FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  Ain’t Sarah held Red Annie in her arms and rocked her and hummed to her...and whispered in her yellow ear, “ganudu ma goo” (we are much of the same muchness, you and I).

  ••

  New Netherlands Colony (New York) 1635

  The Heyden Inn--A Bed and Breakfast

  Like many slaves of the north, Shange was owned by a business and not a private family. A local blacksmith had been paid to take a branding iron and sear the words “Property of the Heyden Inn” deep into his chest. They also seared those words into the backside of a frightened black girl who had come off a different ship but had been sold to the Heyden Inn at the same auction as Shange. The whites called her “Night”, because of her starry eyes and harmonious sooty black skin, but back in Africa as a daughter of the Ga tribe, her parents had called her Nio.

  “Delbert”, said Tom Hampton, the kindly Englishman who managed the Heyden Inn and acted as master over its slaves, “This here pretty black wench is named Night. Starting today, she’s your wife. You and her are to work the same shift, eat together, share a cot.”

  Of course, neither Delbert (Shange) nor Night could understand English, so Mr. Hampton took their hands, crashing their black fingers into each other’s palm until they held hands. Then, when he smiled at them as though regarding them as one, they kind of understood.

  Night, because she was a virgin, looked at the ground with a mixture of fear and shame, but later that day when she and Delbert (Shange) were left alone in the dark, cold tiny corner of the basement that was to be their home, Delbert had rolled up a potato sack, filled it with sand from the floor and then wrapped it around Night’s trembling body. She had not been able to look him in the eye, because it was forbidden for a non-Ga man to touch her, and as they had no language between them, it only intensified their intimacy and their loneliness at the same time.

  Shange built a small fire and set her down in front of it, his hands, as they handled her limbs, bearing kindness and compassion instead of anything remotely animal, and because of that, Night relaxed and became animated. She found herself roasting goobers, duck fat and hog’s ears that the Englishman’s wife, Agatha, had given them, and by the time the stars were in the sky, she finally looked at Delbert’s chocolate face and saw that he had her father’s eyes--wet brown and muddy like a lion’s. She smiled and said to him, not that he knew what she was saying, “I trust you.”

  ••

  Hattie Mae (Roo Ife Ife) gave birth to a boy this time. The date was April 28th, 1636, and as soon as Ain’t Sarah saw the deep chocolate skin and rich nappy hair, she knew that it was the field hand from Dahomey’s baby. Hattie Mae (Roo Ife Ife) might have been at death’s door, but she wanted him in her arms immediately. “Givom ta me!”

  “Big, strawng strapp’n black boy!” quipped Ain’t Sarah.

  Roo Ife Ife saw the doorway in Africa again. The bright, burning sun over top the Ajowan harbor, the crucifix-shaped doorway of stone...the wall of Kofi Hoodi through which walked the chain of black bodies, naked and sweaty, negro man after negro man and negroid woman after negroid woman.

  I’m dying now, she realized.

  She knew because she could see Shange’s face and body all of a sudden, as though she could reach out and touch it. She could hear his voice promising: “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.”

  “How many times have you made me a woman?” she asked.

  “As many times as you’ve given birth to me.”

  Ain’t Sarah took the baby as she noticed the mother weakening. Gray clouds full of rain filled Hattie Mae’s slurring eyes. Her mouth forcing out the words, “I wohnt you to call him, Shango, you heah me? I wohnts him name ta be Shango Carolina. That him name!”

  “I’ll tell massa”, Ain’t Sarah promised. “I’ll tell ‘em it’s yo dying wish. He wohnt much mind.”

  Suddenly, Roo Ife Ife was in the green morning of a fresh meadow...her mind remembering the first time she’d been called by her slave name. One of her master’s daughters had come calling to her, “Hattie Mae...Hattie Mae.”

  And Roo Ife Ife had looked at the white girl wondering, “Who...in the fuck...is she talking to?” That annoying high strung white girl’s voice calling out to her. Hattie Mae?...Hattie Mae?

