FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  “You speak as blacks”, said Kofi Hoodi in confusion. “What land are you from?”

  “We are the Dutch people”, said Geert Van Funkel. “This is my wife, Annika, my shipmates--Mr. Riegart and Hess Heyden. The two over there are from England. They’re missionaries bringing the message of YaWee (Jesus Christ) to Africa--Reverend Basil Sherwood and his wife, Astoria.”

  “YaWee?” Kofi Hoodi asked suspiciously. “Why would you need to bring us the message of our very own son? YaWee the Prophet is the son of an African mother.”

  On top of that, the Ajowans couldn’t contain their laughter at hearing such outlandish names, but Mr. Van Funkel continued saying, “We’ve been trading for several decades with your black brothers on the lower coast. We were told by the Portuguese traders that there are two giant kingdoms here--the land of the Ajowans and the empire of the Gods.”

  “Portuguese traders?”

  “Yes, your royal highness...the Portuguese told us that they have purchased Ajowan slaves from the Berbers and Arabs in the north. Slaves that you provided them.”

  Rain Iyanla looked at Kofi Hoodi as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing and Kofi thanked the spirit world that his mother was not there to hear such truths spoken, because she would have only had to feel the vibrations in his body language to know that he was guilty of it. He shouted, indignantly, “That’s a lie! You dirty white bastard! You want me to cut your tongues out?”

  Geet Van Funkel recoiled in fear and confusion. He looked at his wife Annika who had helped him to tie and pack so many slaves. She looked up at Hoodi and said in a sweet voice, “O dear king of Ajowa...my husband pays the greatest riches for niggers. My husband has made many of your brethren richer than the Sea and Moon. Slavery is nothing to be ashamed of. It rids many wonderful societies of their worst criminals and demons. It is written in the book of Sweet Jesus that this is the answer for your people, your highness. You are the children of Ham, O dear king. We mean you no disrespect. Only the salvation and the cleanliness of the messiah’s pure ivory goodness--to wash you nigger people white as snow.”

  “Nigger people--that’s us?” asked Kofi Hoodi.

  “Yes”, said Geert Van Funkel with a vigorous, friendly nod. “It’s what we call you blacks as a term of affection. Niggers.”

  Rain Iyanla picked up a mask and covered her face with it--an indication that she was becoming ill.

  “The Queen is requesting that we leave this visit for another time”, said Kofi Hoodi, gratefully. “Guards--take the prisoners to the guest huts of the royal compound. We shall have dinner and discuss their intrusion upon our land further.” He stood up and for the first time in his life could feel that he was naked. The citizens commanded him with their gaze, but Hoodi looked out at the masses and ordered them, “Noo-tuu now!”

  No one moved. The people of Ajowa had heard it with their own ears. Kofi Hoodi selling slaves. For years now they had wondered about the random disappearances of people in jail, the abductions of young girls working in the cassava fields, the queerness of loved ones going off on holiday to other villages and never arriving, never returning. Kofi Hoodi’s cryptic silence only made it louder.

  He stomped his stubby black foot against the floor and shouted to the masses, “Noo-tuu now!”

  Slowly...very slowly, the crowds began to disperse.

  ••

  1630

  Not once, in five years, had Mother Iyanla seen them mourn the hundreds of their own kind who had been killed by fire and drowning on the giant Whales they called “ships”--and as for destruction of those ships, she hadn’t seen them so much as bat an eye. That’s how she knew they were wicked, but nobody listened to Mother Iyanla. Her son and Rain Iyanla both accused her of being mean and paranoid, and it came to be that even the masses adored the whites. Kofi Hoodi even did the thing that Mother Iyanla stood in his face, at the risk of his ire, and forbid him to do--he proclaimed the whites to be “Ajowans”. Telling his mother, “We’re all the same. Just people. What’s ours is theirs and what’s theirs is ours. Stop trying to keep them out, mother.”

