The Nigger Factory Read Online Free

anything to stop MJUMBE. The students would construe any negative move as jealousy. The deposed SGA leader would be a Mjumbe for MJUMBE. Pleasure at his own play on words almost capsized the chair in which Baker sat, back-tilted.
    Gone was the animosity he had felt the previous April whentold that some skinny, ostrich-looking nigger from Georgia had defeated him for the SGA post. Gone was the bitter gall he tasted when told forty minutes before: ‘Mr and Mrs Calhoun returned from Norfolk, but they are attending the theater this evening. They are expected to return about ten o’clock.’ The small, wigged maid who delivered those lines had stood in the Calhoun door-way like a reject from a Steppin’ Fetchit movie wiping her greasy hands on a napkin and trying to sound like a fancy British bitch.
    Baker laughed out loud. He could imagine Thomas sitting helplessly in front of him like a jackass with an Afro.
    ‘Did’joo, did’joo hear that bitch?’ Baker asked when he realized everyone was watching him. ‘Did’joo hear that funky-ass maid callin’ the Sutton moviehouse wit’ wall-to-wall rats a thee-ate-uh?’ He told them that because he knew what Jonesy would say if he told them why he was really laughing.
    Evidently everyone had heard because a faint smile choked through their clamped mouths. They smiled because they needed to. No one really thought that it was very funny. The crooked grins bounced off the dimly pulsating light bulb and skipped nervously out through the window. The room then returned to its tomblike silence.
    Baker felt grimy. Sweat had stuck his underwear to his crotch.
    Jonesy was visibly worried.
    Speedy Cotton and Ben King were tired and nervous. They sat directly beneath the bald, waxy wattage that illuminated itself and little else. They tried to convince themselves that the tightness in their groins came from too much beer, too much football, and too little sleep. Their eyes wandered about the room but they saw very little.
    Abul Menka remained cool. It was impossible to conclude exactly what was on the man’s mind. Baker called him ‘Captain Cool.’ He sat in the corner, feet propped, smoking a cigarette. In truth, Abul Menka was very seriously thinking about cutting out. He would have been gone had he not known thathis motives would be misinterpreted. The MJUMBE men would have thought he was leaving because he was afraid of Calhoun.
    ‘Fuck Calhoun,’ he thought sullenly. Abul did not care if Sutton’s Head Nigger had eight strokes and ten heart attacks, outdoing all of the other university presidents who were cracking up as a result of student demands. No, Calhoun was no problem. But Abul Menka was not anxious to see Earl Thomas.

3
    Earl
    There were only three tenants at Mrs Gilliam’s boarding house on Pine Street. The three men lived on the second floor of the white three-story structure. It was not for lack of applicants that the third floor was empty, but because Mrs Gilliam was very particular about her roomers.
    Earl had always considered himself highly fortunate when he thought about how quickly Mrs Gilliam had taken him in. At the end of the previous school year he had decided not to leave Sutton, but to take a job as a mechanic at the nearby computer factory. All at once the dormitories were closing for the summer and he was without a place to stay. It was then that he remembered Zeke, the Black handyman, who had often mentioned his room at Mrs Gilliam’s, where he also took his meals. With three days remaining before school closed Earl had gone to see her. The two of them had hit it off immediately.
    Mrs Gilliam was sixty years old. A short, gray-haired, thickly built matron of a woman who had lived in Sutton for thirty years. Her husband had been a conductor on the ICC railroad, making runs from Miami to Chicago on the Seminole, when she met him. She was a waitress at a coffee shop in Kankakee, Illinois, and after having seen the big, raw-boned Black man twice a week