FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  As Shane entered the foyer and went through the living room, the great room and the east hallway, he shook his head noticing that even though it was bright and sunny outdoors, every light in the house seemed to be on.

  He walked into the den, his eyes meeting evenly with the hatchet-like stare of Rosaria’s mother. She was bent over his son, tickling the boy, and speaking to him in Spanish.

  Shane coughed and said, “Hello, Gerta-Maria.”

  Gerta-Maria, who was the shortest person in the house, went back to her usual bird-like drill sergeant’s posture and said, “O.K., stop having fun now, your Papi’s here. Say hello to Papi.”

  “Hey dad”, came Sergio’s lukewarm eight year old voice. Shane secretly hoped for a hug, but the boy went over to his PlayStation box and resumed the Pokemon battle on the screen.

  “Guess what?” beamed Gerta-Maria with a fake fondness for her son-in-law. “Sergio spoke long distance to his cousins in Puerto Rico today. He did the whole conversation in Spanish! The boy’s got culture now!”

  Shane bristled, saying, “Mother Gerta-Maria, there’s a t.v. on in the living room, there’s a t.v. on in here, every light in the house is on...”

  Gerta-Maria looked up at Shane as though ice water was gushing from the top of his head. She murmured something dismissive in Spanish and then asked with her real face, “How was your damned trip, Mr. Roberts?”

  “Mother Gerta-Maria, could you please not curse at me?”

  “Ey essay, I didn’t fuckn’n curse at you!” She went over to the pool table, snatched her pack of Pall Malls from it and stormed out through the patio doors. From outside, over her shoulder, she yelled back to him, “There was a curse word in the sentence, but I didn’t fuck’n curse at your ass!”

  ••

  Upstairs in the master bedroom, Rosaria lounged on the bed, completely entranced by the news report on the screen.

  A woman had tried to drown herself at Sandy Point.

  “Has now been identified as twenty-eight year old RooAmber Sojourner Childress”, said the news lady.

  Rosaria found the idea of this woman’s suicide attempt puzzling, because when they showed the woman’s driver license photo on the screen--she was fucking gorgeous! Honey sepia skinned brown with emerald green eyes, long, feathery auburn hair and slenderized negroid facial features. The shape of her lips, thought Rosaria, were to die for.

  “Sources say that Mrs. Childress was despondent after suffering a miscarriage and being fired from her job all in the same week.”

  As RooAmber Childress’s husband, a tall, Professor-looking white man, came running up to the emergency room entrance, the reporter woman shoved the microphone in his face and started asking a bunch of questions.

  “No comment”, said the white husband, and as he jumped out of the camera shot, Rosaria wondered why it was that these black women were able to land prized all-American white gringo men for husbands and not her.

  Of course, having a successful, well educated black husband with a big cock was better than being married to Juan Carlos the plumber (in her opinion), because black men tended to drool over women like herself in ways that a Puerto Rican or white man never would--for instance, white guys would never place special value on her hair texture, because they all had that hair--but still, as the problems with Sergio increased, she lamented the idea that if only she had stuck it out, been patient and found that right white guy, then she could have married up instead of down, and then her poor son wouldn’t be cursed with this damned black people race stigma. She sighed heavily and thanked her lucky stars that at least Shane wasn’t an overly dark skinned complexion.

  “Hey babe”, said Shane as he entered the bedroom.

  Rosaria looked up at Shane with pure love in her eyes and gushed, grinning, “He’s back! My sweetie!”

  Shane went over and leaned down to kiss her. He wacked her across the ass and asked, “What ‘cha watching”

  Before he could get a good look at the woman on the screen, Rosaria punched the remote button cutting off the television. She stood up and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “How was New York City?”

  “Pretty cool. I don’t think I got the gig at Newsweek, but I’m determined not to give up. Somebody’s going to let me in one of these years.”

  Shane was a semi-celebrity, not just for churning out yearly books of essays for Post Mutual Press about issues related to black men’s lifestyles, politics and the like, but also for being a senior editor at The Washingtonian Post, one of the nation’s most respected daily newspapers. He was now at the point where he received a hundred fifty thousand dollar advance each time he put out a new collection of essays.

  “I keep telling you”, said Rosaria playfully, “that you should write one of those racy Terry McMillan-like pop novels. That’s where the real money is. I heard she got fifteen million for the one that came after Waiting to Exhale.”

  “Yeah, well, Terry makes it look a helluva lot easier than it really is, trust me.”

  Rosaria pulled him into a deep kiss, then rubbed noses. In Shane’s eyes, she saw dread. “Hey...what’s wrong?”

  “Did you get Sergio signed up for race counseling?”

  Rosaria sighed heavily. “Yes, I did, but he’s made up his mind, Shane. He doesn’t want to go to Sag Harbor’s Talented Tenth Club this summer, he’s tired of having to live in the shadow of his father’s swimming trophies and he’s tired of being limited by labels such as African American and black. He just wants to be Sergio.”

  “Before I left New York he was claiming to be white and Puerto Rican. He had a damned fit when I showed up at his swim meet to bring his goggles. Do you know how he looked at me when I walked in there?”

  “Shane--Sergio is eight years old. He’s at that age when kids stand next to one another to see who’s the tallest, they compare their clothes, their hair, who has the biggest feet--it’s so hard for him right now, and Shane, listen to me--studies show that children are psychologically healthiest when they have accurate racial labels at their disposal. Sergio is race-less.”

  “Sergio is black, Rosaria!” erupted Shane, suddenly and fiercely. “One day, sooner or later, this whole fucking society is going to get in his confused, yellow face and remind him that he...is...black...and they might not use such a beautiful word as ‘black’ to describe it. We, as his parents, need to get him prepared for reality. Do you know how hard it is for a black man to live in this society?”

  Rosaria was so tired of hearing that shit.

  It took everything in her to get up the courage to say it, but finally she did. “Sergio is not black, Shane. Our son is not black. He is raceless. In fact, if you look at me, my white father, your white grandmother and both your parents put together, he has more white blood in his veins than anything else. You yourself are multi-racial, Shane, but you’re too stubborn to acknowledge it. You’re not all black.”

  “I am not multi-racial, Rosaria! I am a black man, goddamnit! I am your black nigger husband! My mother is black, my father is black!”

  “To you they’re black”, she said, cruelly.

  “Ohhhh”, he wailed while disrobing to do his favorite thing--hop in the swimming pool. “This is just fucking great!”

  He grabbed a terry cloth towel and stormed out. Then stormed back in and pointed his finger for effect as he shouted, “My mother and father are the descendents of house slaves, Rosaria! House niggers!”

  Rosaria shook her head vigorously, “Don’t say that.”

  “Generations of rape! Generations of snobby high yellow negroes with good hair mating exclusively with other snobby high yellow negroes with good hair, or the occasional drunk Indian. But we are black! And you couldn’t pay me to be anything else. I am black! Sergio is black!”

  Rosaria clasped her hands together, tears of passion beading in her eyes as she asked Shane, “Why can’t you let Sergio be his own unique person? Why can’t you let him have a life free of all this racial mumbo jumbo? Wh
y do you want him to carry the same fucking burdens that you had to carry? Why do you want him to be you?”

  Shane’s face twisted up. Why do I want him to be me?

  “Because he’s my son!”

  11

  •

  RooAmber Childress opened her eyes, and at first, she wasn’t sure where she was, including that it could be planet earth, but then she turned her head to the voice speaking softly beside her, that of her mother, Soraya Jones, and then she focused on the loving stares of the two dark brown people standing behind her mother, her brother Dinari and her sister, Sula. And then she saw a white man entering the room with what was apparently snacks for everyone.

  Is that my husband?

  He seemed very tall, very studious and had a remarkable kindness about him. She remembered that his name was Scotch.

  “She’s wak’n up”, said Soraya excitedly. “Get the doctor.”

  “Babe?” called Scotch Childress, lovingly.

