The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  * * *

  It was shortly after nine o’clock and the bogus PM found himself seated in a den-of-an-oak-paneled tavern room in front of a marble cocktail table shaped like a map of Africa. A busy bar was at the other end of the room. Seated next to him and swilling mucho vodka was Ms. Virginia Oregonia Washington, a middle-aged woman of some forty years, give or take, mostly take, underneath a wig as red as ripe strawberries. She was consuming Bloody Marys like they had just become of vogue. To his left was Judge Herman Startling Thatcher, salt-and-pepperedly bearded, dignifiedly, discussing a case he had decided that very same afternoon. “I gave that nigger so much time, when he gets out of jail, we’ll all be well into the twenty-first century. He’ll be worse off than Rip Van Winkle.”

  His wife piped up, “Oh Judge baby, must we always discuss shop?”

  A young lawyer who sat on the thickly carpeted floor in front of Jimmy Johnson and too near Her Excellency for comfort, for the fake PM’s comfort, that is, asked the venerable judge, “Judge Thatcher, are you empowered to pass judgment and mete out sentences to white felons of the District as well as Black ones?”

  Herman Startling Thatcher answered indignantly, “Why of course. What the hell did you think? I’m judge of all the people of the District of Columbia.”

  “Judge, why have the DC prisons always been overcrowded with Negroes and very few white inmates? Are white folks in DC so goody-goody and law abiding?”

  “Hell naw,” another young Black lawyer interjected. “You answered the question your own damn self, when you asked it. It’s because they are Black. It’s because they’re Negroes. That’s why they drove Judge Livingston from the bench, because he stood up for Black folks, Rich Livingston was my main man. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Red-wigged Virginia Oregonia Washington seated next to the bogus PM interpolated, apropos of who knows what, “My first and only husband was a doctor, but he was also a revolutionary. Poor thing. I’m glad he died when he did, because they surely would’ve killed him just like they did poor Malcolm X.” The red-wigged one had pulled off her expensive pumps and had begun to play footsie underneath the cocktail table with the phony PM’s ankle.

  Under her breath she whispered froggily to the ersatz Prime Minister, “Don’t try anything funny, buster. I know you Africans, especially you good-looking ones, but I tell you in front, I don’t go for no hankum-pankum.”

  The PM did not believe his ears. His imagination was playing tricks on him. Perhaps it was the first cocktail. It had been a very potent one.

  The good judge said, “Not true at all. True at all. Richard Livingston was removed from the bench because he was a heavy drinker and committed acts unbecoming the dignity of a gentleman of the bench.”

  The young Black lawyer said, “Bullshit! Judge Thatcher. Nobody swallows more booze and chases more whores than Harry Jackstone, and he’s going to be on the bench until the day he kicks the bucket.”

  The young lawyer seated “too close” to Her Excellency asked Judge Thatcher, “Are you for home rule here in the nation’s capital, Judge? I mean real home rule, not this jive representation we have now.”

  A voice from near the bar piped up with, “The only reason the District doesn’t have authentic home rule, there’re too many people of color here. That’s common knowledge. Right, Judge Thatcher?”

  “I’ve got a terrible headache,” the venerable judge replied. “Let me see if I can find a couple of aspirins.” The good judge got up and departed.

  The young lawyer seated too near Her Excellency said, “That’s the way it is with most of these bourgeois Negroes. You start a serious conversation and they come up with a headache. They avoid a political or intellectual dialogue as if it were a communicable disease.”

  The red-wigged one said, “My husband was the most famous nigger doctor in all of Washington. I’m glad he died of a heart attack. They would have killed him sure as he was born to die, like they did poor Malcolm X. He was a militant revolutionary, don’t you know?”

  Out of the side of her mouth, she muttered, “You just watch it, buster. I’m a lady of distinction.”

  The PM pretended it was not happening. He would just ignore her this time. Then he thought perhaps she was a CIA agent.

  “The most famous ‘nigger’ doctor?” His Excellency heard himself inquire, rhetorically.

  “He was the richest nigger doctor in the District of Columbia, and I’m glad he died before they killed him.”

