FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Page 27

  Rosaria held the drink to her lips, her vision misted by a hurt so gut-wrenching that there weren’t words to describe it. Only other women knew that pain, that feeling of wanting so desperately to sing, because the sorrow is so great, and finding that you have no voice strong enough or clear enough to sing with. Whereas the whole world mourned the blues of Billie Holiday and Blinky Hampton--at least they could sing what they felt and get it out, but for women like Rosaria, there was nowhere to put it. It was a feeling of overwhelming loneliness and despair, and yet, it pounced in ones head like music.

  He’s really leaving me.

  “I wish I was dead”, she whispered, not really to him. “Because then I wouldn’t have to feel this way.”

  And she cried into her drink and drank some more.

  Finally, she looked up at Shane standing in the mirror in his underwear. She noticed how dark his skin had gotten--the burnt orange color was miraculously turning golden brown as the summer now departed.

  “Your skin is getting darker.”

  “It’s because of RooAmber”, he said. “She’s like the Sea--becoming more and more of itself, and each time I’m with her, I become more and more of myself, too. It’s as though we’ve stumbled upon a secret. The secret of joy. We are becoming whole.”

  Rosaria downed her drink. Then, as Shane climbed into bed, occupying his side as though she were a leper, she said, very calmly, “You realize that I’m going to take you for every penny you’ve got, don’t you?”

  “You don’t have to do that, Rosaria. I intend to give you every penny I’ve got. It’s the least I can do.”

  She dissolved into drunken tears and slurred, “I’m going to destroy you, Shane Roberts. Somehow. I’m going to hurt you worse than you’ve hurt me. You and your ghetto bitch are not going to get away with this.”

  And then she flung her drink into the mirror, shattering it, as though the wave of her white hand...could shatter time.

  ••

  Up the dark staircase he came and into her bedroom, his eyes noticing, before they noticed RooAmber on the bed--the most perfect full moon he had ever seen hanging just outside her window. White and luminous as a spirit leaving the body, high and holy as all the dreams crashing heaven. Scotch Childress went to his wife’s bed and stood at the foot of it, his hand clutching the gun, its handle clammy and hot by then.

  RooAmber writhed in the bed, her spirit not merely dreaming, but hanging upside down like a possum from some tree on the road to eternity. She saw the lover’s faces:

  The girl black as coal, the boy more chocolate than blood. How to describe them, she simply couldn’t--because she had never seen people like these in America before. But dreaming about them...was heavenly.

  Scotch stared down at his wife, his great ancestor, Jemima Sullivan appearing in his mind from the old black and white daguerreotypes (photos) that were tattered and worn, but hung like ghosts on the walls of the Oklahoma Historical Society. The runaway slave woman, brown as mud and red clay mixed, her face distrustful of the camera as she tightly clutched the arm of her Paniwassaha Indian husband.

  Scotch had always been drawn to but politely rejected by black women, his ivory white skin and blue eyes confusing the wind song’s mind, because love knows no color, and his secret blood lurking within. Hot and shiny. And when he had seen RooAmber Childress walk into his sociology class all those years before, he had felt not only that he’d known her all her life, but also that he couldn’t live life without her.

  Scotch coveted RooAmber not like other men covet a trophy woman, but more like a child covets its mother. To his blue eyes, even after the time of the whole ancient world had passed by, RooAmber represented the sun.

  The thing he would hate now--was killing her.

  ••

  RooAmber saw the man clearly. As Shane’s semen traveled inside her like shimmering white particles of an exploding moon, she saw the man clear as day.

  The color of cooked chocolate, wildly handsome and proud looking, but his features coming to her from different angles.

  Shango Ogun, Shange, Shango Carolina, King Solomon, Second Solomon.

  As though separating fresh quail’s meat from its elastic skin, the wild women of the wilderness dutifully called the names of the Kings of their wombs, the skies of their seas.

  Ife Ife said, “Shango Ogun.”

  Night said, “Shange.”

  The Queen of Sheba, Sholoongo and UhSoora said, “King Solomon.”

