O, Africa! Read online

  “Our first order of business,” he says, staring hard at Early as he smashes the bulb underfoot, making a crunchy sound like mashing fistfuls of shredded wheat. “Mazel tov to your sister on her wedding. I hope Rose and her barber friend had a swell day.”

  Faces look to Micah, awaiting instruction. He had decided on the walk back to the hut that he wouldn’t try competing with King Mishi in the theoretical department but would instead call upon the organizational component of his talent, the compulsive jigsaw-puzzle-solving and model-airplane-building part of his professional brain. “Gentlemen, I’d like to remind you before we begin that between the years 1908 and 1912, D. W. Griffith made four hundred pictures. Now, we’ve got a light job of it by comparison, but still we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Micah says as Izzy distributes mimeographed lists of assignments, random script pages, and a catalog of shot lists from other directors’ pictures, a dozen or so films that include the next installment of Numa Pictures’ Tarzan serial, an agrarian drama from MGM called His Daily Bread, and a Fox kids’ film called Mr. Maslansky’s Animal Menagerie. “Izzy, I’m putting you and Early in charge of the B-roll project. As many apples as you can pick.”

  “Done,” arrives the answer with military efficiency, his brother a lesser officer on a frozen Russian field.

  “Good. Arthur’s committed to these licensing agreements, and I’d like to help preserve the man’s half-good name.”

  Rumor of the seriousness of Marblestone’s illness had come to Micah just days before they’d shipped out. News of the whispered, initialed disease that, like the holy deity, was too terrible to be invoked by name, the great- and many-souled macher said to be diminishing by the day, melting away like a snowman under an August sun.

  Barely twenty Micah had been when he first showed up at the Vitagraph lot, a kid with a notebook filled with sketches, a motor mouth, and a face still full of freckles whom Marblestone somehow trusted to put in the director’s chair. “This kid know what he’s talking about?” the classically trained actor asked Marblestone, who searched the postadolescent’s face for glimmers of princeliness, stirrings that corresponded with the producer’s own kingly self-conception. “Yeah,” Marblestone said, “I think he does.”

  “Till,” Micah says, turning his attention to the pale-faced star, who had not been holding up well since the company decamped from Congo, his chalky complexion now attributable less to pancake makeup than to some creeping intestinal ailment, “you heard it from Mtabi—it’s your coattails we’ve flown in on. I figure we can shoot about half of Pot of Trouble here on location, but we need you in fighting trim. Can I count on you to deliver the funny?”

  “There’s a little thing us Protestants refer to as a work ethic.”

  “Good. Spiro?”

  “Aye, aye,” says the bare-chested assistant, picking threads of citrus from his teeth with a scimitar.

  “Get the lay of the land, see which villagers have star quality. Bring me back some faces.”

  “Arrrrgh,” answers Spiro, headed for the exit with the blade between clenched teeth.

  “Not their heads, dwarf, faces! Faces! Now, before we retire for the evening, gentlemen, there’s one last thing to discuss.” A new tone enters Micah’s voice, a syrupy quality that’s equal parts soothing and medicinally insistent. He addresses them now not as a friend or a colleague or a fellow artist-laborer-in-arms but in the tones of a bank president looking over a balance sheet. It’s the voice of political candidates and captains of industry, the distinctly American voice of a man who, through force of will and self-invention, could double assembly-line productivity, get girders strung up over a cityscape, coax a desert derrick to erupt in tar. “There’s another project we’ve committed ourselves to in Africa,” Micah says as Izzy begins distributing among the men crinkly onionskin mimeographs of Bumpy’s film treatment.* “I’d like each of you to review those pages in your quarters tonight. More than gathering Marblestone’s B-roll, more than Pot of Trouble, that scenario you hold in your hands is the reason we’re here.”

  *

  “O, AFRICA!”

  A Historical-Tragical Motion Picture Scenario in Four Parts

  by

  Byron Marcus Waldo Ellsworth Raymond Johnson & Isidor Grand

  PART I: THE OLD WORLD

  A montage history of slavery through olden times.

  The HEBREWS of Egypt being worked to death in the Sinai copper mines. Siberian SERFS toiling in the hard Russian soil. VEILED FEMALES of the camel lands being sold into amorous bondage. An image of the globe in chains.

