The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man (7 page)

“That we need the present system.”

“That's not what I said, I said we need the political parties we got, even if ain't too much difference 'tween 'em.”

“That's what I'm talkin' about, the Democrats and the Republicans represent the present system, and the present system stinks.” The words snapped out with a little more force than she had intended, causing her father to stare at her for a hard five seconds. “O.k.,” she continued, a bit more mildly, “let me put it this way, for a few hundred years now, the people who run this country, the rich people, meanin' the white folks, have tried to convince all the rest of us that all we had to do, in order to change things was to vote for the Republicans if you didn't like the way things were goin', or the Democrats, whichever one was in power at the moment.”

“I been a Democrat for twenny years,” Father Franklin shot in, not exactly delighted to hear his daughter run down the America he had voted for.

“But,” Lubertha continued earnestly, “what they didn't tell us, the lil' po' dumb believers, is that the money people run both parties, and when it gets to a point of makin' a decision about whether we're goin' to have good government or dirty money, it'll be dirty money every time.”

Ed Franklin fished a pack of cigarettes out of his robe pocket, lit up and looked at Lubertha with a deep frown.

“Hold on now, you done lost me somewhere … and I don't mean about the money part; I know, for a fact that all them slimy politicians got they hands in the kitty but I'm still sayin' that this system is still the best.”

Lubertha rode past her father, knowing that she would get bogged down if she allowed him to deviate too much. “Daddy, let's just stay with the money part for a minute 'cause that's really what it's all about. Those names they've stuck on these so-called political parties don't really count. For all we know, a couple billionaires in Argentina or somewhere may have gotten together with a couple billionaires in the U.S. of A. to decide who was gonna be president for the next four years, or vice versa.…”

“Ain't you forgettin' somethin'?” he asked sarcastically, certain that he had a nail for her.

“What's that?”

“What about the people? You forget, we vote whoever we want into office even in Miss'ssippi nowadays.”

Lubertha gulped her beer and almost choked on it in her hurry to reply. “I disagree, Daddy. We
think
we vote whoever we want into office. In this day 'n age, television, meanin' Big Money, makes the vote happen for whoever Big Money is behind.”

Ed Franklin smiled at his daughter's logic, liking and disliking her opposition. “Hmf! Sho' is cold, daughter. Sho' is cold. To let you tell it, the American voter ain't got a leg to stand on.”

“It may sound cold, but facts are colder still. If the American voter had a leg to stand on, things wouldn't be in the messed up shape they're in now.”

He shook his head slowly, picked up his can and drained it, thinking hard. “Awright, things ain't as good as they could be, but we still got it better than most other folks in the world.”

“The reason why,” she answered promptly, “is because we've no, no, I can't say
we
, lets say
they've
exploited, cheated, conned, warred and ripped off all the rest of the world for as long as they've been in power, the only things we've received have been the leftovers, the crumbs from the ripoffs and you can bet your bottom dollar that if they had a way of keeping the crumbs away from us, they would've done it a long time ago.”

“These billionaires you talkin' about?”

“Uh huh, one 'n the same, some of 'em have English names, Spanish, Greek, Indian, German, Arabic, Jewish a lot of 'em have Japanese names these days. The point is, when they link up to exploit, their names are all the same, Exploitation.”

Ed Franklin shrugged away the wild urge to snatch his daughter across the table, pull her across his knees and spank her. “Awright! awright! money rules! the rich run every damned thing and all the rest of us fools is just runnin' 'round tryin' to survive. Awright! I'll go for it. Now lemme ask you this, since you seem to have all the answers. What other way could thangs be? And how you gonna get 'em that way?”

Lubertha shook the dregs of her can down her throat, a warm, deliberate calm settling over her. What other way, and how? “Let me put it a couple ways, Daddy. Number one, I think we ought to change the jive political system that doesn't guarantee the best standard of life possible for all the people.”

“Nawww, no m'am, you ain't gon' take me all over the world, I'm just dealin' with the U-nited States, let's just stay up in here for awhile.”

