, except in Nathan Hare’s satirical title. ASP was more accurate in description of their venom. “They’ll take your ass right out of this world!” He worked himself into an angry sweat. He sometimes felt uneasy all through the day, especially when he was out there in that world away from the hotel, felt that he was walking stupidly through a field that had been booby-trapped and mined especially for boobs and boobies such as he. ASPs! The fear would stay with him through much of the morning. Seated on the commode, under the shower, shaving, getting dressed, then gradually wear away as morning moved toward afternoon and got involved with early evening. By then, he was ready to make war against the whole world, if it came to that. There was a Don Quixote romanticism in him that always fought for hegemony. And then there was Maria Efwa, the bewitching beauty of her strength and the strength of her bewitching beauty. Overpowering, to one like him, so susceptible to beauty.

  Apprehensions be damned! Let the ASPy rattlesnakes come. He’d deal deadly with the mother-muckers! He’d been an expert on the rifle range. He’d detonated the booby traps. Then a slightly calmer inner voice would caution him. “Go forth militantly, but dammit keep your guard up, ALWAYS!” It was an ASP that caused the early demise of the fabulous Cleopatra.

  They had been invited to attend an “intimate” reception the next evening, given in their honor by a very very colored lady who was reputed to be the Elsa Maxwell of the Black elite of the nation’s capital. If you were not invited to her little old make-do domicile to be the center of attraction, you could not possibly be that important. She was the colored social indicator. The fake PM knew of her reputation, had met her casually during his brief sojourn at Howard University in Washington, when he was Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson, fox trapper nonpareil, before he’d made his sacred pilgrimage to the Mother Continent and his life had changed forever. He smiled when they received the invitation, actually he laughed aloud with excited expectations. These were Franklin Frazier’s Black and beautiful bourgeoisie, he thought, and he intended to enjoy them to the fullest in his fake role of the Minister Primarily. He forgot about his apprehension.

  * * *

  All night long the night before he had found sleep elusive. And when finally sleep did come, it dealt with him fitfully, he dreamed nightmarishly. Replete, his nightmares were with premonitions of danger, attempts at assassinations on the next evening along the line of convoy to the palatial mansion of the Black (change that) colored Elsa Maxwell. Snipers perched on rooftops with telescopic rifles. In his mad dream, they even let him take dead aim at himself. That one was the first nightmare, from which he awakened with a sweet relief. And glad he was to be awake and still among the living. The second dream had him running smack into one of his sweethearts at the party of his former Washington days, a lovely colored Mata Hari working for the CIA. The third dream had him back in Bamakanougou riding through the dark in the same Land Rover as before, and this time he did not jump before it detonated. He awakened in a drench of sweat and shaking as if he suffered badly for Saint Vitus.

  What did it mean? Were his nightmares trying to tell him something? Were his dreams a forewarning? Did his prescience come in nightmares now? Perhaps he should forgo this reception. Beg off this time for the reason of sheer exhaustion, which would not be far from the truth of the way things were. Again, his sense of adventure took precedence over his fear of premonition. Preposterous! Yet an ominous foreboding lingered with him the whole day through.

  It was mid-September, a time of autumnal equinox, and a tender breeze blew gently its soothing breath among the golden brown-leaved trees that lined the avenue on Sixteenth Street; the tall trees were afire with autumn, as they rode in long black limousines, led by a convoy of the capital city’s motorcycled finest. This time all of them were dressed in their national attire. The bogus PM stared from the open limo, as they moved up the boulevard past Malcolm X Park (formerly named Meridian), past the Howard University extension of dormitories, where the students stood outside, it seemed thousands of them, and threw flowers at the entourage. He thought that quite easily a bouquet of flowers could conceal a hand grenade. Each time one was thrown he fought hard to keep from ducking. And also kisses from the women; they waved Guanayan flags at the famous PM’s entourage past the churches at Columbia Road and Harvard Street, the Universal Church to the left, past the proud baroque establishments once known as “EMBASSY ROW” before the coming of the great Black horde, which laid waste everything and everyone in its path, past the great apartment houses, with armed men on rooftops as if his dream were being reenacted, complete with his own perspiration. Now past the fabulous and fashionable Black bourgeois–owned mansions ultimately past the District line into the Maryland suburbs. Several blocks more and then a turn to the left, another sharper turn to the right, and shortly they were in front of the humble abode of Madame Marie Antoinette Robinson (known to her intimate bourgeois friends as “Toni” and to less intimate ones as “Madame Guillotine”).

  A three-storied edifice constructed of stone and mortar, a realistic replica of a castle out of Tuscany in the Middle Ages, turreted and towered. Replete with sentinel and security agents of all denominations, plainclothed and uniformed. The bogus PM thought, amusingly, all that was needed was for the house to have been encircled by a moat with drawbridge even and some idiot in the tower walking back and forth and shouting, “Seven o’clock and all is well!” The medieval illusion would have been complete.

  Uniformed policemen were all over the place, every entrance to the castle, trampling on Madame’s manicured lawn, a lawn that resembled a college campus in its breadth and vastness, uniformed parking attendants always at the ready. Proud Black SS men stepped anxiously forward and opened the doors of the long black limos and surrounded the fake PM and his entourage and hurried them into the front entrance. Armed SS men on the roofs of all the nearby elegant edifices, rifles pointed. They had the PM and his retinue covered.

  Our man of ’Sippi and lately of the Guanayas made an entrance to end all entrances. In his long white flowing silk brocaded boubou, he made a theatrical ingress like the Prime Minister he was not, as if he
had been trained since he was a babe in the cradle for His Excellency’s Ministership, primarily. With his exquisitely bouboued coterie he glided into the hallway and henceforth into the vast living room with its wall-to-wall carpeting and its wall-to-wall Black boogwuggies. The haute monde Africaine for sure. Doctors and their spouses, lawyers and their spouses, dentists, university professors, here and there a congressperson, a couple of recognizable movie actors, and one or two real live labor leaders. He could not help hearing a concert of murmurs of admiration as Madame Marie Antoinette moved gracefully toward him and offered up her glowing cheek to be kissed. She was a sensually faced woman elegantly gowned and sequined in a long black silken caftan garment that hugged the contours of her body, passionately, lasciviously, sans bra, sans girdle. There was apparently nothing ’neath that finely clothed caftan but her fine brown-framed sensuous self. Madame Marie Antoinette Robinson was a society lady of the middle ages growing slimmingly and inevitably toward a very slight obesity, due quite obviously to overindulgence in exotic culinary pursuits and alcoholic imbibition. Notwithstanding Madame Guillotine was not slack of face. Her flowing light-brown skin pulled tightly over her high oriental cheekbones à la Sophia Loren (many of her friends had remarked admiringly of the resemblance), brown walnut-shaped eyes, a full-lipped rich-red avaricious mouth. It was a gathering of the elite among Franklin Frazier’s fashionable bourgeoisie of color, with a fair sprinkling of the paler people of the upper middle classes. State Department types and all. Truly high society. Through it all he looked apprehensively for a recognizable face. He was threading through a minefield that might detonate at any moment. He told himself, heroically, that he would do the detonating.

  “Well,” she said flamboyantly in a breathless voice. “We have ultimately arrived.”

  The fake PM wondered which or what “we” the elegant lady referred to. He looked behind him and around him. And apparently Madame seemed to have forgotten that the other members of his retinue existed, as she took him in tow and led him to the bar in an oak-paneled room across the hall from the drawing room.

  Jimmy Johnson said, “But the others—I mean, my cabinet—”

  “What others?” Madame inquired cavalierly, mischievously. “Dearest of all excellencies, there are no others when His Excellency makes an ingress.”

  He started to say, “But—”

  When she interrupted him with, “First of all we will refresh ourselves in the Tavern Room. Then we will conduct you on a tour of Madame’s humble abode escorted personally by yours sincerely.”

  He looked behind him and saw that he was being followed by the others of his entourage.

  They refreshed themselves in the Tavern Room, as Madame kept up a constant soliloquy. They all drank to Madame’s health and her continuing prosperity. And, as always, to African liberation. It was one of the few moments since the fake PM had known His Wife’s Bottom that Mr. Lloyd had opened his mouth and even cleared his throat, and yet had remained speechless. Even Foreign Minister Tangi with his perpetual sarcastic smile was suddenly and ominously without the powers of articulation. The Minister of Education, Her Excellency Mamselle Maria Efwa, looked on with amusement, silently. Already she had been taken in tow by a tall dark brown-skinned young man, thirtyish and handsome, one of the up-and-coming legal lights of the nation’s capital. They had met before at another gathering. There had been so many in the last few days it was impossible to keep up with them. Whites and Blacks vied viciously for His Excellency’s appearances. All of Washington society went to parties expecting to see His Excellency Jaja Okwu Olivamaki of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya.

  From the Tavern Room up the spiral staircase to the five bedrooms on the second floor. By now the tour contingent had multiplied.

  The fake PM said, “Aah, the master bedroom.”

  Madame said, “Yes, but there no longer is a master to occupy it with its lonely mistress. The poor dear passed away three years ago.” She wiped her eyes with a silken handkerchief. He feared she would be overcome with grief, but then she mustered strength from some unknown source. Who said women were the weaker sex? Then: “This canopied four-poster is of course French Renaissance Louis Quatorze seventeenth-century rococo (she pronounced it row-cock-co, with emphasis on the middle initial, lingeringly), as is the damask drapes and the dresser and the bidet in the bathroom there. All baroque and row-cock-co.”

