FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  She saw Second Solomon, her fine mean daddy man--her love.

  White folks had put a noose around his black neck. He hung from a tree. Swinging in the wind. White men and white women sitting around having a picnic. Watching the hanging black man swing in the breeze.

  How many times had Blinky seen this? All down south, time and again, black screaming nappy-headed negro women. Scream’n for they children’s daddy...and even sometimes, scream’n ‘cause it was another black woman that got hung from a tree herself.

  Blinky warbled the classic jazz standard rich and clear:

  He beats me...’n though he lies real pretty...he cheats me

  But I loves my man.

  I ain’t noth’n.

  But his.

  I’ss only bad...from all the love...I never

  had.

  RooAmber felt a presence in the room and opened her eyes--Prince Shango Ogun of the Ajowans stood before her, his dark utterly black body shining tall and muscular, his exposed manhood hanging down like a long, thick cucumber, the hair around it unbelievably thick and nappy. The sight of him terrifying and exciting her, but then she heard herself speaking in some jumbled foreign language. “How many times...have you made me a woman?”

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

  RooAmber did not look in the adjacent mirror. If she had of, then she would have seen what she looked like.

  Instead, she stared at him.

  He was so incredibly...beautiful. Dark, dark. His negro face reminding her of the famous African actor that she had loved in “Amistad”, Djimon Hounsou. Was it him? She reached out to touch his stomach muscles, but then he lifted her up, pulling her to him...and kissed her.

  Her flesh burning as though it were on fire, and as she closed her eyes and let herself be engulfed by Shango’s jungle smell and powerful arms, she heard the sound of a man’s fist socking a woman’s jaw.

  Blinky Hampton screaming and fighting back. Second Solomon beating the shit out of her. BAM! Black woman.

  The downcast eyes, the blood running from her mouth.

  The tender words of the deep baritone voice telling her, “Baby girl, I’s sorry. I didn’t mean it. We been togetha forever. Cain’t you forgive me?”

  The kiss.

  Deep and soulful.

  “Look what I got for ya! Brand new straight’n comb.”

  “I loves you, Second Solomon. You my good lov’n boo.”

  “I loves you, too, Blinky.”

  Suddenly, RooAmber Childress felt a pocket of wind catch in her throat, her senses gasping in surprise as her body was laid down, placed upon a soothingly warm bed of ocean. “Ife Ife”, he sang, and as though in a dream, RooAmber sank into the calm, delicate saltwater. “Once is not enough”, he sang. “Life is too short. Sometimes over before we get to the loving.”

  The loving covered her like flames of choir singing and slow dancing, but it was not sexual. It was loving. Shango Ogun’s massaging hands bathing her, handling her like tulle and silk. His touch godly and healing.

  By chance, in the middle of this dreamy sudden ocean bath, RooAmber turned her head sideways and caught a glimpse of their images in the mirror of her bedroom. Her eyes bulged wide with shock! She saw her body, reed thin and charcoal colored; shiny, shiny black. Her arms and legs wrapped around Shango with the clumsy need of a young girl, and her face was heart shaped and her head bald, the circumference of it decorated with pearl and shell. How could those be my eyes? she wondered.

  Although startled and bewildered, RooAmber could tell that she’d never looked lovelier. There was such beauty in this ocean.

  And then, when she looked up to spy Prince Shango Ogun’s handsome negroid features--he was gone. She saw a nappy reddish man.

  It was Second Solomon. His handsome cranberry brown complexioned face admiring her with a rakish masculinity. His devilish smile was especially irresistible. “O, daddy.”

  “How’s my sweet baby girl?”, he asked as he penetrated and kissed her at the same time.

  Wet, sloppy, slurping kisses covered her mouth and neck as Second Solomon presented a different loving. His bare bottom galloping like a winner between her smooth, suddenly cocoa brown colored legs.

  “Whuss daddy’s name?”

  “Solomon!” she screamed out deliriously. And then as she turned her head sideways again, she realized that someone was holding her hand.

  It was Prince Shango Ogun, and behind him was another him, this one dressed as a slave. Delbert (Shange).