  Immediately, the “Dutch” had given up their request to purchase slaves. Instead, they persuaded Kofi Hoodi to allow them to build a shipping port, trading posts, storehouses and a strange temple they called “church” right on the outskirts of Banjula City. They sent up colored cloud bombs in the sky--reds, blues, greens--and with such a display of magic, they instantly won the imagination of the Ajowan people. They became very popular, trading mirrors, knives and ink pens with the citizens, but in front of Kofi Hoodi, they showed off their real wealth...guns and horses.

  “What do you want in exchange for guns and horses?”, he had asked.

  “Slaves”, smiled Geert Von Funkle.

  For five long years Kofi Hoodi had simply smiled and shook his head silently.

  On Sundays the whites would host “church”--which was strange to the Ajowans that it was confined to a certain day, because all African tribes held worship and ritual ceremonies, of some kind, each and every day to honor their ancestors, worship the Creator and borrow power from both good and evil. They believed, immediately, in Jesus Christ, because as they told the white people--”he’s a nigger like us, he came from Africa.” They knew all about his life, telling the whites that YaWee was tall, black and naked with very long dreadlocks and a beard and had many wives and that he had filled the jungles with strong children, song, prayer and led triumphant battles against the Berbers and Arabs. “He was a Fallati”, the Ajowans would report--the East African word Fallati meaning “Hebrew”.

  As for attending the actual church services, they angered whites initially in two ways--first, they insisted that the Jesus man on the cross be painted black (but with his blue eyes and blond hair left in tact), and second, the tribal women refused to cover their breasts in order to enter the church.

  This forced the English missionaries to hold a separate service outdoors, because African women considered it a great, great indecency and a fall from social and spiritual honor to have their breasts covered--a woman’s breast being her direct personal link to the earth, the man, the universe and the Creator. This was the organ, along with her cut and stitched vagina, that insured her respect and fair treatment from the men, and as the whites had learned already, nudity was considered by Africans to be the supreme symbol of truth, mental and spiritual harmony and belief in justice. It was, in fact, the refusal by whites to go naked that would cause the West Africans by the 1800’s to determine that they must be cursed by the Moon and given no coloring for their skin--to show the ugliness their ancestor’s deeds against nature and their people’s fear of anything natural.

  Kofi Hoodi nodded, because yes, they were wicked and unnatural--but he liked them.

  “It’s been five years and they don’t seem to be leaving”, Rain Iyanla complained to him one morning. “It used to be that a ship came to visit them once a month, but now that they’ve finished building that sea port, it’s four times a month. As though they’re planning something.”

  Kofi Hoodi balled up his fist and punched his wife dead straight in her mouth--Bam!--busting her lip and drawing blood. He then grabbed her by the neck, flung her into the side of the hut wall and kicked her as she slid to the ground. He walked up to her and hissed, “Stop trying to sound like my mother--bitch!”

  A female hyena?

  It was a word that the white men called their womenfolk whenever they beat them or spat on them.

  Rain Iyanla held her bleeding mouth and cried into her hands, very sad that it was now acceptable to call African women by this word, and sadder still that she, a Queen and wombbearer, had been the first so anointed.

  ••

  “I’m a man now”, said Shange to his great grandmother one morning on the beach searing shrimps in a sand fire. “It’s time for me to take a wife.”

  Mother Iyanla looked over at him and smiled as though she were seeing his father come back to life. He was now tall
, muscular, rich ebony colored, handsome, deeply sensitive, honorable and adventurous. Shango Ogun all over again. She asked him, “And have you decided which of the compound virgins will become your bride?”

  “Roo Ife Ife, of course. We’ve known that since the day we met, but we had to wait for time to catch up with us. Us and the turtle’s back.”

  “Turtle’s back?”

  “Our mirror in the ocean”, he said flipping a shrimp in his mouth. “That’s how we see each other. The real each other.”

  “The real each other?”, smiled Mother Iyanla impressed. “A mirror in the ocean that shows the real each other?”

