Klan March

  Cornelius saw Walt through the window of the library and went in to talk. Walt had a textbook open and his calculator open on top of the book.

“You wanna come to the march?”

“What march?”

“Klan March. Up Congress Avenue. Starts at noon and if we hustle we can just make it.”

Walt looked at his friend like he was crazy.

“That tired old shit? Ku Klux Klan doesn’t scare me half as much as my physics instructor.”

“Who cares anything,” Cornelius asked, “about the Klan?”

“Then what you going for, fool?”

Cornelius leaned closed over the tabletop, the ends of his dreadlocks falling across his cheeks. “My brother,” he said, “the things I have to teach you.“

“Yeah.”

“Every liberal white woman in this town will be there to protest. Proud African-American warriors like us can’t help but find some sweet stuff to take home.”

Walt was still looking at Cornelius like he was crazy. “What you talking about this time, Corny? What’s the wild-ass plan today? And before you tell me, aren’t you still on academic probation?”

“Yes. But—I’m proud to say—not for my academics, which are excellent. Besides, what I do off-campus is my business. Dean Trump can kiss my black ass.”

That much was true. Corny was an excellent student. Four years in college might have given him an education, but the time in class still hadn’t straightened out any of those tangled neurons in his head. Seemed to Walt like his friend’s schemes were only getting worse the closer they got to graduation. 

Cornelius spent more energy plotting weird, utterly complicated shit than he would have going about things straight on. 

Walt exhaled. He ran track and had good lungs. “Tell me about it.”

“What you think all those white women going to be coming to a Klan march for?”

Walt exhaled again, not to empty his lungs, but to show his exasperation. “Let’s see. This is just a guess. How about, to protest the Ku Klux Klan?”

“Exactly. They’ll all be singlehandedly trying to make up for slavery and a century of what Professor Hartzbaum calls ‘post-Reconstruction marginalization’ of the black race. 

“Take my word for it, Walt, I know what I’m talking about here. Horizontal reparations are a sure thing.”

Walt picked up the calculator from the table. He studied the glow of the electronic display.

“No sir. I’m already getting my share. Besides, I have a big test in two days. If I remember right,” he said, looking up at his friend, “so do you.”

“The way I see it,” Cornelius said, already turning towards the door, leaving his ignorant friend to mere books and calculations, “if I have a test on Monday, that’s what God gave me Sunday for.”

The march was downtown, from the shores of the river north along the main street to the State Capitol. On site there were like eighteen Klansmen and five thousand anti-Klan protestors. Corny had to strain just to keep the hoods and white robes in view.

Despite what the newspapers had described as “a potential for violence,” everyone seemed to be politely playing a role. The Klansmen moved phlegmatically, full of suppressed indignation at the debasement of the white race, lifting their signs up and down sporadically to an inaudible beat. Protestors whistled and jeered in time with the raising of the signs. Only people who looked really uncomfortable were the police. Cornelius knew why. Half the cops wanted to pull on their own hoods and join the parade.

Cornelius moved to the grass in front of the Governor’s Mansion and scanned the crowd in search of a likely target. This town! He loved it. Chinese, Spanish, Anglo, Indian—all that jogging and jazzercise and kickboxing paid off. Cornelius had only one caveat. He didn’t do black girls. His eyes swept the field without even pausing on the sisters. He knew instinctively that his rap would have little effect on them, that they were immune to his standard persuasion, but it was more than that. He had a positive aversion to jumping females of his own race. He didn’t like to say why publicly. But black women had fucked-up values, Corny believed. 

He had met one the night before who only proved his point. Law student. Fine as she could be and still be mortal. When he finally made his move, deciding he would bless her with his body, she cut him off cold. 

“I’m sorry, Cornelius,” she said, looking him up and down, finally settling on his shoes, which were expensive trainers but last years brand, “I don’t date less than $200,000-a-year.” 

Imagine how he felt. That’s not a woman, he told himself on the lonely walk home, that’s a business. That’s why—while he talked black—Cornelius much preferred to sleep white. 

Your average liberal white girl could usually be persuaded not just to fuck a nigger’s balls off, but to pay her own way at dinner, and maybe even pay his way too. Maybe buy tickets for the movies, pop for the popcorn, cover the bar tab and probably even, with a little persuasion, and after a satisfactory performance in bed, contribute a few dollars to a brother’s rent. There was so much injustice to make up for and so little time. Corny was a big believer that cash helped.

He saw her. She was blonde. His reaction was instantaneous. Corny hesitated, attracted and repelled at once. 

Cornelius was not prejudiced but the truth was he did not normally do blondes. The rule was not strict but it was nonetheless a rule and would require a justification to break. The reason was simple. Blondes tended, he found through trial and error, to be dead lays. Just lie there and expect a brother to do all the work. No thank you, that’s not what his revolution was all about. Cornelius J. Smallwood was not going to allow the rigors of cotton-picking—a life his great grandparents had known—to be replaced in his generation by over-exertion in the bedroom. He wanted a girl to work for him. 

Still, curious, he looked again. There was something about the figure at the back of the crowd that called to him. 

Maybe he was getting sentimental. When he saw that ponytail behind the line of screaming protestors he thought instinctively of Kristin. Exchange student at the university year before last. Sweet as honey. Deep, deep pockets. European: from Norway, or Italy, somewhere in there. There were together three months and he had never known such luxury. When it was time to go home she wanted to put him in her backpack and take him with her but Cornelius said no. ”My work,” he had told her in a tearful scene in the backseat of a car outside International Terminal, “is here.”

 The tears had been hers alone but he knew enough to know that one day he too might experience genuine emotion. Cornelius had long feared that moment more than anything else, not falling in love—that particular emotion was nowhere in his DNA—but he that would actually feel something for a woman. He caught himself suddenly and issued a silent reprimand to his consciousness. He found that he had to fight the tendency to humanize these women. “They’re just white girls,” he told himself, “bed and breakfast,” words to remember. This one in the crowd was no different from all the others. 

On the other hand, he didn’t want to show prejudice, either, and he’d always felt rules were made to be broken. Wasn’t that what this march all about? Where would he be today if old prejudices had been allowed to stand? Cornelius thought a little longer and, using the same mental flexibility his professors had come to admire, he decided he wasn’t going to deny any woman his body just because she had the wrong hair color. He was congratulating himself for taking a principled stand when the momentum of the crowd shifted. There. The girl half-turned. She wasn’t chanting like the rest of the crowd but she was following the protest big-time, an intent look on her face. Cute, but not beautiful—that’s the way Corny liked ‘em. Cornelius liked a girl he could work with, not so ugly he had to close his eyes but no one who expected worship, or worse, tribute. The most important feature was always her bank account. The sister the night before had reminded him of the importance of another color, green. 

When the march turned again, in the lead up to the Capitol grounds, the girl moved apace and now offered her full profile. He saw that pug nose, just like Kristin’s, and the full lips, and the swell of those impertinent titties. Haltar top and jeans. Definitely undergraduate, maybe only a sophomore. Actually Corny liked sophomores because they had been around a little but not long enough to know better. He also liked seniors, especially in their last semester, because they generally didn’t care anymore about their reputations on campus and usually just wanted to fuck until it was time to pick up their diplomas. Freshmen were the worst because they were dumb, yeah, and terrified by pecking order and by social norms Corny felt should have been left behind in high school. He had tried to educate a few rich freshmen from Dallas but it had been too much work. 

He thought a second longer. 

Ye-s-s-s-s, he decided after some hesitation. Sophomore was okay. 

“Lock and load,” he told himself, smoothing down his floral bodyshirt and pulling up his jeans. “Let’s roll.”

But, in a last effort at caution, as he got closer to the crowd he raised his nose to sniff the air. 

Corny had discovered a disturbing rate of psychosis in white women, at least the white women he dated. A high proportion seemed to be crazy fucking bitches, excuse the expression. What was amazing was that he had noticed an equally disconcerting correlation between these disturbed women and a fruity odor on their bodies. It was a particular peach-apricot smell that he had first noted on a psycho white ho who had grabbed him by the throat in the kitchen of her condo on the lake, after a silly argument about some unproven indiscretion on his part. As in so many of Corny’s interactions with women the action had started out in the vertical plane and ended up in a horizontal position, but with the added complication that her hands were still around his fine ebony neck.

While she was choking Corny was sniffing. He knew he could break her hold before he passed out, so he gave her a moment to express her anger, while he did some basic science, after which he planned to flip her on her back and have great reconciliation-driven sex. 

The odor, he found, was coming from her pores. When he flipped her, arching his body like a wrestler, she didn’t let go as expected and he had to punch her lights out. There was no sex, great or otherwise, and since then, every time a pair of scissors or kitchen knife was introduced into one of his relationships, every time he had to take a girl to have her nails trimmed, he tried to get close enough not just to disarm but to smell. The odor was always there with the crazy ones. He had been deceived once or twice by peach or apricot lip gloss, which was popular among Boopsies in this part of the country, and had that same fruity aroma, but he usually preferred to err on the side of caution. He always tried to sniff before climbing on board. 

He came up behind this girl, the presumed-sophomore at the back of the crowd of protestors, and brought his nose close to the back of her freckled, cream-colored neck. Nothing. No smell. Or at least none he could detect out of doors. 

Cornelius reached into his pocket and brought out a tube of lip balm and lubricated what many of his women friends had described as an exceptionally pleasure-giving mouth. He didn’t know if he would be going straight into action and he wanted to be prepared. Just a dab was enough. The key, he felt, was proper application, not quantity. 

He twisted and turned his lips to spread the lubricant, and smacked discretely when done. All right. Ready to rumble.

He stopped beside her.

“It just fills me with rage!”

He didn’t look at her and he waited until she had turned to look at him before he continued. “To be a black man in this bitch, America,” he said. “After four hundred years of slavery and second-class status and then to have to stand here and take this affront to our dignity as a race—

“It fills me with black rage!”

Just like Kristen, he told himself.  He was looking at her now, as if he had suddenly noticed her, the girl at his side. Her mouth opened and closed involuntarily, like a goldfish at the aquarium glass, as she began to speak and then stopped. 

She had round, ruddy cheeks, freckles, and accompanying green eyes. Full blowjob-giving lips, even fuller than Corny’s generous mouth. Just like Kristin in almost every respect—her eyes were wide like the European girl’s were the first time too, literally a doe caught in a hunter’s scope.

“Listen. I know we don’t know each other,” Corny told her, “but do you mind coming over and sitting down with for a minute with me? At a time like this I don’t want to be alone.”

“I don’t—“

“It’s okay. I just want someone to talk to.”

“But I don’t—“

“It’s not because I’m too black, is it? It’s not because I would stick out in your white-china-and-lace world?”

She followed him. The municipal government had just finished a project widening Congress Avenue’s sidewalk and now everywhere outside there were cafés and parasols, tables and chairs. The march meanwhile moved on toward its grand finale on the Capitol steps. In a misguided effort to create harmony between the races there would be fifteen minutes of speeches and booing by both sides. Cornelius liked to think he was doing more important work toward resolving racial differences, using only his dick, than either side could with words or with violence.

Due to the march most of the tables were empty. They found comfortable seats and while she was still dizzy from the excitement of the march and the swift pace of his attack, he told her about growing up “hard and fast” in the ghetto—with an especially poignant sidebar about living “with the White Man’s foot on my neck.” Some of it was even true. After all, he had had a lower middle-class upbringing in what was still, forty years after the Voting Rights Act, the black part of this supposedly liberal town. But if the police were always after young Cornelius, it was probably because young Corny was always breaking the law, a perfect little hoodlum in every way except violence, which, truth be told, scared him. 

His own uncle was a cop who said Cornelius would end up in prison, as some bull’s bitch, by age eighteen. Wrong. Providence took a part in young Cornelius’s development. At seventeen he was busted for attempted burglary of a synagogue in the west part of town. He got probation after a plea for mercy by the rabbi himself, and the arrest had a bright side, since it brought Corny into contact with the rabbi’s hot-blooded wife Bathsheba who, in exchange for certain physical favors, bought Corny his first car and convinced him of the importance of higher education. 

Bathsheba also taught him that the only thing he had to give, as a young black stud, was in high demand among a certain portion of the white female population. She called him, “Mandingo,” and, alternately, “the Killer of Women,” and he tried to live up to the billing.  

He had started college the next year and decided to carry crime to its logical conclusion by becoming a lawyer.  

Of course most of these details he spared the young Boopsie sitting across from him in the café.  

 “What’s your name again, darling?” he asked.

“Caitlin.”