  “How many times”, the slave asked her with a loving stare. “Have you given birth to me?”

  She couldn’t speak, because the red brown man banged furiously, commanding her, “Whuss daddy’s name, huh? What’s daddy’s name!?”

  And then, suddenly, the ocean rose up and engulfed them all. Second Solomon lost his place between her thighs. RooAmber was floating in a beautifully deep melodic love. A sea paradise. Hot masculine flesh against her, not in a sexual way...but holding her. It was Shange. Holding her close to him as though she were a baby. His hands caressing her and his arms rocking her--and then he passed her into the powerful arms of Shango Carolina, another slave version of Prince Shango, and he held her close and rocked her like a baby. And then King Solomon lifted her out of the sea and smiled at her and kissed her feet and then her forehead, and then he held her close and rocked her. And from one man to the next, she was held and rocked and cradled by a continuous healing, a masculine life-affirming loving.

  “Ife Ife”, the voice intoned.

  And then again when her face was blacker than chimney velvet and her lips full beneath a wide sexy nose, it was as though they all held her at once, all of them pulling her as though she were being born into a soulful entity of oneness as they said with the same voice, “I never meant...for you to know sorrow.”

  Like a kiss, eternity came up in her. Down her throat and up in her tunnel of flesh and rebirth. Eternity came up in her.

  “Ife Ife”, he cried against the plaintiff blues song. “I never meant for you to know sorrow.”

  RooAmber Childress peered out of emerald green eyes.

  The body hung from the tree. Swinging in the southern breeze. The neck like puddy in the choke of the noose. Black man, black daddy.

  Her whole voice ripping out of her lungs, screaming, screaming.

  The morphine high tingling in her rotting veins like cheap liquor.

  With a busted lip and a black eye, Blinky Hampton belted out the blues:

  An don’t be mad...’cause I’s only bad

  from all the love

  I never haaaaaaad

  RooAmber pressed the numbers nervously. 202...555...80...

  Ring-ring. Ring-a-ling.

  On about the fourth ring, she picked up. “Hey yall...this Sula.”

  What a pretty voice she had. RooAmber had always wanted Sula’s tenor-mellow speaking voice. “Sula...it’s Roo.”

  “RooAmber, what is it?”

  “I had a dream”, RooAmber said. “I dreamt that I was in the ocean with a long row of angels from heaven, Sula...black men!...and they were my ancestors--they knew me from a long time ago, and they were healing me. Passing me from one set of arms to the next. Healing me.”

  “They tell you to stop mess’n with other women’s husbands?”

  “Sula, listen...I need you. I need you to come over.”

  “Roo...”

  “No, Sula, listen”, the older sister broke down weeping. “I need you to come...and help me take my hair weave out. It’s been killing me for years. I need you to help me take this off. So I can think straight.”

  ••

  Sula came over and they spent the rest of the afternoon chatting and taking the hair weave out. RooAmber sat cross legged in the floor while Sula cut the strings, picked the wefts out and pulled the long, flowing pieces away from the nappy roots, the thick foliage, the rising cloud of dark natural negroid hair. Around the edges, of course, her natural ha
ir was straight, chemically relaxed, but the majority of it, within that circle, was a hefty healthy bush.

  “Girl, you got some hair”, Sula said as she took the pile of removed human hair weave pieces and bagged it. They then took RooAmber’s real hair and washed it, conditioned and blow dried it into an afro of medium height.

  “How you like that?”, Sula asked as RooAmber walked in front of her floor length jeans mirror.

  RooAmber took one look at herself and couldn’t believe it was her. In fact, she didn’t like it, because with her natural dark hair color, her honey-pineapple complexion seemed less buoyant and rather flat, and her nose looked bigger for some reason--her lips, which were naturally bubble gum pink, more prominent and suggestive.

  “I look more African”, RooAmber frowned.

  “Like me”, said Sula.

  “Sula, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say it like that.”

  “It’s alright”, Sula replied. “I like looking African. My blood is still mainly the queen’s, and despite what girls who look like you think, RooAmber, I’m proud to look all black. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “Sula, you’re beautiful.”