  Ain’t Sarah pulled the wool over the dead woman’s face with her free arm, and held newly born Shango Carolina with the other arm. She said as clearly as her heartbroken voice could say it, “Bye for now...Roo Ife Ife.” The baby boy began wailing and screaming. Ain’t Sarah held and rocked him and said “Don’t you worry now, Roo Ife Ife. Shango be jess fine.”

  ••

  Shange pumped his bare buttocks between Night’s crooked legs as though he were running from the moon. His hands engulfed her young, nob-like breasts as he stifled her whimpering cry with a passionate kiss and knifed his penis inside her, as gracefully and methodically as he could, his loneliness seeping into her flesh and bones as though it were a secret song they shared, and somehow--she knew the words better than him.

  “I am a woman now”, she had cried when he rolled off her. He wondered what she had said.

  And then, there in the dark, because he felt so fortunate to be out of the bowels of the slave ship--he began to dream without sleeping.

  First, he saw her hair. The luster of its coarse darkness coiled and knotted against her scalp like black raisins. Her nose, the sexy West African kind, wide and thick as the span of her life sustaining smile. Her flesh, deep and dark with good health and black richness. He saw her buttocks, the rank powerfulness of them holding up the rhythm of nature and man’s birth itself. He saw her round, full face. Celestial-eyed and perfect. He heard her quiet storm of a voice--sounding like that moan that only a black woman can make.

  “How many times have you made me a woman?” Roo Ife Ife asked him.

  “As many times as you’ve given birth to me.”

  Delbert held Night in his arms and began to sing to her, but not about being a slave, not about being Delbert, but about being a lion.

  Though she couldn’t understand a word he sang, his calmed her, its coarse roaring alto oozing like molasses and hope:

  Sitting by the lake at night,

  soft insects attend the sickle’s light,

  I will remember her...

  I will remember her.

  Where magic remembers us.

  And Night said, “Find my prayer...open it with your hands.”

  Not knowing a word of what the other spoke, but black as all black put together, millions of slave couples like Shange and Night held onto each other...for dear life.

  And nothing since or nothing before has ever quite hung in the world the way the negro slave men and negro slave women hung. As one.

  ••

  The Englishman’s wife, Agatha, delivered Delbert and Night’s first child--a healthy baby girl.

  “Heaven’s to Betsy...my lord! She’s got a caul over her face, poor thing.”

  As the child wiggled resisting, Agatha Hampton took her thumbnail and perforated the bloody tissue, loosening it and then pulling it back to reveal the baby’s face.

  “Oh, she’s a handsome little nigger bitch”, said Agatha, lovingly. “Real nice eyes on her, reminds me of a german shephard’s eyes. Black, oceany.”

  Tom and Agatha Hampton dubbed the child, “Queenie”, because her eyes reminded Agatha of a dog she’d loved growing up, and they jotted down Queenie Hampton on the birth papers, but after they were gone, Shange came to his wife’s cot and took her cold, trembling hand into his. He gently kissed the newborn slave on her forehead and then looked deep into his wife’s soulful stare.

  And even though Night didn’t know what it meant yet, he told her, “We will call her ‘Remember’. That is an English word that I like very much. That will be her name, whenever we’re alone--’Remember’.”r />
  Part Two

  The Africans

  In America

  .

  10

  Washington, D.C.

  Summertime--1993

  •

  Shane Roberts returned to his hometown by air, TWA flight 257 descending from thirty thousand feet as though it were some great phallic moon dragon, the newspaper editor’s handsome but deep in serious thought tanned orange face staring out at the plane’s wing as it tilted, his rugged Marlboro-man like stare suddenly entranced by the beauty of the green Atlantic ocean shimmering beneath him.