  “Find my prayer...and open it with your hands”, Shange recited as though it were a secret scripture. “At the bottom of the sea, we look in the turtle’s back, we see the real each other. That’s how we remembered it. Beautiful...beautiful love. And now that time has caught up, we can be married.”

  ••

  Time caught up, as well, with Soraya and Namibia. In fact, they had not long discovered the real each other when suddenly...Nkrumah stepped out of a mystery and plopped his manly foot into the path of the Sula women, his fat sexy Bambara tribeswoman pregnant with yet another child, and her two sons--the sons of Nkrumah that Namibia hadn’t been able to give him--standing at his side like little wooden angels, their faces painted in dots and their lashes powdery with ash.

  “Don’t kill him!” Namibia had begged the Sula warrior women. “He is my husband. The one I told you about.”

  A hot rope dragged through Soraya’s throat at that moment. Her chest heaved with anguish and her body chilled with suspense.

  She had to watch as Namibia ran into his arms, his dark muscular arm hanging down her chocolate backside and the full hugeness of his hand clutching at her thick booty, generously squeezing the syrup Soraya had put in it.

  “I thought he was dragged off by white moon people”, one of the Sula women joked sarcastically.

  “Women see all kinds of things”, hissed Soraya, “when they don’t want to see the truth.”

  Nkrumah nudged Namibia away and introduced her to his new wife--the much younger Togo. She was black as Namibia and had the same soft tangy rind-thick features but was considered sexier due to her girth and baby fat, the meaty shapeliness of her ass and hips. Immediately, both women cut each other with venomous eyes.

  “What are you doing out here in the wilderness?” Nkrumah asked his first wife.

  Namibia looked up into his stare as though she were a stick of wood destined to burn in a sweet, drunk fire. “After you abandoned us, I had to find a safe place for our daughter. I took her to Ajowa-land. I couldn’t stay, because the Kofi would’ve made me pay for you kidnapping me in the first place. The sister tribe took me in...they’re my family now.”

  “It’s important”, Nkrumah said as he looked into Soraya’s furious gaze, “for women to have sisters. Women never looked more beautiful.” He could just imagine them, rubbing and writhing in the jungle at night.

  Soraya raised her spear, her bare honey colored breasts rising and falling like the chest of a lioness when hot sun hits it where it’s the most yellow. She told him, bravely, “I could kill you...for how you betrayed Namibia!”

  “That won’t be necessary”, he replied. Then he looked into Namibia’s charred brown eyes. “I have a wife who can make sons now, but if you wish, I will take you back to my new village. You are my wife after all.”

  “Don’t do it!” the Sula women gasped at Namibia.

  But, of course, she was a typical African woman. She let Nkrumah swath the crack of her bubble brown bare ass with a peacock feather and piled her belongings atop her head and followed behind Togo and her children as though she were on her way to the paradise of the next world.

  Togo objected bitterly, but Nkrumah struck her across the mouth and she fell in line, silently carrying her basket atop her head.

  Soraya hung her head and threw up pure tears of salt and pain. Like a sapling, she shook in place, her heart cut like an infant’s newborn pussy.

  Not even goodbye. Namibia didn’t even say that much. And she was gone.

  ••

  Roo Ife Ife was not surprised when Shange asked her to be his wife, but in her eyes was a dry creek. She told him, “In my sleep and when I’m awake, I hear women crying. Their sorrow pours over me like leaves from the stars, Shange. It makes me pause.”

  “I would never let you feel sorrow or shed tears.”

  “You’re only a man, Shange. You have no power to keep a woman from sorrow and tears. Women have rivers and rivers of lives, lives that men know nothing about. Pictures of themselves that only they would recognize. There is no way for a woman to tell a man her full truth, because even she cannot know it without experience, without the bleeding and the aloneness.”

  “What are you saying, Roo Ife Ife? That you won’t be my bride?”

  “I will be your bride”, she assured him. “But first, you must journey to find your mother. In her land, in her footsteps. I feel very deeply that she is calling you. She wants to touch you.”

  A soft chill ran through Shange’s neck and back. Goosebumps sprang up on his shoulders and his nose. His body shook with the chill.