  Blinky Hampton called out, “Second Solomon.”

  And Queenie Hampton, the one whose daddy had named her, ‘Remember’, said, “Shango Carolina.”

  RooAmber opened her emerald green eyes--and she could see it all over again—the plantation.

  ••

  In the clearest English possible, the grandly beautiful white woman stood there on the porch and told them that she had been forced to sell their little boy--their son--because her dear sister was coming to visit from up north, and she, the most stylish southern belle outside Charleston, needed money to redecorate her sitting parlor.

  These were the days that Frederick Douglass wrote about in his autobiography. The days, four hundred years long, when little black boys were frequently sold away from the same plantation as their mother, usually by age six. A girl slave was allowed, most of the time, to stay on with her mother until she had her first baby, and occasionally, she got to stay with her mother for life, but the boy slaves were sold away from their mothers as often as possible--to separate them from the mother’s tit and “point of legacy”.

  White women, naturally, benefitted from the sales of slave children and often instigated it, selfishly coveting material goods, and were called “eggeaters” by the first waves of African women to reach America, because the sons in the wombs of black women were fodder for the whims of white women. Beginning in Africa, the English wives of the Christian missionaries would pray over the pregnant bellies of African women, asking God to make the baby inside a male and to make him strong, simpleminded and obedient. These white women often took the boy child right from his black mother’s innards during labor--and sold him fresh or trained him from birth to be a good lackey.

  Miss Britney Jane Sullivan lived in the days when it was only natural for her to believe that she had a right to the dark son in any black woman’s womb. Love between slaves was the purest, because it was “reasonable”--but part of that purity was in knowing that a negro woman’s womb was not her own.

  The boy’s slave parents, Shango Carolina and Queenie Hampton stood before her, mud black and helpless as eternity.

  “Naw, Miss Britney Jane”, Shango objected, immediately. “You cain’t sell ma bwoy. Zion de only son I got.”

  Miss Britney Jane Sullivan stood there on the porch looking down on him as though he had spit on her lovely white ruffled dress. She fluttered her pretty powder blue eyes, her golden blond ringlet curls jangling as she spoke, admonishing him, “Neh have you heard a word I said, Shango? My sistuah is com’n from up nawth to see me--she married into a varry important Yankee family, her manor-born is like a grand ole...”

  Of course, reduced to children themselves, Queenie ended up crying and begging that Miss Britney Jane find it in her good Christian woman’s heart to spare Zion being sold, and Shango Carolina, like generations of black men before him, eradicated his manhood, begging and pleading the fine beautiful white mistress of the plantation until he was reduced to sobbing, his tall, muscular chocolate body falling on bended knee, his hot tearful eyes staring up at her grace, her chilling white perfect beauty listening to him beg until his throat literally went to choking--begging for his god-given right to his son’s company.

  In those days, black children were required to pick at least 150 pounds of cotton per day or get whipped by they massa, and little Zion, bless his heart, picked 250 on average per day and was one of the strongest, most intelligent and reliable child slaves that Miss Britney Jane Sullivan had ever lain eyes on. One thing tha
t she loathed, however, about little Zion, was how protective he was of his mother. His little brown eyes always watching her, beholding her lovingly as though she were more than just some field nigger mule.

  Of all the pretty little slave chillens on the plantation, it was cute, smart little Zion that Miss Britney Jane wanted to be adored by the most, and yet he never come runn’n up on the porch to sing her no smooth dark field moan or brang her no daffodils, his little black hand presenting it and saying, “I’s yo bess nigga, Miss Britney Jane. I is, I is, I say. I’s yo bess nigga chile.”

  Dozens of other slave chillens did it, but never cute little Zion.

  Britney Jane turned her back on the pitiful begg’n of his parents now. Her mind was made up no matter how they cried, and of course, if anyone thought Miss Britney Jane was a cold, unfeeling person or unattractive and ungodly in any way--due to the power that whiteness gave her--then surely the whole common sense and code of decency of the society would rise up to defend her white honor.

