The Minister Primarily

by John Oliver Killens

  The battle cry went up with shouts of “The shit is on! The shit is on!” People who had been watching the proceedings on TV clicked off their sets and hit the streets. Others did not take the time to click them off. If the excrement had indeed come into sharp contact with the air-conditioner, or in the poetic vernacular of the mean and happy streets, with all due respect to Piri, “if the shit had indeed hit the fan,” they wanted to make sure it flew in the right direction and into the proper and deserving faces. Can you dig it? Meanwhile the rest of the world held its breath on television.

  When out of the first copter, then the second, third and fourth and fifth stepped men and women of an African descendency. A deafening roar went up, as if the ultimate bomb had been exploded. Windows detonated. Ears were damaged permanently.

  “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! RAAAAAAAAAAAAY!”

  Some wisecracking Harlemite was reputed to have quipped, “The Maroons have landed, and the situation is well in hand! Everything is copasetic!”

  * * *

  Which was apparently no overstatement, since the white SS withdrew discreetly, though hurriedly, and now the PM and his entourage and his honor guard of the Black Alliance and Black persons of the Secret Service proceeded to move jauntily toward the entrance of the Armory. As they gained the entrance and moved toward the platform, the roar of welcome increased. Before they reached the platform, the rafters were actually quaking with applause and cheering.

  Rhythmic handclapping to the beat of:

  “JAJA! JAJA!”

  “LONG LIVE JAJA!”

  CLAP CLAP—CLAP CLAP CLAP!

  “JAJA! JAJA! LONG LIVE JAJA!”

  CLAP CLAP!—CLAP CLAP CLAP!

  Whistling, stomping. More than fifteen minutes passed before quiet could be achieved. Then a deafening din of expectant quietude. The mayor of Harlem introduced the Minister Primarily. And then another bursting forth of uproarious welcome as he strode to the podium.

  Jimmy Johnson stood before the mic now with both arms upraised. Ultimately there was silence.

  “Sisters and brothers—”

  An equal mixture of sighs and applause. He’d never thought his voice was sexy or even sensual. He held up both arms again.

  “Sisters and brothers. This is homecoming day for me. I feel somewhat like the prodigal son. As you probably know I spent many months going down these mean and beautiful streets, all praises to Brother Piri Thomas. I feel that you are my family, my sisters and brothers, my mothers and fathers, and I love each and every one of you. I said I felt like the prodigal son, but I don’ need a fatted calf, because this is a feast of love, and I am filled up with the love that pervades every nook and corner of this vast auditorium. If we could sustain all the love we feel for one another in this room this afternoon, if we could preserve this precious moment, we would constitute an irresistible force and there is no immovable object on this earth that we could not set into motion.”

  “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Shouts of “TEACH!—TEACH!”

  “I love you and I want you to know that the people of the land of your ancestors love you, and we also want you to know that anytime you wish to come home the welcome mat is waiting for you. We believe in you. I bring you expressions of solidarity to you from the Mother Continent, in your struggle for liberation, which is a statement perhaps not tactful or diplomatic of me, coming as it does from a leader of another country. But I say it to you from the heart, we extend our hands to you from across the wide Atlantic.”

  * * *

  He had been speaking for almost an hour, looking down upon a sea of upturned faces. Those faces were more like a lake than an ocean in the tranquility of their countenances, taking in every word, as if they drank spring water from the depths of an everlasting spa. He knew that there were some unattractive Black folks somewhere on this earth, but today as he looked down upon their faces, they seemed the most beautiful people he’d ever gazed upon. Beautiful people. Classy people. It had nothing to do with how nicely they were dressed. He’d seen ugly well-dressed people.

  It was a sense he had of how they felt about themselves and of each other. He felt their love for him deeply, and likewise his great love for them flowing to and fro across the distance between the audience to the podium. At the same time, he felt an awesome responsibility to them. He felt humbled by their love for him. Then against his conscious will the prescience of great danger began to grow inside him, a premonition he fought valiantly against, but it persisted, as he remembered Malcolm and that fateful day at the Audubon Ballroom. He continued speaking but his mind began to wander. For he had learned his lesson, painfully, the folly of ignoring his premonitions. He fought fiercely to recapture the precious-to-him moment of the love he had been overwhelmed by. When over to the left of him, down in the audience, a scuffle began, he thought immediately again of Malcolm at the Audubon.

  A Black man jumped up screaming, “Get his hunkie motherfucka outa here!” A diversionary tactic. Obviously.

  His Excellency stood there wanting to duck behind the podium but thought it would not be dignified. It would be cowardly, unbecoming an African prime minister. He need not have worried. Before he could react, four of the Black honor guards from the Black Alliance came swiftly from four edges of the stage and surrounded him. Meanwhile down on the floor, other security men and women moved hurriedly toward the center of the great diversion, where they were dragging the “hunkie motherfucka” from his seat, until one of the security men of the Alliance said in a loud, baritone, and definite voice, “Hey, I know that brother. He ain’t no hunkie. He’s Black like us.”

  The embarrassed Black brother released his victim reluctantly.

