I was standing on my father’s grave, in the mud, underneath the water spray meant for the potatoes. From there I could see the whole farm from front to back. The rows of fruit trees. Separated by color. Light to dark. Lemons. Apricots. Pomegranates. Plums. Satsumas. Figs. Pineapples. Avocados. The fields, which rotate from corn to wheat, then to Japanese rice, if I feel like paying the water bill. The greenhouse sits in the middle. Backed by leafy processions of cabbage, lettuce, legumes, and cucumbers. The grapes on vines along the south fence, tomatoes on the northern, then the white blanket of cotton. Cotton that I haven’t touched since my father died. What was it Hominy said to me when I first started popping off about bringing back Dickens? You heard the saying, you can’t see the forest for the trees? Well, you can’t see the niggers for the plantation. Who was I kidding? I’m a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.
“Hominy!”
“Yes, massa?”
“What day is it?”
“Sunday. Why, you going down to Dum Dum’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Then ask that bitch-nigger where my fucking Little Rascals movies at!”
Nineteen
Attendance was light, maybe ten people. Foy, unshaven and draped in a wrinkled suit, stood in the corner twitching and blinking uncontrollably. Foy had been in the news lately. His out-of-wedlock children so numerous, they’d filed a class-action suit against him for the emotional distress he’d caused by sticking his face in front of a camera or microphone at every opportunity. At this point it was only the smooth Euclidean planar perfection of his box cut and his Rolodex that was holding both him and the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals together. Hard to lose faith in a man who even at the worst of times can keep his hair on point and call upon friends like Jon McJones, a black conservative who’d recently added the “Mc” to his slave name. McJones read from his latest book, Mick, Please: The Black Irish Journey from Ghetto to Gaelic. The author was a good get for Foy, and with the free Bushmills, there should have been more people, but there was no doubt the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were dying. Maybe the notion of a cabal of stupid black thinkers had finally outlived its usefulness. “I’m in Sligo, a small artist hamlet on the northern coast of the Emerald Isle,” McJones was reading. His lisp and faux-white enunciation made me want to punch him in the face. “The all-Ireland hurling championship is on the telly. Kilkenny versus Galway. Men with sticks chasing a small white ball. A round-shouldered bloke in a fisherman’s sweater stands behind me gently tapping the butt end of a shillelagh into the palm of his hand. I’ve never felt more at home.”
I copped a seat near King Cuz, who was playing the back as usual, munching on a maple bar and leafing through a stray issue of Lowrider magazine. When Foy Cheshire spotted me, he tapped his Patek Philippe like I was a deacon walking in late to church. Something wasn’t right about Foy. He kept interrupting McJones with meaningless questions.
“So hurling, that’s also college slang for vomiting, am I right?”
Seeing as he wasn’t using it, I borrowed Cuz’s copy of The Ticker. In the fiscal quarter since the Wheaton Academy’s inception, employment in Dickens was up an eighth. Housing prices had risen three-eighths. Even graduation rates were up a quarter. Finally, black people were in the black. And though it was still early in the social experiment and the sample size was relatively small, the numbers didn’t lie. For the past three months, since the Wheaton Academy went up, the students at Chaff Middle School were performing considerably better. Not that anyone was going to be skipping any grades or putting in an appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire anytime soon, but on average, the scores on the state proficiency exams were approaching, if not mastery, a promising competency. And as near as I could make out from the state guidelines, the improvement was such that, in all likelihood, the school would not be going into receivership, at least not anytime soon.
After the reading was over, Foy strode to the front of the room, clapping like an enthusiastic child at his first puppet show. “I’d like to thank Mr. McJones for that stimulating reading, but before we get into this afternoon’s subject matter, I have an announcement. The first is that my latest public-access show, Black Checker, has been canceled. The second is that, as many of you may know, a new battle has begun, and the enemy dreadnought is right here offshore in the form of the Wheaton Academy, which is an all-white school. Now, I have friends in high places, and they all deny the existence of the Wheaton Academy. But fret not, I have developed a secret weapon.” Foy dumped the contents of his attaché case onto the nearest table, a new book. Two people immediately got up and left. I wanted to join them, but remembered I was there for a reason, and part of me was insanely curious as to what American classic Foy would bastardize next. Before passing it around the room, Foy coyly showed the book to Jon McJones, who shot back a look that said, “Nigger, you sure you want to unleash this shit on the world?” When it reached the back, King Cuz handed it off to me without even looking at it, and as soon as I read the title, I didn’t want to let go. The Adventures of Tom Soarer. It dawned on me that Foy’s written works were Black Folk(s) Art and were going to be worth something one day. I was beginning to regret the book burning thing and that I hadn’t started a collection, because I’d spent the past ten years looking down my broad black nose at probably now-impossible-to-find first-and-only-edition titles like The Old Black Man and the Inflatable Winnie the Pooh Swimming Pool, Measured Expectations, Middlemarch Middle of April, I’ll Have Your Money — I Swear. On the cover of Tom Soarer, a preppy black boy, wearing penny loafers and argyle socks exposed by a pair of flooding whale-print lime-green pants, and armed with a bucket of whitewash, stood bravely in front of a wall splashed in gang graffiti, while a pack of ragamuffin hoodlums looked on menacingly.
When Foy snatched Tom Soarer from my hands, it felt like I’d fumbled away a game-winning touchdown catch. “This book, I’m not ashamed to say, is a WME, a Weapon of Mass Education!” Unable to contain his excitement, Foy’s voice rose two octaves and took on a Hitlerian fervor. “And just as he inspired me, the character of Tom Soarer will galvanize a nation to whitewash that fence! To cover up those frightful images of racial segregation that the Wheaton Academy represents. Who’s with me?” Foy pointed at the front door. “I know these great African-American heroes are down with the cause…” Legally, I’m not allowed to say who Foy name-dropped, because when I turned my head toward what I thought would be Foy’s invisible hallucinations, standing in the Dum Dum Donuts doorway were three of the world’s most famous living African-Americans, the noted TV family man _ i _ _ _ _ _ b _ and the Negro diplomats _ o _ _ _ _ o _ _ _ and _ _ n _ _ _ e e _ _ _ _ _ c _. Sensing the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were dying, Foy had pulled out all the stops and called in who knows what favors. Somewhat surprised the crowd was so small, the three superstars cautiously sat down and, to their credit, ordered coffee and bear claws and participated in the meeting, most of which was spent with Jon McJones regurgitating the usual Republican Party bullshit that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised in a two-parent household than was a baby born after the election of the U.S.A.’s first African-American president. McJones was a snobby Negro who covered up his self-hatred with libertarianism; I at least had the good sense to wear mine on my sleeve. He went on to cite statistics that, even if true, were completely meaningless when you consider the simple fact that slaves were slaves. That a two-parent antebellum household wasn’t necessarily a bond of love but a forced coupling. He didn’t mention that some two-parent slave marriages were between sister and brother, mother and son. Or that, during slavery, divorce wasn’t really an option. There was no “I’m going out for cigarettes” and never coming back. What about all the two-parent households that were childless because their kids had been sold off to who knows where? As a modern-day slave owner, I was insulted that the venerated institution of slavery was not given the viciousness and cruelty which it was due.