Unable to distinguish between himself and the corny “I owe you my life, I’ll be your slave” trope, Hominy had finally lost his mind, and I should’ve hospitalized him right then and there. Called the police and had him 5150’d. But once during an afternoon visit to the Cinematheque Hollywood Home for the Aged, Forgetful and Forgotten, he made me promise that I’d never institutionalize him, because he didn’t want to be exploited like his old friends Slicker Smith, Chattanooga Brown, and Beulah “Mammy” McQueenie. Who, chasing one last film credit before heading up to that green room in the sky, auditioned from their deathbeds for novice film students from the UCLA Extension Program, looking to attach a star, even a faded-out senile one, to their certificate-earning final projects.
The next morning, Thursday, I awoke to Hominy, standing in my front yard, shirtless and barefoot and lashed to the curbside mailbox, demanding that I whip him. I don’t know who tied his hands, but I do know that Hominy had tied mine.
“Massa.”
“Hominy, stop.”
“I want to thank you for saving my life.”
“You know I’d do anything for you. Your work with the Little Rascals made my childhood bearable.”
“You want to make me happy?”
“Yes, you know that.”
“Then beat me. Beat me to within an inch of my worthless black life. Beat me, but don’t kill me, massa. Beat me just enough so that I can feel what I’m missing.”
“Isn’t there another way? Isn’t there something else that would make you happy?”
“Bring back Dickens.”
“You know that’s impossible. When cities disappear, they don’t come back.”
“Then you know what to do.”
They say it took three sheriff’s deputies to pull me off his black ass, because I whipped the shit out of that nigger. Daddy would’ve said that I was suffering from “dissociative reaction.” That’s what he always attributed my beatings to. Opening up the DSM I, a holy book of mental disorders so old it defined homosexuality as “libidinal dylexsia,” he’d point to “Dissociative Reaction,” then clean his glasses and begin explaining himself slowly, “Dissociative reaction is like a psychic circuit breaker. When the mind experiences a power surge of stress and bullshit, it switches off, just shuts your cognition down and you blank out. You act but are unaware of your actions. So you see, even though I don’t remember dislocating your jaw…”
I’d love to say that I awoke from my own fugue state and remembered only the stinging fizz of my wounds as Hominy gently dabbed at my police-inflicted abrasions with cotton balls soaked in hydrogen peroxide. But as long as I live, I’ll never forget the sound of my leather belt against the Levi Strauss denim as I unsheathed it from my pants. The whistle of that brown-and-black reversible whip cutting through the air and raining down hard in loud skin-popping thunderclaps on Hominy’s back. The teary-eyed joy and the thankfulness he showed me as he crawled, not away from the beating, but into it; seeking closure for centuries of repressed anger and decades of unrequited subservience by hugging me at the knees and begging me to hit him harder, his black body welcoming the weight and sizzle of my whip with groveling groans of ecstasy. I’ll never forget Hominy bleeding in the street and, like every slave throughout history, refusing to press charges. I’ll never forget him walking me gently inside and asking those who’d gathered around not to judge me because, after all, who whispers in the Nigger Whisperer’s ear?
“Hominy.”
“Yes, massa.”
“What would you whisper in my ear?”
“I’d whisper that you’re thinking too small. That saving Dickens nigger by nigger with a bullhorn ain’t never going to work. That you have to think bigger than your father did. You know the phrase ‘You can’t see the forest for the trees’?”
“Of course.”
“Well, you have to stop seeing us as individuals, ’cause right now, massa, you ain’t seeing the plantation for the niggers.”
Six
They say “pimpin’ ain’t easy.” Well, neither is slaveholdin’. Like children, dogs, dice, and overpromising politicians, and apparently prostitutes, slaves don’t do what you tell them to do. And when your eighty-some-odd-year-old black thrall has maybe fifteen good minutes of work in him a day and enjoys the shit out of being punished, you don’t get many of the plantation perks you see in the movies either. No woe is me, “Go Down Moses” field singing. No pillowy soft black breasts to nuzzle up to. No feather dusters. No one says “by ’n’ by.” No fancy dinners replete with candelabra and endless helpings of glazed ham, heaping spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, and the healthiest-looking greens known to mankind. I never got to experience any of that unquestioned trust between master and bondman. I just owned a wizened old black man who knew only one thing — his place. Hominy couldn’t fix a wagon wheel. Hoe a fucking row. Tote barge or lift bale. But he could genuflect his ass off, and from 1:00 p.m. to 1:15 p.m., or thereabouts, hat in hand, he’d show up for work. Doing whatever he felt like doing. Sometimes work consisted of donning a shiny pair of emerald green and pink silks, holding a gas lamp at arm’s length, and posing in my front yard as a life-size lawn jockey. Other times, he liked to serve as a human footstool, and when the spirit of servitude moved him, he’d drop to all fours at the foot of my horse or the base of the pickup truck and stay there until I stepped on his back and took an unwanted trip to the liquor store or the Ontario livestock auction. But mostly Hominy’s work consisted of watching me work. Biting into Burbank plums whose tartness to sweetness to skin thickness ratios took me six years to get just right, and exclaiming, “Damn, massa, these plums sho’ am good. They Japanese you say? Well, you musta stuck yo’ hand up Godzilla’s asshole, cuz you gotta green thumb like a motherfucker.”
So believe me when I tell you human bondage is an especially frustrating undertaking. Not that I undertook anything, my dominion over this clinically depressed bondsman having been forced upon me. And let’s be clear: I tried to “free” Hominy countless times. Simply telling him he was free had no effect. And once, I swear, I almost ditched him in the San Bernadino Mountains like an unwanted dog, but I saw a stray ostrich with a Pharcyde promotional bumper sticker affixed to its tail feathers and I lost my nerve. I even had Hampton draw up some manumission papers written in industrial-age jargon and paid some scrivener $200 to write out a contract on antique parchment paper that I found at a Beverly Hills stationery store, because apparently rich people still have use for it. What for? Who knows. Maybe, with the state of the banking system, they’ve gone back to the treasure map.
“To Whom It May Concern,” the contract read. “With this deed I hereby emancipate, manumit, set free, permanently discharge, and dismiss my slave Hominy Jenkins, who’s been in my service for the past three weeks. Said Hominy is of medium build, complexion, and intelligence. To all who read this, Hominy Jenkins is now a free man of color. Witness my hand on this day, October 17th, the year of 1838.” The ruse didn’t work. Hominy simply pulled down his pants, shit on my geraniums, and wiped his ass with his freedom, then handed it back to me.
“Medium intelligence?” he asked, raising a gray eyebrow. “One, I know what year it is. Two, true freedom is having the right to be a slave.” He hiked up his pants and slipped into his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer plantationese. “I know taint nobody forcin’ me, but dis here one slave you ain’t never gwine be rid of. Freedom can kiss my postbellum black ass.”