The Nigger Factory (3 page)

Baker had asked Abul to join MJUMBE as a matter of course because of their common interest in the fraternity, but he had been a little surprised when he accepted. Baker had seen him frequently in the frat lounge with a Black history book or reading material relating to the Black struggle, but the man had never expressed an inkling of political consciousness in the way he spoke. But there was little question of Abul’s dedication
to the organization. He was on time for every meeting and faithfully carried out every duty assigned to him.

‘He ain’ got a nerve in his body,’ Baker decided. ‘He’ll go with us all the way.’

The roundup had given Baker a little more confidence in his co-workers, but his personal confidence was slipping. The thought of working with Earl Thomas did not appeal to him. Even if everything looked good. He compared himself to Thomas critically. Earl was six-two, perhaps one hundred and eighty pounds. He had a broad chest and wide shouders like a boxer. Next to him Baker looked like a powerful Black barrel. Football had developed Baker’s arms, neck, and chest until he resembled a tree trunk. Baker’s eyes were deep set and his nose was African flat. Earl was a bushy-browed Indian-looking man with a wide mouth and two inches of kinky hair. The MJUMBE leader rubbed his bald head thoughtfully. When football ended he would grow it again.

Sitting in the half-light of the MJUMBE meeting room, the massive strategist was slowly turning new facts over in his mind. He had been so let down by Calhoun’s disappearance that some aspects of MJUMBE’s move had slipped by unseen. Now, with time to think, new evidence was focusing on his mental screen.

First of all, Earl Thomas was going to be his pawn. He felt very good about the position the SGA president was in. It didn’t matter if the students saw Earl puttering around in connection with MJUMBE demands. They knew who the real leader was. But second and best, Calhoun didn’t know who was in charge. He would identify Earl as the leader of the detested militant faction on campus because Earl would present the demands. Earl couldn’t do anything to stop MJUMBE. The students would construe any negative move as jealousy. The deposed SGA leader would be a
Mjumbe
for MJUMBE. Pleasure at his own play on words almost capsized the chair in which Baker sat, back-tilted.

Gone was the animosity he had felt the previous April when
told that some skinny, ostrich-looking nigger from Georgia had defeated him for the SGA post. Gone was the bitter gall he tasted when told forty minutes before: ‘Mr and Mrs Calhoun returned from Norfolk, but they are attending the theater this evening. They are expected to return about ten o’clock.’ The small, wigged maid who delivered those lines had stood in the Calhoun door-way like a reject from a Steppin’ Fetchit movie wiping her greasy hands on a napkin and trying to sound like a fancy British bitch.

Baker laughed out loud. He could imagine Thomas sitting helplessly in front of him like a jackass with an Afro.

‘Did’joo, did’joo hear that bitch?’ Baker asked when he realized everyone was watching him. ‘Did’joo hear that funky-ass maid callin’ the Sutton moviehouse wit’ wall-to-wall rats a thee-ate-uh?’ He told them that because he knew what Jonesy would say if he told them why he was really laughing.

Evidently everyone had heard because a faint smile choked through their clamped mouths. They smiled because they needed to. No one really thought that it was very funny. The crooked grins bounced off the dimly pulsating light bulb and skipped nervously out through the window. The room then returned to its tomblike silence.

Baker felt grimy. Sweat had stuck his underwear to his crotch.

Jonesy was visibly worried.

Speedy Cotton and Ben King were tired and nervous. They sat directly beneath the bald, waxy wattage that illuminated itself and little else. They tried to convince themselves that the tightness in their groins came from too much beer, too much football, and too little sleep. Their eyes wandered about the room but they saw very little.

Abul Menka remained cool. It was impossible to conclude exactly what was on the man’s mind. Baker called him ‘Captain Cool.’ He sat in the corner, feet propped, smoking a cigarette. In truth, Abul Menka was very seriously thinking about cutting out. He would have been gone had he not known that
his motives would be misinterpreted. The MJUMBE men would have thought he was leaving because he was afraid of Calhoun.

‘Fuck Calhoun,’ he thought sullenly. Abul did not care if Sutton’s Head Nigger had
eight
strokes and
ten
heart attacks, outdoing all of the other university presidents who were cracking up as a result of student demands. No, Calhoun was no problem. But Abul Menka was not anxious to see Earl Thomas.