  And yet from up that high, he couldn’t possibly make out RooAmber Childress--a honey colored yellow girl with emerald green eyes and a copper brown hair weave that swooshed and danced like the fan of a fish’s tail as she bent her torso in and out of the ocean’s surface, her concentration lost in a perilous depression, her stomach rumbling and contorting because of the handful of sleeping pills she’d ingested, her long legs and African bush woman’s booty thrusting her...ever deeper into suicide’s chilly looking glass.

  “Please fasten your seat belts”, said the stewardess, “we are now approaching the runway, and hey--welcome to our nation’s capital.”

  Shane took a deep breath and reclined sipping the champagne that came with first class. The face of his beautiful Puerto Rican wife flashed before his eyes, because he wasn’t sure how he was going to confront her about Sergio’s growing problem concerning race and identity.

  Rosaria had a habit of coddling and protecting their son to the point where Shane found himself having no room to father the boy, and as she and her relatives were teaching the boy Spanish lately, Shane felt sort of left out and jealous about Sergio’s preference for clinging to the Puerto Rican side of his family and ignoring the black.

  It startled Shane a little, because back when he was living with his college sweetheart, Tangie Brown, in a committed relationship, and Rosaria had been trying so hard to convince him that he should be with her instead--she had talked incessantly about the African blood in Puerto Ricans and how that made she and Shane “just like family”, and how it would produce the most beautiful children--children that she had promised would make Shane so much prouder than the ones he could have with Tangie Brown, because she said they would have “decent hair” and be raised black. “Proud, intelligent, good looking black kids”, Rosaria had promised.

  None of this, however, had been Shane’s reason for dumping Tangie Brown and marrying Rosaria.

  In all honesty, Shane had simply grown bored with the staidness in his relationship with Tangie, and on top of that, she had a lot of insecurities. She was a dark brown girl and came from the Anacostia ghettos, so she assumed that any light skinned guy from an upper class Georgetown family, as Shane was, had to be colorstruck, and because most upper class yellow boys from Georgetown really were colorist assholes, she constantly insulted Shane’s background, his family and his complexion, making him feel less authentic than her and guilty about his family’s Jim Crow days practice of “breeding lighter, getting whiter”, but then again--adoring and cherishing him, mainly, because he had that coloring and that hair.

  In fact, she would even lick his hair sometimes when they fucked.

  “You wouldn’t be with me if I wasn’t a fine ass orange colored rich boy from Georgetown with a big dick”, Shane told her one night during a heated argument.

  And eventually, he had to put up with situations like Tangie coming home as a platinum blond. At first, he had thought it was adventurous and figured they could have some fun sex behind it, but when he realized that it wasn’t a wig, but her real hair dyed that color, he felt disappointed, accusing her of self-hate, which of course she denied--in fact, she came up with this fantastic story about how she had become blond to honor African tribes in Sudan who used cow and goat’s urine to dye their hair yellow during religious Sun worship ceremonies--and that shut Shane up, but deep inside he hoped that it was just a phase she was going through. Unfortunately, she came home a few months later sporting green contact lenses.

  “Ancient tribes in Africa wearing fake green eyes, too?” he asked her.

  “None of your fucking business, Shane!” she had hissed at him. “You ain’t my got-damned daddy!”

  “Why do you feel inferior to white women?” he then asked Tangie point blank. “Is it because so many guys on campus are obsessed with light skinned girls and white women that you have to try to look like them? Is it because every time you turn on the television, all you see are black men fawning over mixed race and white women so much that...”

  And before he could finish the question, Tangie had slapped him across the face hard. She turned to walk away, but Shane grabbed her and turned her back around. He told her, “I don’t want you to look like a white woman, Tangie, I don’t want you to look like Mariah Carey or even Halle Berry--I want you to look like yourself. Your kind of beauty is so original, so mysteriously soulful and unique, I don’t think sistas like you realize what a fool you look like parading around as some second rate imitation of a white woman, when you should be holding your head up high as the devastatingly beautiful black woman that God made you.”

  “Motherfucker, let me go!”

