A Visit Home

Jungle knew he was home when he stepped off of the plane onto the stairs. Outdoors, it wasn’t cold at all despite it being December. It wasn’t even 9:30 am local time and yet the temperature was no less than 70. The humidity was already rising and he’d be too warm in his sweater by noon. Nashville was warm for the time of year, and yet it had still been cold every night and morning even on warm days. Though the tropic of cancer was about 400 miles to his south, he was really in the tropics as far as he was concerned. The sun was even higher in the sky than it was in Nashville. He immediately relaxed and walked with purpose to the baggage claim.

His childhood friend, Reggae, was waiting at the baggage claim when he got to it. He only knew this because he heard the bird call they had as kids. Reggae walked up to him and spoke to him in his island English. “Tink seh yu bad? Yu know seh a me run tings inna town!”

“Well, is that how you all say good morning in Tarzan country?” Jungle teased, hugging him. “How you livin’, porch monkey?”

“You ’bout to see how I’m livin’ in a second, Jungle. How you livin’?”

“Like Kunta Kinte the second time he got caught running away. And what’s with this nice weather in December? This warm this early?”

“Okay, that’s bad livin’ and if it hadn’t been hot like this all month long I’d say you brought this weather with you from Africa.”

“If that were the case I’d travel the world and everywhere would be tropical, Reggae, like them jungles you came from back in Nigeria,” Jungle teased.

“Jamaica,” Reggae corrected, hinting to the origins of his nickname.

“All you Black people look alike to me,” Jungle teased again. Coming from a Black man, it was funny to hear this. His other nickname, Black, came from him getting darker each year since puberty. ‘Jungle’ came about when they went on a fishing trip in the woods and he had just thrived in that natural environment, telling them when something was approaching them in the woods and somehow managing to catch more fish. Max had begun to call him Black Dundee, then Jungle Black. Reggae had been nicknamed such when he moved from Miami to Mobile as a child and still had his Jamaican accent. His was one of only five families from the Caribbean living in Mobile at the time, so he had felt outcast due to his accent until Jungle, then called Jabari, and Max had taken up for him. Jabari had lied to his friends and said Reggae was related to Bob Marley and was in the US on business for the record company Tuff Gong. “Besides, you niggas didn’t treat them guys from Detroit like that and they was all some punks,” he’d told them in the playground.

They left in Reggae’s Benz and Jungle looked around in amazement at the city. Very few trees were bare, suggesting that the winter had seen more warm days than cold. Things were a dull green, but still green and not gray. The air was not just warm, but balmy like it would be in late spring when he was a youth. Only the southern sun told him what time of year it was. “What you lookin’ at, Black?”

“The lack of winter here. Man this some odd mess to be looking at. No leaves on the ground, no frost this time of morning, nothing to show it’s winter except the days are shorter. It’s December. When we were 18 it would be winter here. Even if it got warm, the trees were still all bark and it wasn’t like this in the morning. This climate change is nice for now but I always wonder what it’s gonna cost later.”

“You know Marty said his dogs are already shedding their coats.”

“What dogs?”

“He has a dog breeding farm, raising pits and Rotts and dobermans.” Just when Jungle was gonna ask why those breeds and for whom, Reggae continued. “Ain’t nothin’ but drug dealers and police buyin’ from him. But he’s doin’ well, though. He say he don’t care who buys them, so long as they pay for the dogs.”

“And they’re shedding already? They shouldn’t be shedding for some months now!”

“Welcome to di tropics, mon,” Reggae said in his accent. “Mi used to wan go back just for di weather, now mi have it right hyah inna Mobile.”

“Yeah, I bet your jungle behind is real happy here now. All that’s missing is some lions and gorillas in the woods for you to be right at home,” Jungle teased as if he couldn’t differentiate between Jamaica and rural Africa.

“You know where Jamaica is?” Reggae asked as if he forgot who he had picked up from the airport.

When they turned off of the interstate and onto some surface roads, Jungle took in the familiarity of his hometown up close. The smaller trees in some places and the much taller ones in others. The poverty and the prosperity separated by less distance than in Nashville. The subdivisions built up where only woodlands were before. Reggae pulled into a nice neighborhood and eventually into a nice set of condominiums where he parked. His condo was only about four stories up, but it afforded a nice view of the area as many buildings that tall were office buildings a distance off. “My neighbor on the top says he can see the Bay from there. I doubt it, though, it’s only two more floors. Some niggas just have to lie.”