3

Earl

There were only three tenants at Mrs Gilliam’s boarding house on Pine Street. The three men lived on the second floor of the white three-story structure. It was not for lack of applicants that the third floor was empty, but because Mrs Gilliam was very particular about her roomers.

Earl had always considered himself highly fortunate when he thought about how quickly Mrs Gilliam had taken him in. At the end of the previous school year he had decided not to leave Sutton, but to take a job as a mechanic at the nearby computer factory. All at once the dormitories were closing for the summer and he was without a place to stay. It was then that he remembered Zeke, the Black handyman, who had often mentioned his room at Mrs Gilliam’s, where he also took his meals. With three days remaining before school closed Earl had gone to see her. The two of them had hit it off immediately.

Mrs Gilliam was sixty years old. A short, gray-haired, thickly built matron of a woman who had lived in Sutton for thirty years. Her husband had been a conductor on the ICC railroad, making runs from Miami to Chicago on the Seminole, when she met him. She was a waitress at a coffee shop in Kankakee, Illinois, and after having seen the big, raw-boned Black man twice a week over a six-month period, they married. The railroad rerouted Charles Gilliam soon after, and his route carried him through Sutton and other parts of southern Appomattox County in Virginia. He bought an impressive three-story frame home on Pine Street and started his family. He had been working for the line nearly twenty-six years when he died of a heart attack.

His wife, Dora, thrived on company. She was a cornerstone
at Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church and the head of her sewing circle. Soon after her husband’s death she began to take in tenants, mostly for the companionship it provided.

Earl had made Mrs Gilliam break one of her cardinal rules. She had vowed never to rent rooms to college students. For the most part she considered them to be impolite, disrespectful young men with no idea of the meaning of the word responsibility. Earl was somewhat different. In the first place he was working his way through school and intended to add his summer’s earnings to a partial scholarship. Secondly, he was as polite and mannerly a young man as Mrs Gilliam had ever met. And he had looked so let down when she told him, quite gruffly, that she didn’t rent to college students, that she had had no choice but to invite him in for a cup of coffee to better explain her position. Somehow over coffee the word ‘college’ came to mean more to her than it had meant before. It took on the meaning of her dead husband’s unfulfilled dreams. She found it very easy to overlook the fact that Earl was a student. She even rationalized her decision by pointing out the fact that he wouldn’t be a student during the summer, but when September rolled around there was no mention of Earl moving out.

As Earl combed his head of thick hair his mind ran through the maze of emotions that gripped him, identifying first one and then the other. Jealousy? Fear? Anger? Anger was the most predominant. He felt as though he had been betrayed. Not betrayed by friends, but by that insidious ‘Brother’ term. MJUMBE subjugated the entire campus into one giant malignancy and classified all constituents under the heading of ‘Brother.’ The word seemed to have less meaning every day. Long ago he had decided that he would not be a part of the group that criticized the hypocrisy without an alternative. Who was sure how it felt to be Black? Maybe running your tongue over the word ‘Brother’ a thousand times a day was a step in the right direction.

Earl felt the muscles at the hinges of his mouth tightening
to form knots of energy. He looked like a cracker ballplayer on the Baseball Game of the Week with a quarter package of Bull O’ the Woods chewing tobacco poking his mouth out a foot and nowhere to spit.

He knew he must not allow himself the luxury of rage. He knew he could never accomplish anything that way; barging into the MJUMBE meeting room and screaming, ‘Just what the fuck is everybody tryin’ to pull?’ He decided to play it New York-style. Be cool. They had him by the balls. Everybody knew that. But if he acted as though he didn’t know it or didn’t care he might be able to jive them into a mistake. Then what? He didn’t even know if he wanted them to make a mistake. He couldn’t decide which side of the fence he was on.

He thought about the election that had taken place the previous spring. When March rolled around and the first signs about nomination procedures were pinned on dormitory bulletin boards he had thought little of it. He had never run for a school office and often thought that the only reason he had been a high school basketball captain was because he was the only returning letterman his senior year. But one afternoon after a heated argument between him and his Political Science teacher he had been halted in the hall by a classmate he knew only by sight.

‘Excuse me, brother,’ the other had said. ‘My name is Roy Dean, but people here call me Lawman. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.’

‘Sure,’ Earl had replied, caught off guard. ‘I’m Earl Thomas.’

