RL's Dream

Eight

They sat next to each other on the couch for over an hour without talking. Soupspoon took an old address book out of his guitar case and flipped through the pages, mumbling and musing over what he saw. Kiki slouched down next to him looking miserable.

“Why’ont you go over an’ watch TV?” Soupspoon asked to show that he was over being mad.

“Don’t wanna,”

Soupspoon had put down the address book and was now rubbing his guitar with an oversized white handkerchief. He watched the young woman sulking and shook his head.

“Why’d you hit me, girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think it’s right to hit somebody when you mad? You think that’s gonna teach’em sumpin’?”

Kiki glowered and shifted her position — a petulant child.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.

“But you did.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You did hurt me an’ you did mean it. An’ you know I ain’t done nuthin’ to hurt you.”

“You coulda burnt down the house!” she blurted out. “We coulda been killed!”

Soupspoon put his hand on her thigh and said softly, “But you saved us, honey. You saved everybody.”

A free-roaming twitch moved around Kiki’s body. First in her shoulder, from there to her foot. Her cheek jumped twice and then her stomach contracted, forcing her into a half-bow.

“I set my house on fire once,” she said.

“You did?”

Kiki stared ahead, her assent more in her posture than in any gesture she made.

“Anybody die?”

Kiki seemed to enjoy the question. She smiled, then grinned. “No,” she said. “Nobody died. They didn’t even know that it happened. I lit a match in the basement and threw it in a trash can full of papers. Then I went back upstairs and waited for the house to burn down but I guess that it fizzled out.”

“How old were you?”

“Eight.”

All the anger and sadness was gone from her. She went back to her bed and turned on the Johnny Carson show.

Soupspoon took out his address book again and murmured over the scrawled names as if he were praying in a foreign language.

“Kiki?”

“Yeah, Soup?”

“You wanna lend me some money?”

“Sure. What for?”

“T’buy me a tape recorder.”

It was late. Kiki was propped up at the head of her bed with a water glass and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at her side. The TV light played over her head, across the blank wall.

“What you need a tape recorder for?” Kiki asked out of a blue-gray haze of cigarette smoke.

“What that doctor say to you?”

“Which one?”

“Dr. MacDuff. What she say to you when you went down there?”

The television ran long flickering shadows across Kiki’s face, but the sound was turned low. “She said that you were in remission — mostly. And that if you went in for checkups and stuff that you’d be okay.”

“That all? That all she told you?”

“Well...” Weak laughter rose up from the TV and then a drumroll. “...You know doctors, they always got to say some things, but it’s not because it’s so.”

“What things?”

Kiki’s eyes, trying to be innocent, opened wide, making her, in that ghostly light, resemble the zombies that the old folks told about to scare children and keep them home at night.

Soupspoon had come to like this girl all over again. She had some kind of anger built up inside of her. That’s why she hit him. But even those blows had come from her crazy kind of love. It was that same craziness that made her take him in.

Now she wanted to keep quiet so as not to scare him with what the doctor might have said.

“What things?” Soupspoon asked again.

“Well... they always say, even if it isn’t true, that if you got even a little bit of cancer then you might only live for five years.”

“Tops,” Soupspoon added.

“It could be more.” Just that quickly she was on the edge of tears.

“I once knowed a man name’a Bannon,” Soupspoon said. “Ole roustabout down Mississippi.”

“Was he your friend?” Kiki used the blanket to wipe her eyes and nose.

“In a way he was. I was a boy an’ he was pushin’ sixty. But back then, in the country way’a life, you could have friends all kindsa ages an’ there wasn’t nuthin’ weird about it.”

Soupspoon fingered a page in his address book as if he had found something that proved what he said.

“So what about your friend?” Kiki asked. Someone was shouting on the TV and then came applause.

“Bannon? Bannon was a thief by trade and a history teacher by nature.” Soupspoon looked at the guitar on the couch beside him. “He played guitar too.”

Carefully Soupspoon took up the guitar and put it back in its case.

“Bannon would take me out on walks an’ tell me all about what he called real history; all the things he had learned from African students that he’d met in Washington D.C when he was a janitor at Howard University.”

“What did he steal?” Kiki asked.

“What?”

“You said he was a thief. What did he steal?”

“He only stole from white folks, but what Bannon loved was history; especially African history, which, he said, was hidden by white people who was jealous of all the things that the Africans had when people in Europe was still holed up in caves.

“He used to say that your African races was civilized six thousand years ago. Egypt and the Sudan, that’s where it all started. Your first Jews and your first Christians was black folks. They made Babylon and the pyramids, they wrote the Bible and sailed the seas. Mosta your black people around today don’t know all that. But I do. Mosta your white kids grow up thinkin’ old is England, old is Rome. But they don’t know shit...” Soupspoon was the voice but they were Bannon’s words. The dapper little man with fuzzy gray hair like a halo around the shiny black dome of his head.

Soupspoon laughed to himself.

“What’s funny, Soup?”

“I met Bannon ’cause one day I was breaking inta his little old shack out past the Willis plantation. I just went in there t’take some apples but I didn’t know that he was out back nappin’. He caught me by my ankle before I could get back out the windah.”

