Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“Hey buddy, take some of these, and be careful parking around here, if you know what I mean.” He winks, because he must think I’m white. He hands me a stack of fliers. Not printed, mimeographed — I can still smell the ink. Rest For The Raped , it says, with a crude illustration of a crying white woman, with wings. I get as far as the sentence, In 1954, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Agnes Goines was raped and murdered by black man Charles Jefferson, yet her spirit may… and then I throw it on the floor of the passenger seat, where hopefully it can later get stepped on.

When I ride up to my father’s driveway in the Bug, I know this will be the last time. I see that damned house up there on the hill, watching the circus on its lawn. If it had a memory, it would think back to the time Washington’s Continental Army did the same, and how far it had come, just by staying in the same place. It must be tired. It must be ready to go. It has reached the completion of its circle.

The Bug is barely through the gate when I’m stopped by Spider. He comes up to the side of my window and asks, “You got my tank?” and I say yes and start driving till he whoa, whoa, whoas me down again.

“Yo, let me get it out, right? You’re bugging, dude,” he says, then starts laughing, pointing at my father’s car. “You’re bugging, get it?”

“You see those crazy white folks across the street?” I ask him. “I mean, you know today’s going to be insane, right?”

“Ah, man, that’s nothing. Let me tell you what’s crazy: they gots a zonkey, man!” I look across the street. No zonkeys. Just honkies.

“No, at the petting zoo! There’s going to be zonkey rides! I saw it — I think it might just be a pony they painted but the kids are going to love it.” Spider opens the back of my car before I can, goes to pull a canister out, then looks at me watching him through the back window.

“You all right?” he asks.

“Oh I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. Hey, three o’clock, main stage. Don’t miss it,” he tells me, which gets me to turn over in my seat and look back at him. “You don’t remember? The Miss Cegenation Pageant, man. I think Tal could totally win,” Spider says, and starts walking away without closing the back door behind him. I drive off fast enough to close it with the certainty that I really do have to do this thing.

I try parking the Bug in the garage and carrying the tanks over, but after straining to lug one, adjust my strategy. Slowly down the grass, about ten feet from the house, I park and start rolling them out. Straight to the fuse box. Lining up some bricks as a wedge, I lay four on the bottom, and start building up from there. I can hear the music echoing from the other side, and start dropping the tanks down in beat to cover the sound. But it doesn’t matter. No one can see into my heart, no one knows what I want or what I don’t or what I’m intending. I include myself in that ignorance. My body has its orders. My mind doesn’t even have to do anything beyond continue willing.

A small group of Mulattopians drifts back behind the house as I’m finishing, and it doesn’t even matter. When they light a joint, I point to the containers and say, “You really don’t want to be smoking around here.”

—

I watch most of the day from the front window, drinking. I am drinking to access the courage. Or I am drinking to get drunk enough to not be able to do anything at all. It changes between swigs. Once the whiskey loosens my mind, I start imagining the scene again, but can only see it darkly. I see an explosion, all the tanks lighting at once in a blaze of glory, but with me accidentally in the middle of it. If I die, I realize, Sunita Habersham will think I committed suicide, and will be destroyed by it. Maybe not destroyed, but it wouldn’t help her general spiritual growth to have another boyfriend croak, I’m sure. So I write her a note on some copy paper. It says, If something happened to me, it’s because I’m an idiot, but not because of any self-destructive impulse. I would never do that to you, because I still love you . Which has the balance of focused and vague I was going for. I sign it and with that productive task out of the way, I go on to check and recheck the security cameras, make sure the back one is aimed high enough to miss the show. I take the box of pictures and Tal’s things to the garage where they’ll be safe.

Then after that, I’m ready.

There’s a cake in the fridge. It’s homemade. It’s either a yin yang symbol, or patterned after a New York black-and-white cookie, I can’t tell, but it looks delicious, and in a fire it would be destroyed anyway. So I eat it. I eat the whole cake over two hours. When more than half of it’s gone, it just seems like a shame to waste the rest of it, which is the same logic I apply to the flask.

They’re out there. Everyone on the lawn, swirling in their mass. Black and white balloons are pulled by children, tied to trailers, and line the property like they’re trying to lift us all to the half-breed promised land. And everyone past the gate, they’re just as festive. The white folks stay across the street, angry, wanting something back: their country, their dominance, their youth. Petrified of a world where they don’t make all the rules. They chant for a bit, something about this being America. I think everyone here knows that, though. I don’t think this could be happening anywhere else. Across the street from them, on our side — of the sidewalk at least — the red, black, and green balloons wave in the wind, strong. I’m pretty sure those balloons weren’t here this morning. Somebody must have been sent to get them. Someone must have thought the Loving Day balloons demanded a helium response. I can’t see the kids out there, the stone base of the fence is too high, but I see Kamau. It’s hard not to, he’s got his horn going. “Umoja!” is his favorite call. None of the white folks across the street speak Swahili, I would wager. They probably think it’s Zulu for “Sharia Law.” I see Natasha and George as well. They march together, south on Germantown Avenue, reach the end of the property, then they march north again. Repeating in an endless loop with all of the rest of the protesters, chanting whatever they can to stop the spell being cast by the larger Loving Day crowd on the grounds.

Cast with live bands. Cast with a bouncy house. Cast with lemonade and funnel cakes and white-looking people dressed in Ashanti throws and black-looking people dressed like Sally Hemings’s in-laws. There’s even a couple dressed as zombie colonists. No, they’re dressed like ghosts. Like the ghosts, I imagine, or they do. A white woman and a black man. The costumed couple even comes to the door of my father’s house, shaking the doorknob in shock when it doesn’t open for them. They find a more receptive audience in the news crew that shows up hours later; I watch the duo venture outside and to the front of the queue for an interview. Everyone is eager to share their thoughts about how other people should categorize themselves. The cake is long gone and in my stomach it discovers the liquor and the horror of being inside me, but I don’t leave the building till the news van does, heading to the main stage when I see Tal standing with all the other would-be Miss Cegenation queens.

It’s not a beauty contest. It’s not a talent contest. I don’t know what the hell it is, but a large crowd has formed around the stage so I slip in and discover more as everyone else does. Tal is wearing a dress that I didn’t buy for her, presumably given to her by Sunita, from the slightly baggy way it’s fitting. The bustier top is wired to carry the weight of significant mammary heft, and on Tal it just catches air and the idea of breasts as an intellectual concept. I don’t catch the question asked of her, but the answer Tal gives is “I believe that we are the living embodiment of our ancestors, and to deny them, any of them, is, like, to deny ourselves, and disconnect ourselves from the very essence of Gaia.”