FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Page 23

  Black man had his own kingdoms, his own religions, armies mightier than thunder, his own black wife that was his own reflection and his own dark giggling chillens. In other words, his own family created from his own loins. He was a whole, healthy human being in and of himself.

  But the minute we got heah to the Americas, our white brother start trying to figure out ways to divide African people from they own truth. They biggest feah, you unnerstand, was that the blacks was gone rise up and revolt, so they had to figure out a way to make sure that didn’t happen, and thass when they looked at one another and say to themselves--”We gotta put someth’n on black people’s mind.”

  All of a sudden, African babies start coming in fifteen different shades of black, and no matter what you modern fools say--this do not promote unity, because the less people look alike, the more they don’t they trust one another. They form petty jealousies against each other ‘n you cain’t kiss one without the other one plott’n revenge. The color shades--not the issue of color shades--but the actual color difference itself is what divides the blacks. I tell you the white people is a very clever and united people, they looked at each other and said, “We gotta put someth’n on the black people’s mind.”

  I was heah in the 1630’s. The days when they started taking newborn blacks from they pure African parents and telling them babies from the day of birth--”You is a nigger. You come from nothing. You is black ‘cause Ham was yo daddy. I saved you from living in trees ‘n eat’n nuts ‘n berries. I saved you from walk’n roun’ naked all day. I saved you from poverty and hunger, I saved you in the name of our lord and savior Jesus Christ--you’s a nigger and you don’t speak no other language but mines, ‘cause that’s the proof that you don’t come from nowhere. You’s jess a nigger from nowhere.”

  Remember...without your language, you done forgot what tribe you is and what land you mammy ‘n pappy from. Without your own language...you cain’t remember what you name ‘sposed to be or what name to give you chillens. You forget how you really laugh, without your own language.

  I was heah in the 1630’s and 1640’s when they started systematically lynching, poisoning and drowning the pure Africans ‘n raising up the newborn babies on separate breed’n plantations whurr they taught them babies who they was.

  Slave master gather them chillens around him by the hundreds and say, “You is a nigger. You come from nowhere ‘n you three fifths of a human being, ‘cause God is white ‘n him chillens is white--walk in the light, the beautiful light. I’m good ‘n you bad. My European mama is pretty and you African mama, without my white blood in her, is a baldheaded ugly black ape. Now you jess remember--you’s a nigger. That what you is, that you race.”

  We slaves were separated from our African parents. That they ever existed was erased from our inch of knowledge. We was niggers and we depended on the white folks for any and everything we knew. They was human beings, the whites. We let them kill our parents and when we lay down wid each other...we left our parents dead. Generation after generation, we left our parents dead. Until we looked different. Until we forgot thangs. And then the white man had raped so many negro girls til we had the new breed...the mulatto...and that was the thing that sealed the black man’s defeat, because our African mothers hated themselves and wanted us to be free. Lighter skin, our black Mammys believed, would give us just dat little inch more of favor with white folks. So both Massa and Mammy put them new breed on high. Mulatto womens with white looks and house nigger minds was labeled “The Black Woman” and raised up as the ideal mate for our mens, and through these bi-racial women...white acculturation...began to mentor a new stock.

  Naturally, without black mothers, real black mothers, the chillens lost Africa forever.

  In Africa, our warrior men had a saying when battling ant armies for space in the jungle--”Kill the Queen, the nest will die.”

  So there it is chile. The main thing the slave master wanted was for the black child to hate they own mama. That, naturally, is the ultimate goal in conquering another human being, because the womb of a man is both his roots to be born from and his earth to be buried in. To destroy black people and create slaves, they had to be taught to hate they mama, and the mama to hate her own self--to realize that by rubbing up against her pure blackness, it only made them blacker, and therefore, increased their suffering in slavery. Being abused and despised did make the slave children learn real quick that it was her black egg and her black womb...that made them black. So little by little, dey had to kill her.

  .

  And when we seen that the slave master was less afraid of the bi-racials and thought them to be a more human grade of nigger--our black mama start teach’n her chillens--”get light, get bright. Each one try to mate with somebody lighter than you is...til we’s all light enough to move on up.” The light skinned colored women like you benefitted from white supremacy and white beauty evil. Your light image became the veil that covered our West African mother’s face. Your yellow skin became the black man’s bridge out of blackness. Little by little, decade by decade, your birth became the death of our West African mother.

  As the centuries passed, it wasn’t just dark skin and nappy hair that we tried to distance ourselves from--it was any and everything that come from our mammy’s place of origin. West Africa itself became the thing we despised. We tried to claim Egypt and Ethiopia. Anything raped by light. We claimed it, loved it and held it above our own image.

  And thass how de white man made niggers. All over Africa, on the slave ships, on the islands, in the holding dungeons, on the plantations in America--he bred and systematically orientated a new religious slave progeny; a new white supremacist follower and believer. He created a nigger. If’n you ever run into Dr. West, you tell him what you Ain’t Sarah from Africa told jew, and after dat, you ax him why he makes all dat money an been to Ethiopia but say on t.v. that he this damn old and ain’t nevah been to West Africa. I may be barefoot, naked ‘n Mammy-mouthed, bu.

  Over in Africa, the Berbers and Arabs re-classified themselves as belonging to the “white race”, and in America, the house nigger’s dream was to become white--the field African’s dream was to become a house nigger.

  And by the time I come back to dis world as another black person, I was a little mulatto boy in 1844, the black slaves was all proclaiming, loud as they could, “I...ain’t no African!”

  17

  •

  When next RooAmber Childress opened her emerald green eyes--the only thing in this world that she wanted to see--was those black and beaten slave children that Dr. Yoo’s medication had taken away. Those hallucinations hung in her mind, in the dark, like sacred ghosts. Black and beady-headed, their smiles as new as God. Celestial-eyed. Black children.

  Where had they gone? Disappeared to?

  Who was it, she wondered, that still loved black children--not the darling dream babies that so many Americans called black, but real black children--who loved them enough to bring them into being?

  And how had she, an African woman, ever lost them?

  How does a mother lose her own children, but not the house keys?

  ••

  Eye to eye, they held on like birth. Enjoining the morning.

  How long has it been? 26,000 years?

  Shane Roberts took her in his arms and kissed her as though they’d never been apart. RooAmber opened her legs like wedges of sun welcoming the night sky. Her blood hot as the forehead of a nursing baby. Her heart as ancient and insane as the stretch marks of the sea.

  Yes, it had been 26,000 years.

  An endless, rolling melodious drumbeat. The miracle being that they found each other again and again, like nature finding daybreak--eye to eye, the remembrance of death. Stiff and recent between them. Their blue, blue faces and breathless lungs--still touching like Sky and Sea--even in death. 26,000 years of life and death. Knowing and loving the every inch...of everything.

  “You went to the beach last night.”

 
“I met an ancestor there.”

  “An ancestor?”

  “Perhaps it was a hallucination--but I cherished it.”

  Shane studied her eyes. “Your flesh seems calmer than usual. You talk about having hallucinations as though it’s something normal.”

  “It is normal, if you’re insane.”

  He cupped her face with his hands. “You’re not...”

  “All women are insane”, RooAmber interrupted him with glaring, tearful eyes. “All we know and wait for is love. Forever. Love from you...until finally, we are touched by the insane part.”

  “You seem angry, sunshine.”

  “I’m not angry. My heart is broken.”

  “Broken why?”

  “Broken because...I have to be the woman to hurt another woman. Because I’m insane.”

  “I want you RooAmber. I’m willing to pay the consequences.”

  “Want me?”

  “Love, need and want you.”

  She burst into tears and said, “I should shoot myself.”

  Like a movie actress from some old 1930’s melodrama. She cried with a twisted up Joan Crawford face and said, “I should shoot us both, right in the head.”

  ••

  It was too rich. The being touched by him. The being held and handled, the urgent, passionate kissing. Smoke and twilight.

  So good that they had to draw the curtains of the Bullova Carriage House room and pretend that the sun hadn’t come up. Their nakedness wrapping around need like want. All the tender jazz of loneliness bursting free, galloping, riding with them into the love parade. The fuck. The opening.

  Open it with your hands.

  “I just want this moment”, RooAmber panted beneath his weight. “I just want to feel this...once. Loved by my own.”

  Once in my life. Find my prayer.

  “To be loved by my own”, she cried, reaching for Africa.

  And as Shane possessed and worshipped every inch of her body, it felt as though they made love for the whole 26,000 years all over again. The moons and the suns passing between their shadowy twilight like chances between God and satan--the two-ness of sin and virtue bringing out the loneliness and heartbreak like the goodness in dirt. Good soil.

  “I must be insane”, shuddered RooAmber Childress.

  “It’s what makes the world go round”, Shane told her. “Love.”

  ••

  Come nightfall, long after Shane had gone to see about his poor wife and baby...RooAmber drank half a bottle of vodka and found herself tripping over the bungalow’s furniture, tears burning like acid on her cheeks.

  How could she find them--her children? Their black rind negro faces. More beautiful than spring and rain to RooAmber. Those faces.

  “Noooo!” she shrieked crying. Because they came to her eye-less.

  Her hands found Dr. Yoo’s yellow pills in the medicine cabinet, but she refused to touch them. Barefoot children dressed in rags.

  She picked up razor blades instead. Quickly, she did it.

  She slit her wrists...thinking some of the sorrow would escape.

  ••

  Shane stood before Rosaria and his mother like a man who had just walked barefoot through a burning desert. Tenderly, passionately, his eyes beheld the beauty and anguish of his good luck bride, Rosaria Roberts. Good luck, because people had paid attention to him, noticed and studied him once he had Rosaria by his side. She had brought beauty, excitement and newness to his life. He couldn’t believe that his only thought now was to leave her.

  “Through our children...we live forever”, said Rosaria with an avalanche of tears. “I feel...like I’m dying.”

  Guilt shone in her husband’s eyes, and he wanted so very desperately to avoid holding the handle of the knife that he was going to stick in her back. His betrayal humbled him and aged his guts like a drought.

  “Hug your wife for crying out loud!” snapped Namibia.