  In an altogether different voice, she mumbled. “I know you Africans upside down and sideways, especially you, pretty one. All you want is one thing from a genteel lady.”

  Perhaps this was a case, he thought, of paranoiac schizophrenia. The film The Exorcist came to mind. Her froggy voice sounded as if it came from a different person altogether.

  “Nigger doctor?” the bogus PM questioned further. “A specialist, was he? Is nigger some kind of dread disease we have not heard of in Guanaya?”

  Now the red-haired lady’s left foot had begun to play some desperate dynamite footsie higher up on the PM’s leg.

  “You can’t fool me,” she whispered hissingly. “I know every trick in the book. You’re trying to lull me into a sense of false security.”

  The PM thought, Perhaps this one is unsafe. He began to feel a premonition coming on. He remembered the Rev. King at the autograph party up in Harlem. Perhaps he should change his seat.

  The young lawyer too close to Her Excellency Maria Efwa said, “Niggers is that rarest of devastating diseases found mostly in the Western world, Your Excellency. But if you stay here long enough, you will not get by unscathed. It is the most contagious disease ever known to man or beast, especially Black folks. And most of the time it’s terminal.”

  His Wife’s Bottom sighed. “Oh dear!” And wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

  The bogus PM glanced at His Wife’s Bottom. “Oh dear is an understatement!” And he took a silken handkerchief from a pocket of his boubou and tied it around his face from nose to chin. He looked just like a stickup man. “No offense intended, sisters, brothers,” the fake PM assured them apologetically. “Nothing personal, but we wouldn’t want to transport such a virulent disease back to the old country.” He stared at the amused expression on Maria Efwa’s lovely face. “Is there any successful inoculation against niggers?”

  A dark-brown young man in a carefully coiffured Afro à la Stokely Carmichael and a kente-clothed dashiki, seated too close to Her Excellency for Jimmy Johnson’s comfort, said, “The only cure for niggers is Pan-Africanism.”

  “Niggerism is a state of mind,” Maria Efwa explained, patiently, to His Excellency the Minister Primarily. “A psychological disease. We have a few niggers in Guanaya already. So, you may take the handkerchief from your face, Your Excellency. One does not breathe it through the mouth or nostrils.”

  The dark-brown young lawyer in the carefully coiffured Afro à la Stokely Carmichael seated too near Her Excellency said, “It is a disease of the brain, Your Excellency. It is contracted through a process known as brainwashing.”

  The red-wigged lady with the hyperactive left foot whose late husband had been a revolutionary “nigger” doctor, untied the handkerchief from around the PM’s face and began to mop his perspiring brow. “Poor poor dear!” she murmured. “Poor poor dear! My husband would have treated you successfully. He was the richest—”

  Even as the busy-footed one mopped, she mumbled, “Don’t get any funny ideas now. I’m just trying to be hospitable.”

  The bogus PM took the handkerchief from the red-wigged lady. “I’ll do very well, Madame,” he assured her graciously. “Thank you very much.”

  Virginia Oregonia Washington the Third took her seat again and promptly began to play footsie with his leg again beneath the cocktail table. Another youngish woman, strikingly handsome in the extreme, tall, majestic, burnt-brown-toast of skin came into the room and sat in the chair recently vacated by the venerable judge. Jimmy Jay wa
s suddenly alerted. He thought her face familiar. He felt a familiar response to her deeply in the middle of him, warmly, in the middle of him. Her eyes were large and dark and wide and knowing, her mouth was fully lipped and firmly confident.

  The bogus PM addressed his remarks to all of them, who looked to him now as if he were the second coming of the Long-Predicted One, now suddenly arrived. He knew his Negritude severely now and felt an awesome responsibility on his shoulders, somewhat like he imagined Jackie Robinson must have felt every time he came to bat in the last game of the World Series with the bases loaded with two outs and the Dodgers trailing seven to four, the responsibility of the entire race upon his slender shoulders. “Hit that ball, Jackie! What you say!” With grateful apologies to Flip Wilson. He felt the awesome lonesome responsibility he imagined Jackie must have known as did the great Paul Robeson and Willie Mays and Rosa Parks and Mary Bethune and all the other ones who blazed the trail, so long and awesome and alone. He felt the tears for them collecting on the other side of his eyes. Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Fannie Hamer. He blinked his eyes and blew his nose. His Negritude and his Pan-Africanism collided now, blending, clashing, and he would never regard his ministership primarily as flippantly as he had before. He reached around in his excited brain to say something of significance to his sisters and his brothers. “It seems to me, sisters and brothers, that the grave question before us is how can we as an African people inoculate ourselves with the serum of Pan-Africanism. I am an avid student of Pan-Africanism. My specialty is Afro-Americanism. As you know I lived for five years in this country. We as a people must come to understand that—”

