DARIUS JAMES

lil' black zambo, from negrophobia
1992

Lil' Black Zambo was a little nigger boy. Or pickaninny. Or jigaboo. Or any number of names we have for little colored children—shine, smoke, snowball, dinge, dust, inky, eggplant, and chocolate moonpie. And since Lil' Black Zambo lived with his mammy in a one-room hut made of mud and leaves near a croc-infested swamp in the Jungle, we can call him 'gator bait, too.

There was not much in the hut where Zambo and his mammy lived: a dirt floor, several pairs of dice (Zambo and his mammy liked to roll the bones), and hundreds of big, brown cockroaches with wings snapping dickity-click splat as they buzzed through the hut and slapped against the walls.

Zambo's pappy, Tambo, who liked to drink cheap coconut wine, ran off long before Zambo was born, so Zambo and his mammy were very, very poor. They didn't give out welfare checks in the Jungle. The Jungle was uncivilized. Or at least that's what Zambo's mammy, Mambo, said. "When we gwine git civilized so I can git on d'welfare?"

Zambo's mammy was as big as a gorilla and looked like one, too. She had big, red lips stretched out of shape by two clay plates stuck in her face and a big, white bone pushed through her nose. Her knuckles even dragged on the ground.

Zambo was no looker himself. "Lawd! What I do to deserve such an ugly chil'?" his mammy moaned. "An' why you give him such nappy hair? It look like d'wool knotted up on a sheep's ass!"

Zambo was real, real, black. Spear-chucker chocolate, his mammy said. She clacked her lips and told Zambo he d'darkest chil' she ever seen. Darker than her frying pan even.

"Dat pretty damn darkl" Zambo said.

"Damn rightl" Mammy exclaimed. "When you born, you so dark, d'docta slapped me!"

Zambo's eyes grew big and sad when his mammy said that, thinking, "What I do to be so black an' blue?"

(Sometimes Louie Armstrong flew out to the Jungle with his band and jammed for the Jungle Bunnies. That's where Lil' Black Zambo picked up all his blues references. All the Jungle Bunnies in the Jungle would show up, dressed in their finest feathers, and smoked the Mezz. As Pops blew, the Jungle Bunnies, high as a kite, cheered, "Oooga-booga!"*)

Now Lil' Black Zambo loved to eat watermelons. He didn't eat the red juicy part because he didn't like the seeds.

"What I look like sittin' in d'Jungle spittin' a bunch o' seeds?" he said.

"Can't kill no lions wif a moufful o' seeds!"

So he ate the rind and threw the rest away.

But more than watermelon, Zambo loved pancakes. He loved pancakes more than he loved his saucer-lipped mammy. Mile-high stacks of pancakes dripping with sweet sugary syrup and lots of hot yellow butter. Zambo's lips got greasy just thinking about it. Ummumm!

Zambo's mammy made him pancakes three times a day, every day. She made her pancakes from scratch. They didn't have Aunt Jemima in the Jungle.

Zambo liked missionary sausage with his pancakes real special. "Mammy, when we gwine eat mo' Bibletotin' whyte folks?"

So Zambo's mammy would file her teeth, streak her face with fresh daubs of paint, and go into the bush, trapping herself a nice, plump white missionary. She'd grind him into wormy bits of red meat, stuff him into a tube of monkey's intestines, and fry him up grease-poppin' brown.

"Uuuumm-yum, Mammy! I love whyte people!"

One day, as Zambo's mammy stirred pancake batter made from scratch, and battled an airborne squadron of flying cockroaches, she complained:

"We so uncivilized! We don't have welfare checks or Aunt Jemima mix or nuffin in d'Jungle! When we gwine git civilized an' go pick cotton fo' d'rich whyte folks in America?"

Zambo tugged at the fringes of his mammy's straw skirt. (Zambo's mammy wore a straw skirt and nothing more. When her picture was published in National Geographic, baring her black bushbabe bod and flat Jungle Woman tits, she knew she'd finally been civilized. She could just see the welfare checks flying in.) "An' not only dat, Mammy!" he said.

"We ain't got no hot yellow butter, neither!"

"Oh no!" his mammy wailed. "We ain't got no hot yellow butter!

What me an' my poor chil' gwine do now? He gone haf t'eat his pancakes wif sweet sugary syrup! Damn dis uncivilized Jungle life!"

With her face buried in her hands, she dropped to her knees on the hut's dirt floor and began to cry.

"Don't cry, Mammy!" Zambo said, forking a pancake into his mouth.

"Look! I eatin' it! It good wif jus' d'sweet sugary syrup! I don't need no old hot yellow butter! Hot yellow butter ain't good fo' you no way! It high in cholesterol, it harden on yo' arteries, an' give you hypertension, d'number-one killer o'black folks today! Dat one thing I'll say fo' dese damn flyin' cockroaches. Dey strict vegetarians!"

As was the habit of his kind, Zambo was lying.

While his mammy howled like a horse-whipped hound, Zambo took his plate of pancakes and marched from the hut with a pout. He was in a huff.

"Shoot! I'm gone git me some hot yellow butter! Sittin' 'round whinin' fo' d'rich whyte folks t'come civilize us pickin' cotton wif Aunt Jemima an' welfare checks ain't gone git me no hot yellow butter! What cotton anyway? Shoot!"

Zambo walked through deep, dark jungle with the pancakes stacked high on his plate. Suddenly, a Tiger sprang out from behind a coconut tree. "Hey boy! Can't you read the sign? It says, no darkies allowedl"

"No," said Zambo. "I can't read. I ain't been civilized. What's a 'darkie'?"

"Don't talk smart at me, boy!" said the Tiger. "We eat little darkies like you where I come from!"

"You does?" Zambo trembled, his eyes wide with fear.

"Yes. I 'does,' " said the Tiger with considerable condescension. "Like hell you does!" Zambo zipped to the top of the coconut tree, trailing a plume of dust.

The Tiger was confounded by the little nigger boy's speed.

"You sneaky little burrhead! Come down here this instant!"

Zambo stared down at the Tiger from the top of the coconut tree with the plate of pancakes balanced on his lap. He looked like a lump of coal.

"Is you out yo' rat mind? Does you think I'm gonna climb down there jus' 'cause you say so? An' let you eat me, too? Dis might be d'Jungle, Mr. Tiger, but my mammy didn't raise no fool!"

Zambo's grin displayed a set of perfectly white teeth.

The Tiger's face turned red with frustration. He stomped his paws and thrashed his tail.

"You insolent little ragoon!" the Tiger fumed. "We give you people all the mud and leaves you need for your roach-infested huts, plenty of open space to chuck your spears, all the monkeys and coconuts you can eat, and all I ask for in return is one lousy meal! Is this how you people show your gratitude?"

"What 'graptitude,' Mr. Tiger?" Zambo asked innocently.

The Tiger grew blind with rage at Zambo's niggerheadedness. He rolled his paw into a ball and shook it at the sky.

"Just one woolhead little Jungle Bunny! That's all I asked for! One kinky-haired little ink spot! Who's going to miss him? His big, ugly, bone-through-the-nose, gorilla-lookin' mammy? Not that fat, funky, watermelon and pancake eatin' bitch! She done lost her mind and don't know that's gone yet!"

That made Zambo mad. The tiger was talking about his mammy! She might be big, black, and ugly with a bone through her nose but she was his mammy. What was wrong with that Tiger? Didn't he have enough sense to know you didn't go around talking about other people's mammies like they were pellets of monkey doo-doo?

"You talkin'junk now, sucka!" said Zambo. "Don't lemme haf t'come down there an' beat th'stripes off yo' butt!"

The Tiger laughed. "I'll slap the black out of you and that fat flapjack freak you live with! Now what you got to say to that, punk?"

Zambo hit the Tiger in the head with a coconut.

The coconut raised a big, throbbing lump between the Tiger's ears. He staggered around the coconut tree with a circle of stars revolving around his head. Birds chirped tweet-tweet. An asteroid flashed past his eyes.

Upon recovery, the Tiger angrily shook his balled paw at Lil' Black Zambo.

"I'm gonna put a hurtin' on you now, you Uzi-armed little crackhead!

When I get through with you, you'll never listen to rap music again!"

The Tiger began running in circles around the coconut tree.

"I hope you enjoy the view up there, boy, 'cause when I get my claws in you, you gonna be a dead nigger with an attitude!"

The Tiger ran faster and faster and faster. He ran so fast he looked like a yellow ring of swiftly spinning light.

"Burrhead!" the Tiger roared. "Jungle bunny! Ink spot!"

The Tiger ran faster still. "Spear-chucker! Mau-mau lips!"

Suddenly, there was the gleam of flame and the acrid smell of smoke. The glare hurt Zambo's eyes. In an instant the Tiger was gone. Lil' Black Zambo blinked in amazement.

He couldn't believe what his eyes had just seen. He rubbed them with his tiny fists and blinked again. It was true. The Tiger had vanished.

And directly below him, in a bright puddle circling the foot of the coconut tree, was seven-hundred pounds of hot yellow butter.

Lil' Black Zambo smacked his lips.

His last thought, just before he shimmied down the trunk of the coconut tree, was how he'd like, with his pancakes, to sink his freshly filed teeth into a string of sizzling missionary sausage.

Editor's Note: "That nigga can play his ass offl"