  “I know that. But what about you, RooAmber? You’ve been a butterscotch barbie doll for years now. You got enough courage to go without your white girl drag? It’s the hardest thing in the world for a black woman to do in a culture like ours, you know. This ain’t our country. Well--it is our country--I mean, our slave ancestors built it, but we’re not allowed to look like our real beauty. We have to fit in by looking more like the people who used to own us. I guess looking more like them means they still own us. Hell, they even own the Africans nowadays.”

  “You make us sound so tragic”, RooAmber said as she stared at her reflection in the mirror. She realized that she wanted Shane to see her with her own hair.

  “We are tragic”, Sula told her with certainty, but then she added with a proud smile “You’ve never looked more beautiful, RooAmber. You look daring. You look natural...sexy...soulful. You look like a black woman. A real one.”

  “You really think this works for me?”

  “It’s you girl. But be prepared to feel invisible sometimes. Be prepared for people to stereotype you as anti-social, an ‘outsider’, angry, a lesbian. Brothas aren’t gonna respond to you the same way they have in the past. You think white people are white supremacists, wait’ll you get a whiff of some of these black men.” RooAmber cracked up laughing. “Well, not all of them, Roo...but you know what time it is.”

  ••

  Rosaria Roberts sat in the mirror brushing her hair. Her eyes entranced as the brush teased and tamed her long, luxurious mane of dark silky hair. The thing that entranced her, however, was not her hair--but her daughter’s hair. It seemed to get more and more course with each passing month and Gerta Maria had finally been the one to break the ice--asking Rosaria straight out--if the baby was Shane’s or not?

  “Of course she’s Shane’s!” Rosaria had squealed indignantly (and truthfully). To which her mother had smirked and remarked, “Well, maybe it’s that nappy head that’s making your husband stray from you. He probably doubts Esmerelda’s paternity.”

  Which made a lot of sense, because Shane didn’t have African hair, he had what black people call “good hair” and Rosaria’s hair was Spanish Caucasian, so it was perplexing to see little Esmerelda growing such a nappy grade of hair, and on top of that, her skin seemed to get darker and darker no matter how Gerta Maria and Rosaria made sure to keep her out of the sun. Presently, she was the color of light tea.

  “I love it”, Shane had said regarding the little girl’s skin and hair, but Gerta Maria had cornered her daughter in the hallway and whispered, emphatically, “He’s lying. Nigger men always lie. He doesn’t want any nappy haired little jiggaboo or he would have married one. He’s planning to leave you high and dry and he’s glad that precious little doll gives him a good excuse. He can call you an adulteress and anybody looking at Essie would believe it under their breath.”

  Rosaria gulped now remembering her mother’s vile words, her eyes misting over with moisture and her fingers...her beautiful creamy white fingers...loading bullets into the gun.

  “Imagine”, Gerta Maria had breathed ominously. “Imagine the shame when people find out that a black man left you high and dry for a little snot colored ghetto bitch. What has she got, green eyes? That’s all she’s got! But no matter, people will think there’s something wrong with you. First your son gets hit by a bus and then your black man leaves you for his own kind. And with all your beauty--you should have had a white man to begin with.”

  “Mama please!”, Rosaria had cried in tears.

  “I gotta go out back and smoke a cigarette”, Gerta Maria had said. “But you just think about that, Rosie. The children you could have spared from all this nigger drama had you held out and got you a gringo papi.”

  “I married the man I loved, mama!”

  “No...you tricked him, remember? He was gonna go back with that fat behind dark one and you come up pregnant. Only it was a lie, remember? You and I talked about it and you said that Shane was gonna have money and he would be willing to spend it on a woman he loved. You said you wanted this house in Fort Washington. You said you could make him get it for you.”

  “Yes, but I was also in love, mama! I still love him madly.”

  Gerta Maria looked as if she could slap her daughter for being so stupid. She rolled her eyes hard and asked “Well what did he tell you when he got back from Sag Harbor?”

  “Mama, I don’t...”

  “He came back from Sag Harbor asking you for a divorce, Rosaria! That’s what he told you. And you say he stopped fucking you, right?”

