“Thought you said you wasn’t going to run?”
“You know what I mean. Ms. Nomura wanna play social worker, I don’t care.”
Fariq grabbed Spencer by the elbow and guided him out of the room. “We be right out here, all right?”
“All right,” answered Winston.
Yolanda cleared the layer of perspiration off Tuffy’s chest with her hands, then blow-dried each nipple, watching his skin fill with goose bumps. “Yolanda, what are you doing?”
“You ever think we married too young?” she asked, driving an index finger into the abyss that was his navel. Her finger two knuckles deep into his belly button, she probed for the pressure points in her husband’s soul. She wanted to arouse the real nigger within, hear him scream, and beg her, and only her, for mercy. Winston clenched his abdominal muscles, causing the walls of his belly button to clamp down on her finger like a set of fleshy Chinese handcuffs. “Landa, you not going nowhere, so stop fronting.” Yolanda tugged violently, trying to extract her finger from Winston’s suction hold. “Tuffy, stop playing!” Winston exhaled and released her finger. It was moist. She smelled it before wiping it dry on Winston’s pants. Yolanda lifted her shirt and they hugged, their sweaty bellies stuck together like wet tissue paper.
Outside, Spencer turned to Fariq. “Are Winston and Inez serious?”
“Jewboy, I don’t know about Ms. Nomura, and I doubt Tuff will be out there campaigning and shit, but I know when he was talking about who he know in the neighborhood and all, he was coming from the heart. He only has two emotions: serious and serious as fuck, straight up. Only time I ever heard the nigger tell a joke was when we was working in Brooklyn, that shit was just a freak thing. Even when Tuffy jokin’, he bein’ dead real. He a sensitive nigger. You know how niggers be snappin’ on each other, ‘You so ugly,’ ‘so black,’ ‘so stupid’? Don’t no one get into it with Tuffy. Not since him and Carter got into it. One day we was comin’ from the beach and Carter was all over Tuffy, ‘Nigger, you so fat, you jumped into the sky and got stuck. Motherfucker, you so big, you wear pillow cases for socks. You so big, you shit cannonballs. You so fat the only things on earth the astronauts can see from space is the Great Wall of China and the crack of yo’ ass.’ This wasn’t no when-you-sit-around-the-house, you-sit-around-the-house, seafood-diet bullshit; this session was heated. Carter was rockin’ that nigger, and all Tuffy could do was take the blows. But Tuffy can’t play the dozens, ’cause he can’t lie. If he ever say to a nigger, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ that boy will have fewer friends than Israel. So Carter breaking on Tuffy so hard he has to stop and catch his breath. Tuffy, tired of Carter fucking him up, right out of the blue says, ‘Yeah, nigger, like I fucked yo’ mama.’ Now normally when a nigger go into the ‘I fucked your mother’ bag, the other niggers start groaning, saying, ‘That shit’s a dud.’ But in this case they start laughin’, fallin’ off the stairs, runnin’ into traffic, giving each other pounds — niggers is straight dyin’.”
“Why?”
“Because they knew that if Tuffy had said it, then he’d really fucked Carter’s mother.”
“Oh, shit.”
“ ‘Oh, shit’ is right. A nigger who honest as Tuffy just said he fucked your mother in front of your boys? You gots to fight. Tuffy should’ve just let Carter hit him, he don’t weigh but a hundred twenty pounds. But Tuff play for keeps. Nigger hit Carter so hard — you ever see a matador stab a bull? Bull staggers for a quick second like, ‘Goddamn, this punk motherfucker stabbed me,’ then just fall to his knees. That’s how hard Tuffy hit Carter. Nigger dropped to his knees olé like a motherfucker. His nasal passages is all permanently crushed. The poor guy got to keep his mouth open to breathe. You give that nigger a lollipop and he’ll die.”