Max was inside on the couch when they walked in, watching cable TV and laughing at the comedian talking about bad children and lax parents. When they walked in, he jumped up and greeted Jungle with a hug and some banter. "You two midnight-black jigaboos in one place, that explains why it started getting dark this early!” he teased. “How you been, Jungle?”

“Glad to be visiting home again, bro. How you?”

“Glad you back. You ain’t got no jungles out there in Nashville and I was beginning to worry about you. Want to go to the zoo and see your old friends?”

“Why, you plannin’ on turnin’ yourselves back in voluntarily?” Jungle teased.

On the balcony, they looked at the southwestern sky it faced as they reclined on chairs and Jungle drank up their iced tea. By then, it was beginning to get warmer, in the high seventies, and the sun was shining in on them. “Jungle, you know you changed, right?” Max said.

“I hope so.”

“Yeah, but you got to reach out to your boy Bantu. He also went Muslim but he ain’t changed at all. Now, it’s one thing for us to smoke weed and drink, but for him it’s different. How you gonna say you Muslim and be in the club doin’ everything worse than before?”

“Has there been any one improvement at all in him?” asked Jungle. Bantu, really named Bantam Lawrence, had become Muslim in prison unlike Jungle. He had never seen Islam functioning in a community level like in Nashville, Tampa, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, or any city of size. Mobile had a small community of very few African Americans and hardly any more Palestinians and South Asians. Though Jungle had never lived in Mobile since his conversion, he knew that the African Americans in the Islamic center were usually poor and looking for a way out of their suffering. The other two saw them as being lazy, shiftless, jealous of them for their relative success, and quick to complain about racism. The African Americans saw the Palestinians and South Asians as sell outs because they would sell anything from their stores for money. Bantu had no functional community to join when he left prison.

“The only improvement is that he now has a steady job and he hasn’t gotten arrested since he got out in ‘04,” Max answered.

Reggae cut in. “But him still inna de club a drink an’ smuok like him nevah learn no bettuh. Jus’ last night me see him inna Hog Heaven wit’ a rasclot joint inna him fingas.” Max was just beginning to learn Reggae’s other dialect of English. Reggae had just said that Bantu was still in clubs, drinking and smoking like he’d never learned better. Just last night, Reggae saw him in a club called Hog Heaven holding a joint. Max proceeded to tell Jungle about Hog Heaven and Jungle listened, but he had learned about Hog Heaven already through the Internet, keeping up with some happenings in Mobile while he was away.

“Reggae, why you inna de club wit him?” Jungle asked pointedly. “Not just Bantu but de wuol o’ we too wold fi be in deh.” Not just Bantu, we’re all too old to be in there.

“Well, for me it’s no sin. But fo Bantu it nah mek sense fi be deh. ‘Im fi be inna mosque wit him face pon de floor. He’s the Muslim, not us.”

“Lemme call him right now,” Max said.

“It’s only 10:30, you think he’ll be awake?” asked Jungle.

“Almost. He’ll get the message when he is.”

Jungle later went back to his parent’s house and settled in there, his father showing him the change he had made to the old office room. He had set up a desk and even a partition for Jungle to stand behind when he prayed. “I got it facing east so you don’t have to look for the direction. You can have some privacy when you pray.” Jungle thanked his dad and he did appreciate what his father had done. But he knew there was a mixed reason for his father doing this. One; his dad had just told him, so he could pray undistracted by outside noise. Two; because his dad didn’t want to see his son praying. Not out of hostility for Islam, but because he wanted to test Jungle’s sincerity. He doubted anyone who prayed in public, and if his son wouldn’t pray behind closed doors, he’d doubt Jungle’s Islam, even after all of these years.

Bantu and Jungle got together at Max’s hunting house on Dauphin Island in the evening time, just before sunset. Dauphin Island was in the Bay of Mobile, but further south from the city and was developed in some parts and secluded in others. When the sun went down, Jungle asked Bantu, “You ready to pray maghreb?”