“Did he beat you?” Kiki asked — she was wringing the blanket.

“Naw. He told me, If you do anything you gotta do it right.’ I was sweatin’ an’ shakin’ under the pecan tree that growed at the side’a his place. The grass was cold and them pecans was hard under my feet.

“Bannon was preachin’ up to the branches of that tree, ‘Here you got a black child comin’ t’steal from a old black man — from his own people.’ An’ that’s when the lectures started. All about how black people everywhere didn’t know who they was an’ didn’t know how to be proud. ’Bout how writin’ an’ readin’ an’ arithmetic all started in Africa.

“‘All the white man ever made was weapons. But that’s all they needed.’ That’s what he said.

“With those weapons they stole everything in the world. They piled their warehouses with every goddamned thing they could carry. An’ when they couldn’t carry any more they made slaves carry away their own things to put in the store. An’ when the white men had so much that they couldn’t use it all they made the slaves work and serve.

“‘White men the biggest thieves in history,’” Soupspoon said, making his voice deeper so that Kiki knew he was quoting from the long-gone Bannon. “‘And it’s our job to steal it right back.’

“The old boy didn’t believe in working, no sir! He say, ‘Workin’ for the white man is helpin’ him to pick your own pocket. Work every day for your whole life and you might make ten thousand dollars. But it’s in the white man’s pocket and the white man’s bank. An’ here you livin’ in the same goddamned shack from six to sixty-six an’ you even payin’ him rent. When you die the white undertaker pull the gold right from outta your teeth.’

“I was just a little boy really, ’bout ten I guess. My daddy an’ my momma was already dead an’ I didn’t have nobody to talk to. I mean, I stayed with these two women that I called my a’ntees but I guess I needed a man to talk to. An’ the way that Bannon talked was so great that I still remember all the stuff he told me. It was like I had been lied to all my life an’ now somebody finally wanted t’tell me what’s what.

“An’ he needed t’talk too. Because Bannon knowed mo’ than almost anybody I ever met, but he didn’t know how to read. Everything he knew was in his head an’ he had t’talk to keep it up — if you see what I mean.”

Kiki took a deep breath and brought her hand to her throat. She looked as if she wanted to say something but the words didn’t come.

“He say, ‘So when you go crawlin’ in a windah it should be a white man’s windah. An’ if you use a gun it should be against a enemy, not some lost African brother don’t even know who he is.’

“You know I’idn’t have no gun. Shit! I’idn’t have a stick. But I knew that if I hadda had a stick I woulda swung it an’ because I knew that I knew what he meant.

“I spent every day at Bannon’s house, eatin’ apples and pork rinds while that old man talked about the great black men of history. In the afternoon, when we’d take long walks, he’d tell me all about people like Marcus Garvey an’ the return to Africa. We always found ourselves in the woods behind white people’s houses. Bannon would not steal from a colored man, he said that stealin’ from a colored man was wrong.” Soupspoon cackled and sat back on the couch. “But if some white man so happened to be gone, and his door was locked, then Bannon didn’t mind me goin’ in through his windah an’ openin’ up. You see, he’d get mad when a white man had a lock on his do’. He figured that that white man had money he stoled from the coloreds in there. Yep.”

“Did you ever get caught?”

“I didn’t. I was s’posed to meet’im on a Tuesday mornin’ and he was gonna start talkin’ about Hannibal and the black armies that Rome drafted out of Africa. You see, I’idn’t stay wit’ him ‘cause he thought that people might get suspicious and put two an’ two together. So I still stayed wit’ my a’ntees but I never told ’em what I was doin’.”

The flutter in Soupspoon’s heart had a small speck of pain inside it.

“By the time I got there the shack was burnt down an’ Bannon was dead. They had took him an’ piled stovewood on’im an’ then set him afire. His arms was just black bones reachin’ out away.

“I runned right back to Inez an’ Ruby. And I prayed that the people killed Bannon never knew about me.”

Kiki came over from the bed to hug him.

“So what does all that have to do with a tape recorder?” Kiki asked some time later. She turned out the lamp, leaving the room lit only by the blooming blue waves of television light.

“Only two men ever taught me anything,” Soupspoon said. “Bannon Tripps and Robert Johnson. But they taught me a lot. You know I ain’t never had no kids or no nieces or nephews even.

“But I once knew this man name of Early, William Early out in Chicago. He wanted to interview me twenty years ago for a book about the blues. He called it Back Road to the Blues. I didn’t want to at the time. That was a bad time in my life an’ I didn’t wanna think about no blues.”

“But now you do?”

“That’s why I want a tape recorder. I wanna tell my story like Bannon told his. I know stuff now too. I got somethin’ to say an’ you done gimme a chance here to say it, Kiki.”

“What?”

“I could die anytime now, girl. I need to say somethin’ an’ send it to Mr. Early before that happens.”

“Why not just call him?”

“I don’t wanna call’im, goddammit! I wanna tell it an’ play it right here. I wanna tell it my own way wit’out all kindsa questions an’ shit. I just wan’ it, wan’ it the way I wan’ it.”

“Okay, daddy,” Kiki said. “I’ll get it for you on payday. Next Friday, I swear.”