  The fear and confusion in her face reminded Shane of something his Uncle Walt used to say--”Some black women would rather committ suicide than surrender to a black man’s love. They been conned so many times.”

  And when Shane let Tangie go that night...he let her go.

  He started having sex, immediately, with the Puerto Rican loan manager at the bank, Rosaria Socrates, because she had been offering herself for more than a year by then. And resisting had been so hard. Cause her ass was not just fine, but foine. And it was good being wanted.

  That first night, in fact, she got down on her knees between his black jetta and the green trash dumpster in the alley behind her apartment building and sucked his dick. After that, she pulled him behind the dark side of the trash dumpster and turned doggy style and let him poke up in it, hard as he wanted, as she moaned loud and unashamed, “git this sweet pussy!”, her bare flesh pressed against the cold metal surface.

  Obviously, Shane hadn’t taken Rosaria to be serious relationship material--until he noticed that he got a lot of attention just for being with her. People stared and watched them when they walked down the street, especially black women.

  What was even more priceless than that was that other black males praised him just for “landing” a girl like Rosaria. Shane’s mother fantasized that Rosaria was Italian, because although her porcelain complexion was ivory rose white, the undertones of her skin were still pale olive. She had long, flowing waves of shiny dark hair and the “brothas” constantly told Shane how “fine” and “beautiful” she was, what a “prize” she was. Some of them even said, without pause, that black women come a dime a dozen, the mothers of these black men not being highly prized by the general society, but landing a girl that looked like Rosaria really impressed Shane’s black Professors, his frat brothers, his mother and his male family members--he had never been patted on the back so much in his life by black folks, and although he had always fantasized about black girls with bright smiles, fluffy hair and tea brown complexions, he decided to keep Rosaria as a show piece, a status symbol.

  But then Tangie Brown popped up again. It seemed that everywhere Shane went on campus or anywhere near Howard, he ran into Tangie and her new boyfriend, some chocolate stallion from the football team who always had his hand draped across her ass as though he owned it--and what a fine, bodacious ass Tangie had. In fact, Shane noticed that breaking up with him seemed to have done wonders for her looks, because now she had her hair back how he liked it--no chemicals, dark and glossy, pressed and curled--and her nut brown skin looked radiant and healthy, and she smiled and shook that ass when she walked--and Shane couldn’t stand to see her with another man! He got in her business, calling her day and night until she agreed to drop the football player and take him
back.

  But then Rosaria announced that she was pregnant.

  “I thought you were on the pill!”

  “We are on the pill, and we used condoms, remember?”

  “Damnit!”, he hissed.

  “It’s alright...we’ll just have an abortion.”

  “No!”

  “Shane, I already made an appointment with an abortion clinic. I’m not some wayward ghetto chick, I’m a Catholic girl from a family that has standards. A Socrates woman cannot have a baby without getting married. Either we’re getting married or I’m aborting this baby--it’s as simple as that.”

  Rosaria hadn’t been the least bit pregnant, but her rouse had worked like a charm, and a week after they had the wedding, she called her girlfriend Trina and got the 411 on how to fake a miscarriage using diet pills and Spam.

  “And make sure you git paid”, Trina purred.

  ••

  Now Shane Roberts entered the small two story Fort Washington mansion that he’d bought for Rosaria to have his children in. The house had five bedrooms, a pool, triple chimneys, a Puerto Rican-styled wet bar, spacious green yards front and back, and even though the mortgage payments were killing Shane after nine years, and even though he could never get a grip on the gas, electric and water bills, he was proud to say that the best looking house on Fort Washington’s Skipjack Drive was owned by a black man--and by a black man with a beautifully glamorous wife, the kind that important white men always had when you saw them in gangster movies or the kind that draped “cool” black pimped out brothas in music videos. Shane’s mother had even spent a whole year taking Rosaria to the best stores and teaching her how to dress impeccably for church, classy for dinner parties, and sexy for evenings with Shane.