  One of the brothers in the conflict said, grudgingly, “Well if he isn’t a hunkie, he ain’t got no business looking like one.”

  When he got their attention again, Jimmy Johnson asked, “What is Blackness? Is it the color of the skin?”

  Most of the audience answered:

  “IT IS NOT THE COLOR OF THE SKIN.”

  “Was anybody Blacker than Big Detroit Red, better known as Malcolm X?”

  “NOBODY WAS BLACKER THAN BIG RED!”

  “Well all right then. I think you get the point I’m making. It isn’t about who has the darkest skin. It’s about who has the deepest commitment to the people.”

  “Teach! Teach!”—“Talk pretty for the people!”

  The PM smiled at them. “All right now. Understand that you African Americans are the most beautiful people on the face of this earth. Look around me if you don’t believe me.”

  They looked around at one another, their faces beaming.

  “You are the greatest people on this earth, the Afro-American and Caribbean people, Central American, South American, English speaking, Spanish, French, Portuguese. What matters the language spoken by your slave and colonial masters?”

  They shouted, “Teach!” . . . “Teach!” They applauded and they shouted, “Tell it like it is!” . . . “Talk pretty to the people!”

  He continued, “Greatest, not because God, Allah, Buddha, Jehovah, or nature ever made one race superior to another, but because you are descendants of ancestors who were the crème de la crème of a great continent. When the most horrendous holocaust known to human history was perpetrated, they snatched away from Mother Africa her greatest and very finest sons and daughters. Those who were not great and strong enough did not survive the horrors of the Middle Passage, in which more than a hundred million souls were sacrificed.” A shocked expression on most of their faces. An angry and an anguished murmur.

  He went on. “How else to explain the magnificence and the fortitude of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Elijah, Robeson, Du Bois, Garvey, and Hugh Mulzac? How to explain the physical and athletic prowess of a Jack Johnson, a Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jim Brown, and Paul Robeson, again. The creative and artistically gifted ones like Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes, Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne, Belafonte, and Robes
on again. The magnificent Leontyne Price, the late Roland Hayes, and the incomparable Marian Anderson. The aristocrats of indigenous American music, Lady Day, the King of Cole, the Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie, and the Earl of Hines.” He paused for their appreciative laughter, their shouting and applause. Then he continued. “Never to forget the comedic genius of Richard Pryor, who doesn’t call us niggers anymore.” The Armory detonated with whistling and applause and cheering. “Thank you, dear Richard, beloved brother.” He paused again. “And how to explain the indomitable courage of Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, and the children of Little Rock, Malcolm, Medgar, and Dr. King. And who would deny that Paul Robeson is the authentic protagonist of the twentieth century, along with Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, as were Tubman and Douglass of the nineteenth century?” He paused. He smiled with pride.

  “You African Americans are much too modest,” he told them. “If you really understood how truly great and beautiful you are, you would turn this old earth upside down.”

  He turned from the podium and started toward his chair on the stage amid deafening applause. Standing, cheering, stomping, whistling, clapping.

  As one thundering voice, they shouted:

  “JAJA! JAJA! LONG LIVE JAJA!”

  “JAJA! JAJA! LONG LIVE JAJA!”

  He turned again and strode back to the podium. He held up his hands, and the clamorous ovations slowly subsided.

  “Sisters and brothers, I was feeling so good, I felt so much love coming from you to me and going from me to you, I almost forgot to introduce to you the people who lead the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya. It would have been a terrible egotistical faux pas.”

  He introduced each in their turn as they were seated on the stage, deliberately skipping over Her Excellency, who was seated in the middle of them. And then he turned to her and said, “And now the high point of the afternoon, I introduce to you one of Africa’s most beautiful of daughters, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, Her Excellency the Minister of Education of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, Miss Maria Efwa!”

  She stood, her lovely face abeam with smiling. She heard murmurs and sighs of admiration and then applause that made the building shudder. He came to her and took her by the hand and led her to the podium, holding up his hand for silence. The shouting and the cheering slowly died away.

  It would be more accurate to say that, with her statuesque construction, she glided to the podium and the microphone. In a voice that was like violins playing and soft summer rain, à la Miriam Makeba, she told them:

  “I love you. I love you. I love you! In this Armory, like His Excellency, I also feel I am at home. I am in Africa, among my people. You are my people. Wherever you are together like this, a hallowed place like this suddenly becomes Africa. You are Africans, the sons and daughters of the African people. His Excellency is right. You are our greatest sons and daughters. And I love you. I love you! I love you!” She felt the tears spilling down her cheeks; she did not bother to wipe them away, and as she turned to her bogus Prime Minister, she saw that his dark eyes were also filled with wetness. They went toward each other and into each other’s arms, and they kissed each other briefly, deeply, as the people stood and applauded wildly.

  Through the standing clamorous ovation, they dimly heard the voice of Foreign Minister Mamadou Tangi. “Your Excellencies have forgotten you are first cousins and leaders of a country!”

  * * *

  Over in a corner of the auditorium, a lovely young brown-skinned brown-eyed Black woman sketched hastily on a pad of drawing paper an imagined picture of His Excellency, the Prime Minister—without a beard. She shook her head in disbelief. No matter, she believed it. More than that, she was convinced. His Excellency Jaja Olivamaki of Guanaya and Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson of the ’Sippis were one and the selfsame person.