“What? Oh, magrib!” said Bantu, stressing the second syllable to make it sound like ‘McRib’. He wasn’t playing, that was really how he thought it was said. Jungle knew that that was due to African Americans who had gotten it wrong. “No, man, I’ll pray it later on. I’m not clean for it right now.” He signaled to Max to ask for a lighter as he pulled a cigarette out with his other hand.

“Nigga, you’re gonna str8 up refuse to pray? Let me ask you honestly, Bantu, do you still pray at all?”

“Yeah, I prayed on the way over here. I pray a lot of times in the day.”

“And the required five prayers?”

“Nope,” answered Bantu proudly. “I pray more than five times a day. And I don’t do that Arab prayer you’re talkin’ about, either,” he boasted.

“You mean the right way to pray? And you braggin’ to me about refusin’ to do it?!”

“I’m just sayin’ that Islam is in the heart and not in the rituals. Seems like you wanna take Black people from the back of the bus to the back of the camel.” From the resulting argument as they got in the fishing boat and headed out to the Gulf of Mexico, Jungle could see that Bantu had fallen not only under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad’s son, but the worst leadership at that. To make matters worse, the local leadership under which Bantu had fallen was more lax than what Elijah’s son would have even picked had he been responsible for the appointment of imams at local levels.

From the way that Bantu kept interrupting Jungle, it gave him another hint. “Did you learn that at the mosque you go to?”

“Naw! They just taught us to focus on the heart, and a bunch of us got the message and took it to another level.”

“So that’s what taught you to keep smoking and drinking? Think I don’t know to access security cameras online? But I wasn’t expecting to see you, holding a joint and a drink in your hand! That’s what happens when Islam is in your heart and not the limbs. You know we’re not allowed to drink or smoke and you do it anyway in front of others?!”

“Chill out, Osama!” said Bantu. “Hey, Max, where’s the lighter?”

“Not now, Bantu, this is too serious, man.”

Bantu cursed and turned back to Jungle. “You need to relax before you get recruited to Al-Qaeda, bro. What are you, the next Adam Gadhan? Got something to prove?”

“No, but I have to avoid misleading like any other Muslim does. We all sin, but we’re not supposed to be reckless with it and we’re not to show it off.”

“Say, bro, if you don’t chill out I’m gonna warn your parents about your extremism. You’re scarin’ me.”

“What extremism? All I’m talking is the bare minimum and the basics to even hope for forgiveness. Allah promised Muhammad that He’d throw anyone in hell if they died without repenting for drinking. And if you wouldn’t turn in your weed supplier to the police, you shouldn’t threaten to turn me in for being a Muslim!”

“But being strict don’t mean being Muslim, and Muhammad wasn’t like that. He was soft with people and he never forced people to be Muslim.”

“Except one class of people he did force. Muslims themselves. He forced them to be Muslim. Salallahu alayhi wa salam. He had a noble lady’s hand cut off and didn’t accept intercession on her behalf. He punched some people in the chest and so did Umar ibn Al-Khattab. Radi Allahu anhu.”

Bantu had been trying to outsmart Jungle in the debate, oftentimes by interrupting him and asking him to operationally define certain words. Other times by re-defining words himself, anything to justify a non-demanding form of Islam that he practiced in Mobile for two reasons. One being to rebel against the Arabs and the South Asians for not accepting Blacks as equals even in the mosque, the other being to make it easier to practice in a city almost devoid of Muslims and empty of any Islamic influence. But when he tried to outsmart him this time, Jungle really stopped him in his tracks. Bantu told him, “My weed supplier doesn’t threaten to force his religion down my throat, and besides I don’t smoke weed. But you need to stop trying to lie to me about Islam and lying on Muhammad. You ain’t foolin’ me.”

“You just confessed to having a supplier, so not smoking it means you sell it and no one here knows how you make money since you don’t work full time. You just confessed! And no one is lying to you about the religion. Bantu, I asked you to move to Nashville with me years ago for a reason. I knew this would happen. It’s hard to be a Muslim in this place, and the first thing we have to do as Muslims is go where it’s easiest for us to be Muslims and stay that way. That means Muslim even with the things that the non-Muslims don’t like.”

“So they can become against Islam and never accept it?”

“No, so they know they’re worshiping Allah and not their own desires.”

“Well, for your information, I don’t sell weed for a living, I got a sign-on bonus from the Army.”

Jungle was shocked into silence, along with Reggae and Max. They were by this time half a mile out into the Gulf of Mexico with their fishing lines cast. For a minute, Jungle was so silent that they could hear some traffic back on land that far away. Then Jungle asked him, “Did anyone tell you what that means before you signed on?”

“Yeah, two people did. The imam said it was a good deed and a good dawah. The imam I knew in the joint said it was leaving Islam, but he was an extremist, anyway.”

“Of course he was an extremist, that’s what a real Muslim is in America! And you believed the imam at your mosque instead? You don’t pray and that’s the same as leaving Islam, but then you join the army to go kill other Muslims? Bantu, you’ve been lied to about Islam long before I got here. But the question is why do you believe it? If you became a cop, would you go after Duke for the weed and cocaine we know he sells? Would you turn him in right off the bat? But you sign up to go fight Muslims who never did you anything?”

“They don’t like Black people, that’s enough for me. They got Black Iraqis and they make them live in the swamps around Basra ’cause they don’t want them in the city. Go talk to them, not me.”

“If that’s even true, why do you think we were allowed to hear that here in the US? To educate you? No, Bantu, it’s to make you want to go and fight them AND NOT FIGHT THESE DEVILS IN DC THAT BLEW THE LEVEES IN NEW ORLEANS!” Jungle boomed angrily. His voice echoed back from the tree line on land. “So now you signed on to go and fight the wrong people because the Black imam said it was all right?! You used to know better!”

“When we get back, Jungle, I’m gonna warn your dad about your extremist tendencies and tell the cops, too. If you’re really not an extremist then you got nothin’ to hide and shouldn’t be worried.”

“Bantu, in times like these I will have to worry even if I haven’t done anything wrong. All I did was talk to you about what I know that was kept from you and what you cannot do as a Muslim. You’re talkin’ ’bout ruining my life just for that. Don’t do it. When you were in the streets you wouldn’t rat on no one when you knew they were wrong, so don’t make me an exception when I haven’t done anything.”

“Open your mouth, Bantu.” It wasn’t Jungle that said this, it was Reggae.

“What?!” said Bantu out of surprise.

“Open yuh bumbaclot mout’, you ras informah!” Reggae said more loudly. In the low light conditions, Bantu could not see what Max did, that Reggae had drawn his pistol stealthily and had not yet aimed it. “It a we dat tell Jungle fi talk to yuh, not he! We know seh yuh nah fi smoke and drink inna de club and you tell us seh yuh Muslim! Everyone know seh a Muslim fi be better, not worse!”

“Yeah, Bantu, you went too far,” said Max. “You talkin’ about gettin’ another Muslim sent to Cuba just because he told you what you needed to hear. We can’t have that. But please go easy on him, Reggae.”

“What the hell is this?” said Bantu.

“Never mind!” said Reggae as he snuck his pistol back to his waist. Then in a quick and fluid motion, he grabbed Bantu’s chin and back of the head with his hands and twisted his neck. A snapping sound was heard and Bantu was slumped over with his eyes wide open. Reggae then calmly threw the body over the side of the boat.

“You know, guys,” he said in American English without his accent, “I loved him growing up, and I’ll never forget the good times. But I can’t have you in Cuba just because he wants to be a fake Muslim. All you’ve done is be a Muslim and make improvements in your life. That ain’t against no law.” Reggae was nervous about what he had done, he obviously hadn’t killed anyone before. But he was still somewhat composed, and he even was thinking clearly. As Bantu’s body began to float around the boat in which they sat, Reggae removed his pistol again and put the muzzle of the gun just into the water and against Bantu’s stomach. The sound was muffled by the water and the pressing against the stomach, and only the light of the muzzle flash shone through, blinding their eyes. Then he did the same on each side of the chest. It was to puncture each lung and the stomach so that as he decomposed and bloated, he wouldn’t rise to the surface again. Also, the fresh blood would seep into the water before the body cooled too much and the blood coagulated. This would attract both sharks and smaller fish at the bottom where they still lived in that time of year. The body would be scattered at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico as far and wide as traveled any fish or sharks that ate from it. As the water filled his punctured lungs, Bantu began to sink slowly with his eyes still wide open as Max spoke up.

