“Tops,” Soupspoon added.
“It could be more.” Just that quickly she was on the edge of tears.
“I once knowed a man name’a Bannon,” Soupspoon said. “Ole roustabout down Mississippi.”
“Was he your friend?” Kiki used the blanket to wipe her eyes and nose.
“In a way he was. I was a boy an’ he was pushin’ sixty. But back then, in the country way’a life, you could have friends all kindsa ages an’ there wasn’t nuthin’ weird about it.”
Soupspoon fingered a page in his address book as if he had found something that proved what he said.
“So what about your friend?” Kiki asked. Someone was shouting on the TV and then came applause.
“Bannon? Bannon was a thief by trade and a history teacher by nature.” Soupspoon looked at the guitar on the couch beside him. “He played guitar too.”
Carefully Soupspoon took up the guitar and put it back in its case.
“Bannon would take me out on walks an’ tell me all about what he called real history; all the things he had learned from African students that he’d met in Washington D.C when he was a janitor at Howard University.”
“What did he steal?” Kiki asked.
“What?”
“You said he was a thief. What did he steal?”
“He only stole from white folks, but what Bannon loved was history; especially African history, which, he said, was hidden by white people who was jealous of all the things that the Africans had when people in Europe was still holed up in caves.
“He used to say that your African races was civilized six thousand years ago. Egypt and the Sudan, that’s where it all started. Your first Jews and your first Christians was black folks. They made Babylon and the pyramids, they wrote the Bible and sailed the seas. Mosta your black people around today don’t know all that. But I do. Mosta your white kids grow up thinkin’ old is England, old is Rome. But they don’t know shit...” Soupspoon was the voice but they were Bannon’s words. The dapper little man with fuzzy gray hair like a halo around the shiny black dome of his head.
Soupspoon laughed to himself.
“What’s funny, Soup?”
“I met Bannon ’cause one day I was breaking inta his little old shack out past the Willis plantation. I just went in there t’take some apples but I didn’t know that he was out back nappin’. He caught me by my ankle before I could get back out the windah.”
“Did he beat you?” Kiki asked — she was wringing the blanket.
“Naw. He told me, If you do anything you gotta do it right.’ I was sweatin’ an’ shakin’ under the pecan tree that growed at the side’a his place. The grass was cold and them pecans was hard under my feet.
“Bannon was preachin’ up to the branches of that tree, ‘Here you got a black child comin’ t’steal from a old black man — from his own people.’ An’ that’s when the lectures started. All about how black people everywhere didn’t know who they was an’ didn’t know how to be proud. ’Bout how writin’ an’ readin’ an’ arithmetic all started in Africa.
“‘All the white man ever made was weapons. But that’s all they needed.’ That’s what he said.
“With those weapons they stole everything in the world. They piled their warehouses with every goddamned thing they could carry. An’ when they couldn’t carry any more they made slaves carry away their own things to put in the store. An’ when the white men had so much that they couldn’t use it all they made the slaves work and serve.
“‘White men the biggest thieves in history,’” Soupspoon said, making his voice deeper so that Kiki knew he was quoting from the long-gone Bannon. “‘And it’s our job to steal it right back.’
“The old boy didn’t believe in working, no sir! He say, ‘Workin’ for the white man is helpin’ him to pick your own pocket. Work every day for your whole life and you might make ten thousand dollars. But it’s in the white man’s pocket and the white man’s bank. An’ here you livin’ in the same goddamned shack from six to sixty-six an’ you even payin’ him rent. When you die the white undertaker pull the gold right from outta your teeth.’
“I was just a little boy really, ’bout ten I guess. My daddy an’ my momma was already dead an’ I didn’t have nobody to talk to. I mean, I stayed with these two women that I called my a’ntees but I guess I needed a man to talk to. An’ the way that Bannon talked was so great that I still remember all the stuff he told me. It was like I had been lied to all my life an’ now somebody finally wanted t’tell me what’s what.
“An’ he needed t’talk too. Because Bannon knowed mo’ than almost anybody I ever met, but he didn’t know how to read. Everything he knew was in his head an’ he had t’talk to keep it up — if you see what I mean.”
Kiki took a deep breath and brought her hand to her throat. She looked as if she wanted to say something but the words didn’t come.
“He say, ‘So when you go crawlin’ in a windah it should be a white man’s windah. An’ if you use a gun it should be against a enemy, not some lost African brother don’t even know who he is.’
“You know I’idn’t have no gun. Shit! I’idn’t have a stick. But I knew that if I hadda had a stick I woulda swung it an’ because I knew that I knew what he meant.
“I spent every day at Bannon’s house, eatin’ apples and pork rinds while that old man talked about the great black men of history. In the afternoon, when we’d take long walks, he’d tell me all about people like Marcus Garvey an’ the return to Africa. We always found ourselves in the woods behind white people’s houses. Bannon would not steal from a colored man, he said that stealin’ from a colored man was wrong.” Soupspoon cackled and sat back on the couch. “But if some white man so happened to be gone, and his door was locked, then Bannon didn’t mind me goin’ in through his windah an’ openin’ up. You see, he’d get mad when a white man had a lock on his do’. He figured that that white man had money he stoled from the coloreds in there. Yep.”
“Did you ever get caught?”
“I didn’t. I was s’posed to meet’im on a Tuesday mornin’ and he was gonna start talkin’ about Hannibal and the black armies that Rome drafted out of Africa. You see, I’idn’t stay wit’ him ‘cause he thought that people might get suspicious and put two an’ two together. So I still stayed wit’ my a’ntees but I never told ’em what I was doin’.”
The flutter in Soupspoon’s heart had a small speck of pain inside it.
“By the time I got there the shack was burnt down an’ Bannon was dead. They had took him an’ piled stovewood on’im an’ then set him afire. His arms was just black bones reachin’ out away.
“I runned right back to Inez an’ Ruby. And I prayed that the people killed Bannon never knew about me.”
Kiki came over from the bed to hug him.
“So what does all that have to do with a tape recorder?” Kiki asked some time later. She turned out the lamp, leaving the room lit only by the blooming blue waves of television light.
“Only two men ever taught me anything,” Soupspoon said. “Bannon Tripps and Robert Johnson. But they taught me a lot. You know I ain’t never had no kids or no nieces or nephews even.
“But I once knew this man name of Early, William Early out in Chicago. He wanted to interview me twenty years ago for a book about the blues. He called it Back Road to the Blues. I didn’t want to at the time. That was a bad time in my life an’ I didn’t wanna think about no blues.”
“But now you do?”
“That’s why I want a tape recorder. I wanna tell my story like Bannon told his. I know stuff now too. I got somethin’ to say an’ you done gimme a chance here to say it, Kiki.”
“What?”