  Rosaria now shut her eyes as tightly as possible to push out the memory of her mother’s awful, awful words.

  “Let you suck his dick one night but wouldn’t kiss you afterwards like he usually does. Wouldn’t even run his hand through your beautiful hair while you sucked it for him. Imagine that--a nigger man not running his hand through a white girl’s hair when she’s giving him a blowjob. Now that’s what I call leaving, and I’ll tell you something else--those nigger women got ways with their pussies, they dance on a man’s dick. They do all kindza tricks. Shane’s always been into black women anyway. You may as well start look’n for a white man.”

  Knock-knock.

  Rosaria looked up and saw that her mother was standing in the doorway of her dressing room holding Esmerelda in her arms (dark pretty Esmerelda staring at her mommy, balefully, wondering why it wasn’t her mommy that was holding her).

  “Your husband just called. He’s getting off work in an hour, but he says he’s not coming home until late. Said he’s having dinner out. Said he wants you to kiss Esmerelda, but not wait up.”

  Rosaria took a deep breath, and without Gerta Maria noticing, she slid the gun out of sight.

  “He’s getting off in an hour you say?” Rosaria stood up and tossed her hair. She slipped out of her flowing silk house coat to reveal a still youthful body--her legs firm, her waist still under control and her breasts only slightly sagged. Her flesh was still milky white and rose petal soft.

  Gerta Maria huffed and puffed like a mad pig. Then she snapped at her daughter, “You aren’t going to follow that damn man to the bitch’s house are you? Oh, for crying out loud, Rosie! Why don’t you get yourself dressed up and go find a decent white man instead. That would make more sense.”

  “I don’t want a white man, mother, I want Shane.” Rosaria moved around angrily, her breathing heavy as she threw on her clothes and makeup in a frustrated rush. “I want my husband. I love him. I love him!”

  ••

  “You’re kidding!” RooAmber gushed, excitedly.

  “No, I’m not”, smiled Sula proudly. “I’m pregnant. Six weeks.”

  “Does Trent know?”

  Sula nodded, but in her eyes, there seemed to be sadness. She said, “He knows and he wants us
to get married, but...”

  “But what? Do you know how hard it is these days for women to get men to take responsibility for their children.”

  “He hesitated, RooAmber.”

  “Hesitated?”

  Sula swallowed in shame and then confided in her sister, “His first reaction to the news of my pregnancy was that he hoped it would be a boy and a not a girl--because it’s obviously going to be ‘one black ass baby’. That’s what he said.” RooAmber’s mouth fell open. “But he caught himself. He tried to clean it up, but...hey. I guess we’re all affected by thoughts like that in some way, if we’re honest. You can’t live in this country and not be. Trent and I are both very dark skinned people. I never thought it mattered to Trent. I mean, there was a time in natural history when black children were supposed to be genuinely black, right? Like we were when we came here from Africa?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, Trent seemed kind of disappointed--or scared. Frankly, I don’t know if I want to marry him now, RooAmber. I lost all respect for him.”

  “But, Sula! Come on, the baby will need its father and Trent adores you. He’s not colorstruck. And besides, you’re both gorgeous.”

  “What if I do have a daughter? Be honest, RooAmber, won’t you be worried about how she’ll turn out, even if she’s extraordinarily beautiful? Won’t you be worried that she won’t have many options? Since Trent made his comment, that’s all I’ve thought about. That’s why I don’t know about him anymore. I mean, how is she going to feel if her own father can’t stand the sight of her dark flesh? Don’t forget, RooAmber, we grew up in a neighborhood filled with street loads of pitch black girls, African look’n sistas whose father’s never told them they were pretty, never spent any time with them, never even smiled at them. Not only were they abandoned and rejected by their own fathers, but they were shunned by the whole black community if we’re honest. Look at how many pass themselves off as lesbians just to know love and compassion. Don’t deny it, RooAmber! Many of them turned into anger-filled, lost, lonely people. I’ve been pissed off at Trent every since he fumbled and said that. It’s like I’m holding something against him now, and I can’t talk about it, you know what I mean? But the more silent I am, the more it divides us. He may as well be a white man. I don’t totally trust him anymore.”