She listened to his slight slurring carefully, aware that she would have to be a little more diplomatic now, knowing from past experience how easily his aggression was set off by her theories.

“O.k., just in America, hugh?”

“Thasss right, just in America!”

“Well,” she started in again, the brew and her thoughts swirling around, “I don't wanna get placed in a position of havin' to say that this should be done before that, or vice versa.”

Ed Franklin, up to pull the last two brews out of the box, spoke over his shoulder. “I don't give a damn what order you put 'em in, just lay it out for me. You always talkin' 'bout changes 'n revolutions 'n whatnot, well, here's your chance! Run it out for me.”

Lubertha accepted another can, took a deep sip. “Well, to begin with, the best thing we could do to start off with is to equalize things make certain that there were no outrageously rich people or outrageously poor people.”

“Oh, you talkin' about communism then!” he announced smugly.

“No, not really,” she answered, her mind wandering. “That's the trouble with how we get hung up between semantics and concepts. The concept of everybody havin' enough to eat, a decent place to stay and good clothes to wear doesn't mean communism. What I'm talkin' about has to do with the people being granted the human right to live like human beings, minus all the fake hustle and drummed up drama that the people who control things lay on us.”

She paused for a long sip, into it now. “I mean, look at it this way, Daddy this country is too rich for anyone to be poor in it. It just doesn't make sense. Like, is it really necessary for some ol' dude to be livin' in a fifty room house, just because he manages to cheat somebody out of a million bucks a year?

“O.K., startin' with the wealth factor, spread that all the way out, that way you wouldn't have Big Money runnin' the political setup. It might mean that the best man could be found for the job of runnin' the country, or the county, or the city or whatever, rather than the one who has the most oil money behind him.

“I could stay for a long time on the money thing because that's what messes up a lot of other things here.

“But it's so tied in with the racism thang that you really can't separate the two. The white people who run this place, the altogether racists, not the All in the Family racists, have such a vested interest in institutional racism that they are even thinkin' of, if not actually callin' their own children niggers, not in the sense that they called us niggers, but in a different kind of way, simply because their children don't want to be oppressors like their mothers 'n fathers have been.”

Ed took a long pull on his beer, eyes shining, waiting for a mistake to happen that he could figure out.

“So, along with equalizin' things on the economic front, we should have a complete overthrow of the racial scheme of things, and I
ain't
talkin' about integration either. I think it would be stupid to try to legislate social habits. What we should have is a system that guarantees, absolutely
guarantees
the best woman or man the opportunity to do meaningful work, for a
living
wage; regardless of race.

“That would settle a bunch of problems, if we could solve the white racial problem. I know we can't solve it by killin' all the white folks.”

Lubertha stopped, her heart pumping faster. “Kwendi says that we ought to put groups of the best so-called minority group minds in Think-Do-Tanks for a month, dealin' with each one of the problems we have here.”

“Minority group minds?” Father Franklin asked, slightly worn down.

“Uh huh, his thing is that the so-called majority group mind, the white mind, has so completely messed itself around that it will never be straightened out enough to deal with the problems they've created. If they'd been able to, once again, things wouldn't be in the state they're in today.”

“So, you sayin', you 'n Kwendi 'n him, that Negroes gon' solve the country's problems, huh?”

“Right on! Chicanos, Indians, Asians, Blacks, us!” Lubertha's intensity took her voice almost to the Club meeting level. Her father stared at her as though he were seeing his daughter for the first time.

Mrs. Franklin shuffled into the kitchen, yawning, wandered past them sitting at the table like a sleepwalker and poured herself a glass of water from the cold water jug in the refrigerator. “You two gon' sit up here boozin' 'n flappin' your jaws all night?” she asked, almost as an afterthought, as she shuffled back to bed.

Father and daughter burst into broad grins as they watched her shambling departure.

“Momma's got a point, we both gotta get up tomorrow.”

“Yeahhh,” Ed Franklin agreed sourly, crushing his beer can in his paw. “But we ain't got to the end o' this,” he reminded his daughter.

