excerpted from the unpublished novel NEGROSSITY

Did this happen or was it still happening? Or was it long ago in my mind a science fiction negro comics? Though it was not strictly negroes. In fact there was a long questioning going on between somebody and them on whether this tall dude was, in fact, a negro. Or as they said in the liberal drags. Whether he was, in fact, negro. Are you negro or a Negro? Well, strictly speaking, Bof.

How my city am changed. When you bees in it, watching and not watching. Feeling Somebody stealing. And the gremlins from the anti-kremlin limiting the space you save to be yrself when you can, after all. They said you said I thought. Hmmp.

Like this one guy I’m staring at in my mind, was a murderer. Is a murderer. He do murders. From the tip of his shrunk eye, acid shoots on you from the hate peepas. They supplies it. He was a hunk of ugly. He was ugly and he wanted ugly and he looked ugly too. He had an ugly son who looked like him but pitifuler. You never expect the son to be as ugly as the father. He shd be farther away from that ugly. But there him were, ugly naw ugly as, to say yr expectations was spat out with the rest of the coming.

I was metaphoring about the coming of the Occupation. When the dead sent a light skinned negro who had been Presidenk of the Oxford University Jewish Student Organization. Don’t say "what?", like that. It’s true. How does him qualify with that? Aw, well you know the script. Like they have in the holy wood. The grove of trees where they gives degrees. Stanford. Yale Law. Cecil B Rhodes collar. So youse can woof down the goodies, almost, with the rest of the pesses. Who else can play like they didn’t kill Jesus just turned him in?

But then you wanna accuse the neo colons and the neo cons with being the same as… No, not the same as, part of the same instrumentation. They don’t beat the drum but they plays one of them little horns, a flute, a meat whistle or something.

So you could be standing in the street and the streets moved. They, like, closed. Narrowed, thinned… You cd see people disappear, you could remember how they last looked, how they were, you could see them talking and they were gone. Hundreds now. More than that. Disappearing every day. People you knew well. And not altogether suddenly, there is, by replacement, a weaseling skirmish line of noticeable vermin. Not just that, that’s the worst. But not even that ugly, by strangers with degrees, bylines, cover stories, titles, ignorant quotes or not so ignorant, but strange. Some like they hadn’t witnessed the last 50 years. And well they hadn’t, they just got here twenty thirty years so they mind’s “beards” is just coming.

But then we cd be facing the talk of these phantoms of material life. Squawking opposite justifications, reporting phenomena you didn’t know or knew as something else. Could you sit like the deity of judgement without arguing or getting fucking angry? Ha Ha, you just another slightly out of shape humanoid.

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Cd we skip the years from the overthrow of the lst coming and hit on Yeats’ second coming and break that down with this. Cd we go right to the spooky house drama. The story that claims narrative underwear to cover its tale. So it is not Jesus and his disciples of whom you re-fur… nay they is in they grave naked still.

No these is negroes and they grayish brownish pinkish retainers by whom they is retained as well, as ladders to good fortune. Are these fortune hunters to which you give reefers to? No they is mentally arrested, they is cool with the low.

But you must give us some tale for our story. Some real life clothed in singing words, that tell the tale all right. And who it was, and what they did, and what you thought. And what it all bought of the years, the laughter the tears.

How, for instance, you went from this street, that night, with the street light slanted like it is in paintings and interesting movies. Not with them, but perhaps a paralleling forward to here, colors lights, sounds, conversations, acts of any kind, just to be where we are now listening, to you and ourselves.

That like a play we had finished this act and the curtain came down, the blackening tissue that covers the space that is the space till the next scene. The next seen. The next Act, perhaps. And where wd we be then? It had all been folded in symbolic parables. (You dig, parables don’t you, Jesus!) So then we thought, as if it had only been understood by a few who turned pages in the north where it was cold and they had little else to do.

So we sought then to make it a telling narrative of sorts. To give it more flesh like covering, a cover story. Since at base it is a sermon looking up at the mount. And thus have it understood by those, with us, on the ground. (Abbey made us cry, telling us what it was like “here on the ground!”)

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And so begin again. After years of the earlier noted negroes had practiced such isms and plasms and spasms of their intensifying backwardness. The more you do the more its you. (An old saying) Which was local, for all that. Home rule, by fool. After a few decades, it growing more used to by us, there came another kind of negro, not from here. From near hear but not actually with us.

We had actually been warning yall of this. There is a whole philosophy of Negrossity which I didn’t uncover but repulled the covers off. “Here they is,” I warned as the little snaggle brain (or “brain-ded” as Bloods like to say, still wounded by their antiquity). They was here, these ossitys in all the epochs. From way back way over. (Dig, “The Africans Dug Negrossity.”) But then you always got some name to drop on em that make them other. And they is other, to a certain extent. But then, understand, Man, they is yoself. That thing you bring with you that aint you exactly, but a reflection of your weakness that you carry so there is a dialectic to your existence like everything else. No Up without Down, no Left without Right. So the Negrossity is the grossest part of you, the dumbest, the slave that walks behind you, along side you, in front of you, dissing you with the worst features of yourself. I meant our self.

