“I find myself suddenly in a world in which things do evil; a world in which I am summoned into battle; a world in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph.”
--Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
PART 4.
New York ran her fingers through the hair on Joseph Whitfield’s stomach as her hand rested on his chest. She kissed his breast and bit him on the nipple. He winced from the pain and dribbled a small groan of passion.
“You never told me why you were late,” said Whitfield. His round belly shook as he spoke and ran his fingers through thinning brown and grey hair.
“I did tell you sugar, said I had business. Didn’t know it was gon take as long as it did, but I made it up to you didn’t I? Didn’t your ‘little diamond girl’ make every second worth your wait?”
She moved her head up to his and kissed him hard on the mouth. He reached to hold her but she suddenly pulled away and jumped up from the bed. She stood smiling over him, teasing him, enjoying the helpless look of give-it-to-me on his face.
“I know you see other men, but the deal is you keep yourself for me on Fridays, and nobody but me. Nobody!” He yelled the last word and the sound of his raised voice bouncing off the wall startled him. He sat up and looked around as though someone else had shouted then he suddenly became timid. “Please, you don’t realize how, how bad, I need to see you when I walk through that door... it’s like a hunger... I-I feel like a puppy that’s been chained up all week and need something good to chase. I’d trade my wife for you if I could. She could have my house and car an money if I could put you in a crystal cage with the other pretty little stones in my jewelry store. I wish for that.”
New York opened her mouth to say something when the window shade rolled up and cut her off with its loud flapping. She walked naked over to the window. As she reached to pull the shade down, she saw a tall dark man standing beneath a street lamp, winding his right arm like a fastly spinning windmill. She put her hand to her mouth as the man’s body suddenly heaved forward and a tiny spark of fire lit the air just before the stone struck her throat with the force of a rifle bullet. She grabbed her neck, stumbled backwards and fell onto the bed. Blood gushed into her mouth and spurted out onto Whitfield’s legs and stomach.
“Oh my God!” he whispered. “Miss New York! Miss New York you’re bleeding!”
He rolled from the bed and scrambled into his clothes while on the floor on his knees. The blood on his stomach seeped through his shirt. He grabbed his suit jacket from a chair and crawled until he got out the door. He ran so fast that he shot past his car and went blindly into the street, jumping into a taxi that almost ran over him.
PART 5.
“Little pretty boy, be nice to George. Look at all that hair on yo head. Like some pretty little female.”
Juba’s back was against the wall. As easily as a child lifting a doll, George scooped him up in a one-armed bear hug and slid his free hand beneath the waistband of Juba’s pants. He squeezed him tighter and tighter, all the while drooling and kissing at Juba’s face, groping feverishly at his flesh. Their lips came hard together when George saw the first flickers of flame. He dropped Juba and jumped back. There it was again. Flame. Crackling, jumping, alive in Juba’s eyes.
“What you, what you doin?”
George could smell the smoke, felt it drifting from a cloud in his hair. He looked down and saw the red tongues of flame licking at his legs, and the sudden rush of heat began to eat him like acid.
“Sweet Jesus, it’s burning me. Help me somebody!”
Other prisoners began to yell.
“Shut the fuck up George!”
“Hey Georgie, you buggin the new kid? Save me some.”
“I’m on fire! I’m on fiiiiiiiirrre!”
Horrified at the flames climbing up his body, he grabbed a cup and began raking it across the bars of the cell door. The other prisoners did the same, thinking it was a joke, liking the fun of it. Tin cups clanking against steel bars. Music.
George ran back to the toilet to throw water on himself, but he was too late. His reflection no longer showed flesh at all, only a screaming mass of fire. All he saw of his former self were his eyes, wide and terrified, surrounded by red and yellow flames that had swallowed him whole. He screamed, a yell so loud and aching with such pain that all the other prisoners became immediately silent and three guards came running down the corridor. They opened the cell door without looking in first.
George lie on the floor on his back, mouth twisted down, eyes so wide they seemed to sit on top of their sockets. A guard knelt over him, touched his throat and wrist.
“Lordy! He cold and hard... like stone.”
“You mean he--”
“Dead as a brick, an I don’t see a scratch on him.”
Soon, the prison doctor came and said that though he was not sure for the moment, he believed George had had a fatal heart attack. No one paid attention to Juba as he sat in the moonlight beneath the window. The guards put George’s body in a green sack and took it from the cell.
When everyone had gone, Juba began to moan, a soft sound like a mother humming to her infant. The song was even, hypnotic, it swayed in the air like a seductive cobra, then it wasn’t a moan at all, but an urgent wail like the cry of an old-black-man calling from the deacon’s bench. It flew high then low as it flooded Juba’s cell and spilled out into the corridor. Prisoners yelled.
“Shut up! Somebody shut him up! He tellin on me! Don’t, don’t let him... tell on me...”
“What’s that song boy? Come on now, I’ll sing it with you.”
The sound of Juba's moaning attracted the guards on his floor and they came running back to his cell to see what the problem was, but when they tried to open the cell door, they found that it was stuck. Most of them decided he could wait until morning and returned to their stations. Others said they should break the door down and remove him because he made them feel uneasy and was obviously disturbing the other inmates, perhaps they should put him in solitary confinement that very night. A crowd of nervous murmuring and frightened laughter gathered among the prisoners, while still Juba sang, a slow, wordless, bleeding tune.
