Foy continued his sales pitch: “The ‘n-word’ is the most vile and despicable word in the English language. I don’t believe anyone would argue that point.”
“I can think of a more despicable word than ‘nigger,’” I volunteered. Having finally swallowed my gooey chocolate-and-crème chaw, I closed one eye and held a half-bitten cookie so that the dark brown semicircle sat atop Foy’s gigantic head like a well-coiffed Nabisco Afro that read OREO at its center.
“Like what?”
“Like any word that ends in — ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”
“Problematic,” someone muttered, invoking the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me. “What the fuck you come here for, if you don’t have anything productive to say?”
Foy raised his hands, asking for calm. “The Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals respect all input. And for those who don’t know, this sellout is the son of our founder.” Then he turned to me with a look of pity on his face. “Go on, Sellout. Say what you came to say.”
Most times when someone presents before the Dum Dums you’re required to use EmpowerPoint, a slide presentation “African-American software” package developed by Foy Cheshire. Not much different from the Microsoft product except that the fonts have names like Timbuktu, Harlem Renaissance, and Pittsburgh Courier. I opened the store’s broom closet. Next to the mops and buckets, the old transparency projector was still there. Its glass top and lone sheet of transparency paper filthy as prison windows, but still usable.
I asked the assistant manager to dim the lights, then drew up and projected the following schematic onto the cork ceiling:
I explained that the boundary labels were to be spray-painted onto the sidewalks and that the lines of demarcation would be denoted by a configuration of mirrors and high-powered green pinpoint lasers, or if that proved to be cost prohibitive, I could simply circumnavigate the twelve miles of border with a three-inch strip of white paint. Hearing the words “circumnavigate” and “lines of demarcation” come out of my mouth made me realize that even though I was making this shit up on the spot, I was more serious about this than I thought I was. And yes, “I’m bringing back the city of Dickens.”
Laughter. Waves and peals of deep black laughter of the kind kindhearted plantation owners long for in movies like Gone with the Wind. Laughter like you hear in basketball locker rooms, backstage at rap concerts, and in the backrooms of Yale University’s all-white department of black studies after some fuzzy-hair-brained guest lecturer has dared to suggest that there’s a connection between Franz Fanon, existential thought, string theory, and bebop. When the chorus of ridicule finally died down, Foy wiped away the tears of hilarity from his eyes, finished the last of the cannoli, scooted in behind me, and turned my father’s photo toward the wall, thus saving Pops the embarrassment of having to witness his son desecrate the family intellect.
“You said you were going to bring back Dickens?” Foy asked, breaking the question-and-answer ice.
“Yes.”
“We, and I think I speak for most of the group, have only one question: Why?”
Hurt that I expected everyone to care and no one did, I returned to my seat and spaced out after that. Half-listening to the usual diatribes about the dissolution of the black family and the need for black business. Waiting for Foy to say “and things of that nature,” which is the “Roger. Over and out” of black intellectual communication.
“… and things of that nature.”
Finally. The meeting was over. And as the gathering broke up, I was twisting open my last Oreo cookie when, from out of nowhere, a callused black hand ganked it and popped it into a tight-lipped mouth.
“You bring enough for the whole race, nigger?”
With tufts of perm-straightened hair fastened to hot pink rollers stuffed underneath a see-through shower cap and giant hoop earrings dangling from both ears, the cookie snatcher looked more like a Blanche or a Madge than the notorious gangbanger known as King (pronounced “Kang”) Cuz. And silently, very silently, I cursed Cuz as he slid his tongue over his metal-rimmed teeth, clearing tiny flecks of chocolaty goodness from his bridgework.
“That’s what my teachers used to say to me if I was chewing gum and shit. ‘You bring enough for the whole class?’”
“No doubt, nigger.”
In all the time I’ve known Cuz, I’ve never had a real conversation with him beyond “No doubt, nigger.” No one has, because even in his middle age, he’s sensitive, and if you say the wrong thing, he’ll show the world just how sensitive he is by crying at your funeral. So no one engages him in conversation; whenever he speaks to you, no matter what he says, man, woman, or child, you put as much bass in your voice as you possibly can and reply, “No doubt, nigger.”
King Cuz has faithfully attended meetings of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals ever since my father nigger-whispered his mother off the Metro train tracks. Feet and hands bound in a jump rope, she had pitched herself onto the commuter rails screaming, “When a white bitch got problems, she’s a damsel in distress! When a black bitch got problems, she’s a welfare cheat and a burden on society. How come you never see any black damsels? Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your weave!” She was yelling so loud you could hear her suicidal protests over the ding-dong of the falling crossing gate and the blaring horn of the onrushing Blue Line. King Cuz was Curtis Baxter then, and I remember the windy wake of the passing train blowing young Curtis’s tears sideways on his face as my dad cradled his mother in his arms. I remember the railroad tracks, rusty and ringing and still hot to the touch.
So you bring enough for the whole race?
Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin’ Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn’t know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn’t long after that innovation that he applied for membership to NATO. Everybody else is in NATO. Why not the Crips? You going to tell me we wouldn’t kick the shit out of Estonia?
No doubt, nigger.
“I need to talk to you about a couple of things.”
“No doubt, nigger.”
“But not in here.”
Cuz lifted me by the shirtsleeve and escorted me out the door and into the hazy Hound of the Baskervilles night. It’s always a shock to have the day turn to dark without you, and we both paused to let the warm wet mist and the silence settle on our faces. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s more interminable, prejudice and discrimination or the goddamn meetings. Cuz made half a fist, examined his long, manicured nails, then raised one heavily teased eyebrow and smiled.
“First thing is ‘bringing back Dickens.’ Fuck what the rest of them niggers who ain’t from the hood say, I’m thoroughly with that shit. It ain’t but a couple of us in there, but the Dum Dums who from Dickens wasn’t laughing. So set that off, cuz, because if you think about it, why can’t black people have their own Chinese restaurants?”