  The red-wigged footsie-playing lady, Madame Virginia Oregonia Washington the Third, interrupted him with, “My late-departed husband knew niggers backwards, forward, upside down, and sideways. He was a specialist on them.” She took a handkerchief from her pocketbook and began to dab her beady eyes. “I’m so happy that they died before he killed them. Or vice versa.” She corrected herself, hopefully. She paused and blew her nose and looked around her. “He was too militant for them to live.” The lady had been drinking.

  The youngish majestic familiar-faced woman with the burnt-brown-toasted skin stared at the red-wigged one, incredulously, impatiently. She addressed the fake PM directly. “What can we as African Americans do to bring our people closer together as an African people lost out here in this vast diaspora—” Jimmy Jay stared at her unbelievingly. He’d known what she would sound like before she had spoken. It was weird. It was unreal, a case of eerie déjà vu.

  The red-wigged one said, “Ain’t no way in the world to get rid of niggers. There are niggers when I came into this world and they’ll be here when I leave it. They multiply like rats and roaches.”

  “Your Excellency,” the burnt-brown-skinned beautiful lady with the face and voice that was familiar began again.

  But Virginia Oregonia Washington the Third continued unabated. “I know niggers. My husband was a nigger specialist, the richest in the District of—The most militant—and revolu—”

  The lovely burnt-brown youngish woman said, “Go on, Your Excellency, you were saying.”

  Apparently the red-wigged one thought the beautiful familiar-faced one had designated her as “Your Excellency.” Virginia Oregonia Washington the Third continued. “As militant niggers, we must demand to be invited to the White House—We must—we must—” Ms. Red Wig paused to pour herself another drink.

  The bogus PM leaped headlong into the vacuum. “We who are sons and daughters of Mother Africa must make the connection and let nothing dissuade us. We must be guided by an African value system, that places human beings ahead of things.” He felt inspired, as though some other entity spoke through him. He was on automatic pilot now. “We had a communal system long before Karl Marx was born. We always believed that the earth and the fullness and the goodness thereof and therein were God given and belonged to all the people. We were—”

  Ms. Red Wig of the dynamite footsie interrupted him with, “We must prove to the white man without a shadow that we’re the same as him. We are human beings just like them. My hus—”

  “That’s where you are absolutely wrong,” the familiar-faced one interpolated. “We are not like them. They are not human beings. They landed on this earth like thieves in the night, with the wheel. That’s why and how they outdistanced everybody. They came with the wheel, and they’ve been wheeling and dealing ever since.” She paused as she stared at the PM and his perspiring forehead. Then she said, “Why do you think they spent all of those billions for that first trip to the moon? They’re getting things ready for them to go back where they really came from. And I wish them bon voyage. Because if they stay here much longer, this planet is going to be just like the moon. Empty. Lifeless. Just like they left it in the first place.” She was smiling now.

  Ms. Dynamite Footsie was left speechless, momentarily.

  With a big grin on his face now, he heard himself say, “You may just have something there, Thelma Powell. I—” Then he thought, Where did I get that name from? He was sweating all over now, perspiration pouring from him. He had exposed himself, irrevocably.

  When he heard her say, “My name is Aisha Umulubalu. I—”

  He didn’t hear the rest of it. She’d been Thelma Powell when he’d known her as a student at the university on Georgia Avenue. Why had he not recognized her instantly? They had been close friends, sweethearts, lovers, bosom buddies. It was her close-cropped Afro that had transformed her, embellished the latent beauty of her. She used to be pretty, with long black gleaming hair that came down to her shoulders, her pride and glory. No longer was she pretty. She was outrageously, defiantly beautiful. Dark eyes, deeply dark, a rich curvaceous African mouth. Her voice was possessed with more assurance than before. The Minister Primarily felt Maria Efwa’s dark eyes staring warmly at him, as if she sensed the strong vibrations between His Excellency and Aisha Umulubalu.

  Ms. Red Wig’s nervous left foot was halfway up the PM’s leg by now, her green eyes blinking a mile a minute. “I don’t believe there is no such thing as a Klu Kluck Klan.” Apropos of God knows what. “It’s nothing but a publicity stunt to scare the hell out of Jews and Niggers. My late beloved husband wasn’t no American Negro anyhow. He was an Indian.”

  “An Indian?” the winsome youngish burnt-brown woman, Aisha Umulubalu, asked her, suspiciously. “What kind of an Indian, Lord help us, and from what tribe?”

  “A West Indian from Trinidad. He wasn’t no American Negro. He was a British subject all the way, and the Klu Kluck Klan is nonexisting.”

  Aisha Umulubalu, a.k.a. Thelma Powell, was growing impatient, burnt-brownish skin, wide, beautiful, dazzling dark-brown eyes and all, gradually, at first, now rapidly and all at once. She turned to the fake PM again. “Your Excellency, you were saying.”

  Maria Efwa’s warm dark eyes were taking note of everything going on between Jimmy and Aisha. Not that it mattered to her, personally, but her concern was with how it affected his role as the so-called Prime Minister of Guanaya. After all, she was not in the least emotionally involved with Jimmy Jay.

  “We are all of us Africans,” Jimmy Johnson said, importantly, in his very special theatrical voice à la Sidney Poitier, who was his model and his patron saint, next to Robeson and Du Bois and Rosa Parks and Douglass and Nkrumah and Nzinga and Nassar and Mary Bethune and Belafonte, Gil Noble, ad infinitum. “We are not a minority and we have a common destiny. None of us will be free until all of us are free. From Brazil to Ouagadougou, from Cairo to Hattiesburg to Johannesburg, to Port-of-Spain to Kingston, from Timbuktu to Boston, Mass. We must not allow ourselves to disunite. Freedom is indivis—”

  The red-wigged one said, “I’m so indivisible I don’t know what to do with myself sometimes. I—”

  Aisha Umulubalu interrupted. “Keep talking, Your Excellency. Keep talking. Keep talking!”

  Maria Efwa could never become emotionally involved with macho Jimmy Jay, she to
ld herself.

  “My husband was a revo—”

  “Go ahead, Your Excellency. Keep talking. Keep talking. Don’t let her—” Aisha Umulubalu was losing patience.

  Jimmy felt the sudden urge of nature. He excused himself and went toward the door to the powder room, to check the plumbing. As he opened the door, he almost poked Ms. Red Wig of the hyperactive foot and mouth in her breast with the doorknob. It was obvious to His Excellency that she meant to follow him inside the fashionable toilet with aquamarine bidet. “Madame,” he said in a resonant voice that filled the room, purposefully. “Would you mind terribly if I took a pee in private?”

  She replied, undaunted, “Oh don’t pay me any mind. I used to be a doctor before my husband who was a militant nurse adapted, I mean, adopted me. I mean, I used to be a nurse before my militant doctor married me. I’ve seen all sizes and denominations, all races and religions.” She hiccupped. “Like the man said, a rose is a rose is a rose, in the words of William Shakespeare.”

  Then he heard another voice entirely, that reminded him again of the girl in The Exorcist, in a kind of sotto voce, rapid-fire basso profundo. She whispered foggily. “I know you’re married, pretty baby, but everybody likes to play around every now and then. And Mother really do know how to play around from all angles and positions. Don’t pay this strawberry wig no never mind. I’m a real Afro-American militant and a revolutionary.”

  “I believe you’re quoting Gertie Stein instead of Shakespeare. Notwithstanding, Madame, in my country, prime ministers simply do not piss publicly. It is not the custom or tradition in Guanaya. It would be considered gross. Totally undignified.” He closed the door determinedly in the outraged lady’s face.