Foy Cheshire stood underneath the clock. In ten years’ time, other than gaining seventy-five pounds, he hadn’t changed much. He wasn’t much younger than Hominy, but he’d never grayed and his face bore only a few laugh lines. On the wall behind him were two framed poster-sized photos, one of a variety box of insanely puffy and succulent-looking donuts that looked nothing like the shrivelled-up, lumpy, so-called fresh pastries hardening before my eyes in the display case behind me, the other a color portrait of Pops, proudly wearing his APA tie clasp, his hair shaped to billowy perfection. I played the back. Judging from the serious mood in the room, there was a lot on the agenda and it’d be a while before the Dum Dums got to “ancilliary bidness.”
Foy held two books, fanning them out in front of the group like a magician about to do a card trick. Pick a culture, any culture. He held one aloft, addressing his audience in an affected Southern Methodist drawl, even though he was from the Hollywood Hills by way of Grand Rapids. “One night, not long ago,” Foy said, “I tried to read this book, Huckleberry Finn, to my grandchildren, but I couldn’t get past page six because the book is fraught with the ‘n-word.’ And although they are the deepest-thinking, combat-ready eight- and ten-year-olds I know, I knew my babies weren’t ready to comprehend Huckleberry Finn on its own merits. That’s why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain’s masterpiece. Where the repugnant ‘n-word’ occurs, I replaced it with ‘warrior’ and the word ‘slave’ with ‘dark-skinned volunteer.’”
“That’s right!” shouted the crowd.
“I also improved Jim’s diction, rejiggered the plotline a bit, and retitled the book The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” Then Foy held up the copy of his revamped volume for examination. My eyesight isn’t the best, but I could’ve sworn the cover featured Huckleberry Finn piloting the raft down the mighty Mississippi, while Captain African-American Jim stood at the helm, hands on narrow hips, sporting a cheesy goatee and a tartan Burberry sport coat exactly like the one Foy happened to be wearing.
I never much liked going to the meetings, but after my father died, unless there was an emergency on the farm, I showed up. Before Foy’s appointment as lead thinker, there had been some talk of grooming me to step in as leader of the group. The Kim Jong-un of ghetto conceptualism. After all, I’d taken over the nigger-whispering duties. But I refused. Begging out by claiming I didn’t know enough about black culture. That the only certainties I had about the African-American condition were that we had no concept of the phrases “too sweet” and “too salty.” And in ten years, through countless California cruelties and slights against the blacks, the poor, the people of color, like Propositions 8 and 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and Dave Eggers’s do-gooder condescension, I hadn’t spoken a single word. During roll call Foy never called me by my proper name, but simply yelled, “The Sellout!” Looked me in the face with a sly and perfunctory smile, said, “Here,” and placed a check mark next to my name.
Foy touched his fingertips together in front of his chest, the universal sign that the smartest person in the room is about to say something. He spoke loudly and quickly, his speech picking up in speed and intensity with every word. “I propose that we move to demand the inclusion of my politically respectful edition of Huckleberry Finn into every middle-school reading curriculum,” he said. “Because it’s a crime that generations of black folk come of age never having experienced this”—Foy snuck a peek at the original book’s back cover—“this hilariously picturesque American classic.”
“Is it ‘black folk’ or ‘black folks’?” My having not spoken for the first time in years caught both of us off guard. But I came with the intention of saying something, so why not warm up the vocal cords. I took a bite out of the batch of Oreo cookies I’d boldly snuck in. “Which one is grammatically correct? I never know.” Foy took a calming sip of cappuccino and ignored me. He and the rest of the non-Dickensian flock belonged to that scary subset of black lycanthropic thinkers I like to refer to as “wereniggers.” By day, wereniggers are erudite and urbane, but with every lunar cycle, fiscal quarter, and tenure review their hackles rise, and they slip into their floor-length fur coats and mink stoles, grow fangs, and schlep down from their ivory towers and corporate boardrooms to prowl the inner cities, so that they can howl at the full moon over drinks and mediocre blues music. Now that his fame, if not his fortune, has waned, werenigger Foy Cheshire’s foggy ghetto moor of choice is Dickens. Normally I try to avoid wereniggers at all costs. It’s not the fear of being intellectually ripped to shreds that frightens me most, it’s the cloying insistence on addressing everyone, especially people they can’t stand, as Brother So-and-so and Sister This-and-that. I used to bring Hominy to the meetings to alleviate the boredom. Plus, he’d say the shit I was thinking. “Why you niggers talk so black, dropping the g’s in your gerunds in here, but on your little public television appearances you motherfuckers sound like Kelsey Grammer with a stick up his ass.” But once he heard the widespread rumor that Foy Cheshire had used some of the millions in the royalties he’d earned over the years to purchase the rights to the most racist shorts in the Our Gang oeuvre, I had to ask Hominy to stop coming. He’d scream and stomp. Interrupt every motion with some histrionics. “Nigger, where are my Little Rascal movies!” Hominy swears his best work is on those reels. If the talk were true, it’d be impossible to forgive that self-righteous guardian of blackness for forever depriving the world of the best in American racial prejudice in Blu-ray and Dolby surround sound. But most everyone knows that, like alligators in the sewers, the lethality of Pop Rocks and soda, Foy Cheshire’s ownership of the most racist Little Rascal films is nothing more than urban legend.
Always fast on his feet, Foy countered my insolence and Oreos with a bag of gourmet cannoli. We were both too good to eat the crap Dum Dum Donuts served up.
“This is serious. Brother Mark Twain uses the ‘n-word’ 219 times. That’s.68 ‘n-words’ per page in toto.”
“If you ask me, Mark Twain didn’t use the word ‘nigger’ enough,” I mumbled. With my mouth filled with at least four of America’s favorite cookies, I don’t think anyone understood me. I wanted to say more. Like, why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to your children that the “n-word” exists and that during the course of their sheltered little lives they may one day be called a “nigger” or, even worse, deign to call somebody else a “nigger.” No one will ever refer to them as “little black euphemisms,” so welcome to the American lexicon — Nigger! But I’d forgotten to order any milk to wash the cookies down with. And I never got the chance to explain to Foy and his close-minded ilk that Mark Twain’s truth is that your average black nigger is morally and intellectually superior to the average white nigger, but no, those pompous Dum Dum niggers wanted to ban the word, disinvent the watermelon, snorting in the morning, washing your dick in the sink, and the eternal shame of having pubic hair the color and texture of unground pepper. That’s the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch.