The Portable Promised Land Page 19

  THE SAMBOMORPHOSIS

  Shout-out to Kafka

  Man Jackson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find his son Nappy asleep in his little bed, transformed into a little Black Sambo. Man immediately cried out for his wife. Sistuhgirl, catching the desperate, four-alarm tone in his voice, jumped from their bed and ran to Nappy’s room. Her sleep-fogged eyes focused in on the little monstrosity sitting up in Nappy’s bed and she began to scream but found herself so horrified as a Black woman, a mother, a human, that no sound emerged from her open mouth for a full five seconds.

  The thing in Nappy’s bed was Nappy’s height, the height of a normal five-year-old boy, and had Nappy’s general facial composition. But so much was awry. Nappy had been a cherub, with soft brown skin, a dimple in each cheek, and a meticulously picked, neatly combed, carefully patted Afro. This thing in his bed had an oily beehive of six-inch pickaninny braids. Its skin was chalkboard black even underneath its fingernails. Its eyes were gigantic, bulging out like Baldwin’s. Its mouth was this snow-white blob. Its skin had a greasy film to it and yet, somehow, its elbows and knees were speckled white and ashy. It looked as though it smelled and, sure enough, it smelled like dead fish. It wore a pair of blue denim overalls with a bright red longsleeve undershirt. And, perhaps most dishearteningly of all, its left hand clutched a generous slice of watermelon with the fervant grip other children reserved for their teddy bears. It munched aggressively, like a scared prisoner or a starving beast, chomping in, chewing a bit, then chomping again as if someone might snatch the rind away if it paused. It chomped and munched with an open mouth, loudly smacking away, completely unaware of the visual and sonic damage this did. To say those once-proud parents were disquieted, flabbergasted, unnerved, and undone by the vexations of the little changeling was to say slavery was a little rough on the slaves. The only reason Man and Sistuhgirl did not go instantly into homicide mode was because somehow they remembered that somewhere beneath the coal blackness, the pickaninny braids, the fishy smell, the fucking watermelon juice dripping from his snow-white lips, this thing was still, somehow, their son. And one other thing. It wore a giant, disarming, ear-to-ear supersmile that melted their parental hearts.

  Then it spoke. It opened its mouth and out leapt a loud, deep, grizzled, cigar-ruined croak completely incongruent with the little-boy body: “What the fuck you lookin at?”

  Nappy would’ve been beaten within an inch of his life with a forest of switches, but Man and Sistuhgirl immediately disregarded the comment, figuring that at this moment a foul mouth was among the very least of their very grave concerns.

  Sistuhgirl took Sambo, who she could barely stand to touch let alone lay eyes on, into the bathroom to wash him, hoping against hope that somehow a good scrubbing would return her son to her. But a little time alone with the malodorous Hellspawn made her see even more what sort of possessed little jackal had arisen from Nappy’s bed. Before she’d even finished running its bath it had farted, burped, dropped watermelon seeds all over the floor, and snorted snot back up into its head and swallowed. Then Sistuhgirl discovered that whenever you were really close to it, you could hear the faint sound of jaunty huckabuck banjo picking. At first she thought there was a Walk-man in its pocket, but after getting it undressed she realized the sound was coming from nowhere, as if Sambo traveled with a sonic cloud in tow.

  Sistuhgirl got it into the tub without issue, but no matter what she tried, from bribing to grabbing, she could not get that piece of watermelon out of its left hand. It seemed glued there. So it was washed holding that piece of watermelon. When it finished smacking its way through one piece, it held onto the rind and within five minutes a new piece regenerated. Sistuhgirl stared at this blackened boy sitting in her tub, devilishly chomping through a self-reincarnating piece of history-heavy fruit, and something in her soul slumped. Never once through the entire bath did the miasmic rapscallion cease its incessant smiling, which no longer seemed sweet. It now recalled the Joker from Batman.

  And almost everything it said was some biting, sarcastic remark infused with a ton of smartassedness that just made you wanna scream, “Shutup!” It said, “I think this Nixon guy will make a good president.” Then, “Say, how many cows die to make Brother Huey P. Newton’s leather coats?” When Sistuhgirl — who, like her husband, was a prominent Black Panther — began to say that it needed to show respect for Brother Huey in her house, it cut her off midsentence, barking, “Awww, shut it, cunt.” Only Sistuhgirl’s desire, nay imperative, to see that oily, ashy, greasy, eight-ball-black boy clean kept her scrubbing away.

  But after two solid hours of tubwork, three coats of lotion, and intense Vaseline intensive care, it was still beyond black, still greasy, still smelly, still oily, still ashy, and virtually standing on her very last nerve. No amount of spanking or yelling (and there had been a lot) had served to break it even a bit. It was ostentatiously obnoxious, nauseatingly noxious, and an insidiously fiendish malfeasance — the embodiment of the sound of finger-nails on the chalkboard. At least seventeen times during that epic battle-bath Sistuhgirl asked God what she had done to deserve Rosemary’s baby. God remained silent.

  Man had sat in the kitchen through most of the ordeal, though once, when the yelling got particularly loud, he burst in to assert his paternal authority, only to have the little gremlin grumble, “Git me some milk, Bwoy!”

  Man went back to the kitchen and phoned all his enemies one by one. “I know what you’ve done!” he yelled menacingly. “I’ll get you for this!” When they said they knew nothing about Man’s bizarre situation, he hung up on them. He called some of his friends to see if any of them could pull back the curtain on this unbelievably elaborate, though not at all funny, practical joke. No trickster emerged. Finally, Man threw up his hands and said, “Perhaps Nappy’s going through a phase.” A thorough skimming of his prime child-rearing manual, Franz Fanon’s Black Masks, White Skins, turned up nothing.

  Around noon there was a knock on the back door. Man and Sistuhgirl had agreed to house a fugitive for a day while a path to Miami and a boat to Cuba were arranged. Sistuhgirl stuffed Sambo into Nappy’s room as Man opened the door for the woman on the run and the three Panthers with her. In the living room they discussed future rallies and the free-breakfast program, traded Huey and Eldridge stories, cleaned rifles, and played the bongos to accent the Coltrane on the record player. But after a while the little irrepressibility meandered from his room. The moment the group laid eyes on the blackened boy with white lips clutching a watermelon slice, they had a collective coronary. Not only was it Sambo, three-plus feet of deeply offensive flesh and blood, but now its smile was starting to creep far enough downward to resemble the malevolent grin of an evil clown. It glanced around the silenced room at the statues in black leather and croaked, “Who wants tah hear a joke?” Man and Sistuhgirl thought Ohshit, but stood paralyzed.

  “So this lil whiteboy is in the kitchen with his mom, who’s makin a chocolate cake,” Sambo said, “and the moment she turns her back he’s all into the frosting, dunkin his face in it, spreadin it all over, makin a chocolate-frosting mask. Mom turns around and screams, ‘Billy, what the fuck are you doing?!’ He smiles all big and says, ‘Look, Mommy! I’m Black!’”

  The Panther-filled living room was in shocked silence.

  “Well, she snatches little Billy up off the ground by his arm and beats the living shit out of him, then says, ‘Go show your father what you’ve done!’ Certain his dad will find his gag hilarious, he bursts into the living room and trumpets, ‘Daddy! Look at me! I’m Black!’

  “His father takes one look at him, rips off his belt, and whips his ass til it’s red like raw meat. ‘Go on the fuckin porch and show your grandaddy what you’ve done!’ Resigned to telling a joke he knows will fail, he drags himself out onto the porch and lifelessly says, ‘Look, Grandad. I’m Black.’ Grandpa makes him pull a thick switch from a tree in the yard and proceeds to beat the last bit of piss and tears out the poor boy. Whe
n Grandpa finishes he says, ‘Now git back in the kitchen wit your momma, ya little bitch!’

  “The boy drags himself back to the kitchen, his ass stinging to high Heaven. His mother says, ‘Good. You learned your lesson.’ He says, ‘Yeah, I sure did. I been Black five minutes and already there’s a bunch of crackers beatin my ass!’”

  As Sambo alone began to laugh, Sistuhgirl came sprinting in from the kitchen, snatched the little boy up, and raced him to Nappy’s bedroom. Everyone turned to Man with eyes that said, What-the-fuck was that? Before he could open his mouth to explain, the woman-in-hiding said, “Brother, I’d rather be in jail than have to deal with that motherfucker again.”

  Back in Nappy’s bedroom Sistuhgirl pulled out handcuffs to chain Sambo to the bed. The creature began screaming. “Black is ugly! Black is ugly!” It was loud enough for the neighbors to hear. “Black is ugly!” Sistuhgirl backhanded him across the face. “Shut the fuck up!” She had lost it completely. “You will stay here and not make a peep until I come back and you will not move until I say so.” But little demons are not so easily denied. “If you leave me here,” it said, “I’ll scream until the cops come.” On any other day she would’ve laughed in its face but the fugitive guest put her over a barrel. She thought of gagging Sambo, but its mouth was so huge it would’ve taken three or four jumbo towels to do the job. As she considered what to do the little manipulator summoned up the sweetest, saddest, and most vulnerable voice possible and said, “Mommy. Please don’t leave me here all alone. I’ll be good. I promise.” He then poked out his bottom lip.

  “No more jokes.”

  “I don’t know any more.”

  “Just. Sit. Quietly.”

  “OK, Mammy.”

  “What?!”

  “I said, OK, Mommy.”

  So it sat in the corner of the living room and said not a word. It merely scratched its nuts and chomped its watermelon as the sound of jaunty banjo picking quietly emanated from its aura like racist Muzak — soft hits from slavery.

  That night Man and Sistuhgirl sat up in bed a long time, half worried about their sick son and half scared of what the sickening monster might do to them or their house while they slept. They struggled to remember the little boy who’d made them so proud, the boy who knew the Panthers’ ten-point program by heart, who greeted adult Panthers with a little raised fist, who peppered his conversation with phrases such as “Black is beautiful!” and “Power to the people!” They convinced themselves that Sambo would soon disappear, would be gone as suddenly and as magically as it’d appeared, and perhaps tomorrow sweet Nappy would return and one day they’d all laugh about this ridiculous interlude. They decided to be patient with the hellion because violence was getting them nowhere. This was not the sort of bad behavior you could beat out of a child. This was an entire transformation, a possession, a Sambomorphication. They decided that plan B would be exorcism, though they barely believed in the supernatural. For now they would exercise patience. They drifted off to sleep, telling each other, “And this too shall pass....”

  But even as they slept it tormented them, ransacking their dreams in which they ran frantically through an endless maze of hedges, the walls lined with cops holding pigs, and all night long Sambo chased them, appearing now behind them, now in front of them, taking the form of the pigs, the clouds above, and a twenty-foot version of himself, attacking them with oinks, rain, and a five-foot machete and a ten-foot watermelon slice, chasing, chasing, chanting, chanting, “Redrum...redrum...redrum!”

  They awoke with a heart-jolting start, frazzled and tired from a restless sleep. They ran to Nappy’s room to see what lay in his bed. It was Sambo. Its mouth now turned completely down, its eyes beyond daggers, the look more like, ‘What? You wan a piece of me?’ Man and Sistuhgirl died a little bit more.

  Their friends said, “I wish a little Sambo would show up in my house!.. .” followed by some solemn promise and some garish description of some outlandish torture (firecrackers up its ass, fed watermelon til it explodes, etc.). Man and Sistuhgirl had never seen violence as a good way to raise a child and they’d never had to think about it. Nappy had never really done anything to merit more than a hand slap. Sambo deserved a bullet. Man and Sistuhgirl’s families were little help. “The switch is the answer,” Sistuhgirl’s mother said. “Spare the switch and spoil the child cuz ya know God don’t love ugly, so if you’re cryin over spoiled milk ya cain’t leave one in the bush.” She was a bit of a drinker. “Listen at me! A word to the sufficient is always wise.”

  Man’s mother was more concise, though equally pertinent. “Whoever say violence solve nuttin ain’t know how to fight.”

  But Man and Sistuhgirl continued to choose patience over violence for the sake of the son they knew was buried somewhere inside the little moral outrage. Of course there were numerous beatings during this season of hell, but it was limited violence, like America in Vietnam — a less-than-all-out assault, rather than an unrelenting, merciless campaign of Nagasaki-esque switch spankings. Mostly they explained this nightmare to themselves by citing Nappy’s temporary insanity and prayed for the return of their sweet baby and ran to Nappy’s bed every morning hoping the changeling had changed back. The Luciferous ragamuffin noted their weakness and let loose.

  It turned grouchy, vulgar, hypercritical, endlessly sarcastic, picked its teeth, cracked its toes, drank out the cartons, dropped watermelon seeds everywhere, used the word nigger all the time, made lots of long-distance calls to people it didn’t know, argued politics from a reactionary, right-wing perspective (“The police wouldn’t be such a problem if niggers didn’t commit so much crime”), stole money from Sistuhgirl’s purse, and snagged Man’s keys and drove his car to Kentucky Fried Chicken by standing on the seat and steering with its one free hand while munching on its red and green constant companion. And then, one day, it went too far.

  Man and Sistuhgirl were pressed into hosting a group of ten Panthers from Chicago. They sat in the living room talking strategy, ideology, and where to find the best leather coats, while Sambo stayed in Nappy’s room, locked in chains that had been applied while he slept: one hand and one leg cuffed to his bed, three giant towels stuffed in his mouth and tied around the back of his head. It took Sambo about two hours to chew through the towels and another hour to wiggle out of the cuffs and crawl out the bedroom window. When Sistuhgirl went to Nappy’s room and found no one there, a chill came over her. Not because the little bogeyman, or bogeyboy, was gone, but because she knew it would return. Three hours later, it did. It climbed back in through Nappy’s window and popped into the living room — wearing a Black Pantherish beret and a little black leather jacket, with black pants and boots: a Halloween Black Panther. It thrust its nonwatermelon-clutching fist into the air and shouted, “My name shall no longer be Nappy! From now on, y’all shall call me Sambo Soul!” Sistuhgirl fainted.

  After Man corralled Sambo Soul, a name he refused to utter even in anger, he tried to explain the situation to the Chicago Panthers, but none of them could really wrap their minds around the fact that Man and Sistuhgirl, two respected Panthers, had, in their home, a real Sambo, alive and unmurdered. “Brother Jackson,” one of the Chicago ten said, “I hate to state the obvious, but the dynamics of the revolutionary perspective in this potentially optimum environment are supremely compromised by the very presence of this vampiric miscreant, this hellish piece of nostalgia, this, this walking historical detritus. What I’m sayin, my brother, is havin him around is really fuckin up the vibe.”

  Man and Sistuhgirl agreed. The last line had been crossed. It was time for zero tolerance and massive violence. It was too late for a supernatural exorcism, though a thorough exorcism was in order.

  “I’d like to wring his little neck like a washcloth and snap his head off,” Man said, pulsing with anger.

  “What if we lynched the little bastard?” Sistuhgirl said. “It would exorcise the demons of the thousands lynched throughout this century by mobs egged on by
Sambo himself whispering in their collective ear: ‘Go ahead! He’s not a man! He’s a nigger!’”

  Man’s mouth watered. “No!” he said. “Let’s shoot im!” He was a rabid dog now.

  Sistuhgirl rolled the idea of shooting him around her tongue like wine, tasting it, slow to make up her mind. The gun was steel and powder shaped into power, a symbol the Panthers had embraced to show how serious they were about taking power in America. They were not asking for it like King, were not allowing grits to be poured on them at segregated lunch counters and firehoses turned on them in segregated streets. Panthers had guns. They were paramilitary. They were not asking for power. They were taking it. They were ready to die for freedom and ready to kill for it. So, Sistuhgirl thought, why not blow him away?

  And thus the question was, old violence or new? The bullet or the noose?

  They thought the question that answered that question was What is our biggest problem? The mountain range of racist stereotypes and propaganda inflicted on them by looking at and talking to a life-size Sambo every single day or struggling to stay sane in the face of the world’s biggest problem child? They paused to listen to their son / albatross blissfully chomping away, the sound now audible throughout the house like Edgar Allen Poe’s tell-tale heart. “If,” Sistuhgirl thought out loud, “Sambo had been a pleasant, polite, clean, happy child who did his chores, caused no waves, got along with everyone, and showed respect to adults, could we learn to live with him?” They tried to imagine a scenario where they had a barbeque and all the Panthers came and Man walked around saying, “That’s m’boy!,” pointing out the most monstrous-looking but best-behaved five-year-old anyone knew. It was tough to visualize, but just this side of impossible.