|
Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
/
From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
*
* * * *
And Then
They Laughed
Short Story by
Kalamu ya Salaam
SCENE ONE.
—Places, everybody.
A somber,
chartreuse funk deftly settles expectantly into the
cushions of the wicker sofa right between John and
Angela. Scooting its ass back deep into the throw
pillows with the oriental scenes embroidered on
them, looking from left to right, back and forth,
checking out first the woman and then the man, the
woman, the man, and greedily anticipating a rousing
good fight, funk's emerald eyes were shinning with a
scintillating brilliance.
—Rolling.
(If you were John
right now you would be wondering why this woman was
being so hard on you, calling your cards marked,
your dealing cheat, throwing her hand to the floor,
turning the table over and screaming about the sins
of gambling.
(If you were
Angela right now you would be wondering why do men
make you treat them so hard, why do they take a
woman who sleeps by herself for some kind of rainbow
trout to be caught with hook words, split open,
gutted, fried, seasoned with dollops of hot sauce,
and eaten with relish leaving only bones and a
shriveled head on the otherwise bare plate.
(If you were John you
would be tired of this shit.)
(If you were
Angela you would be tired of this shit.)
—Action!
Funk knows that
the fun part about this prime time drama is that an
argument doesn't have to be about anything real to
make a good show, it just has to be emotional.
Once (a year to
the day after their first date—she reminded him she
had to remind him!) Angela wanted to talk about
their future in the third quarter of a close game.
Another time (about six months
after he moved in) she wanted to discuss bills,
11:38 at night.
Then there was the time they
had just finished eating (at that time they hadn't
even discussed living together) and John had even
volunteered to wash dishes and Angela wanted to
stand next to him rinsing the dishes and asking him
questions about what he did with his dick. With
suds half way up to his elbows, John couldn't care
less about what she put between her legs when he
wasn't there so why, as he washed dirty dishes, did
she care about who all he saw or why he wanted to
sleep with a woman who wasn't her, shit, maybe the
bitch was fine. He even wiped the beige enamel top
of the stove clean and wrung out the well used
(three holes and frayed edges) dishrag.
But though he
cleaned the kitchen well, John had neither clue nor
key to unlocking the deep concern he had for Angela
which was incarcerated inside his size 47 1/2"
expanded chest. John's maturity, but a seed
yearning for spring, was winter blocked by acquired
emotions and ignorantly assumed stances that always
seemed to missile guide the first words out his
mouth—maximum overkill syllables designed to destroy
all vestiges of life. John sincerely believed you
had to be finger quick on the button push or else
the other person's ICBMs would blow you away.
Angela, on the
other hand was visibly shaken, quietly close to
crying. Though she knew without a doubt when she
was being fucked with, Angela was completely
ignorant of what was happening inside of John, and,
based on her ignorance and the stupid things John
said and seemed to do with periodic regularity,
Angela assumed the worst. When the ground moves
rapidly you don't have to be a seismologist to know
it's an earthquake.
It wasn't
personal, there were many different Angelas and
Johns tussling with this same bear. Is there
something in the air that makes it so hard now a
days?
"I don't know,
maybe we, maybe I should be alone." Self-rejection
didn't even sound like her voice. John was well
enough equipped to interpret the no trespass
termination inherent in the dangerous-colored,
slicing sharp, concertina barbed wire gradually
unraveling out of the cotton softness of her sound.
"I don't
understand what you want out of this." A torrent of
cold, quick darting lizards fell into his lap. Well,
he didn't want to always be on trial, that was for
sure. She was smelling up the air. Wasn't she woman
enough to say it straight out if she really didn't
want him anymore? Every inch of her body was
covered. After loosening the reptiles, Angela looked
like she was headed underground. John flinched and
moved back an inch or two in distaste, although he
didn't know he was moving back.
Angela saw the
small movements of his flesh which portended major
emotional shifts. She foresaw his big feet walking
out the door. His green shirt turning sundown forest
dark as he slammed the door behind him without
speaking or saying any kind of goodbye other than
the finality of his olive drab silence.