Ok, like for every WEB there’s a Roy W or a Walter W to hobble your steps with ignorant savagery pretending to be sophistication. So finally, the Sisyphus syndrome is not just the result of the wild white savages plummeting down the side of the mountain to jam you, & turn you around. No, there is spread under your feet like the silent excretion of some hideous beast, the slippery scum of Negrossity, with it’s savage odor functioning like words turning the surface of the mountain shiny slick dangerous, while all the time battering your senses with ignorant submissive words. Like Tom Ass Clarence saying how he would rush down into his basement when the real world got too much and listen to the soothing words of General McArthur. Or with the blanket wrapped around him to weaken the blast of people “wanting”. “Why do they think they should have rights? The way they want to live (like me and my masters) is ‘luxury’. The little children lined up to do the flag salute, a crucifix in each classroom, this is what makes me gloatish with delight.”

So after war and war and struggle (always) our ease turns into a doorway for foulness from another place. “These are not white peepas,” you say. “Why don’t you tell your father to stop calling me ‘a Trojan horse’?" Yet him, them, is. As sure as. And after a few ticks, real “Greeks” crawl out of their insides with contracts from Lehman Brothers.

Do you know you live in “The Money Jungle"? Imagine you were in a city where a constant shower of dollar bills fell out of the sky and covered everything, but you couldn’t touch any of it. This is what Duke told Max and Mingus. Feel that, he was saying.

Hearing the giant animal feets stomping toward us. Disguised as press releases. Articles in the Enemy Chronicles. (I met the editor, he just didn’t want you to call him names or berate evil.) Mere photographs hurt. Sound bites really bit. Innocence was jive. Radios crawled toward you. Satan film company began to produce quality flicks. You was in it or talked about or pointed to. You was some kind of "Before” that made dressed up people itch.

What it was is that they were stealing your shit. They were digging a grave for your everything. Who was this, them …and so forth. Who was they these? In size places, alphabetical order.

We did say what we thought and felt the wind or when and tried to say. But saying sometimes is a fragile insistence.

Like this one poet type, a few years ago a university sent me his book to review, to find out whether they shd publish it or not. And being sprinkled with negro patriotism, I sez, “Yeh, publish the boy.” The shit wasn’t that interesting. In fact it wasn’t interesting at all. But I put my left foot over my heart and sez right on. Then a few years later this negro is being cleaned and sprayed so they cd give him something and as proof he was the new breed he goes out of his way to tell them what they want. “Yeh, that spook is too political. None of us Spaded spades needs all that huffin and puffin when we got a flower we can admire.” And Bingo! He gets the Pulled Negro prize, which is worth money, Jim!

(Is that the guy with the name them Arabs give him in that Sembene movie which Senghor banned? Yeh, but Senghor told me if he hadn’t banned that movie, them Muslims would’a killed yo boy.)

But that’s just stuff passing by or growing up around you like them pods in the BS. Here this thing, then another thing, then you look there’s, like they say, several things. A bunch “appear” later when the smell already came, like the washrags of nasty asses, wafting. You know how stuff wafts? Yeh but it sposed to mean the assholes "clean".

Like people that didn’t do nothing but be taught by Flash Gordon and them while you was getting yr head beat. Dudes that don’t know nothing except some fake shit somebody you know don’t know shit told them.

"OH, Hello.” (Its that guy who doesn’t want to speak to you, but something made his lips move, so he tried to outprovise.) Did he say hello? I guess that’s what that was.

Well, why doesn’t he want to speak to you? Ain’t you a celebrity? No, somebody the Negro who was head of the Oxford University Jewish Students Organization don’t like after he got the 6.5 from your girlfriend. You gotta watch people who lie when they tell you they name. Nothing is Free.

So they tryin to take the city away from us like it was clothes they cd rip off. They cd train a nigloo at Stanford. After he arrived from a little gated joint in Jersey with 20 nigloo families. Whose parents were heroes since they integrated American Express. Wow. See, that was the bit, that they cd claim heroism by being the first niglos while the peepa getting stomped and beat is crisscrossed or locked up Mumia Geronimo style as vermin by the real vermin. And D niglos can get sent to Stanford to learn advanced backwardness. Then to Yale Low school to learn lowness. Which they did. Then qualify as Roads scholars meaning they had rid colored folks all the way up ding dong hill. “Abeast, Abeast,” they say. In the same ritual as that which saw them bind us and take us down to the sea’s edge to sell us to the Ghost. And we say the same thing as they arrive setting up the chopping block with they evangelical negro crackerized mentality, A Beast, A Beast!

