“After all, she is our guest, and we Afrikans always attend to our guests’ needs. As is our custom.”
“As is our custom,” replied the dark woman dressed in white from head to toe, then she bowed her head.
The doctor minister continued through the temple, nodding to the other brothers and sisters he passed as he thought about the situation that had been handed him. And he thought the situation was beneath him.
Dr. Minister Mallory Rex made them feel proud. He was a former officer in the United States Marine Corps, a war hero cashiered for sleeping with a fellow officer’s wife — a yacoub’s bitch. He had fallen within the white man’s military, but had risen and moved forward with a new mission after reading Dr. Isaiah Afrika’s words in Rise Ye Mighty Race: A Message to the New Blackman Dr. Isaiah Afrika had laid the foundation for the Original Kingdom of Afrika based on a conflation of Yoruba and Islam: Izlam. Now it was the relentless recruiting, mesmerizing telegenic appearances, and stylistic zeal of Dr. Rex that captivated the faithful and put fear into the hearts of yacoubs, the nation of white devils. And who knew their trickery and deceitfulness better than one who had served faithfully during his years as a “lost Negro” nigorant but loyal, as the Messenger of Izlam once said of the sleeping blacks he called the “walking dead.”
Thus far the operation had gone according to plan. The she-devil, while taking her lusts, was unaware that her new lover, Douglas, a follower of the Original Kingdom of Afrika, was under orders to bring her in. Inebriated, she didn’t feel a thing, thinking she was being pinched and stroked, when he inserted a small needle into her rumptious tush, putting her soundly to sleep. Hiding her inside his double-bass case, Douglas wheeled her from his apartment on 16th Street onto U Street, in the direction of the temple near the corner of 14th. No one would have thought anything was untoward, certainly not a colored musician rolling his instrument down a street of clubs, southern fried joints, and gut-bucket gospel storefronts. These establishments stretched west from the Howard Theater area to the social axis of U and 14th streets, the heart of Soulsville. It was the center of “third places,” the loci between work and home for the city’s colored population, the best place for the Temple of Ife to recruit the walking dead.
Dr. Rex knocked on the double doors leading to the Messenger’s meditation chamber and waited for the word. Upon hearing it, he removed his shoes, entered a large room with a gurgling fountain in the center, and bowed to the figure in white who sat divining the wisdom of Olodumare with cowrie shells.
“May our Lord and Father be with you,” said Rex.
“And He unto you, my son,” answered the Messenger, without looking up. He counted several shells and moved them around. “It’s been written that you have received some wisdom.”
“Yes,” said Rex, who walked over to the old man’s desk and pressed a button. Water ushered forth from the fountain more loudly.
[FBI Agent 1: Damn it, that smart-assed nigger turned up the volume again.
FBI Agent 2: Hoover is going to have our butts if we bring in more flushing toilets!]
Rex placed himself in front of the man who had made blackness a badge of honor. For untold minutes the master and teacher uttered not a word, letting the sound of water wash over them and empty their heads.
Rex slowly opened his eyes and presented a koan to the Messenger: “Why?”
The old man said nothing at first, his dried lips unparted. The student knew something was coming by the way the old man’s Adam’s apple began to move above his collar.
“Because the Blackman has to become a man of respect.”
Man of respect, thought Rex as he crossed U Street, stopping by Brother’s Shoe Shine Shop to pick up a copy of the Evening Star.
“Good seeing you, brother minister,” said Herman, the legless newsie, looking up to Rex from his platform affixed to four wheels. Herman had always considered himself half a man until he met Dr. Minister Mallory Rex, the only black man in America who truly confronted the devils. He and the denizens of Soulsville, while most of them God-fearing Christians, had welcomed back the black prince from exile after his intemperate remarks brought the Kingdom scorn and opprobrium during the nation’s mourning of the white devils’ fallen leader. He had been cast aside for nearly a year, watching lesser men attempt to claim his position, “trying to rap like Rex” but falling flat on their faces. The Kingdom’s numbers were down. Recruitment had flattened, and the coffers were less than full. It was Rex who added a kind of severe glamour and dash to the humorless black men in white robes who preached Izlam on the street corners of America’s urban bantustans while Uncle Tom ministers called for reconciliation and integration. It was the “mighty Rex” who the brothers proclaimed “cool and slick,” and who the sister women, O.K.A. and not, wished would park his shoes beneath their beds.
Rex understood his new mission: He was on a test. Would he do the dirty work of the Kingdom?
“Peace,” he said to the half-man.
As he walked toward his appointment, the prince of Soulsville observed that U Street was having its streetcar tracks removed — a sign that the sleepy little city was maturing. The Metropolitan Board was laying down the beginnings of a subway system like New York’s.
This stretch of northwest D.C., from 11th Street west to 18th, had seen better days. It was, as one book Rex had read suggested, its own “secret city.” Earlier, a better tone of Negroes had resided there, but the influx of rough-and-umble Southern blacks had changed the place and driven them away. It now had the odor of real people; it was a place of beauty parlors, fried hair, and big-hipped bouffant-do sisters. Men still wore hats but the new looks, the “James Brown” process and the “Afro,” were making barbers anxious. There was a different mood in the air; the elders called it “funky” and the youths ran with it. Soul Brother No. 1 had announced a “brand-new bag,” and civil-rights cats working for SNCC hung out at Ben’s Chili Bowl, with kids constantly coming in and out of the three cinemas along the way: the Lincoln, the Republic, and the Booker T.
D.C. was different. D.C. was country, and that meant a slower sense of reality — colored people time, heightened by the lush foliage of the area and its legendary humidity. The whole city had the feel of a village since the buildings were no more than three stories high in residential areas and ten or less in the commercial districts. It was a chocolate city, a city in which over seventy percent of the population was colored, invisible to the master class that lived there and ignored by the indifferent tourists visiting the national edifices.
But D.C. was also a city of an aspiring middle class that was branching out from Le Droit Park, Shaw, and U Street, to the tree-shaded “Gold Coast” of upper 16th Street. There resided the “big-ticket Negroes” that Rex rallied against in the oasis of Meridian Hill Park, cited in the past as one of the most beautiful landscaped parks in the country. On a warm spring day, when the heat brought out the richness in colored people’s skin, making them glow, the Original Kingdom of Afrika would hold its annual Kingdom’s Day in this park, creating a huge Afrikan village in the heart of bourgie D.C. Hundreds of vendors would lay out their wares in stalls, and it was at the Groove Records pavilion on Kingdom’s Day that Dr. Minister Mallory Rex had first met Sophia Devereaux.