  Queenie Hampton knew another side to Miss Britney Jane, though. She didn’t thank she’d get a whoop’n if she jumped her black nappy self up on the porch and grabbed at the white girl’s glorious petticoats, and that’s just what she did, her voice screaming out in a begging wail, her eyes virtual pools of whirling water, her hands and thick negro lips begg’n all at once, “0 please, mam...I says please don ‘cha sell my bwoy. I done been good...I kept all yo secrets, Miss Britney, ‘cause I loves you so. I loves you so! I ain’t even toll God.”

  “Hush now!” hissed Miss Britney Jane with alarm. Perhaps her only real weakness to the slaves was when one of them told how much they loved her, and ‘course only the women were allowed to utter such words to a white woman, but when they did, as Queenie Hampton did then, it turned something over in Miss Britney Jane Sullivan. She felt even better than when her dog licked her hand or when her cat cuddled up in her lap. It was a good, good feel’n being told by a slave that they wasn’t mad at you for reducing them to scraps of nothing--but, in fact, loved you.

  “I’m so sorry, Queenie”, replied the white woman with a high pitched voice and pleading blue eyes, “But I gots to get that sitt’n parlor decorated. I ain’t got no other way to raise up the money but the honest way.”

  “Please don’t do the honest way, mam”, cried Queenie. “I begs you!”

  Almost, for a split second, something in Britney Jane relented and thought about picking somebody else’s child to sell off, but then...for a flickering half a second...she caught sight of something in that nigger gal’s black eyes. Some piece of smart acknowledgement. That thing that lay unspoken between the white women and the black slave women in those days--the flash of jealousy. Not based on human morality, but plain “female station” jealousy.

  In other words...my man is the master/God...yo man is the nigger on his knees. I’s free...you’s a slave wench.

  Nothing to do with morality. But based on women’s materialism and personal pride. Vanity. Miss Britney Jane Sullivan saw (or rather imagined she saw) that air of worth in Queenie Hampton’s animal eyes.

  “I always been good to you people”, Miss Britney Jane said in a cold voice, her heart changing before it even finished the last beat. She looked down on Queenie Hampton just knowing that that pitiful crispy-headed black as coal thang thought herself, in secret, just as good as any white woman. “It my daddy that’s sell’n that boy, not me. Ain’t nothing I could do if I wanted to.”

  ••

  Shango Carolina took his son and escaped with him.

  “He done run off!” the field Africans hollered come morn’n. “Nigga done took him son and made a run for it!”

  This made Queenie’s heart flutter with sheer horrific fear, but it made her smile, too--the thought that the two people she loved most in the world could actually be free.

  Red Annie (RooIfe Ife’s daughter) came down from the big house and slipped Queenie some biscuits. These were the days when the north had slavery as well as the south, but still, slaves had managed to escape to some-mysterious-where from time to time. Red Annie hardened her yellow face up like a mask and set her mouth to the side, her voice whispering real quick, “Dey might jess make it to a place called Canada.”

  Two days, four days, six days went by.

  And still wasn’t no word of them being caught!

  “Hot damn!” Red Annie sneaked down to tell Queenie. “I thank dat nigger done got his son and him ta freedom, lawd-lawd!”

  Hope lived in Queenie’s heart, and at night, Red Annie and her sweet lov’n man (a field hand by the name of Raggedy Man), and their daughter Jemima Sullivan, met with Queenie in her cabin to hold hands and pray silently. Queenie Hampton said, “I burn in hell willingly to know my sweet baby boy ‘n my good lov’n man outta dis place for good, lawd.”

  But on the eighth day, they strapped Queenie Hampton up to the same tree they’d killed Ain’t Sarah on. They whipped her naked in front of everyone, but she didn’t know noth’n so she didn’t have noth’n to tell. Miss Britney Jane Sullivan cursed her, saying, “You gone buy me a new parlor, nigger bitch, if I have to pluck a newly born darkie right out your bladder this same year--ugly monkey-faced black heiffer!”

