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MAHOGANY STILL felt guilty about Cadillac’s bad trip, so late Sunday night she and Precious took him out dancing. In Soul City there are lots of places to go dancing any time of day or night, as is to be expected of a city with ten thousand DJs. Long after midnight the Funky Butt Dance Hall, the Soul Clap Café, and Cooley High were crammed. But that was never a problem at the Honky Tonk, so that’s where they took him.
Mahogany was a local celebrity, and the Soul City Inquirer was always wondering who she was dating. If they snapped her picture in some nightclub alongside a guy from The City, all of Soul City would be talking. Just because Mahogany didn’t like him didn’t mean it wouldn’t be scandalous. At the Honky Tonk they didn’t have to worry. The Honky Tonk struggled to attract even a modest crowd because of its playlist: all white music, all the time. As they walked in, the Average White Band was emphatically urging some white boy to play that funky music. “I fuckin hate this place,” Mahogany said. She exhaled viciously. Someone slipped past and quietly handed Cadillac a card. They were recruiting for a secret mission to help bring the White Music Party up from the underground. Mahogany snatched the card out of his hand and tore it in half.
“You’re out of control,” Precious said.
“Look who’s talking,” Mahogany said. She tugged at her ear melodramatically.
Precious stormed off as Paul Simon limned a number of ways to leave your lover.
“Can you believe her?” Mahogany said.
He could. And he wanted to say so. Mahogany was a bitch. At first he’d excused it. He’d thought she was justified because she lived in Soul City. By now he wanted to say something to put her in her place, but Mick Jagger started crowing about the sweet taste of brown sugar, then Mahogany stood and the exquisite shape of her ass made him forget whatever it was he’d been thinking. She ordered him to dance with her. If she was a bitch, suddenly he was a puppy.
Most of the meager crowd leaped up to dance, too, and on the small dance floor they were pressed into each other, almost face-to-face. Then someone bumped them close and his lips made contact with hers for a single electric second. He was kissing her. She was not kissing him.
Mahogany’s cellphone vibrated. It was her brother. She listened a moment, then yelled out. Heads turned. “My mom’s having Epiphany!” she screamed.
Precious came running over. “The big moment’s finally here!”
“What’s that?” Cadillac said. They ignored him.
Mahogany had to get to her mother’s side. Precious’s excitement quickly dissipated and she calmly said she’d catch her later. Cadillac could see she was just waiting to go do more B. This was getting bad.
Mahogany ran to the Billiemobile. Despite her telling him no, Cadillac jumped in and refused to get out. He could see this was not something to be missed. His pen was in hand. Mahogany told him she couldn’t take him with her. Her parents would be furious with her for bringing a boy from The City to their home. He told her if she left him with Precious the girl would try to get him high again. They zoomed off to the Sunflowers’ house as Billie blessed the child that’s got his own.
The Sunflowers lived in Honeypot Hill on Bluestone Road, number 123, in a tall, oval house that was shaped like a giant birdcage. Mahogany told Cadillac to stay in the car, then zipped into the house. She opened the door and for a moment he could hear a din, as if a tornado were inside the house. He listened to Billie for a moment, then crept from the car and peeked in through the mail slot.
There was no tornado inside, but if there had been it wouldn’t have added to the raucous, riotous, clamorous, cacophonous scene of Mahogany’s little sisters Magenta, Henna, Sepia, and the twins Pistachio and Cinnamon, and her little brothers Groove, Peasy, and King, leaping around the house as Chickadee screamed from her lungs and contorted her face and spilled birth juice all over, while Mahogany’s dad, Sugar Bear, held Chickadee’s hand and led her in Lamaze, and the midwife, Cocoa Serendipity, yelled at Chickadee to “Push!” as a head, two arms, and a belly slowly squeezed out of Chickadee’s center: Mahogany’s newest little brother, Epiphany. Sometime in the afternoon Sugar Bear had put on “A Love Supreme” in hopes of welcoming the boy with sounds of peace and love, but now all you could hear was a flurry of exalted saxophone notes flying around the room, scoring the moment’s chaos.
The children were wilding, Sugar Bear was breathing, Cocoa was yelling, Chickadee was wilding, breathing, and yelling, and Epiphany—tiny, yellow, shivering, bald, wet Epiphany—was opening up his lungs and letting out a world-class glass-breaking scream that sliced the cacophony into silence. For one second. Then everybody went back to their madcap orgy of sound and fury and Mahogany zoomed in to join, crossing through the chaos of children to land at her mother’s side as Chickadee and Epiphany struggled to separate themselves. Then Cadillac noticed Epiphany was more personally involved in the process of freeing himself from his mother than he’d known a newborn could be. With his bottom half still inside his mom, the little guy had opened his eyes and bent his arms down onto the stretched lips of Chickadee’s vagina and was pushing himself up out of her, as if attempting to rescue himself from quicksand. He pushed, she squeezed, she breathed, he screamed and seemed more determined to get out with every passing moment, the centimeters separating him from freedom dwindling as his waist became visible and then his hips, Chickadee spitting him out as if she were creating him right then and there. When he succeeded in extricating one foot from her honeypot, Cocoa reached in and eased his other foot out. But then he wriggled away from her, grabbed his umbilical cord, and ripped it in two. “Grab him!” Chickadee yelled. But before anyone could, Epiphany stuck his flabby little arms out in front of his head like a swimmer, bent low, and zoomed up into the air. The boy was flying!
He flew directly toward the wall, banged into it, ricocheted off, and kept on flying, out of control and way too fast, zooming and bouncing off walls with the speed, spring, and elasticity of a racquetball, as his soft little penis flapped in the wind. Chickadee yelled, “SUGE!” and Sugar Bear took off into the air trying to grab little Epiphany like a loose rebound, but the kid was far too fast and flew too wild and whenever Sugar Bear was about to grab him, he bounced away. The chaos of children took off into the air and it looked like an aerial invasion and simultaneous counterattack, with children zooming through the air at every angle, colliding in midair and flying on. Epiphany was faster than everyone and happily scooted through everyone’s grasp until finally Mahogany flew slowly into the air, watched the baby’s path, bisected an angle, caught him, and calmed his restless soul in her arms. She floated down to her mother’s side and the children began dancing in the air, doing flips and 360s and loop-de-loops, celebrating not so much the swelling of their ranks but the freedom the newest one allowed them. Chickadee took Epiphany in her arms and looked into his little brown eyes and told him she loved him, and he melted with the boundless ardor that’s possible only with brand-new love.
Now Dad turned his attention to the chaos of his older children, and with just one look from him the anarchy ended, for though this was a happy home, it was also a dictatorship where the wishes of the czar and czarina were backed up by an army called The Belt and an elite force called A Switch From The Tree In The Backyard. Mom and Epiphany fell asleep and the house began to quiet and Cadillac walked back to the car dumbfounded, trying to make sense of the scene he’d witnessed: an entire family of normal-seeming wingless Black folk who could fly even at birth.