Dr. King's Refrigerator Read online

  After taking a deep breath, she said, sadly, “Can we rub noses then?”

  “Of course,” said Fortunata. “I think that’s okay.”

  It is well known that when two people fall in love, their brains produce an amphetaminelike substance (phenylethylamines) that is responsible for what we call “lover’s high.” After Fortunata left, Felicia still felt this chemically created elixir of strong emotion; but she also felt very confused. What she felt, in fact, was half ecstasy that she was to wed the son of an African statesman, and half bewilderment because rubbing noses—in her view—was no substitute for a big wet one. She was a highly intelligent woman. A woman about to graduate with a degree in anthropology. She wondered if she was being culturally inflexible. But Felicia knew that all her life she had been fascinated by and respectful of the differences in cultures, how each was a self-contained and complete system that must be understood from within. She knew her Levi-Strauss and the work of dozens of structural anthropologists. You did not have to tell her that in some Muslim countries, it was insulting to cross your legs when sitting if the soles of your shoes were displayed to your host. Or that in Theravada Buddhist countries like Thailand, patting a cute youngster on the top of his head was a no-no because that part of the body was looked upon as sacred. So yes, she had always taken great pains to listen carefully when Fortunata spoke of his country’s history and mysterious customs.

  But she wanted a kiss! Was that asking for so much?

  In her heart she knew that kissing was special, and to prove it to herself, she sat down at her computer, went to the Internet, and spent the night looking at everything she could find on the subject. Just as she’d expected, kissing as an expression of love and affection was old. Very old. It dated back to the fifth century. And as a custom, it was even older than that! The early Christians borrowed kissing from the Romans. Clearly, it was the most human of practices. Everyone knew animals didn’t kiss. They licked. The reason for having lips in the first place, Felicia decided just before daybreak, was so people could use their God-given soup coolers as the most romantic, the most erotic, and the most natural way to show they loved someone.

  During the last year Felicia had introduced Fortunata to all kinds of things outside his culture—karaoke, the music of Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, the importance of Ichiro bobbleheads, and why everyone needed a good-looking tattoo—and he had enjoyed all of it, and thanked her for enlightening him, as a good Galatea would. When she finally drifted off to sleep, around ten A.M., Felicia wondered if Fortunata had lied. That maybe people in his culture did kiss, but for some reason he simply didn’t want to kiss her. But, no! She had never caught him in a lie before. It was more likely that he’d never kissed anyone. So she was certain that if Fortunata could just experience the electric thrill of kissing once, and with the right woman (meaning herself), then a wonderful new cultural doorway would open for him. If she truly loved him, Felicia knew she owed him that.

  As luck would have it, Fortunata dropped by unexpectedly that evening as she was fixing dinner. He was almost bursting with excitement.

  “Felicia,” he said, “I just spoke with my father. I told him about our engagement. We have his blessing. In my country the wedding ceremony lasts for a week. Since my father is president, the whole country will celebrate.” He paused to catch his breath. “Aren’t you happy?”

  To show her happiness, Felicia pressed her body against him. Before he could move, she placed her hands on both sides of his head, pulled him closer, puckered up, and bestowed upon a startled Fortunata the most soulful, moist, and meaningful lip lock she had ever delivered in her life. She felt her heart beating faster, the temperature of her skin beneath her clothes heating up. Smiling, Felicia took a step back. The expression on Fortunata’s face was unreadable. He started to speak, but stopped.

  And then, suddenly, he was gone.

  Where Fortunata had stood there was a full-grown, giant West African frog. It was a foot long and weighed as much as a fox terrier.

  “I warned you,” he said.

  Felicia felt ill. She thought, I can’t handle this. But what she said was:

  “I don’t suppose we can break off the engagement, can we?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said the frog.

  Dr. King’s Refrigerator

  Beings exist from food.

