Happily, Hamid broke in at that point as he bobbed up from the lower depths of the house; the big rooms below being Mya’s bosom, I suppose. Hamid was sharp in nifty new threads; a Highland-heather purple-green Harris-tweed jacket, white yachting flannels and a cream-colored silk shirt with a black and pink striped bow tie that looked like the misplaced smile on a stuffed cat. Over this he wore his shimmering striped-silk jellaba down to the ground. I thought the first scene between Hamid and the Swiss lawyer Rolf Ritterolf might be a bit rough but they had already met and sized each other up like Dignity and Impudence; a Saint Bernard and plush monkey, perhaps. Talking right over Hamid’s head, Ritterolf said: “At first I thought that this one was an absolute primitive until I heard him explaining the Roman Lupercalia to Mya. Most extraordinary! Did you teach him all this?” Hamid was bouncing up and down, clapping his hands like a small sultan cracking the whip on his slaves and, inside two minutes, he had swept Ritterolf off to his plane; promising lights on the field as if he had everything in “Malamut” already under control and was really running the place. I saw Ritterolf go with the slightly sinking feeling that this stout Swiss was my last link with sanity. When Hamid starts running things, anything can happen and does.
I once made up a fable about this part of the world to match the fairy tale about the frog prince on whom the princess had only to drop three drops of her magic elixir to turn poor Froggy back into a man; some kind of Borbor, no doubt. Anyway, in all the backcountry of Africa, of all the world; in from the desert, out of the bush and down from the hills, millions of young princes in rags are marching forever toward town with their shoes in their hands. City lights dazzle their eyes as they march up to a jukebox. Neon flickers, music rocks and as three bottles of Caca-Culo are poured into them, they turn into toads. So, when I caught that sourly familiar apple odor off Hamid’s breath as he came back and threw his arms around me to give me a boozy wet kiss on the mouth, I knew Mya must have poured three bottles of champagne into him.
“You’ve made it with Mya,” I said, disengaging myself. “You’ve been showing Mya the handle of your big old brush.”
Hamid threw his arms around the elephantine air with his most diabolical grin, like saying: “Mya’s one big girl!”
“I thought you said you knew how to turn on the lights,” I went on, accusingly.
“I fix her generator! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Hamid collapsed on a cushion howling with glee and, then, suddenly shot into the air again to bumble around the dark domed room like an angry bee in his hive; pushing back panels, throwing in switches and punching buttons I was sure he knew nothing about. The Moroccan approach to machines is the same as that used for directing a djinn, and a good many Moroccans have a highly developed genius for this. Most Moroccans can stop a watch or, even, a can-opener simply by taking one penetrating look at it but other Moroccans can repair a carburetor in the Sahara with a few half-chewed dates. In any case, I clutched my UHER, looking around for some safe hiding place to keep it out of Hamid’s reach. From far away and below, someplace, came the hard hammering of the generator and, a few minutes later, the hum of a departing plane dwindling overhead. As Hamid hopped about like a mad monkey in the gloom, various machines sputtered, sparked and blinked into life. The entire electronic library began to light up.
I saw they had installed much the same sort of setup I was familiar with at Hampton Institute, or was it at Howard? I sat down in front of the screen and punched the letter H; waited for the signal to wink and dialed: HANSON. There in front of me, sure enough, was my birth certificate. I was pained to see that my parents’ papers were attached but I realized they were bound to go, too, if I was really going to succeed in what I had always thought of doing — changing my skin but from the inside out, as it were. I was, at last, going to become myself by becoming somebody else. As I was savoring this abstruse search for a self, Hamid broke in with the mention of food. Even food could not tear my eyes away from a page of magnified microfilm which had appeared on my screen.
It was a page from a copybook I’d owned at the age of eight, in which I once wrote in block letters what I thought at the time was my final farewell epistle to my mother. I ran away into the park for what turned out to be a long, boring afternoon and an evening until hunger drove me back home. Luckily, Mother was still out so I ate and went to bed, completely forgetting the letter which my mother found and refused to return to me, ever. She must have read it aloud one thousand times to everybody, anybody; white people, even. She declared it was one of her lifelong treasures and here this masterpiece was again, flickering in front of my eyes.
Dear Pig
I am run away for good.
Your son Ulys.
There was an annotation in my mother’s hand:
These first travels of Ulys did not take him far. His trek downtown was little more than a trick to get out of his homework, I reckon.
That gave me a chill; nearly turned me to stone for a second, as a matter of fact, but there was worse to come as I went on pushing the buttons. Their next item was a typed manuscript of my prize-winning essay which won me the I AM AN AMERICAN DAY CONTEST, in high school. It runs: “This is my own, my native land …” So help me, my mother wrote most of that and it won me a ten-dollar gold piece. Took that old gold piece and the letter that said the principal should present it to me in front of the assembled school and he looked at that letter and he looked at me and he handed me both of them back. I remember, that gold piece went on the rent and I thought my mother should have it made into a brooch for herself or a stickpin for me for my tie. I flipped on through the electronic record of my life with growing embarrassment.
Here was a paper of mine, written at Hampton for a course in Afro-American Lit. This thing was entitled: “Negro Renaissance Poets before Langston Hughes,” and included lots of excerpts of verse. Now, who the hell wrote what I quote? Oh boy!
“You are the gilded pride of Day
And I the sable pride of Night.”
Yeah! I was still stirring these faintly fruity lines around in my head when Hamid showed up with a cold lobster and some champagne but no glasses.
“What, Hamid!” I cried, “no keef? You know champagne gives me bubbles in the appendix. If I drink that stuff, I’ll die of peritonitis out here in the Sahara.”
“Thass all right,” Hamid said and sped off. I set to on the lobster with my hands. On the table beside me was the grubby notebook left me by Rolf Ritterolf. On the cover was written: “O. Pesonius: His Journal.” When I saw that the Little White Reindeer had written in English, I began flipping over the pages with greasy fingers and read: