FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  And with that, she hoisted herself upon her walking stick and left him under the shade of the baobab tree.

  ~

  7

  •

  See without sight

  ...I am waiting for you.

  my heart is not really my own

  because it seems that my heart started /long before me

  Find my prayer. This very lonely prayer.

  And open it with your hands.

  •

  On the night that Shango awoke from a dream in which he had discovered a brightly shining city at the bottom of the Sea and realized that Namibia and Soraya had definitely run off, presumably together (as African women in those days were notorious for doing), and weren’t coming back--unless they wanted to be killed by his father’s wrath--he realized that this was a sign of prophecy, an omen extending him permission to selfishly pursue the one and only thought in his mind...Ife Ife. He packed up in the middle of the night and left a long message scratched in his floor, the symbols he used being the ones that only his grandmother could interpret.

  He wrote: “I love you Mother Iyanla. It may be many years...but I will return to you, because I am your child. I am the light that you blessed.”

  And as though by magic, his journey led him back…back to Ife Ife.

  Their eyes locked now in lucid remembering, his shy handsome dark face shimmering beneath midnight’s moon as he found her there again—standing in the volcanic garden, that rare original African swan, her silvery charcoal beauty framed by the stream of the black lake, her flesh protected by the circle of fat lazy crocodiles.

  “You knew I’d come” Shango said as he came closer.

  “I prayed that you would come”, she said with shiny, wet eyes.

  He touched her cheek, their faces closing in an eclipse, their kiss coming upon them like the days gone by that burn in fire.

  “I came to take you away, Ife Ife. To make you my life.”

  “But first”, said the Princess, as she took his hand and placed it on the hardness of her nipples so that he could feel the trembling quiver of her bare skinned heartbeat. “My mother says that we are born female, but only a man can make us into a woman.”

  He pulled her close and kissed her deeply, his hands sliding down the silky contours of her body until they held and squeezed her buttocks firmly. She spoke gently, whispering.

  “Do you feel what I feel? That we’ve been here before? That our hearts began to beat long before we even existed?”

  These were the days when all the tribes of West Africa shared a common saying in which men and women vowed their wedded devotion and everlasting love. It went: I carry you into this world...I carry you out.

  These were the highest, most committed words that two people in love could say to express the force and scope of their feelings. So it brought tears to Ife Ife’s eyes when Shango looked into her cloudy mystic eyes and told her, “I carry you into this world...I carry you out.”

  He lifted her off the ground, her head gently resting in the crook of his neck as he carried her to the black lake.

  And then in...into the black womb of water, Ife Ife’s dolphin tail splashing like time across the white magic of the moon.

  The moon at the bottom of the lake.

  ••

  Balid

  A village of the Bambara tribe.

  Namibia felt Nkrumah’s hot sperm shoot insider her, her hands cradling the spasm of his lower back as his face twisted up in a passionate groan. And even though he sang in her ear, “Namibia!”...she knew it was Ife Ife that he dreamed of. Ife Ife that he loved and pretended to fuck, his vigorous poke-stroke going so deep and precise that there was no room for denial--he was one of those men who believed that if you fucked a woman hard enough, you could make her turn into the one that you wanted.

  “I am grateful to you”, Namibia whispered in his ear as he panted, his sweat dripping into her face and body. She said, “I shall always be obedient and grateful.”

  “I am the grateful one”, Nkrumah said softly. “You make me feel like a mighty King and I trust you.”

  She got up, after he was asleep, and went out naked in the night, the full moon gracing her coarse monkey-faced beauty with an arc of admiration. And Namibia really was a pretty, pretty Ajowan girl, her skin glowing like copper clay...because she was pregnant in her sleeping husband’s dream.

  She looked at her hands, and upon noticing how slender and beautiful they were, she whispered, “I trust you.”

  ••

  Tenderly...each tongue lick became a butterfly.

  Soraya, laying in the jungle on her back, her bewildered eyes staring up at the white moonlight as the firm, artful strokes became a kind of thunder and rain dance. The sound of woman bending and folding into woman.

  Her legs came together, resisting the power of the passion, the knees forming a pyramid over the loving head out of which the tongue darted like a weaver’s hand.

  Her body writhed in a kind of metabolic ecstasy.

  Someone distant, someone sitting by a fire somewhere near an igbo tree, played a drum. It sounded very sinful, an intricately feminine music that Soraya had never heard before, because women were not allowed to play the drum, but on this night--a Sula woman played.

  And Soraya closed her eyes and let it flood in...freedom. She let it flood all inside her.

  ••

  Shango and Ife Ife broke the surface of the warm black water, their smiles creased by fear and nervousness, their hands coming together in a shared fist as Shango hoisted her back into his arms and carried her to the luxurious ebony bed upon which her father had taken her mother’s virginity and conceived a bloom of royal children, Shango’s hand pulling back the bodice of honeybee lace, his back bending with ease as he lay Ife Ife down upon the loofahs.

  Night of the mind is not the same as night of the heart. Humans are supposed to conduct light.

  Shango came to be atop her, but very gently, his kiss tender and distracting, his hand lightly moving her legs apart and caressing her. Of course, when a girl is circumcised and sewn shut as Ife Ife was, it’s expected to be a very difficult and unpleasant situation. Ife Ife placed a small, sharp cutting stone in his hand and then took a deep breath and closed her eyes shut. Shango rose his buttocks in the air, aimed at the hole and said into her ear, “I carry you into this world, I carry you out.”

  Ife Ife screamed! Her hands digging into his back as pain rocked her soul. She cried out, “Shango!”

  “I know, I know...it’ll be done soon, don’t cry.” He took the sharp, knife-like stone and slid it between them as he raised his body off of hers to look down and cut the sewn flesh at just the right cataract. She screamed again!

  “I love you, my goddess”, he said with tender kisses. Then he waited for her breathing and tears to subside, and once she did, he gently inserted himself as best he could, the tightness of the muscles feeling as though it were skinning his penis, but also wet with contractions, his head moving inside and his push plying quarter of an inch by quarter of an inch until half an hour later she was able to tolerate the full head of it without passing out.

  “You see how good it feels”, he said, and Ife Ife, tears streaming down her cheeks, nodded affirmatively.

  Shango pushed deeper, just a little, and filled her mouth again with his kiss, his hands groping and soothing the burning mounds that were her breasts. His penetration gentle and slow, careful, the quarter inches waded into with a marksman’s precision, his penis stirring occasionally to loosen the ultra resistant walls.

  Four hours later, he had it half way in.

  “I’ve heard women say that it takes more than one night”, Ife Ife said suddenly.

  “Yes, it will. You want me to stop?”

  She said nothing, so Shango kissed her and rolled off.

  Ife Ife burst out laughing, proud, because she thought she had done something, and declaring, “I’m hungry!”

  ••

  As the
y squatted near a fire eating, Ife Ife grinned and grinned. She thought that she was becoming a woman and didn’t care how much her body ached or how annoying the bleeding was. She held a cloth saturated by warm water in the cut of her newly opened vagina.

  “Why are you so happy?” Shango teased her.

  “Because!” she grinned insanely, her face lit like the sun.

  Shango laughed and tweaked her nose.

  She asked him, “Do you remember the first time that it ever rained?”

  Shango smiled and nodded.

  ••

  Daylight burned across the garden like some crashing bird of fire. Ife Ife came up from the lake to see her Aunt Thiaroye and to rub her husband’s shoulders, but luckily, Dinari hardly made demands on her time or attention.

  He was much too busy with his secret nights in the arms of Sumboo the Great. Their masculine black entwinement both nurturing and tiring Dinari all in one. And yet he couldn’t get enough.

  “Guess what?” Ife Ife giggled in her husband’s ear.

  “What?”

  “Prince Shango Ogun is here. I’ve got him hidden underneath the lake. He’s been taking my virginity.”

  Dinari smiled broadly. “You lucky girl. How’s the pain?”

  “Excruciating!” she sang with the freakish joy that’s marked African wives for centuries. “Sometimes it knocks me out cold.”

  “Well if you should ever try it in the butt”, said Dinari, seriously, “please make a comparison for me. I hear that the women’s penetration is far more painful than anal.”

  Suddenly, Ife Ife lowered her eyes, a cosmic, angry gloom flooding inside her, the truth of things unexplainable pecking at the inside of her skull like a rabid sparrow, but her loyalty, as is the way of its daughters, firmly and fiercely lay rooted with Africa and man. If men wanted women cut and sewn this way, then surely, it must be right. She looked up and told Dinari, “He’s taking me away. Taking me away to a dream--his perfect love, a paradise that has waited for me a thousand years. You won’t hate me when I’m gone?”

  “It won’t be my fault you disappeared. I’ll be happy for you. You know how much I love you.”

  “Yes, I do!”, Ife Ife said and kissed him on the mouth. They rubbed noses, laughing together, and then Dinari told her to jump back in the lake and spend as much time as she wanted playing with Shango. He said, “Have a wonderful life.”

  ••

  When night came again, Shango and Ife Ife swam around the black ripples of the lake, their feet warmed by the white moon at the bottom, their mouths tasting the salty water and their eyes passing one another like flashy, happy silver fish.

  They dove under the water and swam back to the cavern.

  Shango kissed and caressed her and then penetrated her again, working the muscles, fighting and squeezing to get inside.

  It went on for two more days. The two of them running and playing in the underwater cavern like children, eating and laughing. And two more nights, their bodies hot and impaling one another to grip Ife Ife’s pain. Shango tenderly and patiently trying to free her.

  And then, on the fourth night, he broke through at last.

  Ife Ife screamed with such a vigor that she thought she was throwing up her stomach.

  “Let he rain”, he groaned as he exploded deep inside her. And it did begin to rain, a light drizzle that turned into a strong, pelting pour.

  “It’s done”, she cried, her body exhausted and swollen with a complete ache. “I’m a woman.”

  “Not just any woman”, he said. “My woman.”

  “Is the world”, she asked, “round or is it flat?” She felt his semen moving inside her, the tentacles connecting to the world inside her. She was pregnant and knew it at the moment of conception.

  “The world is flat”, Shango said, assuredly.

  Ife Ife shook her head and said, “I think it’s round. Round like the perfect woman. I think...”

  Splash!

  Shango and Ife Ife jumped, startled, their naked bodies strewn on the royal bed, shocked and frightened as they saw King Katanga rise out of the lagoon, his face rubbery and contorted by a furious evil.

  Ife Ife gasped, this very moment being the thing about dreams that is unpredictable and certain--the awakening.

  In slow motion, she saw her father coming toward the bed in a mad rage. She saw Shango jump up, his entire body rocked by guilt, because he, an Ajowan, had been caught naked and fully sexed on top of a God King’s royal God daughter. And suddenly, it was true, the world was flat.

  Her father killed Shango. She noticed that first.

  Katanga swinging his Arabian majesty sword, splicing through the air like a fan dancing in a woman’s hand. The blade cutting off Shango’s head clean and completely--no blood.

  She lay there in a daze.

  Awakened from her dream.

  ••

  Namibia held the hands of the women, her body fighting to breath with the pain of the contractions, as the women helped her to get into the squatting, sitting position that sensible women use for giving birth.

  “It’s coming!”

  Namibia screamed, her brow sweating, her vagina stretching as though a rhino were coming out.

  “Here she is...here she is...”

  “A baby girl!” one of them exclaimed.

  Namibia broke down crying with joy, because she had always trusted that she would someday have a little girl. What she hadn’t expected was that her child would be born with a veil, a caul (an extra layer of skin) over the face. One of the women screamed, burst into tears and proclaimed, “She’s sent by the ancestors!”