  —Bhagavad-Gita, Book 3, Chapter 14

  IN SEPTEMBER, the year of Our Lord 1954, a gifted young minister from Atlanta named Martin Luther King Jr. accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was twenty-five years old, and in the language of the Academy, he took his first job when he was ABD at Boston University’s School of Theology—All But Dissertation—which is a common and necessary practice for scholars who have completed their course work and have families to feed. If you are offered a job when still in graduate school, you snatch it, and, if all goes well, you finish the thesis that first year of your employment when you are in the thick of things, trying mightily to prove—in Martin’s case—to the staid, high-toned laity at Dexter that you really are worth the $4,800 salary they were paying you. He had, by the way, the highest-paying job of any minister in the city of Montgomery, and the expectations for his daily performance—as pastor, husband, community leader, and son of Daddy King—were equally high.

  But what few people tell the eager ABD is how completing the doctorate from a distance means wall-to-wall work. There were always meetings with the local NAACP, ministers’ organizations, and church committees; or, failing that, the budget and treasury to balance; or, failing that, the sick to visit in their homes, the ordination of deacons to preside over, and a new sermon to write every week. During that first year away from Boston, he delivered forty-six sermons to his congregation, and twenty sermons and lectures at other colleges and churches in the South. And, dutifully, he got up every morning at five-thirty to spend three hours composing the dissertation in his parsonage, a white frame house with a railed-in front porch and two oak trees in the yard, after which he devoted another three hours to it late at night, in addition to spending sixteen hours each week on his Sunday sermons.

  On the Wednesday night of December first, exactly one year before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, and after a long day of meetings and writing memos and letters, he sat entrenched behind a roll-top desk in his cluttered den at five minutes past midnight, smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee, wearing an old fisherman’s knit sweater, his desk barricaded in by books and piles of paperwork. Naturally, his in-progress dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” was itching at the edge of his mind, but what he really needed this night was a theme for his sermon on Sunday. Usually, by Tuesday Martin had at least a sketch, by Wednesday he had his research and citations—which ranged freely over five thousand years of Eastern and Western philosophy—compiled on note cards, and by Friday he was writing his text on a pad of lined yellow paper. Put bluntly, he was two days behind schedule.

  A few rooms away, his wife was sleeping under a blue corduroy bedspread. For an instant he thought of giving up work for the night and climbing into sheets warmed by her body, curling up beside this beautiful and very understanding woman, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, who had sacrificed her career back East in order to follow him into the Deep South. He remembered their wedding night on June eighteenth a year ago in Perry County, Alabama, and how the insanity of segregation meant he and his new bride could not stay in a hotel operated by whites. Instead, they spent their wedding night at a black funeral home and had no honeymoon at all. Yes, he probably should join her in their bedroom. He wondered if she resented how his academic and theological duties took him away from her and their home (many an ABD’s marriage ended before the dissertation was done)—work like that infernal unwritten sermon, which hung over his head like the sword of Damocles.

  Weary, feeling guilty, he pushed
back from his desk, stretched out his stiff spine, and decided to get a midnight snack.

  Now, he knew he shouldn’t do that, of course. He often told friends that food was his greatest weakness. His ideal weight in college was 150 pounds, and he was aware that, at 5 feet, 7 inches tall, he should not eat between meals. His bantam weight ballooned easily. Moreover, he’d read somewhere that the average American will in his (or her) lifetime eat sixty thousand pounds of food. To Martin’s ethical way of thinking, consuming that much tonnage was downright obscene, given the fact that there was so much famine and poverty throughout the rest of the world. He made himself a promise—a small prayer—to eat just a little, only enough tonight to replenish his tissues.

  He made his way cautiously through the dark, seven-room house, his footsteps echoing on the hard-wood floors as if he was in a swimming pool, scuffing from the smoke-filled den to the living room, where he circled around the baby-grand piano his wife practiced on for church recitals, then past her choices in decoration—two African masks on one wall and West Indian gourds on the mantel above the fireplace—to the kitchen. There, he clicked on the overhead light, then drew open the door to their refrigerator.

  Scratching his stomach, he gazed—and gazed—at four well-stocked shelves of food. He saw a Florida grapefruit and a California orange. On one of the middle shelves he saw corn and squash, both native to North America, and introduced by Indians to Europe in the fifteenth century through Columbus. To the right of that, his eyes tracked bright yellow slices of pineapple from Hawaii, truffles from England, and a half-eaten Mexican tortilla. Martin took a step back, cocking his head to one side, less hungry now than curious about what his wife had found at a public market, and stacked inside their refrigerator without telling him.