Angela saw John's muscular back
hovering over Crystal's nakedness and sensed his
delight in being inside of Crystal. He had someone
else (even though he swore that "it" was over,
Angela had seen:
(how Crystal eyed John when
they had gone to the mayor's inaugural reception and
Crystal was allegedly working the room for the mayor
and had shook John's hand two beats too long and had
barely, limp-wrist offered Angela only the top half
of her fingers in a half-hearted gesture that was
supposed to pass for a sisterly greeting,
(and, besides, Angela was
neither blind nor vain, there was no way Angela's
lanky leanness could even come close to any one of
Crystal's eye-popping curves—not that John ever
publicly gave Angela any reason to feel jealous but
still every woman knows when a former girlfriend and
potential lifetime rival is the kind of fine that
every man wants to fuck,
(and besides Crystal looked
like she always got her man, plus anybody else's man
she wanted,
(and Angela, even though she
hated herself for hating Crystal, well not really
hating Crystal but rather hating Crystal's body,
hating that Crystal had that kind of body that other
women can't help hating because it made a woman
feel, well, feel inadeq… ah, uncomfortable,
especially if one was a little overweight, or a lot,
or a little underweight, or a lot, or just a little
skinny—like Angela was—or whatever,
(Angela really didn't want to
dwell on how thin her thighs were,
(Angela must have been the only
woman in the world who "loss" weight after having a
baby,
(and Angela never could find a
really pretty hairstyle to complement the long oval
shape of her face—what shade of lipstick was that
Crystal was wearing?—shit,
(Angela could understand why
former-collegiate-all star quarterback John was
attracted to Crystal who, even at thirty something,
looked preppy as a goddamn college cheerleader,
(well, at least I'm taller—not
quite up to John's 6'3" but at least 6" taller—than
she is, is what Angela rationalized to console
herself when Crystal brushed pass John for the third
time in less than two hours,
(Angela was tired, if John
wanted that—and there was no doubt in Angela's mind
that "that" was waiting by the phone to call John
the minute John walked out of Angela's door and was
fully able to avail himself of the various female
options lined up waiting for a chance to do what
Angela had not been able to do,
(oh la-dee-da if it was going
to be all this then let him go to Crystal, men
always had someone else…) to be inside of and she
had no one else she wanted inside of her.
Angela wanted to want John, but
considering how everything was turning out, at that
moment she didn't want him inside of her again ever,
no matter how good it felt and it did feel good most
of the time, but, so what, no matter, she could
handle missing him, missing it. It would be hard but
the way to deal with a snake is to cut its head off,
don't delay, don't play, don't hesitate.
"John, please
leave."
—Cut!
Funk lay back
exhausted but utterly thrilled, marveling at the
depth of Angela's self-depreciating workout. Even
thought that thing with Crystal had been over two
years ago, Angela made that stale episode live
again. God, she was good. The crying bit in the next
scene was going to be a snap.
Angela was glumly
biting her lower lip, which she always did when the
stress became a bit much. And John had just dummied
all the way down, had not said a word as he did a
mental inventory of what were the downsides to
cutting his losses and booking up soon as this next
scene was through—damn, she had said "please leave"
just like she meant it, all soft and shit and with
just enough resolve to make it razor sharp, soft but
sharp, how did she do that?
Funk could hardly wait
for scene two.
SCENE TWO.
—Take it from the
dialogue. Speed?
—Speed.
—Action.
"John, please leave."
John had his
directions backwards. When he should have been
moving forward he had backed up, now he was reaching
out for her with his snakes outstretched. Like he
was trying to capture something.
He noticed that
she was wearing the silver earrings he had bought
her. She could keep them. He wouldn't ask her for
them back. Nor the red suede shoes or the orangish
Kenyan woven handbag. Or the three hundred
twenty-five he had "loaned" her. "This is a loan,
not a gift," spouting mixed signals. He knew when he
wrote that check that he wasn't going to see that
money again. He never meant to see it. John only
meant for Angela to be in his debt.
She stood up.
Vultures were on the roof.
Patient.
Angela knew nothing stays fresh
forever but must all flesh rot so quickly? Was this
cancer or murder?
She looked up and the jury was
glumly filing in.
Wes had beat her twice. The
first time he just knocked her down
and if they had not been living
in Houston
and if she had not had a baby
who was five months old
and if she had not been so
young
and if she hadn't just made up
her mind to make it work
and if her Honda didn't have
thirty-seven more payments
and if Wes hadn't been
tearfully pleading, his knees scraping the mauve,
stain-resistant Dupont carpet on the floor of their
three bedroom dream/nightmare house, his pale blue
linen-shirted arms encircling her thighs, not caring
about how he must have looked, singing an Al Green
beg about how sorry he was
and we're going to make it
and I'll never ever hit you
again,
and if her mother had not just
gone back home after staying five weeks helping with
the baby,
and if she were not up for a
promotion at Xerox,
maybe she would have left then
and there,
and thus, never would have
gotten slapped a second time and ended up going off
on his ass, pouring a whole pot of just cooked
spaghetti down his back and grabbing a long, long
kitchen knife when he started to move at her,
remembering the way her jaw had hurt for five and a
half days after he had knocked her down that first
time and then promising herself, like a Jew viewing
relics of the holocaust for the first time, "Never
again. Never again."
She had told John this story.
He knew not to hit her.
Look at her she
thinks I'm going to hit her. John couldn't help his
thought process; his Negro male ego, having
successfully gnawed through the rope holding the
door, was now fully uncaged and roaming the streets
of John's emotions. A well chewed human dove's
feathers warmly covered the bellicose, blood stained
jowls of John's unfettered ego.
This was a
strange ass woman.
This was an
ordinary male.
Nothing prepared
him for living with something he couldn't control.
All his examples were wrong. He had never seen any
of his peers treat a woman like their new car and
really take care of her. From what all he knew about
women John would bet the farm that if you didn't
watch out they had a secret way to make a man cry,
and what man wanted to cry?
"John, please
leave."
"John, please
leave."
"John, please
leave."
If she didn't
stop saying that he was going to have to punch her
out.
"John, please
leave."
Regardless of
what John thought he was hearing, after saying it
the first time, Angela had not said another word.
At a moment when
it would have taken a whole lot of understanding or
at least the image of some man John respected
advising John on the manliness of admitting confused
emotions and admitting to being lost on the
relationships frontier, John pushed on confident as
Custer that he could cope with whatever Angela had
in mind. On the wide screen Eddie Murphy (whom John
mistook for an experienced navigator/scout) was
acting the fool, his manic guffaws misdirecting
John. It made sense to John.
John had watched
tv football. He knew what was happening. A fatal
loop of instant replay was stuck in John's head.
Angela was standing over John's quarterback,
pointing an outstretched finger into the poor boy's
face. Actually she was standing astraddle him doing
the Cabbage Patch over his prostrate body. How did
that look on Monday night television, a sack on his
fifteen, and she jumping up, standing one foot on
each side of his hip, "take that motherfucker, take
that motherfucker!"?
"On who? On
you!" that finger with the blood red fingernail kept
saying. About thirty-six million people was
watching her knock him flat on his ass and then
gloating with a long red finger in his face!
"John, please
leave."
Where were his
blockers?
"John, please
leave."
Five minutes
passed like that.
"John, please
leave."
Although there
was always another game, who wanted to lose like
this?
Angela didn't
want to repeat herself. Once was enough. What she
really wanted was to disappear. She also wanted her
little girl Harriet to grow up in another kind of
country where she wouldn't be expected to be some
man's woman. If there was such a country, Angela's
daughter Harriet could be happy. She could have
children if she wanted to. Could have a lover, if
she found one she wanted, but she wouldn't have to
be "his" woman. That's what she wanted.
John was leaning
against the podium wondering what he was supposed to
be doing. He didn't know how to talk his way out of
this one. Worse than that, he didn't even know he
was not trapped in something that he had to escape.
The microphone was on, the tape recorders were
documenting, the reporters had their pens ready to
scribble down every word of the post-game, wrap up.
John was almost
forty. He had seen a lot of shit. He had been with a
lot of women—well, without really counting closely,
he had been with seven, uh eight women in some kind
of serious, well, almost serious, well like he had
lived with (more or less) four different women in
the last seven years and almost got married twice.
He was tired.
He was also
unreconstructed. He didn't know how to disarm. How
to divest of the need to own. John was afraid to let
go and afraid to hold on to a woman's inquiry into
his guts. John's EWAD (Early Warning Defensive Radar
System) went bonkers— Angela was set to launch fifty
questions. His ego was asking him why did it have to
go back in the cage. There was no logical answer.
And Angela, his
sweet, sweet angel, had her own pack of troubles to
tote, she couldn't help him with his. Besides she
was no expert on safe cracking, there was no way for
her to reach into his head or even if she could, how
could she know his head was not what most needed
reprogramming.
How does it
happen that you can get to someplace but you can't
go back to where you came from? How does it happen
that you long for something you ain't never had?
Something dim but very valuable was in the distance
and they both were reaching for it, but it was far
off, far off. Very far off.
John decided he
was too tired to talk but really his problem was he
couldn't read the script. All he knew was English,
albeit at a first year college reading level, thank
you; English, a language severely limited in
conjunctions and in nouns denoting inner realities.
John had fifty-seven ways to express anger and only
two words that he knew of that seemed to fit this
puzzle. He didn't even know sign language. He had
his arms folded.
Angela was deeply
hurt by John's refusal to unknot himself, but she
was determined. She had journeyed to the crossroads
at midnight many times before. Sometimes confused,
perplexed and in a quandary, Angela had simply sat
on her rump and stoically greeted the dawn. He never
met her there; one usual lie was that you had to go
to the crossroads alone, but if two was one then
being together was alone, right? Sometimes, just
marching on down the highway, she would catch a
reflection of her moon-shadow on the roadside and
realize how doofus she was being by courting the
devil behind the particular simpleton in whose hands
she was considering placing her life, and invariably
on such occasions when even a little sliver of a
moon would throw a sharply defined shadow sprawling
across the gravel, invariably those would be the
times when she knew that the particular man was not
worth the particular effort, so even before getting
to the crossroads she would back down and return
home, would tell Alfred, or whatever his name
happened to be in this particular incarnation, "This
is not going to make it."
Angela had become strong enough
to resist jumping in the water just because a
swimming pool was conveniently near, clean and
available. Once she had gone right, got married to
Westley Richardson, II, Esquire. Blood turned out to
be an excellent lawyer, the natural profession of
liars. And once she had gone left and not married
Julius James Johnson, the man all his friends and
acquaintances affectionately called J.J., even
though returning the rings and canceling everything
damn near broke his heart, Angela knew that was
better than going through with getting hooked up to
a plow she was not prepared to pull. By then Angela
had learned to listen to her stomach which
invariably got upset at the way J.J. treated women,
and Angela didn't take it personally because the
fool was even hard on his mama which was a sign
clearer than that storm God dropped on Noah that
things wasn't going to work out. Yes Lord, Angela
had been to the crossroads.
At the crossroads
anything you did had its ups and downs but, based on
the lessons life had smacked hard into her head, for
sure it was better to walk than wait, "Let's just
end this now before one of us hurts the other."
—Cut.
Of the three,
predictably, Funk was the only one not hurting:
Don't stop now. Keep the action going while it's
flowing. (You know Funk is a midget and likes to
drag everybody down to its level.)
Angela was so into the
scene she didn't hear the director yell "cut." Even
though there was this tremble in her voice, somehow,
she was still holding her head up and keeping her
face dry, even though a floodtide was raging just
behind the brown damn of her determined-not-to-cry
eyes.
Funk knew it would be
a waste of tears if Angela didn't cry until after
John booked up. Funk decided to take matters in hand
and started whispering the name of every man who had
ever fucked and left Angela. Wait a minute, Funk
thought, that's a redundancy of the first order.
Everybody Angela ever slept with was gone—well, of
course, she had put a couple of them out, but they
were gone, and hence, had left. It wouldn't be long
now before she jumped to the grand conclusion that
going to bed with a dude wasn't nothing but a
prelude to the man leaving her. Funk liked the
symmetry of that: getting laid was a prelude to
getting left—how they said it? Wham, bam…
SCENE THREE.
(Do a slow-mo, three
sixty shot.)
—Action.
John stood up.
Turned slowly to walk out the room. And then,
inexplicably paused. His back was to Angela. She
wasn't looking. His voice stopped his feet from
moving. He was shaken by what he heard himself
uttering. He couldn't even look at her and say it.
The words had thorns and ripped his lips as they
poured out. Deep inside him he faintly heard
something cursing at him. The mumble was the muffled
indignation of his ego protesting confinement.
But there was
also a warm light beckoning through the fog. John
could hear its slow blinking, an E major seventh
chord with a husky Ben Webster whisper, only John
didn't consciously know Ben Webster's sound so he
could only recognize it in his subconscious having
stored it deep in his memory cells when he was a
child and his parents were playing Duke Ellington's
"In A Mellowtone" RCA album with the 1940 Ellington
orchestra's rendition of "All Too Soon" or the 1942
"What Am I Here For," both of which featured Ben in
all his majestic glory. Although John could not have
called Ben Webster's name to save his life, Ben
Webster's sound was the singular touchstone that
kept John from making a total fool out of himself
and walking out the door.
