We all hoped Kilpatrick would be canceled, that he’d soon be out of our lives. Lord knew, we were banking on it, especially those of us who’d done business with him. But just as our celebration was beginning, there he was, showing his face, like we knew he would. He strolled into the club in his celebration attire, parting the sea of faces. He looked like any one of us, like no problems had ever come his way. It was how he always looked, the reason he was never liked. He was smug. He was a know-it-all. He was a womanizer, a music executive, a mogul.
For so many reasons, the ballroom was packed in anticipation that night, too. Champagne corks were popping by the bar. The kitchen staff was preparing the canapés, the stuffed mushrooms, the bacon-wrapped scallops. We watched Kilpatrick work his way to the middle of the ballroom, as though he was the guest of honor, which in some ways he was. He pinched a flute of bubbly from a passing server’s platter, killed it and grabbed another as the server moved on.
Graves, our esteemed toastmaster, was on the bandstand, about to summon everyone’s attention. But before any of us knew it, Kilpatrick was stealing the man’s thunder, like he often did. He had a history of interrupting award speeches, flipping out on television, engineering endless selfish and embarrassing spectacles, all for more attention. Now, he was clanging one of his chunky rings against his flute and saying, “Toast it, old man. What you waiting on? We don’t got all night.” He put his fingers in his mouth and sent out an ear-bleeding whistle.
Mildly perturbed, looking as though he literally had a pain in his ass, Graves grumbled and raised his flute. We raised ours and so did Kilpatrick, pretending every head in the room hadn’t just turned and glared at him, like a cold silence hadn’t fallen over us like soft snow.
Most of us turned back to Graves eager to get the show going. But a few of us more distrusting folks, ones who’d known Kilpatrick the longest, who’d been waiting months for this splendid evening, kept an eye on him like he had a price on his head.
*
It was Juneteenth, the day of our annual celebration, which that year just happened to mark our platinum jubilee. All the members had gathered at the club, even our partners and spouses. Our male-identifying members donned navy-blue suits with long tails and crest patches on our breast. On our hips were our customary swords, on our feet, knee-high leather boots. The female-identifying members, some of them wives, some of them members themselves, were all fluffed in big billowy pink chiffon dresses with long white evening gloves and the occasional tiara.
Before Kilpatrick arrived, between all the hobnobbing, some of us had actually been talking about him, discussing how the evening’s events would proceed. Then, we talked about our fall and winter plans and did whatever final buttering up was needed to finish the odd backroom business deal before the jubilee started. It was our club’s seventieth anniversary, our seventieth year of formal Black excellence, and we were all quite cheery. It was also Graves’s birthday, and naturally, us being respectful of our elders, we were feeling lucky and grateful to have the old man around for another year.
Some people, non-members, described us as the Black illuminati, but really that was giving us too much credit. We were powerful, sure, just not that powerful. We were a gentleman’s club. Most of the time, when we were courting prospective members, they heard “gentlemen’s club” and thought we were running some kind of burlesque theater. In actuality, we were called The Onyx, and though there was a Black strip club with a similar name in the city, it was far away in an undesirable borough, so there was never any reason to confuse them with us.
We were a private social club, a place to congregate and do business and hustle a few games of pool with your fellow member, perhaps knock around the racket ball or have a steam in the sauna. Our forebears purposely modeled our club on all those secret societies of the past, the ones white upper-class men of yesteryear had set up to dominate the world. Our Black forebears, some of them our fathers and grandfathers and uncles, started our club to shadow the white ones. Now, it was a statement on changing times and Black ownership and fellowship. And fittingly, our club was secret, too.
Many thought we were the stuck-up offspring of old wealthy Black families who gave roasts, that we were gentle, snooty folks who attended the gentlest, snootiest Historically Black Colleges and Universities for undergrad, the Ivy League for post-grad, but that was just the opinion of the shortsighted. Our excellence went way beyond that.
We had members in stocks and bonds and the Fortune 500, the entertainment business and the art world, philosophy and science, even a few in mildly criminal circles like politics and the law. We hosted more events than any other secret organization in the city. We had comedy nights, snooker and dart tournaments, book and film discussion groups. Every Thursday, we did Jazz Night, Fridays, poker. On any given day, you could spot a Black athlete or even a politician having lunch in the Thurgood Marshall room, or a well-known writer doing curls next to a well-known ballerina or cellist in the club’s fitness center. We were closer to a modern day Talented Tenth than some sort of illuminati.
We were progressive before any other similar organization in our area, admitting women as early as 1980, when many of us were just kids. We were still called a gentlemen’s club, but we were officially a gentleperson’s club in all our literature and contracts. We welcomed the LGBTQ community with open arms. We even operated as a nonprofit, a 501(c)(7), and we gave back to the community with fundraisers for every Black charity under the moon. In fact, every little league team we ever sponsored, baseball, football, basketball, somehow won their respective State championships each year.
So, really, if one were to be frank, there was nothing we were incapable of.
*
It should be said that none of us knew if Kilpatrick had actually done all the things he’d been accused of. Lord knew, Black men were always the targets of false accusations. But we were at least skeptical of his innocence. Who knew the man better than us? Besides, so many allegations had been leveled against him that we figured he had to have at least done some of that stuff. Embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, anti-Semitic remarks, donations to our most racist politicians, being a secret Republican and confidential government informant, showing up in the contact books of a handful of upscale prostitution rings, flashing his genitals to unsuspecting hotel maids, allegedly, all allegedly. Members were beginning to wonder how he’d ever gotten in the club in the first place. Was it possible a bad seed could slip in with so many good ones?
Since he was very well-known, routinely in the tabloids, and on the verge of “cancellation,” now he was virtually a pariah on Twitter, and in public. He was turned away at restaurants and accosted on the street. People posted his many home addresses and picketed outside. People stalked his every move. The District Attorney’s Office had their scopes homed in on his freedom, wanting to lock him up like The Black Comedian who’d previously shamed us, and The Black Actor. But none of it seemed to faze Kilpatrick at all. He was the king of doubling down. The more trouble he faced, the louder he got.
Many of us were caught in the middle since we were all emotionally “there” for Priss, his ex-wife, who was also in attendance with her new man, Winchester, a rocket scientist she’d met at the club. She’d moved on with her life. She’d gotten away from Kilpatrick and was finally learning to be her true self, Priscilla the Famous Singer. Since she’d separated from him, she’d beaten a mild drug habit, which many thought he’d introduced her to. And now her latest album topped the charts. Even though she was once-again so successful, some of us huddled around her, protecting her from the sight of Kilpatrick, the slimeball.
*
In many respects, The Onyx remained a vestige of a long-gone part of the city. We’d started in 1945, and our building, which everyone had named The Temple because of its architecture, was a large former city building, a mortuary, in fact. When many of us joined, the original renovation was decades-old and looking pretty crusty. The air inside every room was fetid, the old stained wood decor mildly derelict, the prime rib and country ham at the daily buffet not all that flavorful. But under the watch of a few older members, Graves especially, the club and building itself had regained some of its old cachet. We’d done new renovations. Everything was high-tech. We even had those Japanese hand dryers in the bathrooms. We’d hired a top-notch chef, and we were a registered landmark now. So, many of us thought all our members should be just as respectable.
But there was Kilpatrick again. To the uninitiated, it probably looked like some of us were actually sympathetic to him and his problems. He palled around with some boorish-acting members as the hors d’oeuvres were served in the ballroom, as a jazz quartet played tamely on the bandstand and everyone mingled. Near the kitchen double doors was a mammoth, thickly layered cake taller than all of us. Next to it was a Champagne tower and a table with mountains of seafood chilling on mountains of ice. The point of the jubilee, the first jubilee for many of the members, would not only be to celebrate the club but Graves as well, for turning the whole place around. He was a MacArthur Fellow, a genius of African and African-American history. To that end, the club had hired actors to stroll through the crowd as notable Black figures from the past. They came into the ballroom by the sound of a gong and an impressive pyrotechnic explosion, entering through a billow of smoke. King Tutankhamen and then Cleopatra were both carried through the room on litters by shirtless muscle-bound men. Nat Turner came in on a horse the color of coal, holding a flaming torch. Hannibal wheeled in on a chariot that was pulled by an actual baby elephant that every few feet stopped and trumpeted out of its little trunk. The performance was all very well done. And many of us who’d planned it were happy that Graves seemed to be enjoying himself.
