The Minister Primarily
Page 45
He stared back at her wordlessly. He did not trust himself to speak. It was the most courageous act he had ever committed. He would not spoil it now with tears. She stood for a moment staring down into his face. She parted her rich curving lips. Her mouth worked vainly for the words of good-bye to come forth. Finally, she said, shakily, “Safe journey.”
He did not trust himself to speak.
She turned and walked majestically away toward Guanayan Airways.
And never did look back.
Epilogue
Legend has it that on a certain evening in the week a folk singer by the name of John Henry Leanderson will make a guest appearance at the Village Gate or the Vanguard without prior notice. And sometimes, only sometimes, he will sing, with a faraway whimsical smile in his eyes and on his face, as if he is enjoying a private joke with himself, he will burst into singing, robustly:
My old master promised me,
Raise the ruckus tonight,
When he died he’d set me free,
Raise the ruckus tonight.
He lived so long,
His head got bald,
Raise the ruckus tonight,
He got out of notion of dying at all
Raise the ruckus tonight.
And oftentimes people will join in the singing at his request and go away with a smiling in their hearts and stomachs, and rack their brains as to when and how and where and whether they have ever heard him sing that song before.
And legend has it further that later on, that one James Jay Leander Johnson was wedded to the one and only Deborah Bostick. And that one day, in a burst of optimism and Pan-Africanistic romanticism, after a furious exchange of correspondence between New York and Bamakanougou, the newlyweds took off for the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, where they would live out their turbulent and eventful lives together.
They are still there, by last report. She is in charge of national television, and he is a national TV personality. They, of course, work wonderfully, though sometimes nervously, under the aegis of the Ministry of Information, Education, and Culture and Her Excellency Maria Efwa.
As to the cobanium, the Guanayans extracted it from the earth by themselves at their own rate of speed in cadence with their own indigenous drums and drummers. His Excellency Jaja adopted a slogan, some say taken from the Black Panthers of the USA: “Power to the People!”
The road to “People’s Power” was not easily achieved, has not been smooth all of the way. There have been roadblocks, and ruts and great New York–styled potholes all along the highway to stability. There have been great and white destructive foams on this stormy sea of independence. Some of the leadership labored under a grave misapprehension. They thought that “People’s Power” was meant only for certain people. Gentlemen in high places were discovered with bountiful bank accounts in the banks of Switzerland. Certain leaders with their spouses were found asleep in beds made entirely of the rawest purest gold purchased in jolly London Town, clandestinely.
They were dismissed in disgrace from the country’s leadership. Some were placed in confinement. Solitarily, there to ponder deeply in profound atonement their shameful misdeed, their betrayals of the trust.
Jaja was firm and steadfast.
The people’s power overcame, ultimately. Their latest venture was to irrigate successfully the Great Northern Desert. Their land there, once entirely unproductive, is now arable. The food supply is more than adequate, if not in great abundance yet. Some exported, practically nothing is imported now. No more seven years of drought and famine.
LONG LIVE JAJA.
LONG LIVE MARIA EFWA.
LONG LIVE DEBORAH AND JIMMY JAY.
LONG LIVE THE INDEPENDENT PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF GUANAYA.
GOD AND ALLAH BLESS THE PEOPLE.
About the Author
JOHN OLIVER KILLENS was a major influence on African American literature. He was a legendary novelist, playwright, essayist, professor, mentor, and activist. He insisted that every time he sat down to the typewriter, he was out to change the world. “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake. All art is propaganda although there is much propaganda that is not art.”
Born January 14, 1916, in Macon, Georgia, Killens attended Edward Waters College, in Jacksonville, Florida; Morris Brown College, in Atlanta, Georgia; and Howard University and Terrell Law School, in Washington, DC. He also studied at Columbia University and New York University in New York City.
He was one of the founding members of the Harlem Writers Guild, with Paule Marshall, John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, and Walter Christmas. Other members included Lonne Elder III, Ossie Davis Louise Meriwether, Audre Lorde, Loyle Hairston, Sylvester Leaks, Godfrey Cambridge, and Irving Burgess, among others. He encouraged poet Sarah Wright from Philadelphia to join the workshop and Maya Angelou from California to come to New York and focus on her writing. Angelou and her son stayed with the Killens family in Brooklyn when she first moved to New York City.
John Oliver Killens died October 27, 1987, on a stormy Tuesday evening. It so happened that the following Sunday, November 1, the New York City Marathon was held, and for the first time in its then-eighteen-year history the first-place male winner was a Black man, Ibrahim Hussein from Kenya. Ironically, in his essay “Wanted: Some Black Long Distance Runners,” Killens insists that, “We Black folks, as a people, have produced some of the most magnificent athletes the world has ever known, but have produced very, very few long distance runners. We’ve raised a whole lot of hell in the hundred- and two-hundred-yard dashes. Long distance running [however] requires planning, pacing, discipline, and stamina and a belief in the ability to win everything over the long haul.” Interestingly, for the thirty-four years since his death, the New York City Marathon has been won by Black men; the one year it was not, 1993, it was a Mexican, Andres Espinosa, who came in first place. Not to be outdone, Black women have also been winning the marathons.
With his life of literary activism, John Oliver Killens was that long distance runner, along with his beloved wife, Grace, leaving us a body of work that spans three centuries, from his fictionalized biography of Pushkin, Great Black Russian: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin to Great Gitten Up Morning, a biography of Denmark Vesey; A Man Ain’t Nothin’ But a Man: The Adventure of John Henry; Youngblood; And Then We Heard the Thunder; Sippi; and now this new gift, The Minister Primarily.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE MINISTER PRIMARILY. Copyright © 2021 by The Grace Killens Revocable Trust, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Foreword, “John Oliver Killens: The Real and The Fake” © Ishmael Reed
Cover images: © Abscent84/iStock/Getty Images (glasses); © CSA-Printstock/Getty Images (clouds)
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
Digital Edition JULY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-307961-8
Version 06212021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-307959-5
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1 “Where is the check on the chief executive’s power as to where that power begins and ends, that is what I am trying to determine,” Talmadge said. “Do you remember when we were in law school we studied a famous principle of law that came from England, and also is well known in this country, that no matter how humble a man’s cottage is that even the king of England cannot enter without his consent?”
2 Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
3 A copy of Killens’s FBI file is available from the Internet Archive, https://archive. org/details/JohnO.KillensFBIFile/John%20O.%20Killens%20001/page/n1/mode/2up.