Fariq’s gaze shifted and Spencer looked over his shoulder to see Winston and Yolanda standing arm in arm behind him. Spencer now understood why little boys ran to Tuff in the streets, tugging on his shirt, begging to be “put down” on some invisible ghetto roster of the terminally bad. He knew why his hubcaps were still on his car after that initial visit to Winston’s apartment. Winston Foshay — a living African-American folk hero whose mythos lay somewhere between that of the angelic John Henry and the criminally insane Stagger Lee. Spencer had his newspaper story.
9- THE READING
Winston paused at the auditorium’s entrance. The stragglers hurried by, and he saw very few neighborhood faces. Whatever their ethnicity, these were people who only came uptown for the meager portions of soul food at Sylvia’s Restaurant, or to hear a career Negro such as his father pontificate on the challenges faced by black Americans and those enlightened few genuinely sympathetic to the cause. Each loyalist mention of his father’s name from a patron’s lips was preceded by a slew of adjectives that convinced Winston that if he ever wanted to get to know his father, he’d have to read his books, because the dynamic, insightful, devoted Clifford Foshay was a man he didn’t know.
“Tuff, you coming, yo?” asked Fariq. “Popduke be dropping bombs.”
“No, y’all go ahead.”
Yolanda and Fariq eagerly sought out seats in the small but crowded auditorium. Spotting Spencer about to settle into a front-row seat, Fariq called out, “Hey, Jewboy! Wait the fuck up! Save me a seat, can’t you see I’m crippled?” Yolanda shoved Fariq ahead of her. “Do you have to say ‘Jewboy’?”
“You sensitive to the word ‘Jewboy’?”
“No, I’m just tired of hearing you say it.”
“What else is there?”
“I thought you were a follower of the Nation? What about ‘Hebe,’ ‘kike,’ ‘hymie,’ ‘Yid.’ Anything but ‘Jewboy’ all the damn time!”
“ ‘Yid,’ ” Fariq said thoughtfully, smacking his tongue as if he were tasting a fine wine. “I like that one.”
Winston stood just inside the exit. On stage, Clifford’s band was in the middle of their preperformance primping. Sugarshack tuned his saxophone with puffs of sound, peering down the bell and then shaking the horn every few notes, hoping to dislodge some invisible clog. Gusto sat behind a small drum kit practicing his licks and his distorted drum-solo faces. Duke adjusted and readjusted the congas propped between his legs. Winston recalled how he used to drive Duke crazy by asking him to explain the difference between congas and bongos. Dawoud rummaged through his duffel bag of percussion instruments, his choices for the evening’s entertainment seemingly based on nonmusical attributes such as blatant Africanness and the dexterity required to play them.
Pointing Jordy’s finger for him, Winston followed the nervous pacing of his father. “That’s your grandfather, Jordy. He’s an asshole.” Clifford Foshay had changed into his poetry garb. The black fakir was resplendent in a Bengal tiger — patterned djellaba, topped off with an intricately woven macramé kufi, accessorized with wooden beads and yellowed lion’s teeth. Unintroduced, Clifford strode across the rostrum, carefully set his watch on the lectern and produced a shotgun, which he fired into the air, silencing the crowd. “That’s for Huey.” Blam! “That’s for Fred Hampton.” He opened the barrel and inserted two more cartridges into the breech. Blam! “That’s for raping my great-grandma.” Blam! “And that’s one to grow on.” A sleet of particleboard and ceiling plaster began to fall. The audience leaned forward in their seats.
When Winston was younger and forced to attend his father’s readings, Clifford’s ostentatious militancy embarrassed him. He would return home obsessed with one question: what would happen if his dad turned white overnight? One day his father was a panelist on a Sunday-afternoon television news forum. The guests, no matter their political bent, argued, threatened, and insulted one another. Winston realized that every guest reminded him of his father and that if his dad had been born white he would be the same person, bellicose and belligerent, spewing his rhetoric from overstuffed recliners and television-studio swivel chairs instead of prison cots and bar stools. When his father called him later that day asking if he’d seen him on television, Winston said yes, then asked his father why, if he talked so much about the glories of Africa and the repressions of America, he didn’t drop his slave name for an African one. Clifford replied, “Because then you can’t cash the checks.”