Charcoal Joe Read Online Free PDF

over with a light brown blanket draped across his shoulders. His chin was down to his chest, his head rising and falling on a derrick of labored breaths.
    I approached and sat across from him on the white railing I had erected for the sweet pea vines that Bonnie cultivated in the spring.
    Joguye Cham looked up at me. His face was older and less arrogant than when last we met. The loss of bravado revealed a strength in his eyes. He gazed at me for a long moment and then sat the rest of the way up. The blanket fell from his shoulders, showing that he wore a dark blue T-shirt and light cotton trousers that could be purchased at any J. C. Penney’s store.
    “Mr. Rawlins,” he said in a deep voice that denied his decrepitude.
    “Mr. Cham.”
    The African tribal prince took in a deep breath, found it restoring, and decided to take another.
    “I was working to unite my people,” he said as if answering the question
Why are you here?
“My father sent me to Oxford and I studied and I learned how the world worked. I told Bonnie that she would be my princess and that, and that I would make a new world for her in Africa, in Nigeria. I made alliances with big corporations, oil companies. There was money and weapons and a future where I believed my people could rise up and contribute to the world as we have always done for ten thousand years.
    “When Bonnie told me that she was going to be with you I said, ‘With that nigger?’ I said those words and lost her. I said one word and lost her. Me, an African king, calling you by the white man’s curse.
    “That’s why she left me. That’s why she came to you. I went back home and shook hands with the white men who owned the oil company. We were friends. We drank together and smoked together; we had women and mapped out the future.
    “And then one day I said, almost in passing, that when I was king of all the tribes I’d set up a central institution that would share the wealth that came out of the ground with all my peoples.”
    The dark flesh around Joguye’s eyes wrinkled and tightened. I could see that the fingers of his right hand were clutched into a permanent petrified fist. Uncontrollably his left knee was bobbing up and down like a seamstress’s joint working a foot-powered sewing machine. There was regret and acceptance in his visage.
    “I have a cousin named Malik. His mother was my father’s sister. He often drank and smoked and had women with me and the white men I worked with. I was to be the leader and he one of my trusted council.
    “And then one day we were in his mother’s house. He sent his servants away, closed his doors, and then he came to me with a pistol in his hand….”
    The blues, I thought, were not limited to the American South.
    “He said to me,” Joguye continued, “that I was stupid, stupid, stupid; that I had said words that could not be taken back, that I had made a vow that could only take everything from our families. I was a fool, he said, and then he shot me. I proved that I could not deal with the white oilmen, he said, and he shot me again. My father had stolen his mother’s dowry, he yelled, and he shot me. He was crying and laughing and talking and shooting me until there were no more tears and no more bullets and I was dead on the floor of my aunt’s home.”
    My mind at that time was looking for a way out of the pain and anger and loss that I and my nemesis both felt. I remember thinking when Joguye said that he was dead on the floor that this was
metaphor,
a word that Jackson Blue once tried to explain to me.
    “A simile,” Jackson said, “is when you say something is
like
something else. A apple is like the earth. A piano is like a hippopotamus. You see the similarity an’ smile. But a metaphor is when that comparison is as close to true as it can be.”
    Joguye
was
dead on the floor, as I had been at the bottom of that coastal cliff.
    “My cousin Jane Okeke, who loved me because I always played with her when she was a