Whip! Whip! Whip! They ideas. Whip! Whip! Whip! They policy. You got them whelps. Old black 3-D tattoos. And savages scream from the woods “how nice, how nice, they cd put you (what he call us) Zulus, on ice.”

They don’t understand what we wanted. They think what they want, which the now-ghost told them, is what everybody need, is co wreck, Slavery under chocolate drop’s version of white supremacy. (One drop make you an asshole.)

What Douglass thought when he could look at the foul thing, Andrew Johnson, was telling him how much he had cared for negras, now they want to vote and shit. Of course not. Ahem (which mean, “get the fuck out!” in recently poor white boy talk) “You all thought you was better than us standing behind that hip fence at the plantation, didn’t you? You despised we poor whites.”

“Not I,” sez Fred, his fist balled up inside his head. “Why you dumb motherfuck,” Fred thunk, “that’s how I learned to read, poor white boys taught me in exchange for scraps from the masters table.”

Johnson goes on, “you want poor whites to suffer by giving you the vote.“ Johnson was raving. What is the coincidence of after Kennedy’s assassination and Lincoln’s assassination the real rulers stuck they Johnson’s in.

See the Moriarity of this story is that now you got jigaboos who is trained to be stand in’s, surrogates for the Head’s child. So you can get a bullet head negro in to put down reform, change the direction of the rock we pushing up the hill. Don’t you understand, Integration Was A Success! And it is not just the persons in some such whatnots, it is the very minds of us, of them, of we, of certain obvious motherfuckers.

So it cd be, ”Hi”, at the disenthralled public house who now have a more prosperous pup to sup, the winking eye sez, don’t dis guy know that’s the police chief over there chuckling and him the loud mouthed n-woid that sd that the PC was either Cholley or Joe McCarthy or a mixture of both. What wd that be, A fascist dummy?

You cd walk in familiar joints and certain rotund rats lately here to feed cd acknowledge with their strained disattention that they were signaling to the peanut head negro who was signaling to Murdoch that a favorite enemy was within slander distance.

They wd always look like they had some kind of makeup on, or make down. They wd have a grey shine to their ribaldic knots. They wd be disguised as colored guys. Prosperous colored guys, But they wd look like spies Michaux had thought up.

But that’s what it was, what it is. Fanon again, some of the oppressed don’t want to kill their enemies, they want to be them. (Huh, that already happened in Europe and sho’nuff, the “middle east”, chum.) There you go again (to quote Da Reag!).

So that the wormiest ideas could be transferred to the whipped. By the whip crackers. Even screams for mercy could be soaked with false consciousness. “I cdda freed more slaves if more of them knew they was slaves,” my old aunt Harriet used to say.

What wd Boris Karlof have looked like if you painted him brown, modernized him, cause if he wasn’t modernized he’d look like one of them zombies in a Republic pictures Voodoo movie.. He’d have to be modernized. Sent to school. All the way. Send the heebie jebbie to Yale or someshit. He cd go to Hampton.

Wait a minute, Jethro, you skipped Howard.

OK, he cd go to Howard too. Damn, somebody always wanna get my shit in it!

Maybe I have said these things many times, even when I didn’t know exactly what I was saying. But now, see the shadow on the wall. Remember the history of anything. The dead! The dead! And what they knew. Likewise today, we seem to be alone. Though that is not true. They are everywhere the voices you knew.

Flitting through the shadow of everything. So we must, nevertheless, put some conscious narrative to this. To sum up. Walking on the late quiet street unknown yet to anybody plunging out of somewhere. The recognition of yourself as somebody in your family.

So information is not enough. What can be done with it? The whippers could make whippers out of the whipped. But we want to know. We want to feel our lives. The quality of living, livingness. Yet tinted, shoved, in whatever direction, yet still underneath inside it the breath the desire.

I mean if we wanted to look at the world as something to be changed. We at the very bottom. Our hands feet minds eyes bloody from this continuing wrestle. Some of them Angels was evil! What wd that mean in the big brittle echoing antagonism of what the world is?

You mean how wd we end up?

Exactly. That How, That End, That Up? Where do they come from, what do they mean?

Where we wd be “someplace else”. And could you be loved, Bob Marley asked, peeping that metaphysical contradiction. But bullets is stronger than holy shit.

But we must find some way to end Negrossity, divert it, at least, before it kills us as it grows to replicate the fiend in its most elaborate and extravagant ugliness. Who has the capacity to render the simple heathen more than he was, at the expense of those more than he was.

But it’s not about anybody or thing other than we who are most belittled and surrendered by this evil masquerade. This body snatcher actuality on our persons. This dripping history, those screams and beatings. Not just that but, the Doctor said, “but none of them was real estate.”

And Wanted or Un, there is nothing to do but move on. Forget the little creepy negroes scattered all over the place like unpaid bills. Look into the faces of the many who are not them.

The haven of each advance gives these flakes of our developing, prominent yet necessarily expendable existence. So they can cavort as something our struggle has given them (yea, it has) & the world, without acknowledging or even knowing it. Even despising it. Like the ugly negro sitting across from Cesaire in the trolley car, that challenged his negritude. But challenged it is not a "tude" but a gross “ity”, the magnification of pettiness, that comes confusing the light through a crack in the slave cabin with something grander than oneself. And yearning for that rather than the self growing of health and wisdom.

Whatta you mean?

That having been raised to recognize part of reality they reject the whole of it to slither in the sliver they feel is sweetest, less us like.

So then, as well, that is, what is more. I left off thinking about all that, all this, & turned where I was to go on, walk on, to the place I thought I wanted to go, & at the signal, the Pomegranate, actually an old politician, one who had betrayed us fifty years ago, and who still breakfasted each Saturday AM with old dudes like him, stopped me in the street. Like he stepped out of the shadows, it seemed maybe he was a shadow, like the suddenly animated humanoid newspaper blowing down the street in The Red Shoes, came alive and was blown up against me by some invisible gust. Did he have on a hat? No. But his hand was up to his ear like a greeting or a salute.

What was this? I had finished the drawn out mental soliloquy-no, it was a dialogue, a narrative, there were many many other voices driving the grimacing images. But it had ended or so I thought. There had been a clear break, where the pictures and voices had stopped. The parables and narratives and inquiring verses had stopped and so I found myself in the middle of the street, in my own town, with the darkness stretched around me like a circle of hard rubber words and approaching and retreating, nearby and distant sounds. Music. Talking things. And the humans zigzagging around the animals.

“What’s happening?," so that is literally what I said. “What’s happening?” Again and he said nothing. He was fatter, older. He looked like he might die any minute. So I hoped that my suspicion that he had chosen to die in front of me, was casual paranoia. But he merely stood there like something meant to hold stuff, hats or umbrellas, his hand up to his ear. Saying nothing. I was anyway trying to insist on him saying something. “How you been? Haven’t seen you in a minute.”

But then I realized he was actually pointing, pointing just behind me. So I turned. At that moment a green and white car slid into place with some heavy white woman driving. She was waving at me as Pomegranate walked around to get in.

I said something, “Seeya later” and began to dial my phone for a cab, still, I guess, distracted. What stopped me was this little group of integrated sentinels. Standing just behind me to face me when I turned. They looked, yes, they were those people I met before, who wanted to take me around town.

“We were supposed to show you how everything has changed. That what you remember doesn’t exist and that there is not even the memory of you anywhere around here.” This was coming from inside the group somewhere. Maybe 5 or 6 negroes, a couple whites, men and women. Michaux’ spy peeked around from the back of the Negronut. Maybe their mouths were moving, but they were not in sync with the words.

What was I supposed to say. “Whatta you stupid assholes want now?” popped into my head, but all I said was, “Yeh, Ok.”

“You don’t even know where you are.” The crowd voice wheedled.

“No? Do you?"

“We changed the name.” It was not laughter the little circle’s voice projected. But some kind of blank sick not thought that is. It could be a song if you had never heard a real one. “We changed the name. We even changed what everything is." The whole circle waved their arms. Like “goodbye, goodbye.” Maybe they or it sounded drunk. As if you could understand twisted gibberish.

“Oh, Jesus,” I had dialed for the cab. “Hello, Ark cabs…?”

“But that’s it, it not old or new Ark any more, we changed the name to Negronia.” (And in unison it seemed.) “All stripes, no stars.” They waved their arms again. “Goodbye!”

But that was just propaganda. The cab didn’t come but I walked and walked and walking seemed to make things familiar, with maybe a few added headaches that one had to sit and figure out how to act, like my grandmother told me. “Boy, you need to find out How to Act!”

And I walked until I arrived at the place we once had called Dar es Salaam. And yes, it was still our house, actually, just recently repainted with a new roof and new lawn. We even had a car sitting in the driveway.

And inside my wife (Shirley Graham DuBois bless her), the boys, (one a high school Principal, one a truant officer, one a trying to be writer, the other out somewhere), a basket ball coach and the teenage granddaughter, just about to go away to, where else, HU. And some more recent more teeny ones thumping around. There was rap on one floor, jazz on another, and two little grands on one computer, putting different clothes on different figures, and laughing at their mutual complaints. And all of them much smarter than me.

No, we are still here. And gonna be. You’ll need an encyclopedia of ignorant motherfuckers to find out who were our enemies.