When John had first
heard Ben Webster his mama and daddy were dancing in
the front room and he was hanging over the side of a
tub they had put him in to keep him from crawling
around, and they were speaking some funny language
that John did not remember sounding like the
language he later learned to speak by mimicking
them. That sound that was blinking like a beacon
inside of him. He wanted to be his daddy dancing. He
wanted Angela in his arms. He wanted to hear Ben
Webster again. But he felt awful stupid. He had
hugged a lot of women before. But none of the others
made music in him and suddenly like a baby, all he
wanted was what he wanted, nothing more, nothing
less, don't give him no other arms, he wanted his
mama, he wanted Angela to be his mama and he wanted
to be his daddy.
But just like
John didn't consciously know Ben Webster, he also
didn't consciously know what he wanted. Which didn't
make John feel better; actually, not knowing what he
wanted made him feel worse. Meanwhile John's feet
stayed rooted to the carpet. E major 7th. He could
hear it but he couldn't think it. John didn't think
his inability to leave was right, in fact he felt
down right weak. If Angela had been hugging him at
that moment and had had her head resting on his
chest, she would have heard a faint grunt, an
involuntary exclamation that acknowledged that at
least John knew exactly what Stevie Wonder meant
when he sang "There's something 'bout your love..."
da-da-da something "...that makes me weak, and
knocks me off (pause) my feet." Even though Stevie
was blind, Stevie had peeped this, so maybe, John
having all his faculties of sight intact, just
maybe, this was the right thing to do. Or something.
Maybe being weak was right. John was barely passing
his first lesson in submission to human love.
But Angela wasn't
looking. When John had stood up, she thought that
was it, blood was about to do the famous fifty yard
dash right on out of the danger of relating to a
female other than his mama.
Angela was deeply hurt by what
she interpreted as John's refusal to speak in the
mother tongue rather than growl in the colonial
language. His silence handcuffed her, and him. She
started to nickname him Cortez. Made love with his
boots on. Saw her indigenous femininity as virgin
territory to be mounted, surmounted, claimed and
controlled, a phallic flag stuck into with its nuts
waving in the wind. Thinking of love like a
business: what he could gain, what he stood to lose.
Angela was really tired, at that moment, so she
didn't hear him stop, desert the armed forces, and
of course she didn't hear that E major 7th, nor the
Ben Webster buzz. But what she did hear, she didn't
believe at first, even though she had been wanting
to believe.
"Angela. I don't
know what to do. I'm scared of you. But, I love
you."
—Cut.
Funk was furious. What
a revolting development this was. Funk was sure that
shit wasn't in the script.
After checking the newly
revised script, Funk was even further dismayed to
find out that Funk was eliminated entirely from the
last scene.
Don't tell me you're going to
shoot some lame-ass, happily-ever-after bullcrap
Hollywood ending. Naw, couldn't be. This stuff just
doesn't happen in real life. Not to Negroes; and
weren't we supposed to be keeping this one real?
Funk's bad breath was
all up in Kalamu's face, but you know how Big Mu can
get when his mind is made up. Funk and Kalamu stood
toe to toe for a minute, psychically parrying and
thrusting retorts back and forth. Just looking at
them, it didn't look like nothing was going on, but
Kalamu was arguing with Funk the way authors do with
their fictional characters, telling Funk, you don't
like it you can just go head and write and direct
your own story. But this is my project.
Funk, of course, shot back,
naw, this ain't your story, this some bullshit
trying to appeal to the women by putting men down
cause a brother wasn't going to put up with somebody
telling him it was wrong to feel the way he felt.
Besides, Kalamu, you know good and well there ain't
no happy endings for 99 out of a 100 Black couples.
Well, Funk, just call this: the
one after ninety-nine. And with that Kalamu turned
his back on Funk and called out: Make sure everybody
has the revised script. The one with the Black
ending.
Kalamu knew that no
matter how consistently acquainted with sadness this
society forced our people to be, love and laughter
was what we intimately craved and would risk
everything to achieve. Fourth and inches. The safe
play was to punt. But without a second thought, they
lined up with two wide receivers and everybody else
blocking.
Funk reluctantly split
behind the cameras, but staying nearby just in case
one of them muffed it and Funk would be able to slip
back in and put a real-ass ending on this bad boy.
SCENE FOUR.
—Is the crane ready
for the overhead? This is the last scene, let's do
it in one take. One smooth take. Tilt down as the
crane goes up, zooming in as you rise. And Funk,
back up, we're catching a bit of your shadow in the
shot and we don't need that.