  ZOOM IN: The Western Coast of Africa. Circles identify the Slave Coast countries: Senegal, Sierra Leone, Congo, Angola, Dahomey, Western Nigeria.

  CLOSE-UP: A polished black boot sinks into fertile soil.

  FADE IN: A peaceful village. Women at work in the fields. Men with spears hunting game. Naked-bellied children playing. Huts dotting the landscape like Morse code.

  CLOSE-UP: A musket fires.

  Scores of tribespeople set running in every direction. Images of white-uniformed soldiers rounding up the villagers. A row of Africans standing in the sunlight shackled in dungeon chains, each of their faces a portrait of grief. A demonically laughing soldier lighting a thatched hut on fire as a family crawls out of their domicile on their bellies. In the distance, the village in flames, swirls of smoke blacking out the scene.

  FADE IN: Ships leaving port. Below, the cargo hold. In the dark, MEN and WOMEN in heavy shackles, packed tight as matchsticks. The ship rocks. Pools of blood and human waste slide across the floor.

  TITLE: “From 1500 to 1850, Ten Million Men, Women, and Children Transported Across the Atlantic.”

  Belowdecks, the strongest of the SLAVES manages to pick the lock of his chains and break free from his bonds.

  TITLE: “But Not Without a Fight!”

  The slave creeps up onto the deck, sneaks up behind the ship’s CAPTAIN, and drives a nail into his neck.

  TITLE: “More Than 250 Shipboard Rebellions Occurred During the Crossings.”

  The slave throws the officer’s body overboard and raises his arms above his head, triumphant.

  TITLE: “But This Is an Exception to the Rule.”

  FADE IN: 1619. Jamestown, Virginia. NATIVES dropped off by DUTCH TRADERS. Slaves working in tobacco and cotton fields. A heartbreaking wilderness sunset, the land still radiant and new.

  FADE OUT.

  PART II: THE NEW WORLD

  FADE IN: 1776. WIG MEN signing the Declaration of Independence.

  TITLE: “We Hold These Truths to Be self-Evident, That All Men Are Created Equal.”

  FADE IN: The auction block. The beam and the post. The lash raised high. Families torn asunder. Husbands taken from their wives. Babies pulled from their mothers’ breasts.

  Slaves picking cotton in the fields. Lighter-skinned blacks, respectably clothed, up at the house fetching pitchers of lemonade, slaves singing and dancing to religious spirituals in “hush harbors.”

  A SLAVE teaching a group of children how to read and write using a stick to draw the letters of the alphabet in the earth. He is discovered by his MASTER.

  CLOSE-UP: The slave at the whipping post. CROWDs jeering. The slave’s FAMILY weeping. He exposes his broad, naked back, welts risen thick and crosshatched.

  TITLE: “The Civil War, 1861–1865”

  A montage of battles from the War Between the states. Weary soldiers and the battlefield dead, corpses stacked by the uncounted hundreds. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in stovepipe hat, delivering the Gettysburg Address.

  TITLE: “We Here Highly Resolve That These Dead shall Not Have Died in Vain—That This Nation, Under God, shall Have a New Birth of Freedom—and That Government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall Not Perish From the Earth.”

  FADE OUT.

  PART III: MAGIC AND DUST

  FADE IN: On a Mississippi plantation, SORI, a young African boy, is maimed by his master, MR. WILLIAMS.

  A serie
s of DISSOLVES takes us through the generations as SORI’s son, WALTER, a sharecropper, works the fields following Emancipation, Sori’s grandson, JACKSON, the spitting image of his grandfather (to be played by the same actor), heads up north.

  TITLE: “Harlem, 1928”

  FADE IN: A montage of Jackson working a moonshine operation out of a nightclub on 137th street. A Robin Hood figure, Jackson takes from the rich and gives to the poor; here he is dressed as santa Claus handing out books and Christmas presents to children at an orphanage.

  FADE OUT.

  FADE IN: The back of a pickup truck winding its way down a dusty road. Jackson, dressed in a black suit and tie, approaches a deserted plantation at dusk.