However, when Nat Turner’s horse got near Kilpatrick, who claimed to be a horseman, an owner of many thoroughbreds, he stroked its ass, making a lewd remark, and then slapped it. The horse reared up on its hind legs, kicking at the air with its front ones. It whinnied loudly, frighteningly, spreading the crowd and knocking over an ice sculpture, all while Kilpatrick laughed like an idiot. The actor playing Nat Turner must’ve been an experienced rider because he quickly got control of the horse and trotted it out of the ballroom before anything else could happen. Many of us wanted to end the night early by throttling Kilpatrick right then, but instead we looked to Graves, whose eyelid twitched at the whole display. He made the signal for everyone to relax, to wait. It wasn’t quite the time. He made another signal, an almost imperceptible movement of his hand, the signal for dinner to be served. We took our seats.
*
We ate banquet-style, and as soon as the dishes had been placed in front of us, Kilpatrick could be heard bragging from his table at the center of the room. He said no one could get him. He could suffer no lawsuits. “You know why? Because I’m getting the hell out of here. My Black ass ain’t stupid.” Though the man was ghetto, he was quite wealthy. He’d sold all of his US holdings, liquidated his assets. He was going somewhere without extradition. In fact, he said, this was his last night in the country. The very next morning, he would be getting on a private plane and vanishing. “Poof! Gone! Well, maybe not gone-gone,” he said. “You’ll still hear from me. I am Kenny Kilpatrick, after all. I’ll still be making a whole lot of noise, just from a safe distance. It’s what I do.”
We all knew this about him, his plans of escape. Many of us had been monitoring his movements. But we just ate and paid him no mind, especially those of us sitting with Graves at the head table. This was a grand occasion. We weren’t going to let his antics dampen the evening. Instead, near the end of the meal, we all watched the big screen at the front of the room, where a video of some new recruits was shown. When initiated into the club, you were escorted to The Onyx campground upstate, where you stayed for two weeks. As the days wore on, little by little, your amenities were taken away until the final day, when you were left with just the clothes on your back, brought to your primal emotions.
Through a series of dramatic events staged by our initiators, you were made to believe someone in your group had betrayed you. The betrayer was another initiator posing as a prospective member. After a clever switcheroo, you were made to believe this person was going to be killed. Only those who could allow this to happen were granted membership. It sounded very harsh, but once it was over, you realized it was all for drama’s sake. That year, everyone passed with flying colors, a famous young scientist, an Olympian, a standup comic, and a novelist. We watched them on the video, all of them laughing about the experience, as though it were a practical joke, which in some respects it was.
As the video ended and the lights went up, we could hear Kilpatrick say that when he was initiated, he knew it was fake all along.
“Bullshit,” someone said. “You were out there just as freaked as the rest of us.”
“Bullshit, my ass.” Kilpatrick took a bottle of bubbly from one of the ice buckets on the table and guzzled straight from the mouth like a wino. “I don’t know what you people thought,” he said, “but it all seemed kind of—I don’t know—faggy to me.”
*
At every celebration, there was always a quick musical interlude. Following this year’s theme, we had impersonators of great Black singers of the past, and since Graves was the man of the hour, we let him do the choosing. We had renditions of Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday’s greatest work, ending with a big choreographed number by a woman who did an exceptional Josephine Baker. It all seemed old and possibly antiquated to our younger members, but the showmanship and production value took everyone back to what we imagined were the good olden days. The waitstaff came around to clear the tables. A hush fell over the crowd, and the sound of clinking dishes and silverware played in the hall.
Everyone engaged in mild conversations, but then all of us heard Kilpatrick yawn quite loudly, boredly. We heard him say to himself, “Goddamn, how long are these Negroes gonna keep us?” We all looked at him and then at old withered Graves, who was eyeing Kilpatrick again. As though he sensed our angst, he finally gave the signal, the one we’d been waiting for all night. Some of us kept straight faces, the most cunning of us, while some were smirking or curling our lips, waiting for it all to go down. The jazz quartet started into a fast, jaunty number that sounded like a game show theme song. On the program, it said we were roasting Graves, which we were, but just not yet. As soon as the quartet members hit their final note, those of us in club enforcement stood and, like the Secret Service, made a beeline for Kilpatrick. He was looking at a dating app on his phone, swiping his finger to the right over and over again. He didn’t even see us coming.