‘I know,’ Lawman said as they started walking. ‘I couldn’t help but know you after all the hell you raise in Poli Sci.’

‘The man bugs me.’

‘Me, too . . . where were you goin’? You got a class? . . . how ’bout a cup of coffee in the SUB on me?’

‘All right,’ Earl said a bit hesitantly.

‘Poli Sci is my major,’ Lawman said, going on. ‘Everybody calls me Lawman because I’m thinking seriously of going into law . . . we used to have a thing called ‘The Courtroom’ when
we were freshmen. If somebody on our wing of the dorm did something questionable, like trying to steal another cat’s woman or something like that, we would have a mock trial. I was a laywer for the defense.’

‘You win a lot of cases?’

‘It was just a joke, but I pulled a lot of fast ones on the jury. Most of law is just semantics anyway. You can say a thing one way and make it sound entirely different from the way it appears if you rearrange a few words.’

‘I guess so,’ Earl agreed.

‘But what I wanted to talk to you about was your political thing,’ Lawman continued.

‘My political thing?’ Earl laughed. ‘I don’t really guess I have one. Just trying to be Black, I guess.’

The two of them walked on toward the Student Union Building, leaving Washington Hall where liberal arts classes were taught, Carver Hall, the science building, Adler Annex, and the mini-square referred to by students as the ‘quadrangle,’ where students sat and studied and talked on the benches.

‘Sutton is fucked up,’ Lawman began as they entered the crowded Student Union Building. ‘A lotta in quotes Black schools are fucked up, but they seem to be gettin’ something done about their problems. If Sutton is doing anythin’ it’s digressin’, you know what I mean?’

Earl nodded.

‘This school was founded in eighteen eighty-three and for all intents and purposes it’s still eighteen eighty-three here, because there hasn’t been much progress.’

‘What about the things the Student Government president, Peabody, planned to do?’ Earl asked as they left the service area with their coffee.

‘Peabody ain’ nuthin’ but a lot of mouth,’ Lawman snorted. ‘What I mean is that the man is disorganized. He’s spent the whole year havin’ Calhoun twist his mind around like a rubber band . . . he goes to Calhoun and sez: “The students want this and that.” Calhoun laughs and sez: “So what?” You dig?’

Earl nodded for Lawman to continue.

‘So next month
ther’s
gonna be another Student Government election and something needs to be done . . .’

‘What are
you
planning to do?’ Earl cut in.

Lawman laughed uneasily. He wasn’t sure how to handle Earl, how to handle the question he was fed.

‘I personally can’t do very much. I can’t dedicate the kind of time you need to give to the Student Government job to run for office ’cause I have an outside job that pays for my schooling. The point of this conversation is to find whether or not you’d like to run.’

‘What?’

‘You care, don’choo?’

‘Yeah. I do, but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘But I’m a transfer student. This is just my second semester here. I don’t think I know enough about the place to . . .’

‘You mean,’ Lawman cut in, ‘that until I mentioned it you hadn’t had one thought about the kinda things that might be happ’ning if you had anything to do with it?’

‘I suppose I had some thoughts . . .’

‘What did you decide you would do?’

‘It didn’t matter since I wasn’t the president,’ Earl said.

‘Give it some thought,’ Lawman suggested. ‘You’ve got a good political mind. Anybody who can hold his own with old man Mills has to have a good political mind.’

‘What about the two guys I’ve seen listed as candidates already?’

‘Worthless,’ Lawman spat out. ‘Hall is a “egghead” dude from Boston or somewhere. He spends about thirty hours a day in the library reading Emily Dickinson and shit like that. He’s a brown-nosed jackass as far as I’m concerned. I go to the SGA meetings sometimes and see him rapping. He’s a junior class senator. Calls himself filibusterin’ when he gets up with a little Robert’s rule book on parliamentary procedure and starts hangin’ everything up with points of order . . . thass what
democracy has done for niggers. They lay in that idealistic crap all day and smell like shit all night.’

‘What about Baker, the football player? He’s runnin’.’

‘Yeah. So what? He’s a maniac as far as I’m concerned, although he’ll prob’bly win unless you or someone like you goes against him. I never heard a sound political thought come from his direction. Him and King go through political issues like they’re runnin’ an off-tackle play. Everything that they don’t like is wrong. I can’t . . .’

‘I understand,’ Earl said thoughtfully.

