Oliver Benjamin
with. And in doing so he got to see the world. Starting in Central
America, he traveled on to South America, then flew to the east,
stopping in Sumatra and Java before finishing his trip in Africa.
His trip was nearly the inverse of the route coffee took on its own
great diaspora, the same route that most of human culture had taken:
Born in Africa, cultivated in the East, capitalized on by Europe, and
then spread to the far reaches of the New World. Coffee beans and
the main currents of human culture did seem to share twin
trajectories. It wasn’t perfectly symmetrical, of course. Java had been
a seminal spot for coffee, but represented only a tiny subplot in the
human saga.
It was a long, slow journey for Roy, one that traversed not only land
and sea, but the backwaters of his own unhappy soul. He felt like a
cartographer mapping out a strange and unknown land, and was
often surprised at what he found there: aspects of his personality he
never knew existed. The fact that he was a successful man of color
crusading for the third world afforded him a complex kind of status
among the poor, who saw in him both a kind of heroic outsider as
well as successful integrator, and he began to see that they were right.
Previously unassuming, Roy started to gradually think of himself as
someone special, a man who could very well change the world. And
while he knew that righteousness was the enemy of clear thinking,
this zealousness provided him the energy he needed to undertake
such an enormous project.
Freed from the context of his own culture, Roy’s mind began to
take on a new shape, oozing out in all directions like liquid from a
broken cup. He started to believe new things. He imagined himself
an interloper, a man of color who could beat the mainstream at its
own game; a mixed-race, multi-cultured underdog who, through a
resourcefulness gleaned from his diverse heritage could heal the
wounds of the world, winning in the end the very muse who inspired
him.
Formerly on the outside, Roy slowly concocted a worldview that
put him not only on the inside, but at the very center, the point of
gravity around which Sammy Davis’ coffee cup spun. He believed
that he had discovered the Archimedean point, a pivot of leverage
from which the whole earth could be moved.
Increasingly zealous, he accelerated his labors, working twenty-
hour days digging in the dirt in search of the honest and the good.
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