  Africans believed such a “mask” to have been placed on a child by its ancestors as a sign of being artistically gifted, clairvoyant or spiritually wise. In fact, it was such a mark of honor that the caul itself would be dried, anointed by the Spirit Rulers and then carried into battle by warlords to guide, protect and imbue them with strategic wisdom in war. Namibia gasped with pride to see the veil over her daughter’s face.

  One of the Bambara women handed her the baby saying, “Only a woman is allowed to remove the mask, preferably the mother or grandmother.”

  Namibia put her arms out before her, staring at her long black fingers and said to her rough cassava worked hands, “I trust you.”

  ••

  Ife Ife saw Shango again. A few days after he’d been beheaded. She saw him in her garden, standing on the other side of the lake, his lean warrior’s body raising a spear to her and ululating.

  Ife Ife’s eyes had filled with tears, her hands clasping over her mouth in shock as the lazy crocodiles shook their tails, coming awake yawning, and roared a definite hello to him.

  Shango had laughed and called to Ife Ife, “Trust me...it’s not the kind of love that dies.”

  “I know that”, she called back crying. “I trust you.”

  Her eyes close, making the world neither flat nor round, but endlessly dark and hollow, an empty black echo, as her whole pregnant body dissolved into a hard, uncontrollable longing.

  ••

  Dinari held her hand when it was time for the baby to come. There was no one around that night but the two of them, her pregnant belly huge and hard as Ife Ife squatted over a solid gold fruit washing bowl, Dinari holding her hands, steadying her body with his knees and instructing her to breathe deeply, hold it and count.

  “Yama dala sawa!” he shouted. Yama (breathe) dala (hold it) sawa (exhale). Yama dala saw!

  Ife Ife screamed with her eyes shut tight, but in that brief second that she opened them, she saw Shango Ogun standing before her, his handsome chocolate face beaming with a proud smile. He said, “I’m coming out of you now.”

  “It’s a boy!...a boy Ife Ife! We’ve got a son!”

  She threw her head back, burst into a piercingly loud sobbing cry and shouted as loud as she could, “I trust youuuu!!”

  But within three days, her bones took to shaking and her teeth to chattering. Dinari was
supposed to leave for a mountain holiday with Sumboo, but he had a drummer inform Sumboo that he couldn’t leave his wife’s side. He babied and held Ife Ife’s hands as they got thin and thinner, her dry-lipped mouth finally telling him, “Shango is coming to take me away, just as I told you, to a perfect paradise. But before that happens, you and I must take the baby and make a very important journey. To the ocean...and then to Ajowa-land. No one must know, and especially not my father. I hate him with a passion. He is to know nothing about my life or my son’s life, Dinari. You promise me.”

  “But you’re too weak to travel, princess.”

  “Of course I’m strong, I’m a woman”, she insisted. “Get me up, Dinari. As my beloved husband, you must be my accomplice.”

  Dinari saw the determination in her eyes and said out of loyalty, “But, of course...my love.”

  Then he lifted her into sitting position, unaware that she was blacking out.

  In life’s beautiful darkness, Ife Ife heard Shango’s voice calling to her, “See without sight...I am waiting for you...my heart...is not really my own, because it seems that my heart began/long before me.”

  Ife Ife opened her cloudy eyes, the delirium in them frightening Dinari, as she smiled vibrantly, Shango telling her, “Find my prayer. The one I prayed only for you. And open it with your hands.”

  A tear ran from Dinari’s eye as he heard Ife Ife gasp, “You mean, there is a prayer in this world...just for me?”

  ••

  Namibia, being an Ajowan woman, properly presented the mantra of the goddess flower to her offspring by properly baring her breasts over the child...firmly holding each melon in a cupped palm, but jutting the nipples out so that the child saw the milk beading at the tips. She stated the women’s mantra to her daughter, “If my father dies...I shall give birth to him again.”