  Red Annie, being half African and half slave master’s blood, stared at that white woman something hard that day. In a sick way, because the whites were like Gods in the eyes of the Africans, Red Annie took pride, usually, in the fact that the blood of the whites was in her veins, but staring at Miss Britney Jane whip Queenie that day, there got to be a question in the mulatta’s mind--just what is a white woman? What makes her different from us?

  Red Annie, who not only worked in the big house but was also sometimes allowed to run errands to the other plantations, would very often spy the white women as they sat on their porches holding their babies, laughing and conversing, planning what they and their free white children would do for Christmas or when the sun came up or when it went down, and as Red Annie’s hazel eyes would behold those images of the white women loving their children, she would think about the lives of white women, even them ones that were battered by their husbands and given few rights in a nation of male privilege, and the one shocking thing always came back to her--these bitches is free!--they sitt’n up here free as fresh air.

  Why us negro women gotta be slaves? White man rapes us more than he fucks them. But dey’s free.

  In those days, white men claimed that black women were “just jealous” of white women. Red Annie agreed. Black women were jealous.

  Jealous that the white woman was free to raise her children from birth to adulthood and never be worried about the probability that they would be sold right out of her life at any given moment--and especially to a field African woman, that was the greatest and “real-est” worry in life. White women, though, was free from any such reality as that, and that’s why all black women were so jealous of white women. Jealous that the white woman was protected by her man and valued by him as a prize--as the negro woman had once been back in Africa with her own King. Jealous that the white woman was free to wear her own natural God-given hair and have the society, both slave owner and slave, celebrate it and mark her hair as the symbolic proof of American beauty. Black women were jealous that the white woman was free to read books and write love letters. Free to run away and start over in a new state if her husband beat her. Free to tell the white man, whenever he got horny in his pants, “I’m a lady...don’t dirty me. Go wipe yourself off on yo nigga wench.” Free to buy a bar of soap and wash her body, wash out her pussy and take in a puppet show if she felt like it. Free to believe that God created her as a superior being to the African man’s black mother and that this was why she deserved to be regarded as valuable property--while the black woman’s womb was simply the reason that African men were inferior to all other men.

  Yes, Red Annie admitted to herself, you black women are “just jealous”of white women--because white women are free. Sitting on porches, loving and playing
with their free white children. Free as fresh air.

  Red Annie would stare at those poor southern white women on the porches with their babies, and not just them--but she would stare at their northern sisters and cousins that came down for visits so often. Different accents, but still the same two faced white bitch. Her northern laugh raised in a shared whiteness as Red Annie thought to herself, “How can she possibly look at my life and look at herns and not see that God loves me more?”

  Like every other smart black woman in history, Red Annie looked at the white woman and wondered--”Do she really think she’s beautiful living off my sorrow, off my man, off my children, off my invisibility? How can she possibly look at my life and look at herns and not see that God loves me more? I got a twat and titties just like she got. But she think herns superior, ‘cause of the way it makes people whiter and brighter. White like death. She thinks she’s something great, everybody tells her she is...but the truth is, a white woman ain’t shit. Everything she has...including what she thinks of herself...is at the expense of someone else. White man fixed it like that. She jess a second class citizen benefitting from her white man’s color supremacy. She just...white.”

  But not to worry. Novelists and playwrights would take care of any blemishes she had. Each week, her humanity would be redefined, defended and held up as proof of the superiority of the white race. Soap boxes and magazine photos would portray her as perfect light, both virgin and whore, the queen of the world, the white man’s mother. And yet...Red Annie and most smart black women knew that a white woman wasn’t shit.

  Sometimes, one of those white women would look her dead in her hazel mulatto eyes with that “everybody’s-jealous-of-poor-me” expression that white women perfected after hundreds of years of toiling in white men’s churches. White women wore that look day and night during slavery days, pasty faced and docile as a possum playing dead, and Red Annie would shake her head realizing that if the black woman was the mule of the world, then the white woman was damned sure its possum. Rat’s tail and all.