I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett Page B

my artificial dignity, my station as
boss Negro,
a meaningless designation. The chorus of slaves appeared in the kitchen.
Swing low, sweet chariot, coming fo’ to carry me home.
With the awful music as background I wondered about the pale woman upstairs and wondered why her blood mattered to any of us, except of course that she, like us, was property, and somehow it was an offense that she did not care or that she was incapable of holding that fact in her head. The choir of slaves kept singing, and I turned to shout at them, “Would you niggers please shut the fuck up!”
    They looked shocked, taken aback.
    “Just shut the fuck up,” I repeated.
    Grumbling, they disbanded, and the scene broke away into pieces, and I found myself being asked by Bond to sing a song for him and his sea captain visitor. Though I did not want to, I could not stop the song from finding my throat. My mouth opened and out it poured while I tasted bile. “Blow the man down,” I sang, and as I did, my voice deeper than usual, I sought to punctuate it with irony that of course fell on deaf ears. “Give me some time to blow the man down,” I sang the last line and then walked away from them as a storm approached.
    Finding myself in the room of the new mulatto princess I was at once confused, outraged, and saddened. I could find no words to share with her, and it soon became clear to me that she was not only unaware of my presence, but unable to see me. The wind blew the French doors open wide, and the curtains danced like loose sails. Samantha Moon tried to push against the wind to close the doors, but she was beaten back. Then Bond dashed in from the veranda and, as if fighting a wind that possessed agency, he closed the doors and locked them. He went to Samantha Moon and helped her to her feet. They stared deeply into each other’s eyes, as deep as they could stare, and kissed. I wanted to puke over and over while they wrestled through brief and uninteresting sex, not knowing why I was made so sick, not knowing why they were having sex. All this while a slave who looked just like Barry White stood at the foot of the bed singing, “Can’t get enough of your love, babe.”
    Spiraling around and around I found myself standing on the deck of a riverboat. As it docked dozens of black people gathered on the hill beyond the dock and began to sing, sing in that mellow and sweet-sad and sickening way of gospel music, sing praises to the master arriving home. I followed Bond and Samantha Moon off the boat and across the dock. There he placed her on the seat of a buckboard that had been decorated with magnolia blossoms and red and white ribbons, and he stood in the bed of it. The wagon carried him and his mistress to the plantation, the singing Negroes dancing behind, singing, cakewalking, grinning, grinning, grinning. One short, spry, bald black man high-stepped the whole way beside the wagon. I lagged behind, wondering at once what I was doing there as Raz-ru and what I was doing in this dream that certainly could not be my own.
    Samantha Moon was standing on the veranda wearing a veranda-standing dress, her light skin catching the moonlight. She was asking me why I hated Bond and why I hated her. I told her that I did not hate, but that I was sad for her, for her inability to accept herself, for her refusal to acknowledge her real self. She glided across the room and went on about Bond.
    “He has raised you like a son, even broken the law to teach you to read. He never beats any of you,” she said.
    “You?” I repeated.
    She look upon me, puzzled.
    “You mean
us.
”
    She stepped more fully into the moonlight, I imagined to appear whiter.
    “Oh, yes, he’s a good master. Good ol’ massa Hamish. He sho nuff good. He don beat us or nothin’.” I stared at her. “How would you describe a relationship where one of the good things to say was ‘he doesn’t beat me’? Do you know about his past?” I asked.
    “He told me all about it. How he