“I wouldn’t have done that, Reggae. But it had to be done, I understand it," Mack said. Then to Jungle he said, "You can’t be going to jail for some stuff that you ain’t do just ’cause Bantu ain’t wanna get his life together. Don’t make no sense for Bantu to be so hard and so street like he was and then threaten to drop a dime on you! That’s too strange. It just don’t add up.”

“You know why he would do it?” asked Reggae.

“Why?” said Max and Jungle both.

“Because Islam must be the truth,” he answered. “Every time the truth is told for the first time somewhere, people are divided when they don’t have to be. Like right now. Bantu didn’t have to fight with Jungle like that but he went out of his own way and his own character to avoid the truth. Doesn’t it remind you of when Jesus was preaching and Judas just didn’t want to sacrifice so he sold him out for silver? Exact same thing. The Jews never liked the Romans once they’d conquered them, but when Jesus started preaching to them to get it right, they hated him so much just for that they asked the Romans to kill him and let a murderer go. Just like the Jews, Bantu went out of himself to treat Jungle like they treated Jesus. I’m convinced of your religion but I don’t know how to accept it. Maybe God will accept what I did to protect you as proof that I mean it. I killed one friend to save another.”

“You want to accept Islam?” asked Jungle. His voice was cracking as he was shocked by what he had just seen.

“Yes,” nodded Reggae after he thought for a second. “What do I do?”

“First thing, reject every other authority that isn’t Allah. Believe in nothing else as deity and divine. Can you do that?”

“Yah, mon. I already have.”

“Next, repeat after me……”

Jungle called Reggae the next morning to wake him up for the fajr prayer and decided to take him to the masjid for the mid-day prayer. When Reggae accepted to go, he had a condition. “Take me where they’re not preaching any lies just to get along. I don’t wanna end up like Bantu, worse off than I used to be as a teen-ager.”

“That’s the problem, Reggae. There are masajid where they just don’t tell the entire truth nor do they lie, so they just omit a lot. There are those where they lie and twist things around. There aren’t any in this country where they tell the whole truth, though. If they did, they’d be closed down. Once we know this, we just go to the least of the evils and pray in those masajid.”

“How do we change that?”

“That’s what I’m working on now. First thing, you leave America, and that means both of us. We got to get out of here when we can and we have to move where they’re not afraid to speak what’s true. And you prepare for the entire world to be against you because they will be.”

“You know what it sounds like, Jungle?”

“What?”

“Like the anti-christ is already here and callin’ shots. I haven’t been back to Jamaica in eleven years, and now I think I need to go back just to tell them that the end times they’ve been waiting for are already on the way. People say it all of the time, but now I’ve seen it with my own two eyes when Bantu flipped like that. And the way everyone comes against Muslims must mean they’re doing something right so I better let the Jamaicans know. Will you come with me since you know more than me. You tell me what I don’t know and I’ll relay in plain terms to the people there.”

“As soon as possible, gladly. How do we earn a living there?”

“I rent out my condo, and in the meantime we go and clean out Bantu’s house, I have his key from yesterday. Then we use whatever he had and we get the money from it for you. You use it to get a car at a police auction and then you get some company to paint their logo on the car and pay you for the advertising. That’s extra income for you right there, and you save that without spending any of it, then you buy a house real cheap at a county auction and rent it out. A year from now, we’ll be ready to go there. So if that works out, will you come with me so I don’t get lied to?”

“I’ll do you one better. You help me get a job there advertising and I’ll be picking you up from the airport there. All right?”

“Done deal. You took up for me and helped me adjust to living here when I first came. So now I’ll do the same for you when we go back to my country. But this time we’ll be there for the best reason ever!”

Return Home: Sequel to A Visit Home, in which Reggae returns to Jamaica with Jungle at his side to give dawah to his homeland. But they encounter a deported imam there who has just begun to do the same thing. The message spreads easily enough, but they must prevent Jamaican Muslims from becoming the apolitical wimps like the American Muslims they left behind. To do it, they must eventually give life to the message and confront what is worst in Jamaica in its early stages, to give the people confidence themselves.