
Cadillac Jackson is a reporter with Chocolate
Magazine, sent on assignment to Soul City to cover the mayoral election. He’s given
three days to complete his assignment and return home, but Cadillac has an agenda of his
own.
Arriving in town, he registers at the hotel Copasetic, located on
Cool Street, then decides to find the infamous Sack-of-Six Biscuit Shop. He walks from
Nappy Lane to Gravy Avenue, continuing on to Cornbread Boulevard. The sidewalks are
triple width and teeming with people engaged in hair-braiding, marble shooting,
preaching, bubble blowing, rollerblading, gossiping, and flirting. He notices that all
of the traffic lights use red instead of green for traffic to advance…and clocks the
average minute at ninety seconds long. He’s in a black utopia…a fantasy
land.
Upon reaching the biscuit shop, he meets Mahogany Sunflower and he
knows his life will be forever changed. They play the mating game, she becomes pregnant,
and they both suffer the wrath of her family and the townsfolk because Mahogany is a
member of the town royalty…a member of the only family in the community with the ability
to fly. It’s expected that the offspring of any members would fly and that flight could
only be guaranteed by mating with people of their own kind. The townsfolk believe that
disaster would befall them if Mahogany’s baby did not possess this ability. All they
could do was wait and see!
Emperor Jones, the mayor of the city is a
72-year-old, 330-pound, six-foot-three man. He’s been the mayor for 12 years and wants
to retire. His main job as mayor is to spin the tunes that are piped into the city from
a central turntable connected to the speakers in the sidewalks. It’s what the mayor
planned to spin while in office that the good people of the city based their votes
on.
His opponents were Coltrane Jones, leader of the Jazz Party, Willie
Bobo, the Hiphop Nation’s leader, and the most dreaded Cool Spreadlove, who spun Soul
Music and whose philosophy was sex…as much as you can get, with as many people as you
liked, in any place public or private at anytime of the day or
night.
There’s another concern that the residents of this wonderland are
not aware of. Having made a deal with the devil, John Jiggaboo is selling a shampoo
that gained its popularity because of the glorious, shiny results obtained from its use.
Those that didn’t have this glorious mane of hair wanted it, and so the competition began
and John Jiggaboo became a billionaire selling the shampoo he knew contained an added
ingredient that seeped into the brain, making the takeover of your soul
easier.
With the wrong man elected to office and everyone shampooing their
hair to see who will look the best, the city gradually slips to the dark side. How they
manage to survive the shampoo and restore their government is told in a story where the
“N” and “F” words flow freely and where the Slavery Experience is offered like a vacation
cruise to those wanting to show reverence to their ancestors. Then there is the wait for
the flying offspring…
I found this book of only 184 pages to be a very
long and tiresome read and was glad when the last page was turned.