Everyone at his table knew the deal. They’d played their roles, so they stood and evacuated their spots, calmly scooting in their chairs as they left. Kilpatrick looked around as the table emptied, wondering what was happening. He turned and saw us just feet away, tried to make a run for it, but it was too late. The big guys snatched up little old Kenny Kilpatrick and dragged him toward the stage. He protested, of course. He tried to go for his sword, but it fell from its sheath and hit the ballroom floor with a metallic clatter.
“What the hell’s going on? You can’t do me like this. Who do you think you are, the police?”
Graves stood at the podium, looking down at him over the reading glasses perched on the tip of his densely pored nose. “Mr. Kilpatrick, do you know why you are here this evening?”
He struggled more. “If you bighead niggas don’t let me go…”
“What?” Graves said. “What will you do?”
“A lot, just watch, you old motherfucker.”
Graves strolled the bandstand, his coattails fluttering behind him. “Mr. Kilpatrick, or should I call you Kenneth? How about Kenny? What did they used to call you in your old DJing days? Double K? Isn’t that how you got famous?”
“How about Double Kiss My Ass?”
Graves exhaled tiredly. He smiled and clicked his heels, knowing he was the one in charge. He filled up with an excited breath. “Just as every secret society has initiations,” he said, “under the right circumstances, they have expulsions, or excommunications, too. The Catholic church, for example.”
Kilpatrick grunted out of frustration. He struggled more, and one of our men headbutted him, ringing his bell. “Oww, fuck. What the hell are y’all doing to me? This isn’t right.” He briefly lost his legs, and one of us said, “Stand up, you bum.”
Graves waited for the commotion to stop. “Many don’t know, but we, The Onyx, also have expulsions. It doesn’t usually happen, but in your case, it will have to tonight. I must say, you made quite the mistake showing up here.”
Kilpatrick struggled again, but our men wouldn’t let him go. He calmed down just enough to say, “Okay, fine. Let me go, then, and I’ll leave. You’ll never see me again.”
Graves stuck out his bottom lip and sucked his teeth. Into the microphone, in his deep voice, he said, “No, no, no. I don’t think you’re getting us.” He paused. “You will be expelled from this Earth.” His voice rattled the speakers. “You will be expelled from existence. You have not only shamed this club but our race as a whole. Your life is meaningless. You’ve proven you have nothing to live for.”
Kilpatrick nearly laughed. “What?! How the hell do you know? I have plenty to live for.”
“This is not up for debate, my dear Kenny. You will not talk your way out of this one, I’m afraid.”
Many of us looked around, wondering if this was truly happening. Were we really witnessing what we thought we were witnessing, what some of us had been planning for quite some time? We’d never gotten a chance to expel the Black Comedian or the Black Actor, those two sick men, before the law took them away, before they’d disgraced us. Unfortunately for Kilpatrick, he was getting the brunt of it. An example needed to be set, and as far as most of us were concerned, he was as good as any.
Graves pointed to the elevators. “Take him down.” He made a thumbs-up sign with his hand and then turned it over. Down meant the old crematory, which was still in use, mainly to incinerate our garbage and old documents. Though this kind of expulsion had evidently happened before, we didn’t know if it was true. Graves was our oldest living member now. No other members were around from back in those days. But we’d heard stories. Some of us even thought this could’ve just been another initiation, perhaps one into a higher level of the club. Was this even real? And if it was, shouldn’t we go along with it?
Security pushed him toward the elevators, but Kilpatrick put his feet out in front of him, trying desperately to halt the progress. “No,” he said. “You can’t do this.” We all thought it was kind of ironic that he said, “This isn’t legal.” He struggled more, and in the clutches of the big men, he looked like a child being dragged into the first day of school. He was pleading. He was suddenly crying. It was a pitiful display. “Please,” he said. “I’ll leave. I promise. I said I was leaving anyway.
Tomorrow morning. You’ll never see me again. I’ll go underground.” The big men pushed him harder, and there wasn’t much he could do.
“But they’ve already canceled me,” he said. “The feminists, the gays, the Jews, the media. I’ve been canceled by all of them.”
“Mr. Kilpatrick, Mr. Double K, they didn’t cancel you. You canceled yourself.”
“But my life has been ruined.”
