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“A Perfect Day for Banana Soda”

The Beggar finds God and gives chase…

1

“In your light, everything is right!”

A little food for thought:
all Marcel hoped for walking into the Marketplace that day
—carrying nothing but a pocketful of revolutionary rhetoric.
Adults who avoided him like a leper
broke ice around fiery oration,
amused how this child albino’s mouth could spit forth words too big for their understanding.
Today, however, the sun in the cloudless noon sky was the only oppressor
in the vicinity worth cursing out.
“Where are these chains, boy?” The street vendor asks, holding out naked wrists.
“Where are these masters? Shoo! You’ll disturb paying customers!”
Sapodillas and breadfruit rot
unmolested by human hands
—perhaps the flies paid their francs sight unseen
and were entitled to their over-ripeness more than he.
The boy’s fruitless harangue persists:
“We, as inheritors of the black struggle…”

Meanwhile: a flying carpet circles the perimeter never breaking its tight orbit
around the last standing mosque.
The Beggar used to travel
across the entire city performing his Whirling Meditations.
Kicking up remembrance of Allah like dust
the new-styled secularists of today inevitably sneezed at.
Whatever their verdict (saint or madman) old bones served as bars to the corporeal prison
innocent and guilty alike are condemned to serve time in
—rendering his decision to sew his prayer rug into a djellaba-tunic and turn himself
into a portable PrayStation a fashion statement hardly worth skirting around blasphemy over.
Lone thought rattling his brain-cage:
“Prayer was action. God could be found anywhere. The devout shouldn’t need a compass.”
Thirsty, The Beggar achieves escape velocity
heading toward the Marketplace to seek a banana soda.

“Kids these days!” An adult grunts, “Talking down to us like he’s grown!
I’d say beat him until the white meat shows but looks like his mama already tried that!”

Laughter grabs The Beggar by the ears turning his head to
a crowd gathering to mock an albino child.
His eyes wetten locking with the boy’s,
drowned in recognition
Animal stares crossing endless sea
The Beggar crawls on all fours!

Marcel hasn’t yet grown to adore
Baba Ibrahim. Every vein in his seven year old body boils over, throbbing hot-blooded humiliation.
Standing stupidly. Watching a sick-minded transient crumpled on his knees before him. Trembling: “Mashallah! Mashallah!” Anointing bare feet
—which it must be said were in far greater need of cocoa butter than slobbering adoration
—with kisses. Living punchline to the crowd’s jeering question:
“You ever seen a black boy blush!?”

Words escape a mouth faster than cowardice can bite the tongue they slide off of. Renewed purpose birthing a dragon in his gut, agitated out of a decades long slumber.
“Fatherless fools!” it bellows breathing fire and brimstone into the crowd, “Do you not recognize our ancestors!? Who offer themselves as blank canvas—weaved by every member of our race raised on cotton fields from conception ’til death—upon which we can paint our own future! Our own light! Who will guide our living and our dead both across Night’s Savannah! Call him by his name!
Dam—”

Alas! The ancestors fled this Marketplace while Ibrahim’s back was turned.
Only cackling jackals remain; bellies overfull
with victories won by those who came before them.
Truth was wasted on these penny-pinching pickpockets
Bleeding a wise man of all good sense without spending any of it toward their own benefit. No.
A serpent’s venom kills long after white fangs have been removed. These civilized
nègroes were already delirious in their lethargy allowing cruelty to set in further. Too far removed from any remedy of days past.

If you wanted to follow God,
talk wouldn’t cut it;
you had to pray with your feet.

2

“Even Gods get turned around traversing The Deep Dark”

Lantern inches in front of his nose, The Beggar could stir ancestral fears
of Obayifa—the dreaded firefly vampires of his native Yorubaland—even in religionless passersby wandering that night.

Streetlights a distant memory.
Main roads avoided lest one fall
victim to robbers. Few trees stand to obstruct his vision
in what used to be a forest outside the city.
Judicious government, wielding Lafcadio Mining and Logging Company as its machete, cleared a path for The Beggar over a century ago.
A continent still dripping revolutionary blood footed the bill (principal and interest) for its freedom after colonizing forces died-and-dashed.
All it cost was a hundred years worth of exported timber.