  Roo Ife Ife touched his face and said, “I will be here waiting for our grand day, our wedding of Sea and Sky...I will be waiting for all the days and years that are to come, our legacy of seeing without sight. Our beautiful...beautiful love all inside us. I want you...and will be waiting, my King.”

  “Even in my travels, Ife Ife...I am with you. In every world of the living and all the dreams of the dead, I am with you. You are the one that I have always known. Before there was time...and tomorrow, too.”

  ••

  See without sight.

  Kofi Hoodi simply could not do it...because what he was seeing...killed his manhood that night.

  “Get off her!” he screamed violently, his eyes bulging in disbelief, his voice breaking as he winced with tears. He had heard the muffled vibrations of his wife’s screams even with her mouth covered, but what he found on the path to the mud baths was even more shocking than seeing white people for the first time.

  Rain Iyanla, the Queen and mother of his children, cowered in the dark bushes, her raped body compacted into a shameless position as two of the Europeans--Geert Van Funkel and Reverend Basil Sherwood--bent over her in a violent perversion, their bare white knuckles holding and twisting her by force as their booted feet pinned her limbs to the ground.

  On her chocolate face were tears of a pure hot humiliation, her eyes devoid of a soul, her nose bleeding and the men’s semen glopped across her mouth and cheeks like hunks of warm snot.

  “Whore wanted it”, cried one of the drunken white men, his eyes bloodshot and democratic. “Said she wanted to see what our white snakes looked like.”

  But the crying moan that came out of Rain Iyanla’s chest was so low and wounded that Kofi Hoodi could barely stand to continue breathing. It was a moan that said--”protect me”--and instinctively, he knew that he should establish his own manhood by avenging his wife, by killing the rapists and banishing them from Africa--but--they had so many riches and things that he wanted.

  They were so brilliant, so cunning and successful.

  “She wanted it!...she wanted it!”, the two drunk, wobbling white men cried out in fear.

  And when Hoodi shook his head, his eyes full of waterfalls as he stared down on the nakedness of black beauty, the semen, the blood...he thought ...how could she put him in this position? It was just like a female to complicate things like this! Why did she have to go and get herself raped?

  Rain Iyanla gasped to breathe through her sobs, her hand reaching up to her husband for help, for rescue. Her voice suddenly crying out, “...they defiled me.”

  Kofi Hoodi picked up his foot--and he stomped her! He let his rage burst from beneath his shining black flesh like a burning meteor crashing into the jungle. He stomped and cursed and stomped h
er in the head--until she was dead.

  “Hoodi, I can get you guns and gunpowder”, said Geert Von Funkel, nervously, because he was grateful to have his life spared as the African Queen lost hers in his place. Reverend Sherwood said, “Your highness, she was acting like a Jezebel out here--laughing and dancing for us. And it’s quite difficult you know, watching your beautiful black women prancing around naked all the days and nights. Their glistening black shoulders calling to us with that sparkle that alights your marvelous ebony skins. We are used to less sexualized women. Women who don’t walk as if they are thinking of sex and aren’t built in the buttocks, O King, as if they were made just for it. 0 King and master of this mother called Africa. You must understand that your black nigger woman is a beauty like none other. Not another woman on earth has her unique thickness, her richness of flavor and color. Her juicy black...”

  But Kofi Hoodi was in another world and could not hear anything they said. He dropped to his knees and wept like a child, because deep inside he knew...he knew!...that they had raped his wife and that he had lacked the courage to stand up to the Europeans and to banish their money from his country and to defend the honor of his wife. He wept not only because Rain Iyanla was gone forever, but because so, too, was his manhood. On the inside of his soul, the white men owned him now.

  And that was the night that he got drunk with the white men and decided that he could sell his own people for guns and horses. That he could join the slave trade and not even contemplate what Mother Iyanla or the Spirit Rulers would think of him.

  He asked the white men, “What ‘cha need?”

  ••

  Hembadoon

  The palace of King Katanga.