  Jackson discovers OLD MAN MR. WILLIAMs, drunk and asleep in a rocking chair on the front porch. Jackson approaches silently, standing over the unconscious figure, he taps the man on the cheek.

  TITLE: “You Old Man Williams?”

  The man stirs awake, too drunk to understand.

  TITLE: “Who Are You?”

  Jackson leans in toward the man’s ear.

  TITLE: “I said, Who the Hell Are You?!”

  Leaning closer.

  TITLE: “My Name Is …”

  Close enough to inhale the man’s breath …

  TITLE: “Get Off My Property, Nigger!”

  TITLE: “My Name Is Jackson Sori!”

  Jackson jams a blade into the man’s overstuffed belly and lifts, lifts, lifts, rising all the way to the neck, gutting him like a fish. Dead. Dead. Dead.

  A series of dissolves follow Jackson’s pantherlike movements around the property as he plants explosives on the porch, in the stables, in the dining room, in the cellar.

  CLOSE-UP: Jackson lighting a stick of dynamite the size, shape, and color of a Coney Island hot dog.

  CUT TO: The Williams plantation engulfed in fire and brimstone, whirlpools of black smoke filling the southern sky.

  FADE OUT.

  PART IV: HOME

  FADE IN: Jackson in his office, his violence appeased. Meanwhile, out in the streets, the ghetto is inflamed. One of Jackson’s LIEUTENANTs, hopping mad.

  TITLE: “Police Killed One of Our Own! Jackson, What Are You Going to Do?”

  JACKSON THOUGHT BUBBLE: THE HEBREW PEOPLE being led by MOSES across the desert to the Promised Land. From high atop Mount Pisgah, the prophet espies Zion, but he is denied entry.

  CUT TO: An ARMY of angry young men taking to the streets of

  Harlem. Jackson addresses the CROWD in statesmanlike tones as the film bursts into sound.

  JACKSON: Brothers and sisters! We must neither return to Africa nor endorse violent uprising. Instead the time has come for us to awake from the nightmare of history. The hour has arrived for us to honor Lincoln and to ensure that our second American Revolution was not fought in vain but might truly be won at last. Though our ancestors arrived in chains, we must now break free from the bondage that confines us all.

  Images of a black-and-white fraternity of MEN and WOMEN: candlelight vigils at the footsteps of the Lincoln Memorial, SCHOOLCHILDREN learning together in rural red schoolhouses, WHITE FOREMEN shaking hands with BLACK WORKERS on the assembly line, integrated military PLATOONS marching in formation, BLACK DAY LABORERS being served at integrated diner counters.

  CUT TO: An unnamed northern city. YOUNG PEOPLE of mixed races at a music hall, the trepidation on display more a product of natural adolescent shyness than of learned prejudice.

  A blues record plays as a BLACK BOY crosses the space and offers his hand to a WHITE GIRL. She takes it. He leads her onto the dance floor. He pulls the girl in tight. she leans in. There is heat rising between them. They dance, their bodies responding to each other with grace and instinct. With grace and instinct, too, the boy screws up his courage, leans in, and the two lock together in …

  IRIS SHOT

  … an interracial kiss.

  THE END.

  FOUR

  Among the many sights Izzy was encountering here that he had never seen before: a collection of uncircumcised dicks, the rope’s length and earthworm-shaped tips of these easygoing organs forcing upon Izzy mental comparisons with his own cold and vulnerable mushroom cap. As the village men go about their work unashamed, Izzy wonders if the Bowery bathhouses are at all like this: venues for nudity untrammeled and unashamed. As he did when present at Marblestone’s Christmas Eve orgies, Izzy finds himself at a painful remove, an observer rather than a participant, comically overdressed in the African sunshine amid a riot of mass nudity, walking around in the steam heat buttoned up in his three-piece wool suit while everyone else in the crew dons cotton T-shirts and khakis rolled up to the knee. “I’m much more comfortable this way,” Izzy explains to no one in particular. “Added layers act as a natural coolant.”