The Beggar listens to the sound of the river
less-than-certain he’s interpreting the babbling brook
southward.

Some time around 8 or 9 in the morning, a terracotta compound covered in immobile pinwheels greets our weary traveler.
The Beggar finds himself climbing uphill
loudly damning arthritis to the farthest depths.
A pair of adolescent girls ditch jump ropes twirled double-dutch in order to run inside. The Nun,
kindly and handsome enough in her habit,
leads The Beggar into the mess hall. Albino orphans line both sides of a long plastic table;
half of them slurp up Espaghetti with slices of hot dog
the other half fussily poke mashed corn with their forks.
Ghost children. Silly superstitions over “bad omens” clung to cosmopolitan nègroes even after European Enlightenment had cast out lords and Lord.
Bah! Beautiful pale black faces all!
Okay—two or three children, The Nun doubly reassures The Beggar while he licks the bottom of his porridge bowl, were instead blessed with ‘personality and strong character’.
“Marcel? He wandered off the week before last. Clamoring on about ‘word’ needing to be carried down to the ‘petty bougie’. He hasn’t returned this time but I can show you his room.”

A twin-size mattress
and unfurled white sheet lie on the dirt floor next to little brown sandals
nursing a broken strap.
Bookshelves—splintered and sagging
beneath the weight of Great Men ranging from a couple of old billy goats
Plato and Marx
to venerable Brothers Rodney, DuBois, Fanon, and even Malcolm by way of Haley—surround it on three sides.
Any scholar of unsung history would feel exaltation akin to Ptolemy wandering his Library of Alexander.
Cradling a leather-bound volume by a brother unknown to him titled The African Origin of Civilization: From Kings to Slaves to Kings Again, The Beggar shakes his head:
Tsk. Tsk. I must introduce the boy to the second sex. Sisters Davis, hooks, and Kincaid to start, perhaps. 7 can never be achieved by 4 alone—
A comic strip flutters from inside the textbook
a butterfly shedding its cocoon.
Benny Breakiron—another blonde-haired boy
of unrecognized strength hoisting his vanquished villains overhead—
#1

…boy…

“What an ass I’ve been!” The Beggar realizes with a slap of the forehead. “Saul in Damascus could just as easily have fallen off me! My being blinded by the light as performatively as that pious Pharisee…”

Never a rain priest according to bloodline,
the ruby-red kola nut adorning a divination chain around his neck
possessed enough blood to afford The Beggar great prescience. Greater, even,
than a few of his kinfolk to whom gifts of future-sight was birthright.
Foresight comes with its own pitfalls,
however. A foolish psychic wandering the desert perishes attempting to bask in the shade of an acorn-not-yet-grown.
Whatever destiny The Beggar saw in the boy, a child simply wants to be acknowledged
for who they are in the here-and-now. Neither Holy Ghost nor ghost child.

…boy…

Eagerly seeking approval from his elders over his first taste of true knowledge.
Instead, hot coals had been heaped on the poor lad’s head by disgraceful crowd and flagrant philosopher alike.

The Beggar makes the return trip to the abandoned mosque with his own head hanging in shame, not arriving until a little after the following dawn.

At the entrance, Marcel waits.
A stone gargoyle stooped in wait atop mosque steps.
Cold to touch, reason, and any such efforts at soothing.
Meeting the boy half way, The Beggar speaks:

“I’m sorry.”

A brick falls from a pale fist echoing against the cobblestone underneath pale feet.
Marcel no longer wonders whether the old man’s leather bag skin will bleed
 all over
or split apart dry like a sun-cured tobacco leaf.

They’ve laid down this first stone together. The roads left in Marcel’s wake will require countless more.
“No hard feelings, little one,” The Beggar smiles, “Would you like to get out of this sun while I run to the Marketplace? Today looks like it’ll be a perfect day for banana soda.”