—Action.
Angela jumps up
quickly but very quietly, she doesn't want to
frighten him. Angela takes John's hand. Turns him
around. He isn't crying. But his hand is shaking.
She doesn't have to look in his eyes. She doesn't
have to look period. Everything is bright, red
bright, makes her close her eyes. She glances
furtively at him before shutting her eyes.
John's eyes are
open but he isn't observing anything outside of
himself. During this brief moment, John's eyes are a
double mirror: he is looking inward at himself (even
though he appears to be standing with his eyes wide
open staring straight ahead at the hanging ivy in
the ceramic pot with the macramé tie that Angela had
labored on during the four and three quarter month
period the last time she wasn't "seeing" anybody)
and at the same time, Angela catches her own
reflection in the opaque blankness of John's stare.
Angela knows,
with the unprovable certainty that those who believe
in god possess, she just knows that at last, and
also for the first time, somehow, John is deeply
inspecting himself instead of questioning her
motives when there is something he can't figure out.
A pheasant, feathered the most dazzling green, flies
across Angela's line of vision. She knows it has
sprung from John's chest, free to fly the friendly
skyways of her dream visions.
Angela
instinctively starts chanting prayers of
thanksgiving. Cognizant that she is near a threshold
and wanting to remain on the path, Angela humbly and
silently asks the creator for guidance. There is no
sound and she thinks the silence is the answer.
"Don't do
anything. Don't say anything. Just hold me."
After he held
her, they talk for thirty-nine straight minutes. It
is a start.
* *
* * *
Today, it's one
thousand, two hundred and forty-five days later.
John and Angela are still together.
They laugh about
this now.
—Cut! Ok, that's a
wrap!
By then Funk, in a
truly foul mood, had angrily put on his wrap-around
shades and silently slithered off the set into the
urban shadows.
Source: WordUp
*
* * * *
music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
* * *
* *
Guarding the Flame of Life
New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin
James /
They danced atop his casket Jaran 'Julio' Green
* * *
* *
|
Track List
1. Congo Square (9:01)
2. My Story, My Song (20:50)
3. Danny Banjo (4:32)
4. Miles Davis (10:26)
5. Hard News For Hip Harry (5:03)
6. Unfinished Blues (4:13)
7. Rainbows Come After The Rain (2:21)/Negroidal Noise (15:53)
8. Intro (3:59)
9. The Whole History (3:14)
10. Negroidal Noise (5:39)
11. Waving At Ra (1:40)
12. Landing (1:21)
13. Good Luck (:04) |
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Obama's America and the New
Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander)
/ Michelle_Alexander Part
II Democracy Now
(Video)
Michelle Alexander Speaks At
Riverside Church
/
part
2 of 4 /
part 3 of 4 /
part 4 of 4
There are
more African Americans under
correctional control
today--in prison or jail, on
probation or parole—than
were enslaved in 1850, a
decade before the Civil War
began. If you take into
account prisoners, a large
majority of African American
men in some urban areas,
like Chicago, have been
labeled felons for life.
These men are part of a
growing undercaste, not
class, caste—a group of
people who are permanently
relegated, by law, to an
inferior second-class
status. They can be denied
the right to vote,
automatically excluded from
juries, and legally
discriminated against in
employment, housing, access
to education and public
benefits—much
as their grandparents and
great-grandparents once were
during the Jim Crow era.—Michelle
Alexander,
The New Jim Crow |
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The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer
By Colin Grant
The definitive group biography of the Wailers—Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston—chronicling their rise to fame and power. Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers—one of the most influential groups in popular music. Colin Grant presents a lively history of this remarkable band from their upbringing in the brutal slums of Kingston to their first recordings and then international superstardom. With energetic prose and stunning, original research, Grant argues that these reggae stars offered three models for black men in the second half of the twentieth century: accommodate and succeed (Marley), fight and die (Tosh), or retreat and live (Livingston). Grant meets with Rastafarian elders, Obeah men (witch doctors), and other folk authorities as he attempts to unravel the mysteries of Jamaica's famously impenetrable culture. Much more than a top-flight music biography, The Natural Mystics offers a sophisticated understanding of Jamaican politics, heritage, race, and religion—a portrait of a seminal group during a period of exuberant cultural evolution. 8 pages of four-color and 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations. Colin Grant Interview, The Natural Mystics
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posted 28 April 2010
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