The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming, “Give me back my Little Rascals movies, motherfucker!” and pummeling your assailant with such knobby-knuckled fury that it takes half the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department to pull him off, while you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter, you don’t have time to let anything slide. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleeting.
“The ambulance will be here soon.”
Things had finally settled down. Hominy, who couldn’t stop crying, had taken off his T-shirt, rolled it into a pillow, and cradled my head in his lap. A sheriff’s deputy squatted over me, poking gently at my wound with the butt end of her flashlight. “That was a fucking brave thing you did, Nigger Whisperer. Can I get you anything in the meantime?”
“Closure.”
“I don’t think you’ll need stitches. It doesn’t look like a belly shot; it’s more like you’ve been hit in the love handle. It’s superficial, really.”
Anyone who’s ever described a bullet wound as being superficial has never been shot. But I wasn’t about to let a little lack of empathy get in the way of total closure.
“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?”
“It is.”
“Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”
I told her about my efforts to restore Dickens and how I thought building the school would give the town a sense of identity. She patted me sympathetically on the shoulder and raised her supervisor on the radio, and while we waited for the ambulance, the three of us haggled about the severity of the crime. The county reluctant to cite me with anything more than vandalism of state property and me trying to convince them that even if crime had gone down in the neighborhood since the Wheaton Academy went up, what I did was still a violation of the First Amendment, the Civil Rights Code, and, unless there’s been an armistice in the War on Poverty, at least four articles of the Geneva Convention.
The paramedics arrived. Once I’d been stabilized with gauze and a few kind words, the EMTs went through the standard assessment protocol.
“Next of kin?”
As I lay, not exactly dying but close enough, I thought about Marpessa. Who, if the position of the sun high in the gorgeous blue sky was any indication, was at the far end of this very same street taking her lunch break. Her bus parked facing the ocean. Her bare feet on the dashboard, nose buried in Camus, listening to the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.”
“I have a girlfriend, but she’s married.”
“What about this guy?” she asked, pointing a ballpoint pen at a shirtless Hominy, standing just off to the side, giving his statement to a sheriff’s deputy, who was writing in a notepad and shaking her head incredulously. “Is he family?”
“Family?” Hominy, overhearing the paramedic and somewhat insulted, wiped down his wrinkly underarms with his T-shirt and came over to see how I was doing. “Why I is something closer than family.”
“He says he’s his slave,” the deputy chimed in, reading from her notes. “Been working for him, according to this crazy fucker, the last four hundred years.”
The EMT nodded, running her powdered rubber-gloved hands down the length of Hominy’s saggy-skinned back.
“How did you get these welts?”
“I was whupped. How else a no-account, shiftless nigger like me going to get whip marks on his back?”
Having handcuffed me to the stretcher board, the sheriff’s deputies knew they finally had something to charge me with, though we still couldn’t agree on the crime as they carried me through the crowd and to the ambulance.
“Human trafficking?”
“Nah, he’s never been bought or sold. What about involuntary servitude?”
“Maybe, but it’s not like you’re forcing him to work.”
“It’s not like he’s working.”
“Did you really whip him?”
“Not directly. I pay some people … It’s a long story.”
One of the EMTs had to tie her shoes. They set me down on a wooden bus stop bench while she adjusted her laces. From the seat-back a photo of a familiar face comforted me with a soothing smile and a red power tie.
“You got a good lawyer?” the deputy asked.
“Just call this nigger right here.” I knocked on the advertisement. It said:
Hampton Fiske—Attorney at Law
Remember, there are four steps to acquittaclass="underline"
1. Don’t say shit! 2. Don’t run! 3. Don’t resist arrest!
4. Don’t say shit!
1-800-FREEDOM Se Habla Español
* * *
He showed up late to the grand jury indictment, but Hampton’s services were worth every dime. I told him I couldn’t afford to do jail time. I had crops coming in and one of the mares was scheduled to foal in about two days. With this knowledge in tow, he strolled into the hearing, brushing leaves off his suit jacket and flicking twigs from his perm, carrying a bowl of fruit and talking about “As a farmer, my client is an indispensable member of a minority community well documented for being malnourished and underfed. He’s never left the state of California, owns a twenty-year-old pickup truck that runs on fucking ethanol, which is next to impossible to find in this city, and thus he’s not a flight risk…”
The California attorney general, flown in from Sacramento just to prosecute my case, leaped to her Prada-shod feet. “Objection! This defendant, evil genius that he is, has through his abhorrent actions managed to racially discriminate against every race all at the same time, to say nothing of his unabashed slaveholding. The state of California feels that it has more than enough evidence to prove that the defendant is in abject violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1957, 1964, and 1968, the Equal Rights Act of 1963, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and at least six of the goddamn Ten Commandments. If it were within my power, I’d charge him with crimes against humanity!”
“This is an example of my client’s humanity,” Hampton countered calmly, gently setting the fruit bowl on the judge’s bench, then backing away with a deep bow. “Freshly picked from my client’s farm, your honor.”
Judge Nguyen rubbed his tired eyes. He selected a nectarine from the offering and rolled it in his fingers as he spoke. “The irony is not lost on me that we sit here in this courtroom — a female state’s attorney general of black and Asian lineage, a black defendant, a black defense counselor, a Latina bailiff, and me, a Vietnamese-American district judge — setting the parameters for what is essentially a judicial argument about the applicability, the efficacy, and the very existence of white supremacy as expressed through our system of law. And while no one in this room would deny the basic premise of ‘civil rights,’ we’d argue forever and a day about what constitutes ‘equal treatment under the law’ as defined by the very articles of the Constitution this defendant is accused of violating. In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality. ‘I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.’ We’ve all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we’d be mad as hell. And that’s what he’s doing. He’s painting everybody over, painting this community purple and green, and seeing who still believes in equality. I don’t know if what he’s done is legal or not, but the one civil right I can guarantee this defendant is the right to due process, the right to a speedy trial. We convene tomorrow morning at nine. But buckle up, people, no matter the verdict, innocent or guilty, this is going to the Supreme Court, so I hope you ain’t got nothing scheduled for the next five years. Bail is set”—Judge Nguyen took a big bite out the nectarine, then kissed his crucifix—“Bail is set at a cantaloupe and two kumquats.”