‘Good!’ Lawman said as he got up. ‘You give it some thought, brother, and I’ll be talkin’ to you.’

That was the beginning. Earl and Lawman talked about it again the next day. Earl admitted that he had often thought about things that would be done differently if he were president. Somehow it had never gone any further than that. Together, the two men constructed a platform for Earl to run on. Odds, Earl’s best friend, was drafted as a campaign manager. They were on their way.

The memory of all the things he had been through with Odds and Lawman brought still another question to the surface. Why hadn’t either one of them called to say anything about the meeting with MJUMBE and the students?

Earl came out of his bedroom and locked the door behind him. He checked his pocket for the keys he needed. Door key and car keys were there. It was then that his light sweater and slacks almost collided with Zeke’s khakis and T-shirt.

‘You got troubles?’ Zeke asked.

‘No,’ Earl lied. ‘Why?’

‘You in such a durn hurry yo’ leavin’ shavin’ cream stuck behin’ yo’ ear,’ Zeke pointed out.

Earl wiped at the spot and Zeke nodded.

‘Dumplin’s t’night?’ Earl asked mischievously.

‘Naw, but we’da had’um if I’da wanned ’um.’

‘Yeah. You an’ Miz G. runnin’ a game on me an’ Ol’ Hunt.’

‘Shit!’ Zeke waved. ‘Mosatime you ain’ here an’ Hunt could be eatin’ cobras an’ drinkin’ elephant piss fo’ all he know. May as well have chicken an’ dumplin’s since I lak ’um.’

‘Naw,’ Earl laughed. ‘That ain’ it. Tell me, man, whuss happ’nin’ wit’yo’ kitchen thing?’

Zeke played the game. He looked both ways down the narrow hall and then lowered his voice in a conspiratorial tone. ‘I shouldn’ be tellin’,’ he admitted, ‘but since you an’ me s’pose to be boys . . . I, uh, sneaks down to the galley wit’ Miz G. every other day o’ so an’ we gits high on Barracuda wine. Then I starts talkin’ ’bout hi’ I been all over the worl’ an’ still ain’ dug nothin that tastes as good t’me as her chicken an’ dumplin’s. Jus’ lak that they out there on the table. Same as when you talk ’bout banana puddin’.’

‘Without the Barracuda wine.’

‘Wit’out that.’

Earl laughed aloud. Zeke maintained a straight face somehow, but the thought of Mrs Gilliam drinking anything stronger than iced tea was too much for him. Zeke was notorious for drinking anything that could be classified as liquid and Earl had often met the handyman at O’Jay’s, a local bar, but Mrs Gilliam? A pillar of Mt Moriah? Sacrilege!

‘We love dem grapes!’ Zeke said as Earl scurried down the stairs.

‘Right!’

Zeke was a good man as far as Earl was concerned. The older man had never had a family or a real home until Mrs Gilliam had started renting rooms. There was nothing that could be described as his real profession either. He mowed lawns or shoveled snow or worked on cars at Ike’s garage and come the first of every month he always had his rent money and he rarely missed a night at O’Jay’s. At forty-five he was a slightly built, balding man with a coffee complexion and a contagious sense of humor.

Mrs Gilliam was stirring the evening stew when Earl rushed
through the kitchen with a quick ‘Good evening.’ He was halfway to the back door when she stopped him.

‘Where might you think you goin’ this evenin’ befo’ you eat yo’ dinner?’ she asked indignantly.

‘I got a meetin’ to go to,’ he said. ‘It jus’ came up.’

Mrs Gilliam looked at him fondly for a second. With purpose she clamped the lid down on the stew pot and wiped her hands on the red trim apron. She took Earl by the arm and led him to the kitchen table where she sat him down.

‘Let me tell you something,’ she began. ‘I’ve been in Sutton a long time. A long time to realize certain things. When I got here Sutton University was sittin’ right where it is today. My husban’ went to Sutton fo’ a year at night . . . why you runnin’ yo’sef into a fit fo’ them? They ain’ never been organized. Why you think you got to do so much to organize ’um? Why you got to be there every blessed minnit? No, I take that back. You ain’ over there half as much as my daughter was. Laurie was there all day an’ wuzn’ no studen’ . . . how she got away wit’out havin’ one a them men’s babies is still beyon’ me. Go on, chile, do what you think you got to do.’