The World Doesn't Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott

Author:Rion Amilcar Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

When they got to the party, their joints felt stiff. Music played in the distance. Nigger Jim adjusted his straw hat and wondered aloud if this was the place to get some good brain. He said: Some brain’ll help relax our joints, right? James-my-man smiled and nodded, kicking at the yellow dust beneath their feet and dropping a fistful of pills into their open palms. They walked in the direction of the plantation and its glowing rich-green cotton field.

Let these vitamins take away your drowsiness and pain, James-my-man said. My friends, here we are in the promised land. A place to get some love for a creaky heart and some cranium on the side. Now to find the Lizard.

Rick’s limbs felt heavy, and if he rested them, he would sleep the whole night. He popped some pills into his mouth and chewed as James-my-man had done over and over. Rick lit a cigarette to blunt the bitter taste and offered Nigger Jim one.

Nigger Jim swallowed his pills, screwed his mouth into a disgusted frown, and shook his head at Rick.

What I look like, smoking them things? Nigger Jim said. Nasty-ass tobacco, he mumbled and then paused. We used to pick it, now they want us to smoke it?

Our ancestors used to pick cotton too, Rick replied.

I don’t wear no damn cotton.

As he stood near the bursting cotton buds, the world began to shift and rock for Rick. The cotton spoke to him, but that was absurd, so he didn’t listen. Music blared from speakers. People in glistening blackface and shimmering red lips passed and greeted him with wide coon smiles. Are they wearing makeup, Rick asked himself, or is their blackface natural like Coon Calhoun’s? But that was a silly thought, so he let it escape from him. He looked all around, his expression changing from amusement to shock to horror. One coon, a woman, handed Rick a large forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor, Crazy Ninja. He smiled and took the heavy bottle into his hand, wondering if, this time, he’d drink it all, or would he surrender somewhere in the middle, right where the alcohol, as usual, filled his bladder to capacity? Rick began to feel tired, so he popped a few more pills into his mouth and swallowed, washing them down with the malt liquor. Soon he lost track of Nigger Jim and James-my-man. He looked around for them, but quickly lost interest.

Next to him was a skinny East African man who stood about six and a half feet, but slowly he grew to eight or nine feet. Next to the East African man was a drunk, short, dark-skinned man with an impish smile and pointy elf’s ears. He held a lollipop in one hand, a bottle of Crazy Ninja in the other. And next to the munchkin-like man was a tallish guy with an oblong, football-shaped head that became longer and longer each time Rick looked at it.

It must be the pills, he thought. All this weirdness. It must be the pills.

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