  Chief among the things Izzy busied insulating himself against was Cri, the nineteen-year-old prince widely acknowledged as the favorite of King Mishi’s many children, who had, since the production team’s arrival, made himself something of a group mascot. At first they mistook for a naïf the slender youth puppydoggishly trailing along beside them. It was only once they returned to the brothers’ hut on the second night and the prince insisted on crossing the threshold and attending the production meeting that they understood that his presence had a more formal component. This was the prince’s first exposure to a world beyond the Malwiki. Ushering the company around the village grounds, sitting in on their planning sessions, directing the camera crews toward prime spots of flora and fauna, then reporting everything back to his father’s aide, Talli, all this constituted the prince’s first diplomatic mission.

  In the same way a newborn’s parents might stare for hours in amazement at the working parts of an infant’s eyes, nose, and mouth, so Izzy was entranced by the transparency of Cri’s face. The revelation surprised Izzy, who made a living appraising faces, envisioning how they would look made gigantic, how light might flatter their planes and folds. Regarding the boy and taking in the simple, elemental fact of his features—the functional brilliance of their hardware—Izzy considered the relationship he had to his own plain but not unhandsome visage. There was the purely mechanical work, his daily caretaker’s rounds—meadows to shear, hedges to brush, weeds to pluck, grouting work to be done on orthodontic stones. But there was also his philosopher’s investigation of it: his face as a field of inquiry and interrogation, the question that he posed to the world. A burden he lived behind—something to puzzle and fret over, a screen to monitor for signs of aging and ill humor, a mask he met in mirrors upon which he could try on expressions or attempt to rid of emotion entirely—rarely was Izzy’s face ever something that simply was.

  Cri, on the other hand, carried with him the terrifying lack of self-consciousness of the very young or the very old. Picking up and putting down various foreign mechanical objects, Cri’s teacup fingers moved only slightly, like those of an expert typist, suggesting his father’s deliberate conservation of movement to which the prince added grace notes of childlike glee and discovery. When he took delight in something, Cri smiled; when unhappy, the prince frowned; when bored, he quit the scene. The outer and inner man in him very much in harmony, Cri had yet to learn his father’s skills of political calculation and withholding.

  Making introductions the first day of filming, Mtabi informs the group that the prince’s name is derived from the king of Christianity, a philosopher and poetic genius whom King Mishi greatly admired. In recognition of this tribute, the boy had stamped across his right shoulder a three-inch-long cross, a sluglike keloid scar prominently knitted upon the boy’s plum-black skin.

  “Praise be,” says Castor, who upon seeing the tattoo pulls a simple wooden cross and some scuffed rosary beads from the satchel around his waist.

  “I didn’t know you were practicing,” says Micah, in opaque sunglasses.

  “Didn’t know what’d we’d come up against out here,” Castor answers. “Like this lunatic script you’ve decided to sp
ring on us.”

  Their work has begun. The Grand brothers have never shot documentary films before, so they decide to spend the first few days simply following the Malwiki at work and play, allowing the villagers to acclimate to the presence of the camera and to the phantoms following their steps like a corps of servants. In addition to helping them get their bearings while building up the vault of B-roll, the group agrees that easing into the life schedule of the village would allow them to discover promising situations into which they could drop their comic star.

  True to form, Pot of Trouble has no script, just a handful of gags they’re still working out. The basic premise: While on safari, Till’s character—a novice traveler who fancies himself a great adventurer—is accidentally separated from his fiancée and their traveling party and quickly runs out of food and water. Wandering from tribe to tribe searching for nourishment, our hero lands in every kind of jungle bungle imaginable—shrunken heads, poison darts, quicksand, Pygmy warriors (a supporting role for Spiro!)—eventually ending in a boiling pot of jungle broth, becoming the very meal he sought.

  A gag is developed for Till. That morning the crew watched four tribesmen begin construction on a six-foot-tall retaining wall; by midafternoon one pair is left to finish the cementing work. Dressed as an explorer from colonial days, the Till adventurer character will come along and try to help but soon lose all his gear in the drying earth-dung construction.

  Izzy frames an establishing shot, Early clacks the clapboard, and Till approaches the work site from stage right as the tribesmen continue hoisting fistfuls of wet earth and pressing them into the wall. Their backs to the movie star, the tribesmen are oblivious to Till, ignoring the actor completely.