  ••

  In her memory, Scotch was making love to her under a pier at Virginia Beach and it felt like flying. And it felt like falling.

  “You’re marrying your Sociology Professor?”, came a shrieking voice from the past.

  Then a different voice.

  “The University has decided to discharge Professor Childress--for unethical conduct with a student.”

  Sula’s voice: “Oh come on, white Professors marry white girl students all the time--what’s wrong with a black bride?”

  Scotch loves me!

  “Mrs. Childress?”

  RooAmber felt herself drowning. Salt water filling her lungs.

  “Mrs. Childress?”

  Her arms reaching for the sun over the sea.

  “Mrs. Childress?”

  Who in the hell is that calling me?

  “Mrs. Childress--it’s Dr. Yoo. Can you hear me?”

  RooAmber’s eyes bolted open and she focused on the young looking Asian man holding the clipboard.

  “Mrs. Childress, can you tell me what year this is?”

  “Get the fuck out of here!”, she hissed.

  “Mrs. Childress, do you know who the President of the United States is?”

  A memory flashed before her eyes in which she, Scotch, her mother, Sula and Dinari were standing in a crowd listening to Maya Angelou recite a poem for the inauguration of...

  “It’s 1993...President Clinton is...Maya Angelou’s the first lady”, she said groggily.

  “Good. Good. Now...do you remember who you are?”

  She saw herself walking to school, the sign up ahead saying Howard Street. The colors for Wilson High were green and white, and apparently, she was a cheerleader, because that’s what she had on. She came from those houses on Brandywine Street in North West. She could see her mother, a fat yellow pretty woman standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face, and then suddenly, RooAmber blurted out to the doctor, “I’m my mother’s yellow baby. That’s why she doesn’t love me...like she loves Dinari and Sula. ‘Cause I’m yellow like her. I’m the stuck up yellow bitch from Brandywine Street that none of the other girls want to be friends with.”

  Immediately, Soraya Jones looked as though she had been caught butt naked in the hospital hallway. Her mouth hung open, the weight of what her daughter was saying so shocking that she couldn’t even blink.

  Tears formed in Sula’s eyes, because she understood the pain in RooAmber’s voice.

  “I’m here, RooAmber”, said Scotch.

  “Mrs. Childress, do you remember why you wanted to kill yourself? Why did you ingest a bottle of sleeping pills and then walk into the ocean?”

  A scene from an old black and white movie flashed before her eyes. Joan Crawford in “Humoresque”. The scene where she walks into the sea. God, it’s so beautiful.

  Then her boss at Flavor Magazine flashed before her. She was upset and disappointed after catching RooAmber smoking a joint and wiping tears from her bloodshot red eyes in the stock room. “You’re fired, RooAmber! Get your little pot-smok’n ass on outta here!”

  Suddenly, RooAmber’s face twisted up and turned beet red as though she were ready to kill someone. She screamed, “I want my son! I want my son! You can’t sell him!”

  Now that didn’t make any sense, thought the doctor, because the child she had miscarried had been a female, eight months old. Her third miscarriage, her third daughter.

  “RooAmber, honey--nobody’s trying to sell your baby.”

  “They’re selling my son!” she screamed, irrationally.

  “Mrs. Jones, let’s let your daughter sleep for a while.”

  Dinari winked at his sister, his eyes flickering with love and support, but for some strange reason, she couldn’t remember what his name was. She knew he was her brother and that he was openly gay, but--what was his name?

  “My wife’s been having nightmares about slavery”, Scotch Childress whispered in Dr. Yoo’s ear. “Sometimes she’s a slave, other times she’s an African princess sitting on the football field at Wilson High.”

  At Wilson High, the boys would hover around RooAmber, because she wasn’t just high yellow--she had green eyes. They would always ask her, “What kind of name is RooAmber? Where did that come from?”

  And RooAmber would tell them, “It’s an accidental name, it’s a mistake, because my mother meant to name me ‘Remember’--but the nurse misunderstood her and wrote it wrong. I was supposed to be named ‘Remember’.”