  * * *

  Back downtown at the presidential suite at the Waldorf, they were still high under the intoxicating influence of the uptown meeting, the festival of love, as the Minister Primarily would always remember it. It was a happy enervating high that had them three or four sheets in the wind. The doors closed, locked, the outside world locked out, he took off his phony beard and threw it across the room. He saw her come toward him as if in a dream he’d dreamed too many times for it ever to come true.

  “Your Excellency! Your Excellency!” she murmured. “You were magnificent, and I love you, and I’m glad I love you. I do. I do. I truly do! And I don’t care. I do! I do!”

  She was in his arms now, and her rich mouth went up toward his mouth in a joyous and receptive mood. Her mouth opened as their lips met. No one existed then for them in time and space save them, even as the members of the cabinet of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya stood there in shocked amazement. They were brought back down to earth from their outlandish high by the clearing of ministerial throats and the gravelly voice of Mamadou Tangi.

  “Your Excellencies—please!”

  Flush-faced, they moved away from one another. Maria Efwa’s face was flaming. She turned away and went swiftly out of the room and down the hall to her private quarters.

  They sat the bogus PM down and spoke with him heatedly about his relationship with Her Excellency. Cousins did not conduct themselves like this in Guanaya, especially in a family like the Olivamakis. It was not traditional. Unheard of, even. Especially in public places, and never ever privately.

  He stared at them, smilingly and smug. Like the cat that had drunk up all the milk, or did he swallow the canary? And yet there was plenty more where that came from. He looked around him at “his” cabinet. Mamadou Tangi was pissed off, for days. His Wife’s Bottom was scratching and clucking his forever itchy throat, disapprovingly. Mr. Tobey’s countenance was deeply lined with worry. Abingiba was smiling at them.

  Jimmy Johnson laughed at them. “But Her Excellency is not my cousin,” he reminded them, with relish. He figured he was in the catbird seat. And loving every minute of it.

  “Well,” Mamadou Tangi declared, “we will just have to see that you two are not together any more than is absolutely necessary.”

  “But you forget, comrades in the struggle, that we have to spend every moment that’s available together, teaching me the history and the folklore of your people.” He smiled at them. (It was more smirk than actual smile.) “I appreciate your deep concern for me, comrades, but look at it this way. It’s all in the line of duty. For the cause of African liberation.”

  19

  By crook or by hook, or even vice versa, whichever, the bogus PM was determined to get Horace Whitestick into the inner-circle sanctuary of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya cabinet in the executive suite of the Waldorf-Astoria, and likewise Hubert Herbert Hubert was equally determined to have the same Horace Whitestick worm his way into the confidence of the cabinet of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya. Horace Whitestick was all manner of things to all kinds of people; truly he was a man for all seasons and reasons. An Uncle Thomas to the beloved Prexy, an avowed Black Nationalistic Pan-African loyalist to the Minister Primarily.

  “You must win their confidence,” the President declared to him, “by any means necessary, and report to us daily about their conversation. I want to know every thought they ever think they thought. Act stupid. Draw them out. You can do it easy.”

  “Yassah,” Horace Whitestick answered obediently, head down, with both hands behind his back and all his fingers crossed, and even double crossed.

  “That’s a fu-fu-fucking good boy,” the President exhorted him. “You’ll be doing your fucking duty to God and your fucking country and a credit to your fucking race.”

  “Yas—Sah!” Horace did his damndest to cross his testicle. His eyes were already cocked and crossed.

  The Lord works in mysterious fucking ways, Horace Whitestick thought, when three days later His Excellency ushered him past the two sentries at the entrance
to the executive suite of the Waldorf.

  Now they sat in the vast and very plush living room drinking Scotch and water. The PM stared across the room at the little man with the dark shifty eyes. The members of His Excellency’s cabinet stared askance and aghast at both of these Africans lost out here in the diaspora of the Americas, as the saying went in those wild and wooly Western days, wondering what in God-or-Allah’s name Jimmy Johnson was up to. Had he suddenly lost touch with his African reality? Had the stress and strain of the grandiose impersonation proved too much for poor exhausted Jimmy? Had his mind suddenly gone crackers?

  Jimmy gave Horace Whitestick another drink and gave himself another, then sat back in his easy chair, relaxedly, laid back, and stared intently at old Horace. How much did this little man already know? How much had a crafty one like him already figured out? Could he be trusted? Jimmy Johnson wanted terribly to trust him. He wanted painfully to open up to him entirely. He felt, desperately, the need of the confidence of another African-diasporated-American.

  Meanwhile they sat staring at one another, when suddenly the little man burst forth with laughter.

  “Qua-qua-qua-gi-gi-gi! White folks is just about the mama-jabbing most!” He laughed now until the tears streamed down his cheeks. When he finally stopped laughing, he got himself another drink. And then he told Jimmy and the astonished cabinet about his conversation with the President. “That cracker President wanted me to spy on my own people, and he thought I didn’t have no better sense than to do what he suggested.”