“No, it hasn’t. You are still extremely wealthy. You will never starve. You don’t know what canceling even is. Our ancestors were canceled. You? You were just ridiculed on the Internet. People disagreed with you. That is all. You were simply held accountable. Your poor little ego couldn’t handle it.”
“Okay. Well, now what? Can I just go, then?”
Graves seemed to consider this. He opened his mouth. “No.” His voice reverberated through the ballroom again. One of the speakers screeched a single note of feedback. “If so-called ‘cancel culture’ can’t get you, well then, we will. You are a mess that you’re forcing us to clean up. You are a shame to us all.”
It seemed very final, but there was some rumbling from a table in the rear of the ballroom. A voice was suddenly announcing itself. “But Mr. Graves, is this really necessary? Do we have to go to these lengths? Perhaps we should all have a vote on this.”
Some all over the room agreed, but many didn’t see the point. Kilpatrick wasn’t going to be missed.
“Okay,” Graves said. “By a show of hands, those in favor say, Yay.”
Most of the hands in the room went up. A resounding “Yay!” boomed through the ballroom, echoing off the high ceilings.
Graves nodded. “And those who say nay?”
Kilpatrick’s eyes darted around the room as nary a hand went up, nary a voice was heard. A few arms started to go up, but stopped and shrank back. He was frantic now, realizing just how disliked he was. He was saying, “No, no! Don’t do me like this. Not my own people.” As the men pushed him past Priscilla’s table, he pleaded with her, “Priss, help me. What about the kids? Priss, please. They’re gonna kill me.” The men pushed him farther.
Everyone watched to see if she’d do anything, and when she finally stood, we thought she would stop all this. But she grabbed an empty Champagne bottle from the table. Quite loudly, she said, “Yay,” and clunked him over the head with it. The sound was like someone driving a stake into cold ground, a dull thud that all of us felt in the pits of our stomachs. We winced. One of the members across the room actually said, “Oh, snap!” and covered his mouth.
Kilpatrick went down like a puppet whose strings had been cut. This wasn’t part of the plan. Its abruptness left us silent. Many hoped we were just going to shame him, convince him he was no longer welcome here, humiliate him much the way he’d humiliated us. But Priss had taken it all the way. Looking satisfied, she smoothed her dress and sat down next to nerdy Winchester. They kissed, and everyone in the room just kind of looked at each other with raised eyebrows, like, Damn. One of the big men stood there, looking down at the body. He nudged it with his foot. When he saw no movement, he simply picked it up and slung it over his shoulder like a large rolled-up rug.
We all watched him go to the elevator and press the down button and wait a solid minute before it dinged. Finally, he entered the elevator, and the doors closed. We all turned to Graves, who looked back at us, his eyebrows raised, too. Even he didn’t think this would happen. He scanned the room for quite some time. We thought he’d have some words of wisdom for us, something tinged with remorse, something that would make this seem justified. Show us the lesson here, we were thinking. But after a moment, he simply cleared his throat and said, “Cake?”
Suddenly, everyone nodded. We turned to each other and started talking amongst ourselves again, picking our conversations back up exactly where they’d left off.
*
The quartet played subdued jazz with just enough bounce to keep spirits up. We gave Graves a playful, good-natured roast, making fun of his old-timey ways and his receding hairline. Some of us drank decaffeinated coffee since we had to be at work in the morning. Some had brandy and cigars and other digestifs. There was no talk of Kilpatrick or any business from the past. We spoke of prospective members, what book or film we might enjoy at our upcoming discussion group, the dart tournament the following week.
As we departed, we were even given large boxes of leftover cake to take home to our families since there was more than enough to go around. Valets brought our cars from the garage down the block. Hired limos and town cars started to show up at the curb. Our chariots were a-waiting. It was Juneteenth, our platinum jubilee, the anniversary of our ancestors’ freedom. And we took in the night air, which, funnily enough, smelled not of death but uniquely of triumph, for all of us. Graves walked everyone out, as though he would be staying at The Temple, as though it was his home. We toasted him one last time, thanking him for his fierce guidance and service. We raised our swords and tiaras to the man, we, The Onyx, an army of good strong people of color, people of intelligence and morals, great Black people, Graves said, who would never feel the shackles of embarrassment again.
Contributor Notes
Chris Stuck is the author of Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, published in July 2021 by Amistad/HarperCollins. He is a Pushcart Prize winner, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Oregon Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