“By no means!” she agreed, as she clicked off the kitchen light, the last one out, and headed wearily for her bedroom.

Chapter 3

Ways of Making Bread

Arnold C., for Charles Mack, but better known as “Chili” to the dudes he had played high school basketball with, sprawled out in his king-sized bed, scratching his crotch with his left hand and reaching for the half smoked joint in the swan-shaped ashtray bedside, a token of last night's doin's, with the other hand.

He lit the roach and took a deep hit. Wednesday, 12:15, what tune was she supposed to show up? 1:00 yawwwnnn, guess I better get up and freshen my ass up a lil' taste.

He slowly, reluctantly lowered his feet onto the pile carpet, sat on the side of the bed finishing off the dope and looked around his bedroom. Nice, nice, he thought, checking out the plushness of the deep red, charcoal black and velvet green of the interior.

Yeahhhh, really nice a helluva long way from 42nd and Bowen Avenue, that's for damned sho'!

He burned his right thumb and forefinger slightly on the roach, dropped it in the ashtray and stood up to stretch his lean, even planed six-foot frame, loaded again.

Shit, shower 'n shave. He strolled out of the bedroom heading for his modern gadgeted kitchen, pausing in the living room to open the drapes, to check out what the day was like. Brisk, wind sweeping in from the lake right around the corner, the Northside, only ten niggers in the whole block and three of them hooked up with white broads.

Chili stood straddle-legged, both hands on his slender hips, looking down at the dull, blue-gray streets uhhh huhhh … he looked up from under his lids slyly, pinning the two women's faces leering at him from the apartment across the street. Uhhh huhhh, that's right, he nodded to them, what you see is what you get.

They stared boldly at each other for a minute and then pretended that each one's attention was drawn to something else.

Chili slid away from the slit in the drapes, tired of the game, remembering that he wanted a snack.

Bitches! Jive bitches! he muttered, jerking the refrigerator door open.

How long had it been going on? he reflected, the standing-in-the-window-for-the-airline-stewardesses-naked-thing.

Just after I got in here, he answered his thought, pulling out a box of chocolate chip cookies and a wedge of gruyere six, no, eight months of me exposing my dick to them crazy bitches, guess I'll hold off for another month and then gon' on over there and fuck everybody in the house, one by one.

The thought caused him to have a semi-erection.

Cynthia! damn!

He snatched a couple cookies from the box and dropped the rest on the kitchen table, rushing to shower and shave, to be smelling good when his main lady, his banker, showed. A leisurely, warm, needle prick shower, a smooth, close shave, a dash of Canoe and the short trip back to the sack for another joint, a full length tuskie this time.

He carefully arranged himself on top of the covers in his midnight blue, three-quarter length robe, head getting lighter with each hit.

Damnit! he jerked himself into a sitting position, hopped off the bed mumbling, puffing furiously on the half-smoked joint as he hurried into the living room to put some music on. Leaning over his record racks, he tried to figure out what his mood for music was something swift by Hubert Laws? Some funky 'Trane? Miles' New Directions? A lil' of the Latin scene with Armando and Mongo? What?

The cold hands over his eyes frightened him so badly for a second that he almost screamed. He recovered quickly, stood up slowly to get his nerves together and turned to face Cynthia Moore, the current sponsor of his lifestyle.

“Cynthia,” he gritted his teeth and tried to look down in her face as meanly as possible, “I'm gon' kick your ass one o' these days, doin' that kinda shit to me.”

“Scare you?” she asked gaily, pecking him on the chin and tossing her full-length baby calfskin across a nearby chair.

He looked at her tripping around the room, lighting a cigarette, tossing her ash blond, shoulder-length locks over her shoulder, Clairol style.

“Nawww, you didn't scare me, you damned near froze me to death with your cold ass hands,” he answered finally, turning away from the sparkling blue eyes, the fading Florida tan, the Norwegian turtleneck and the tailored slacks, to put some music on. He thumbed through the records, feeling, as usual, vaguely irritated that she had a key, a right she insisted on, under the circumstances.