We barely skinned through a narrow alley and swirled out around the Grand Socco, nearly taking a strolling policeman with us as we went. We chopped like a great golden hatchet through the secondhand-clothes market where they sort out the bundles of rags from America. My Master Musicians were bunched up in the back of the car like five live white teddy-bears in their rough woolen jellabas. I leaned around to snuff up their good country smelclass="underline" lanolin from lambs’ wool, wood-smoke, spicy Moroccan cooking and keef. I saw Hamid had found a handy little folding “jump seat” in front of the built-in bar and was helping himself to a mixture of drinks. Knowing only too well how he can be with alcohol in him, I reached around to stop him but he batted back my paw, proudly pointing to the crown on his glass, as if that gave him royal permission to drink. Then, he unbuckled his prizewinning chuckle as he gave the back of my hand a wet kiss, saying fondly: “Who is whose guru? Fuck off!” It sounded more like: Hooz hooz gooroo foo koff!”
“So,” said the lady, “you speak Arabic together.”
We were shooting through “Suicide Village”; so called by all the rich foreign villa-dwellers on the Old Mountain, who sail through it all the time at top speed. This narrow paved alley swarms like a market all day and all night. We were cutting through traffic like a hot gold butter knife through butter, until that Diving Diana out there on what the English call the “bonnet” of the Rolls, stuck her golden nose right up a camel’s ass. Pandemonium broke loose in the street. Moors who know me and know Hamid were squashing their noses against the glass with their hands over their eyes, popping their eyes at me, the lady and the car. The lady gave a blast of her great golden hunting-horns and we swept on, scattering man and beast in our wake. We whipped around the Third Commissariat of Police at Jews’ River on two wheels and flashed on out past the Catholic cemetery at Boubana; then, turning sharp right, we flew up the New Mountain Road through the night on this slightly worn magic carpet of hers. There could be no doubt, either, that this was really her car; the way she drove that pile.
My musicians passed me up a slim pipe and, taking the regulation three drags, I spat out the live coal very neatly in a solid-gold ashtray set into what must be called the “instrument panel.”
“Do you have to smoke that stuff all the time?” the lady asked.
We whirled past the governor’s mansion and Caca Culo castle in the dark and other big estates with their private parks to the right and the left of the road until we came to a spot where she changed gear and we turned off the pavement into a trail down under the trees. I had always intended to explore these big wooded properties running down from the crest of Old Mountain Road to the high cliffs hanging over the Straits of Gibraltar, but I certainly hadn’t figured to do it at night. We were bumping down a water-worn lane under lacy acacia trees until the headlights picked up a dark grove of cedar, practically hanging over the cliff. “It’s no worse on the car, really,” the lady was saying as she ground the back axle over a rock, “than the road from Cairo to Alex.”
She flipped on her lights, blinking them twice, and an old crooked Arab fairy-tale crone, with a pointy straw hat like a cone on top of her red and white striped veils and long raggedy cloak, stepped out of a thicket with a lantern in hand, waving us on. “That’s Calypso, my caretaker,” the lady said. “When I took over this property, I found her already installed in my cave. As if I didn’t know the place was magic enough … some doddery old English don has been writing to tell me it is … actually and historically according to him … Calypso’s Cave. I thought calypso was a steel band from the Barbados until he sent me this book to curry my culture. I can’t think how he got my address … probably figures I’ll invite him out here to explore it but he’s got another think coming, I guess … Since we’ve found you, Hassan … and the dollar has … has gone … well, wobbly. … I’ve wiped out my Foundation. The Fundamental has been found. No! … let them carry the baskets, Hassan. Get out of the car … from here on you walk.”
The loony old woman with the lantern was leading us down a path around the face of the cliff while Hamid and five little musicians trailed us fearfully in the dark, toting their instruments and the wicker picnic hampers full of food and drink which had been packed in the “boot” of the Rolls. We stumbled around a big shoulder of rock and came into a nice little nook, looking bright Paris-green in the white light of our gasoline lamp. A spring of clear water, ringed with dwarf fern and moss, seeped out of the rock close by the entrance to a big dry cave in which a little fire was dancing away by itself. Below us and so far below that the distance looked dizzy, a highway metaled with moonlight ran twenty miles or more across water to the Rock of Gibraltar swimming away in veils of blue night. The old Arab witch gave a sharp cackle to her half-wild pack of flat-headed yellow dogs, from whom Hamid and the musicians cringed away, reaching for clubs. Madame Mya stood in the mouth of her cave with her back to the firelight, flapping her veils as if she were about to take off as she intoned:
“Ulysses of Ithaca, welcome back home!”
Then, in a voice so different it might have come out of another woman, she said:
“You know, Hassan … you and I must be the two most American Americans who ever stepped into this enchanted cave. After all … I’m Pocahontas and you’re Uncle Tom!”
Wow! Wait a minute, lady! Uncle Tom! That’s a hell of a thing to be tagged at this point in the game: where did she pick up on a story like that? But, then, I reflect on how very easy I am to research: Professor Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, N.Y. So, after all, I shrug. There may be a little Tom in the best of us, may there not? And, in my own case, casting about in the darkest corner of my mind, I do recall some cousins in Canada, spell their name different, who admit — just admit, mind you — to descent from the runaway slave turned Black preacher Underground conductor and agricultural colonist in Canada with a side show at the Crystal Palace where he was presented to Queen Victoria and was lost. Poor man had nothing but troubles from then on in: trouble with John Brown at his congress before Harpers Ferry, trouble with the Abolitionist Boston bankers and preacher-trustees of his colony, trouble with the white folks down to the end. Poor Tom! How much can he owe to H. B. Stowe and how much does he owe to himself? He billed himself for half a lifetime as The Real Uncle Tom, because he gave her world rights to his not so exclusive story in exchange for a nice hot dinner under the kitchen sink. White folks! I was thinking as I turned on my UHER and started recording Mya while she pinched out some pennies for poor old Calypso, who slunk off after her dogs: