“What are you doing in the dictionary so early on a Saturday morning, Preston Junior?”
“Just looking up a word, Ma.” He loved the fat Webster’s dictionary his mother had given him for his thirteenth birthday
“Gussie, we’re late and your aunt is waiting. Come along now. What are you doing in the bathroom?”
“Maybe he fell in, Mama.”
Mattie gave Prez that “Don’t-you-dare-mess-with-me-this-morning” look.
“Well, what’s the word? Maybe I can help.”
Of course, Prez knew that his mother probably knew the definition of the word he was looking for, and therefore, the correct spelling, which was really throwing him off. But he needed to do these things for himself. And besides, maybe she was just being nosy.
“It’s alright, Ma. I can find it.”
“Gussie,” Mattie pounded on the bathroom door, “open this door this minute.”
The door opened and Gussie stood there with his pants still around his ankles, tears coming down his face.
“What’s wrong?” asked a now-concerned Mattie. Gussie knew how to play the tears card.
“There’s no toilet paper.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say so?”
“I thought you’d be mad at me.”
“Oh, Gussie, why would I be mad at you because we ran out of toilet paper? Preston Junior, go next door to see if the Hendersons have any.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Prez cut Gussie an evil stare. He had to get up from the dictionary and his writing pad. As he went out the door, he was still going over in his mind what he had just read: “A showy trinket or ornament such as would please a child, a piece of finery of little worth, a pretty trifle; a gewgaw (!)” He had to make some sense of it all before he and his boys made their way over to Lincoln Park.
With Gussie’s butt duly wiped, Mattie rushed out the door, pulling Gussie along. Prez watched them from the front window until he was sure they were around the corner, then waited a few more minutes to be sure his mother wouldn’t double back on him as she had done many times before, claiming to have forgotten this or that. Then he’d be out the door to meet up with his friends at Lincoln Park.
Washington, D.C. is in the South. Make no mistake about that. It’s below both Mason-Dixon lines: the real one surveyed in the 1760s that delineated the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the metaphorical one of the 1860s that separated the slave states of the South from those of the “free” North. Washington gets hot and muggy like any good southern city, but Lincoln Park was an oasis.
*
The locals, of course, did not do their hopping, darting, and flitting at high noon when the bountiful sun had a habit of punishing such infidels by transforming its oozing heat into a hot mallet. So, it was with a sense of bewilderment that Prez and his crew had first encountered Prince Eduardo Flowers that previous Friday.
“What the fuck’s he wearin’, man?”
“I dunno. Looks like pajamas!”
“I’ve never seen pajamas with a hood.”
“You got that right. Whatever he’s wearin’ looks real stupid to me. What’s he doin’ Prez, some kinda karate?”
Prez was agape. He had never seen such a fluid display of speed, power, and control, lightning-fast hand movements and powerful kicks, performed with ballet-like spins and leaps. The hooded figure crouched, ducked, parried, and kicked from ground level while doing what appeared to be push-ups on one arm. And that’s when Prez noticed.
“You know, y’all ought to shut up. That dude is bad.”
His boys fell into an instant silence. None of them had ever heard Prez refer to anybody as “bad.”
“Yeah, y’all. Just shut up and check the cat out. Y’all so busy bein’ stupid that you haven’t noticed he’s crippled.”
There, under the shade of a magnolia tree, the punching, lunging, spinning, crouching, leaping, kicking figure came to an abrupt halt. He was perfectly motionless, standing perfectly balanced on that one good leg. The other leg, along with his arm on the same side, were slightly shriveled. His eyes were closed. His breathing, imperceptible.
Prez and his friends moved in closer to get a better look. This guy looked strange to them. He had Negro skin alright, but his eyes looked almost Chinese. And his hair was long, straight, and glossy black.
“Prez, what the fuck’s he doin’?”
“Shut up, Tons. It’s his religion. We have to be quiet until he’s finished.”
“Finished what?” said Dee Cee. “He looks kind of stupid if you ask me.”
Prez noticed the dude’s eyes open and his head lift to see who had just uttered such a remark.
“Dee Cee. I said shut up, man.” But it was too late.
“You there,” came the voice from beneath the hood. “You must learn that the gift of silence must be treasured whether it is being given or received. Do you know the crane? Ahh . . . you don’t. It’s a bird, a tall bird that wades in water to fish and fight. It is always silent while on one leg out of respect for the mission nature has allotted to it. You, my big friend, would see the bird and think it fragile and vulnerable on one leg. Just like you think I am in the crane stance. But you cannot push me over. Would you care to try?”
Dee Cee went over and gave him a push. Sure enough, the hooded figure didn’t budge.
“I didn’t push you too hard that time.”
“Well, you may push harder.”
Dee Cee gave him a harder shove. Again, the cat in the pajamas was rock solid.
“Aww. What are you afraid of, Dee Cee?” said Tons. “I’ll push the chump.”
Tons rushed at the motionless figure with both of his arms outstretched and his big beefy hands in front like a battering ram. Just when he should have made contact, he was spun and flipped to the ground.
Prez and the rest of the gang doubled over with laughter.
“You weren’t supposed to do that,” said Tons, looking up from the ground.
“No, sir. You weren’t supposed to do what you did,” replied the strange-looking Negro with the Chinese eyes.
This was how they came to meet Eduardo Flowers. The boys immediately began calling him the Flower. For the rest of that day they sat under a magnolia tree while the Flower told them tales of how kung fu had opened up worlds of opportunity to a poor kid who had been hobbled by polio.
“I come to this park all the time, since I was a boy. My Filipino mother would bring me. My Negro father wouldn’t come here. Well, he did once, and the police came and beat him and arrested him. For me, this park has always been a haven. It connects me with my childhood. No one has ever bothered me. They do not know that I am an American Negro. The police see a funny-looking foreigner limping along who could not possibly present a threat to their authority, so they shun me. The other whites see a cripple from another land, so they pity me. No one sees a man. Except you boys. That is why I love the way you call me the Flower. What a lovely expression of affection and respect. Where I teach, the whites bow very low and call me Master Flowers. They are afraid of me because they know I could kill them with a single blow. They also want to take from me that which cannot be theirs to possess, my skills and my knowledge. They really don’t respect me. And you,” he said, turning to Prez, “I’ve watched you for a long time, coming over to your corner to try to prove your manhood. I must say you have some prodigious talents.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“Ah-ha! You are indeed a smart one.”
“No. I don’t know what the word means.”
“It means you have enormous potential to learn and to grow as a man because your natural openness and honesty pushes you to seek the truth. And, therefore, you would make an excellent student. You have great fighting instincts and lightning reflexes. And yes, you can hit pretty hard, for a boxer on the corner, I suppose, even though you do not understand the way of the fist, nor your inner power. You also do not understand the nature of conflict. The first task of a great fighter is to avoid conflict by seeking resolutions to disagreements. Otherwise, you will be doomed to be defeated one day, by the only one who can truly defeat you: yourself. Ah. I see my car is here. The Secret Service have come to take me to my dojo where I give them instruction.”
A shiny black Chevrolet Impala pulled up to the curb with its chrome reflecting a blinding array of the spectrum of sunlight, as if it were a prism.
“Wow!” said Brennie-Man, “check that out.”
“Please,” said the Flower Man, “do not be impressed by baubles.”
As he hobbled away towards the car, Prez yelled after him, “What’s a bauble?”
“It’s what the whites used to trick the Indians into giving away Manhattan Island.”
“What?” said Prez.
“You will tell me next time, won’t you, Mr. Prez?”