  He began to empty the refrigerator and heavily packed food cabinets, placing everything on the table and kitchen counter and, when those were filled, on the flower-printed linoleum floor, taking things out slowly at first, his eyes squinted, scrutinizing each item like an old woman on a fixed budget at the bargain table in a grocery store. Then he worked quickly, bewitched, chuckling to himself as he tore apart his wife’s tidy, well-scrubbed, Christian kitchen. He removed all the berylline olives from a thick glass jar and held each one up to the light, as if perhaps he’d never really seen an olive before, or seen one so clearly. Of one thing he was sure: No two olives were the same. Within fifteen minutes Martin stood surrounded by a galaxy of food.

  From one corner of the kitchen floor to the other, there were popular American items such as pumpkin pie and hot dogs, but also heavy, sour-sweet dishes like German sauerkraut and schnitzel right beside Tibetan rice, one of the staples of the Far East, all sorts of spices, and the macaroni, spaghetti, and ravioli favored by Italians. There were bricks of cheese and wine from French vineyards, coffee from Brazil, and from China and India black and green teas that probably had been carried from fields to faraway markets on the heads of women, or the backs of donkeys, horses, and mules. All of human culture, history, and civilization laid unscrolled at his feet, and he had only to step into his kitchen to discover it. No one people or tribe, living in one place on this planet, could produce the endless riches for the palate that he’d just pulled from his refrigerator. He looked around the disheveled room, and he saw in each succulent fruit, each slice of bread, and each grain of rice a fragile, inescapable network of mutuality in which all earthly creatures were codependent, integrated, and tied in a single garment of destiny. He recalled Exodus 25:30, and realized that all this before him was showbread. From the floor Martin picked up a Golden Delicious apple, took a bite from it, and instantly prehended the heat from summers past, the roots of the tree from which the fruit had been taken, the cycles of sun and rain and seasons, the earth, and even those who tended the orchard. Then he slowly put the apple down, feeling not so much hunger now as a profound indebtedness and thanksgiving—to everyone and everything in Creation. For was not he too the product of infinite causes and the full, miraculous orchestration of Being stretching back to the beginning of time?

  At that moment his wife came into the disaster area that was their kitchen, half asleep, wearing blue slippers and an old housecoat over her nightgown. When she saw what her philosopher husband had done, she said, Oh! And promptly disappeared from the room. A moment later she was back, having composed herself and put on her glasses, but her voice was barely above a whisper:

  “Are you all right?”

  “Of course, I am! I’ve never felt better!” he said. “The whole universe is inside our refrigerator!”

  She blinked.

  “Really? You don’t mean that, do you? Honey, have you been drinking? I’ve told you time and again that that orange juice and vodka you like so much isn’t good for you, and if anyone at church smells it on your breath—”

  “If you must know, I was hard at work on my dissertation an hour ago. I didn’t drink a drop of anything—except coffee.”

  “Well, that explains,” she said.

  “No, you don’t understand! I was trying to write my speech for Sunday, but—but—I couldn’t think of anything, and I got hungry . . .”

  She stared at the food heaped on the floor. “This hungry?”

  “Well, no.” His mouth wobbled, and now he was no longer thinking about the metaphysics of food but, instead, of how the mess he’d made must look through her eyes. And, more important, how he must look through her eyes. “I think I’ve got my sermon, or at least something I might use later. It’s so obvious to me now!” He could tell by the tilt of her head and the twitching of her nose that she didn’t think any of this was obvious at all. “When we get up in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap created by a Frenchman. The towel is provided by a Turk. Before we leave for our jobs, we are beholden to more than half the world.”

  “Yes, dear.” She sighed. “I can see that, but what about my kitchen? You know I’m hosting the Ladies Prayer Circle today at eight o’clock. That’s seven hours from now. Please tell me you’re going to clean up everything before you go to bed.”

  “But I have a sermon to write! What I’m saying—trying to say—is that whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly!”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure all this is going to have a remarkable effect on the Ladies Prayer Circle—”

  “Sweetheart . . .” He held up a grapefruit and a head of lettuce, “I had a revelation tonight. Do you know how rare that is? Those things don’t come easy. Just ask Meister Eckhart or Martin Luther—you know Luther experienced enlightenment on the toilet, don’t you? Ministers only get maybe one or two revelations in a lifetime. But you made it possible for me to have a vision when I opened the refrigerator.” All at once, he had a discomfiting thought. “How much did you spend for groceries last week?”

  “I bought extra things for the Ladies Prayer Circle,” she said. “Don’t ask how much and I won’t ask why you’ve turned the kitchen inside out.” Gracefully, like an angel, or the perfect wife in the Book of Proverbs, she stepped toward him over cans and containers, plates of leftovers and bowls of chili. She placed her hand on his cheek, like a mother might do with her gifted and exasperating child, a prodigy who had just torched his bedroom in a scientific experiment. Then she wrapped her arms around him, slipped her hands under his sweater, and gave him a good, long kiss—by the time they were finished, her glasses were fogged. Stepping back, she touched the tip of his nose with her finger, and turned to leave. “Don’t stay up too late,” she said. “Put everything back before it spoils. And come to bed—I’ll be waiting.”

  Martin watched her leave and said, “Yes, dear,” still holding a very spiritually understood grapefruit in one hand and an ontologically clarified head of lettuce in the other. He started putting everything back on the shelves, deciding as he did so that while his sermon could wait until morning, his new wife definitely should not.

  The Gift of the O
suo

  THE ALLMUSERI, an ancient African people whose kingdom once lay between Cape Lopez and the mouth of the Congo River, required any villager who desired to lead them to feed them foofoo and malt beer every third market, a custom that, according to our elders who never say the thing that is Not, limited Allmuseri rulers to a few generous and gentle men like the good Muslim king Shabaka Malik al Muhammad (1632–1688). This, after a fashion, is a fairy tale of their history.

  A kind, large-bellied king, Shabaka scheduled few, if any, fireside chats with his people because he was shy, and spluttered and blew spittle when speaking, which embarrassed his wife (everything he did embarrassed Queen Melle, to hear him tell it). Having heard an argument as to whether, say, yohimbe roots aided the digestion better than yams, and having made up his mind for yams, Shabaka forgot the spiraling steps of the argument, remembering only that he had a vague feeling of dislike for yohimbe roots, though he couldn’t precisely tell you why. In a word, he was a tired, middle-aged king who lived quietly, knowing he would never be a chief of any importance if he lived to the age of elephants. Still, he knew he had the good fortune to be a sensibly balanced man with simple feelings and, like any good African king, winged his prayers aloft to Allah for greater patience and wisdom.

  One day King Shabaka heard the sound of Mahdi and Kangabar, two osuo—sorcerers—arguing hotly outside his hut, which sat amiddlemost a circle of rain-whitened mud houses on a hill overlooking a river. Him they asked to settle a head-breaking dispute.

  Now King Shabaka’s day had been sour. The queen had shrieked at him, saying he cared not a whit for her because her womb was dry as bone. To do him justice, Shabaka did love his queen (when he didn’t think too much about it), although she was sharp tongued and often snapped at him, as if he were not a king but instead a commoner of no consequence at all. His mind wandered, now and then, to memories of a younger girl named Noi, a griot’s daughter, very beautiful. And very dead. Before his marriage Shabaka ordered his advisors Nduku, Bompo, and Tempo (all incompetents, according to the king) to “Find me for my wife the loveliest woman in the village.” They hunted, fell into a squabble because they had no common standard of beauty, and Noi was married to a blacksmith. He was coarse and crude; and besides being coarse and crude, he abused Noi until her kra went to that place no man has visited. In other words, King Shabaka married, like so many men, not the woman who most stormed his senses, but the simple woman who would have a man as plain as himself. So it was that, at age sixty, King Shabaka, short-winded and feeling cheated, lived alongside but not exactly with his queen, who—if the truth be told—often asked Allah to sneeze her into the afterworld where her faith and loving kindness would be better appreciated.