The subject of the interview has beautiful, high, pecan-toned cheekbones, her most striking feature. Her age is undetermined. She wears a purple scarf about her head, a white man’s dress shirt, surprisingly tucked into a white sun skirt, and crosses her legs modestly at the ankles, exposing her black boots. Her hands are crossed upon her lap and she regards the camera with some apparent suspicion.

The voice of the interviewer is deep: “Thank you for agreeing to the interview. Could you please state the name you would like this session recorded under and describe you knowledge of the man known as Crackman Can?”

The woman speaks in a West Indian accent: “Mamma Maroon, you may call me. I am alone here marooned in this evil land and I have lost my only God-given child, lost and found in this devil-haunted world.”

[Interviewer’s voice redacted and film edited to present Mamma Maroon in prompted monologue.]

“I was born in Kingston Jamaica, and don’t you mistake it. I am no ganja hooking countrywoman! I was born a subject of the Queen, God rest her soul, and you can keep your iced tea to yourself, thank you very much!

“I was working for Farrakhan’s people—don’t go there with your false questions, you know good and well who they are! I was on the security detail in Camden patrolling those damned projects that terrible man put those people into…”

“What man? Are you daft, countryman?! It makes no matter what his specific purported name is, when he is always the same, as alike in looks as he is for a businessman mistook—for He is evil and does no good on this earth!

“I was in communications and scouting about the back lot with one big strapping man, Larry. His name was Larry, Big Larry to be specific, when I heard a cry, a baby’s wee peep. You see, there had been a yearning in my soul since babyhood. Born to Jamaica I was, but brought to Philadelphia with my mother as a child of one or two—the social workers are in disagreement for whatever reasons they have—I recall as my earliest memory chasing down a hen in the street when That Man sent his helicopter, his war machine, his fire breathing, hope crushing devil coach up from hell to burn John Africa out of our self-sustaining home.”

“Yes, you can repeat that, mark those words, and that my mamma was taken from me into medical constable custody and the fright of it all sterilized me, turning a little girl against her eventual womanly nature according to that inner fright unleashed by That Man’s wicked attack—that’s right! I could have no baby of my own I knew, an orphan upon the wicked earth as I was—this was told to me by an old white nun that passed me on the street in Wilmington at the Grayhound Bus Depot...that woman was out jogging in her habit and all. It has been obvious through the long years of this life that she was sent by God to give me the call.”

“Look, He has many names and I had to eventually leave The Nation. But, God in the guise of Allah had put me in that place to be an instrument of his grace, for in the shadow of Big Larry the wheezing words of that old, white, jogging nun, who smooth as could be was shuffling by the bus depot, came to me.

“I new it was a baby, and a child for me, before I pushed back the lid of that dumpster. But that was it for Allah and me, because if I had stayed I would have had to fill out the report and submit that poor abandoned—trash-heaped child—to those soulless dyke devils that had beguiled me down the wide and winding path while my own mother, forever lost to me, was served her bitter portion of iniquity.”

“Big Larry cast a long and kindly shadow and not only let me go, but set me up as his own mother’s housekeeper up in Wilmington. There I raised my boy and dressed his bruises and cuts from those scraps he got into for taking affront to those boys who teased him. For, you see, as good as Big Larry was, was as big a mouth as his little sister had, a wagging tongued gossip, who was a junkie bitch if you would excuse my French—for that is not the English I speak.

“Now, it came to be, that the same Terrible Man runs each and every city. Eventually, that boy that God had brought to me at the end of Allah’s long hooked nose, had to defend his life one too many times.

“Ta Mamma Maroon, which is...was...that is was...what he called me for his own reasons—not every woman is blessed with a smart son that names her so like a heroine… Well, he comes to me en says, ‘Mamma, I was protecting ma girl, Bendy en now the police are after me.’

“It’s a factor of old, that when a good man gives his heart in an evil land, that his affections will be sold…”

“That bitch set him up! …is what I’m sayin’ if the hearer is not too daft to know! You should have bought you some common sense instead of that third camera… Where do you get your money from, anyhow? I don’t see any suits or work boots about.”

“Yes, yes, that bent bitch of no good account!”

“I suppose that extra big camera peeking at me from over there is the government camera, aye—am I right?”

[The subject’s right foot starts to twitch, and then swing like a black booted menace, suggestive of the subject recalling delivering toe kicks to a prone malefactor.]

“Oh, no, Cousin Tom, you may not have his government name. I agreed to talk about Can, what you call by slander some Crackman.

“We are done here—ask that bent, broke-ass so-en-so!”

The subject turns and glares at the backup camera angle, setting her chin in a defiant, jutting pose and wrinkling her nose, her eyes leveled like amber-lit ire.