  “When did these fantasies begin?” Dr. Yoo asked Scotch.

  “After she lost the second baby. She started saying that God was punishing her for going against her mother’s wishes and marrying a white man, and then the nightmares started. She would go to the bathroom, and all of a sudden, I would hear her break out in a blood-curdling scream, because she had looked in the mirror and saw that her skin was the color of charcoal. She said she saw herself with her head shaved and a ring in her nose. It scared the shit out of her.”

  ••

  Dr. Yoo pressed the button and began speaking into his tape recorder. “Patient is a twenty-eight year old African American female.”

  Blithely, his fingers signed the blue-backed court documents. Physician’s signature: Dr. Ken Yoo

  “Suffering from suicidal ideation and hallucinations. Root childhood depression, magnitude 10, caused by classic African Diaspora skin color complex, magnitude 10--unique in this case--because the patient is very light skinned, which is usually the preferred goal of African Americans, but married a white man to keep from defiling ‘real’ black people, whom she feels she’s already disgraced enough by having yellowish skin and green eyes. Patient thinks of her color as dirty. The patient’s mother is the assigning signifier.”

  ••

  “RooAmber, don’t be afraid of the tape recorder. It’s only here to help me remember the details of our conversation. You being a magazine writer and editor, I’m sure you understand that.”

  A hidden video camera recorded the coldness in her eyes.

  “Now, I want you to talk more about these visions you’ve been seeing.”

  “They’re not visions”, she said immediately and calmly. “They’re real.”

  “But Mrs. Childress, when you were receiving care for your pregnancies, weren’t you told that these ‘visual incidents’ could be part of postpartum depression? Couldn’t it be that you blamed yourself for losing the babies and your mind started playing tricks on you? Postpartum depression is often a major factor in why some women develop suicidal ideations.”

  “It’s not the miscarriages”, RooAmber said as a single, icy tear ran from her left eye. “It’s the dead babies coming back to visit me.”

  Dr. Yoo sighed. “Dead babies?”

  RooAmber nodded. “Only these are not the ones I miscarried. These are big children. Five, seven, twelve. And dark, real dark. Not just dark brown like Sula and Dinari. These are black, black kids and they have thick southern accents...and they always call
me ‘mama’ and they keep saying...” RooAmber’s voice broke and an avalanche of tears fell from her eyes, but she continued, saying, “they keep saying they don’t want to be sold away from me. They keep begging me to protect them from being sold away.”

  “Now when you see these children...are you awake or asleep? Your husband says that he’s come and found you at two and three in the morning talking to yourself as though someone’s there with you.”

  RooAmber could hear her own voice. Begging the children to understand that she didn’t have any power to protect them--and then Scotch walking in. His skin white as a sheet, and her--throwing up at the sight of him. Him that she loved so deeply and completely.

  “RooAmber...take a deep breath...and compose yourself.”

  She remembered the night that one of the little boys appeared in front of her. Standing next to her refrigerator as she had turned around from the sink where she’d been washing dishes. He couldn’t have been any older than five or six, his whole upper body covered with lascerations from a whipping, the skin open like red slicks against his black grape flesh. He looked so bad that RooAmber couldn’t believe that he was actually able to stand and talk. But he did talk. He cried out to her as though in a misery worse than hell, “My new massa beats me mama. Please come get me, mama. He beats me someth’n terrible and they don’t feed me good lak you did.”

  RooAmber Childress dissolved into a sobbing wreck. She told Dr. Yoo, “I walked into the ocean...because something inside me snapped, not just against the devil, but against God. When someone committs suicide, you understand, it’s because God and the devil have become one. I thought that if I died, I might be able to get to that little boy’s world and protect him. It killed something in my spirit knowing that I couldn’t protect him. And not just him, but all of them. All my children. One of them...was a little girl. And she was being raped by her master, not vaginally, but anally. So as not to get her pregnant. Every time she reached out her hand to me and said--’mama help me’--it was like a knife going right through my heart, because as crazy as it sounds...I believe that I really am their mother.”