“C-a-i-t-l-i-n or C-a-i-t-l-y-n?”

“C-a-i-t-l-y-n-n.”

“How quaint.”

She turned her head to the side like an inquisitive bird. “What’s that mean?” she asked. 

That was actually a good sign to Cornelius. Ignorance of the finer points of the language was often an indication of foreign-birth—in this case maybe Italy, or perhaps Norway, somewhere in there.

“Are you from France?” he asked, not bothering to answer her question. “Is that why you use the French spelling?”

“I’m from Bastrop,” she said, naming a town one county over. No matter. Cornelius decided to explore the possibilities. When given lemons, you make—

“Is your father, like, a real estate developer, or proprietor of the department store, or a pastor in a big church, something like that?”

“He’s principal of Bastrop High.”

“What does your mom do?”

Even though his tone was casual, the girl seemed to sense that she was being interrogated and her answers might be used against her.

“My mother is a math teacher at Bastrop High?” she asked, timid, slightly afraid even, as answer to his question.

“Doesn’t really matter, actually. You know, even though we just met,” Corny said, moving forward to take advantage of his own momentum, “I feel I can talk to you about anything.” 

Cornelius knew that the best lies were always built on a bed of truth. He really did feel he could talk to this girl. The principal reason was she allowed him to do the talking. She was mostly quiet, watching him with those big doe eyes, just like Kristin. She also had Kristin’s body which, slim and petite, he nonetheless had found to be capable of great feats of endurance.

When he suggested that they continue the discussion at her place, Corny discovered that he had forgotten his wallet. The check, including his double decaf latte with whipped cream, came to seven dollars plus tip. 

After some encouragement Caitlynn paid.

“Good thing one of us brought money!” she said, pocketing change from a twenty, even as he tried to pick it up for her.

Corny was unpleasantly surprised. It was the first complete sentence she had uttered in almost an hour, and it was so not like Kristin. The European girl had always considered it a privilege to pay for Corny’s coffee. Usually she even got him a brownie or a muffin without being asked. 

Truth be known, Cornelius was old-fashioned and didn’t care for attitude from his women. A lot of brothers wanted a girl to be sassy. He did not. If he could have persuaded her to walk two steps back, so much the better. There was something about this girl’s diffidence that he liked, attracted by her innocence, and he decided that after the preliminaries of the conquest were complete he would have to work on that, her attitude, to make her more acceptable to whatever man she married. 

Maybe Cornelius was being sentimental again but he always liked to leave a girl a better person than he had found her. 

She talked, at her place. 

Her nickname was Cat. Grew up in Bastrop County, in the pinewoods east of the city. But he already knew that. She had that fresh-scrubbed, outdoorsy look, little makeup, and no frills. He kind of liked that too.

Both mom and dad were the first in their families to go to college. Cornelius listened as she spoke now, slow and with some difficulty pronouncing poly-syllabic nouns, just like a foreigner. But this girl was clearly American. “Native Texun,” she called herself, just as he did, although he managed to say it without sounding like a hick. 

Still, sometimes, despite “growing up hard in the ghetto,” as he had told her in the café, Corny felt better about America than he dared to say.

“And you came to the march?”

“Sometimes you have to be true to what you believe in,” she said. “That’s what my mom always taught me.  Be true to what you know is right.”

He looked at her again. Something stirred in his chest. Maybe this one wasn’t just a ho after all.

They were sitting on her couch about an arm’s length apart. She’d shown no interest in intimacy yet, but with white girls Cornelius knew that didn’t mean anything. Some of ‘em he had to pleasure completely before they calmed down enough to kiss. Spanish, no. He’d had a few Spanish. Spanish girls you definitely had to kiss first. Cornelius knew that was true because they were Catholic. The Roman Church is very ritualized—he had learned that in a survey class on world religions his second semester—and as a practical matter that meant kiss first. This girl was almost certainly Protestant, even Evangelical, God forbid Pentecostal—and among the poor white religions he wasn’t sure how to establish physical intimacy. 

He noticed an old electric sewing machine, the kind with a foot petal for power, and a large pair of fabric shears on a table in the corner. Cornelius liked to take note of all sharp objects in the room whenever he visited a girl’s home. But the scissors, besides being a potential weapon, were also an indicator that this was a more modest house than any he had recently visited. 

The girl’s disposable income would therefore be considerably less than he was used to, he calculated. Still the furniture was acceptable and she was driving a small Toyota pickup, not a déclassé American brand. Corny didn’t give it away—he did not believe in free samples. She could certainly afford to give something without going into debt herself.

“You know how to sew?” he asked.

Cat laughed as if he’d said the funniest thing in the world. “Oh boy, you got no idea! My mom taught me how to sew before I was big enough for my foot to reach the pedal.”

“Never,” Corny said, leaning in close, sensing a major opportunity, “call a black man ‘boy.’ It stirs memories of disrespect and oppression.”

 Having thrown her on the defensive, he decided now, it was time to suggest they move into the bedroom. He had learned that with Boopsies, especially college-educated Boopsies, you had to act fast. She’d done everything he’d asked so far, hadn’t she? A pattern was developing.

No way to say it except to say it.

“Is that your bedroom in there?” Corny asked. “Do you have a roommate? What do you think of us moving this chat in there?”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t seem shocked or anything. She just looked at him with those big eyes. Kristin was like that too. Modest. Deferential. Quiet. But when they got into the bedroom she became Wonder Woman.

Sensing another opportunity Corny told Cat, still at arm’s length, “Sometimes, after a traumatic event like that march, there are ways for two people to work out the angst and anxiety. To heal the hurt, understand what I mean?”

“You mean,” she asked, “like screwing?”

He nodded his head. 

“That’s one way of showing solidarity against The Man,” Corny said.

He led the way again. She followed him, and he had turned and was doubling back to reach for her and press her against his hard, masculine body, when she took advantage of his closeness to lean even closer and whisper something in his ear.

As she spoke a smile spread from ear to ear across Corny’s face.

“What did you say, honey?”

She whispered again. He was still smiling as he shook his head. He had been right about her all the time.

“Sorry, darling. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m a conventional nigger. I’m actually more a meat and potatoes kind of guy,” he said. “I especially like”—he reached between their bodies and squeezed her breasts—“potatoes.”

She brushed her hair out of her eyes and smiled. “I was thinking,” she told him, “that if we have some fun first, we can go to Del Rio’s later and have a nice dinner. Do you like Mexican?”

“I’m more into higher-end Thai.”

“We can do that too. You’ll have to show me where to go.”

“I’m a little low on funds, darling.”

“That doesn’t matter. I can crack the piggy bank.”

“Piggy bank?”

She pointed to a corner of the bedroom where there was a big pink ceramic pig that stood alone on the carpet. Corny was overwhelmed.

“You would break that for me?” he asked. Maybe this could be a relationship after all.

“Well, no. There’s actually an opening with a plug in the belly. We can make a night of it, what do you say?”

Corny was so close to jumping her than he almost forgot his pre-flight check. He nuzzled her neck and took advantage of the closeness to take a good sniff.

The hair stood up on his neck. He backed away a few steps and looked her straight in the eye—hurt, as if he had been betrayed. 

“What kind of lip gloss to you wear?”

“Huh?”

“What kind of lip gloss do you wear?”

“You’re a strange one.” She looked at him the same way Walt had, as if he was crazy. “What do you want to know that for?”

             “Honey, just answer the question. What kind of lip gloss do you use?”

“Wild peach. Why?” Now she looked hurt. “That’s not it, is it, it’s not my lip gloss that’s bothering you. It’s that I don’t have a lot of money. I’m not rich like all the other girls you’ve dated.” She got up in his face. “Or it’s my suggestion, isn’t it? You’re afraid, Corny, aren’t you? You’re really all talk, is that it?”

Corny realized he may have misjudged this girl on all counts. He touched the corner of her lips and smelled again. He relaxed. “Don’t be ridiculous—“

 “I’ve done this before, you know,” she said, “using toilet paper for the ties, but it’s no fun because it’s not realistic.”

A false positive, Cornelius decided. He’d had those before. He liked this girl and he didn’t want to deny her his body, but a brother had to be sure, before entering combat, that he knew the odds and knew the enemy. He looked at the bed. It was practically the only furniture in the room except an antique dresser topped by a flat screen television, and a big upholstered chair in one corner, and that ceramic pig in the other.

“Tied to that bed?” he asked. She lowered her eyes for the first time. “Is that what you’re asking me?”

She nodded and then raised her eyes. “You don’t have to talk about it out loud,” she said. “You make everything sound dirty.” 

Her round cheeks were turning red.

“Is that what you like? I mean, tying men up?”

Nodded again. She buried her forehead in his shoulder. She was back to not looking at him.

“Have you ever done it before with a brother?” He lifted her chin. “Come on, girl, I want the truth.”

“Oh no, Corny, you’d be my first.”

He believed her. It kind of turned him on, the thought of opening Cat’s eyes to a new world. It was because of times like these, when he got to do good as well as getting his groove on, and maybe picking up a little cash, that made Corny’s work worthwhile. “You kinky little ho,” he said affectionately, and kissed her cheek. 

“But you know,” he said, “ties are like chains, and they remind black men of slavery.”

“I’ll make it right, baby,” she said.

Her bed was a princess model. Corny had been in a few of those now, and he knew they were big enough to take care of business on—and this one had posts, which was a plus from a mechanical standpoint, considering what they were going to do. And in this case there were no stuffed animals to get in the way.

She didn’t have rope. She got two slim, women’s leather belts, one cotton tie belonging to a white bathrobe, and a roll off electrical tape. Corny slipped off his clothes. He was hard as he’d ever been. There was something about this girl that turned him on unlike any of the others.

“Shit, honey!” he said when he was tightening the cotton. “Where’d you learn to tie a knot like that?”

She was kneeling beside him, on the edge of the bed, busy as a Girl Scout setting up camp. “While you were growing up hard in the ‘hood,” she said, “I was growing up on a ranch in East Texas.”

“I’m not a damn steer. Put a little slack in those knots, girl. Jesus.”

“I thought you told me you were a strong African-American warrior.”

He bent his head forward, the only part of his body that could still move, to talk to her. “Not here, honey. Here I’m a lover. Try to keep that in mind.”

When she finished he was spread-eagled, his package pointing straight up at the ceiling. His wrists and ankles hurt but in an odd way he liked it. He felt a little silly, sure, but when she climbed on board that feeling would pass.

 “Now it’s your turn,” Cornelius told her. “Why don’t you take off those clothes and come for a ride?”

Her cheeks were red and she was breathing hard, from the exertion. A sheen of sweat filled her cleavage. She blew the hair out of her eyes as she stood up.

 The doorbell rang.

She looked at him and smiled mock-innocently, like something out of schoolgirl porn film. 

“Excuse me one moment, will you please?”

“Hurry up, girl. I’d hate for this train to leave the station without you.”

Cornelius stared up at the ceiling. Actually he was used to this position, minus the restraints. It seemed that the more shy and diffident a girl was in class, the more she liked to play rough in the bedroom. That was okay with him. He had been tied up three times now, and even whipped once, although money changed hands after that experience. One girl, a feminist, had asked him if she could strap on an implement and do to him what he had been doing to her. Hell no, he told her, not for love or money. He was there to please but, Jesus, let’s be reasonable. 

He was grateful for a few minutes alone to think. Events had moved so rapidly that he did not want to lose control of the situation. His plan this afternoon was to let Cat do the work for a while, in order to see what she was made of, then take off these ties and turn her on her back and take care of business the old fashioned way.  Like he had told her, Corny really was quite conventional in his appetites. But he also liked to think he had an open mind.

He heard conversation coming from the living room. He looked over at the bedroom door just as it opened and standing there were Caitlynn and three men. The men were wearing white robes, and had white hoods folded neatly across their arms.

“Cornelius,” said Caitlynn demurely, her eyes glancing only briefly at his manhood, which was just beginning to show signs of slacking, “this is my Uncle Robert and my cousins Jude and Craig.” She took a step into the room and the three men followed. 

“Boys, this is Corny, um, Smallwood, isn’t that right?” 

She turned to the one called Craig, a big peckerwood with a smile skewed permanently to the right of his mouth. Corny thought he recognized Caitlynn’s cousin as one of a pair of rednecks who he’d seen beating a queer one night on Sixth Street.

“Be a honey,” Cat said to Craig, “and go get those fabric shears off the kitchen table.”

She picked up a pillow to smother the screams. “Now boys,” Caitlynn said, turning to her remaining kin, “let’s cut this nigger’s balls off.”