  Shane went to her, robotically, and held her. It was so sad as she cried and held on to him for dear life. It was so, so sad, because he wasn’t there.

  “0, Shane”, cried Rosaria, sincerely. “I need you so much. I don’t think I could go on another moment if I didn’t have you.”

  She meant those words. They were some of the most heartfelt words she had ever spoken in the whole time they’d been married. “I need you so much.”

  Well, that’s what men want. To be needed.

  And he shuddered, his body rebuking his spirit, because everything within him--he knew it was foul, traitorous and weak. His son hadn’t been dead more than a full day, and all he could think about was the relief and freedom he felt. The clear path...to run.

  And then Esmerelda began to cry.

  Rosaria pulled away from Shane, but holding his hand, led him to the bedroom where a nurse was tending the baby.

  “Daddy’s here”, said Rosaria as she went over and lifted the dainty sweet little tanned girl. “Daddy’s here.”

  Shane hated himself so much in that moment--that he went and took the baby from Rosaria. He held her close and cried and sobbed and rocked the little girl with such a tragic loving that she herself had stopped crying and was staring into his face and eyes, her winsome littleness reacting as though she’d been smiled on by the gods.

  “Children are so very blessed”, Rosaria said, “when they have their father in their lives. I wish I had known mines.” And she trembled, thinking perhaps she would have been a different person. Maybe she would have loved Shane and understood him better if she had been raised by a father. And maybe she wouldn’t have wasted her time, in fact, pursuing Shane’s financial security, if her own father had been there.

  Maybe she would have married for love.

  Rosaria tossed back her long dark hair and caressed her husband’s back and arms, thinking that he cried so profusely because of their young son’s death. But it was little Esmerelda that he cried for.

  So tiny and innocent, he didn’t see how she deserved to be abandoned.

  But then...how could he stop it? In his mind and soul, he was already gone. He had already betrayed them, and that’s why he cried. Because he was guilty and ashamed. A real son of a bitch.

  ••

  RooAmber Childress walked into the sea, and as the warm ocean came live veils against her flesh, the water moving higher and higher, she thought she could feel Shane’s semen dripping out of her pink delta. Heavy rivulets of white shame coursing down her inner thighs and into the salt water. Sperm like eternities of evil, ignorant, selfish male aggression. And need.

  Softly, she closed her eyes against the sun and felt herself dive into the depths. Her soul called by the turtle’s back.

  Her auburn hair weave folded and became the swooshing fan of a tropical fish’s tail. Her suddenly butter yellow body propelling in search of the blueness. Her torso flipping and bending, swimming as though part of the Sea itself, and her legs forming a slashing, whiplashing silvery tail.

  Turning and twisting through the depths. Dolphins coming to greet her.

  Bending and turning with time.

  Until she was black as all black put together.

  When I will be free of this insanity? black women think.

  They all come to that moment when they think it. When will I be free?

  When will I be loved?

  People said that black women...were bitches.

  And that they were the least attractive of God’s women. The mules of the world, made supposedly for servitude. And that they should be pitied, because all they would ever know...was disappointment and sorrow.

  People said that black women were cold and unfeeling. Or hilariously comical and overly intelligent. Intimidating.

  People said that black women weren’t loved by their fathers or chosen to be loved by black men, because they were all born with attitude problems and simply weren’t as nice or playful or sweet or feminine as any of the other women in the world. People said that blackness was evil, because of black women.<
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  People said that a black woman was anything but ...a woman.

  ••

  Shane gave the baby to the nurse and sat Rosaria down on the bed to talk to her. He held her beautiful creamy white face in his hands and told her the truth, “I love you.”

  26,000 years of sun and music suddenly flushed the skin on Rosaria’s pale bosom. She got goose bumps looking into Shane’s eyes.

  She told him, serious as cancer, “I’ll kill her.”

  Shane Roberts was silenced by the look in Rosaria’s eyes. The refusal to be defeated clutching and possessing her worse than jealousy.

  “You belong to me!”, she gasped crying. “You’re my husband!”

  Shane didn’t know what to say, so his spirit made him say, “The whole world lies...on black women.”

  Fast as a cat, Rosaria reached out and slapped the living shit out of him! Ka-Plapp! How dare he bring color into a conversation about true love and true betrayal. Color had no place in her reality. Rosaria was color blind. Unable to see it. Frigid with non-appreciation of it.

  Shane finished bravely by telling her, “And it only takes one lie...to unravel the whole world.”

  “You don’t worry about AIDS, Shane? Rubbing up against black women is the fastest way to get it. Or is that a race card you’ve never noticed?”

  Shane stared at the brutal prejudice in Rosaria’s eyes as she caught herself and then desperately fell back on that old tired saying of the Puerto Rican and mixed race woman, “I’m just as black as she is!”

  “I’ll always love you”, Shane replied sadly.

  To which she hauled off and slapped the shit out of him again.

  And then bursting into tears, she proclaimed, “I’ll kill her!”

  “No, Rosaria”, Shane told her, threateningly. “...you won’t kill her.”

  Through clenched teeth and butcher knife eyes, she promised him, “0 yes. I’ll kill you both! Just like you killed my son.”