  All the fake PM could say was “Very very nice.”

  “They were shipped directly from Paree to me.”

  He heard a feminine and what he thought to be a familiar voice behind him say, “His Excellency is a combination of Sidney Poitier and Robert Redford and Harry Belafonte all put together and combinated.” He broke into a sweat. He knew that voice from days gone by, he thought. She giggled. “You see I am an integrationist all the way. I do not even segregate my fantasies.”

  He had become aware since he started up the circular staircase of someone tugging gently at the bottom hem of his flowing boubou. He didn’t dare look around to see who the guilty party was, but the constant gentle tugging was getting on his tender nerves. At the entrance to every bedroom there was a tuxedoed waiter standing stiffly at attention with a tray of alcoholic beverages and hors d’oeuvres. In the second bedroom it was, according to the Mistress of the house, “Italian Renaissance all the way. It cost us fifty-five thousand dollars and eighty-seven cents, tax included.”

  “Did you get some hors d’oeuvres, honey?” Madame inquired. “All drink and no chop-chop will get sugar pie drunk as a cooter in the bayous.” She pronounced it horses douvreys. “The main course will be served around about midnight.”

  Jimmy Johnson reached back for a handful of “horses douvreys.”

  Then on to the next bedroom, which was “thirty thousand dollars twentieth-century modern” as the master (or is it mistress?) bathroom with the sunken bathtub and its aquamarine bidet and telephone and bookshelves with tapes and albums and stereo equipment. And so forth ad infinitum, even ad nauseum. Up to the third floor and the rec room replete with swimming pool and pool and Ping-Pong tables. Back down the spiral stairway, where pictures adorned the wall, copies of Gaugin and Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, but no evidence of books in this mansion, with now the feeling of the hem of the back of his boubou being constantly lifted higher and higher, as if the holder thought she or he held the train of a wedding dress and that she or he was a flower girl.

  When he reached the first floor at the bottom of the stairway, he turned toward the little tuxedoed mouse-faced gentleman with the black bow tie so large it hid his face. His beady eyes seemed to be peeking frightfully through a great black bush. The thick lens of his glasses made him look like a frog staring blankly from and through a lake of frozen ice. He apparently tried to conceal himself beneath the PM’s boubou, since he almost disappeared from view, momentarily.

  The PM said, “What on earth do you think you’re doing, sire?”

  Perhaps it would be inaccurate to describe the frightened little wide-eyed small-faced thick-spectacled gentleman as being tongue-tied, as the clichéd metaphor goes, since his mouth did open and his red white-coated tongue worked frenziedly, up and down, twisting turning, pirouetting, though no sounds intelligible to human issued forth. Perhaps he thinks he’s speaking Hausa, the bogus PM thought, sarcastically.

  Madame Guillotine said, contemptuously, “The stupid little mousey limp-wristed bitch is trying to find out what you’re wearing underneath your magnificent boubou, if any.”

  The fake PM said, “Oh—in that case, sire, why did you not inquire of me?” And he lifted the bottom hem of his silken boubou, dramatically, theatrically, inch by inch, as the gentleman stood there owl-eyed, past his ankles past the calves of his legs now past his kneecaps up the very dark brown hairless thighs, now to the final excruciating moment of rectitude, all eyes trained on him breathtakingly, when he reached his purple jogging trunks. The little man gasped as his eyes grew larger, wider, larger; th
ey seemed finally to outgrow the sockets that contained them. His poor little mouth worked out feverishly, but again no intelligible sounds came forth, as the floor came up and claimed him, or, in other words, he swooned. Two good-hearted Samaritans dressed as hospital attendants, and present there for such exigencies of overindulgences, took the dear gentleman in hand, gasping now for breath. They stretched him forthwith on the floor and one of them lay astride him, mouth to mouth and belly to belly. The PM wondered if this wasn’t carrying things a bit too far. He was that puritanical, according to Himself. Now the white-coated ones took the upset one up the stairs, waving fans in front of his perspiring face. The party’d ended early for him. Curiosity had damn near killed the cat.

  The mild commotion having subsided, Madame Marie Antoinette had him and his cabinet members stand in a long reception line as the ladies and gentlemen of the reception also lined up and passed before them to meet him and his cabinet, formally. Some giggling ladies bucked the line, including several who were obviously of the masculine gender, tuxedoed and trousered, as it were. Any moment he feared a familiar face would materialize before him and find his face familiar and call him by the name his mama and papa had given him. It was not the most enjoyable part of the reception for him.