FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  Rosaria laughed before she caught herself. She was so moved that she put her arms around Donald tightly and hugged him with her entire being. She said, “Thank you for making me feel special.”

  “You are special. And we’re going to make your husband pay big time. When I get through with his ass, he won’t be able to afford a pack of top ramen noodles for that nappy-headed skank.”

  “Now, Mr. Spears”, Rosaria interjected sheepishly, “it’s not about color. People are people and women are women.”

  “Bullshit”, said Donald. “You white women are the total package and you know it. You’ve got the beauty, the right spirits, the perfect personalities...you know how to raise children and keep your men happy. You don’t walk around with a funky attitude all day...”

  As he went on and on, Rosaria thought he was making some really good points. Black women weren’t nearly as attractive as white ones, everybody knew that, and they were famous for their loud talking in public and their nasty attitudes. Their children always turned out to be bad.

  “...that’s why I don’t deal with a woman unless she’s either white, Asian, latina, and occasionally, I’ve dated biracial women if they came from a white mother. But I don’t fuck with regular black women, and you want to know who was the first person that told me not to fuck with them?”

  Shane’s mother, Namibia, flashed in Rosaria’s mind right before Donald said, “My mother. That’s who. And she was as black as black can get and she always told me when I was growing up to steer clear of black bitches.”

  ••

  When Namibia Roberts hung up from her conversation with Shane, she clutched insecurely at the moon white pearl necklace around her neck.

  Surely, she thought, Shane would understand her reason for keeping the fact that he had a son with Tangie Brown a secret.

  “I didn’t want to bring shame and humiliation on Rosaria’s household”, she practiced saying as she leisurely smoked on a More cigarette (Green Pack). She said, “the boy’s very dark skinned and kinky haired. People would have gossiped, knowing Rosaria wasn’t the mother, and you would have insisted on having him in your lives, and my greatest fear was that the boy’s presence would drive a wedge between you and Rosaria. But...now that you’re marrying a black woman. Shane Jr. could fit right in.”

  Namibia’s gray eyes turned evil as she remembered the last conversation she’d had with that little jezebel, Tangie Brown. The girl had actually threatened her. Made fun of Namibia looking white. Hung up in her face.

  Namibia clenched her jaws and shook her head thinking about all the years she’d waited to get revenge on that low class slut.

  Namibia practiced saying, “I want you to get custody, Shane. Tangie Brown has proven the content of her character by blackmailing us for all these years. She’s nothing but ghetto stock in a tailored suit. She doesn’t deserve to be a mother.”

  That would fix Tangie Brown’s wagon, Namibia thought.

  She picked up the phone and confirmed her flight reservations.

  ••

  The Mirror:

  Slow and meticulous, Rosaria Roberts walked up the spiral staircase that led to the small mansion’s second tier, the heel of her shoe padding very airily into the staircase carpet until it felt as though she were climbing the tiers of an elaborate wedding cake. Snowy white icing on a dreamy mountain. And at the top of the staircase, Rosaria stopped in her tracks, a cold sweat bursting across her forehead, tiny lines pulling at the side of her eyes in newly formed crow’s feet--not from age, but from intense stress. She shuddered, but could not allow herself to drop the long lavish box that held the new wedding gown she’d purchased at one of Georgetown’s top boutiques.

  There came to be a question in her mind. How can I live it down? My husband’s not just leaving me, he’s leaving me for a black woman. A black woman!, she cried suddenly at the top of the stairs.

  A black man is leaving me for a black woman. What kind of statement is he trying to make about me?

  “Rosie...that you?” The baby made baby noises.

  “Yes mother”, Rosaria answered and then composed herself on the spot. Quickly, she floated down the hall and ducked inside her bedroom.

  What could it be?, Rosaria asked herself as she laid the fancy suede box on the bed and went about ripping it open, her hands pouring into the cushy white perfection of a fluffy new wedding gown.

  What it could it be? Does he want blacker children? Is that it?

  Rosaria felt frustrated at the deliberations, because everyone knew (or she believed like so many white women do) that biracial children are simply more attractive and intelligent than black ones. And truth be told, they were even more beautiful than white ones, although, Rosaria would have preferred white babies given the choice, for reasons she couldn’t fully put her finger on, but nonetheless, black children, the truly dark brown ones, were prone to get ashy and were born with that hair like a brillo-pad. Some of them came out with big noses or thick lips. It couldn’t be black children that he wanted!

  Rosaria had always felt sorry for black people’s predicament of being born black, and thought of it as a genetic stressor in life--not a choice. For obviously, given the choice, blacks chose to be lighter skinned, as light as possible, she thought, and saved their children from all that wretched blackness. She had seen it all her life. The way the blacks loved playing in her hair, coveting her gorgeous hair, or the way they complimented her beauty no matter how tired or off she looked on a certain day. The way the black women cut their eyes at her, with that amusing jealousy they have, and the way that black men would damn near knock black girls down in their rush to say hello to her or to ask her what her name was.

  People are going to know...that he chose a black girl over me. Not just to screw around with, but to be with. Instead of me.

  She struggled to breathe, because at that moment, as she pulled out and twirled the new wedding dress, she was having trouble processing oxygen.

  They’ll think something’s wrong with me. That I’m defective. The whole neighborhood will.

  Knock-knock. And then Gerta Maria stepped into the bedroom holding little Esmerelda. “Your baby wants some attention from her mama, Rosie.” It was like slow motion to Rosaria...her mother coming at her with the baby. The baby’s deep brown eyes claiming her. And it would have been alright, it would have gone smooth, and Rosaria would have been able to keep her cool...if only...if only Esmerelda hadn’t chosen that moment to speak her first words. If only her soft, little pudgy arms hadn’t reached out with those huge eyes, tearful and needy, as the baby called out, “...Ma-Mah.”

  Gerta Maria had been so shocked, so stunned and excited to hear Esmerelda speak her first words, that she stopped in her tracks. But before she could get too happy or say a word...Rosaria went off.

  She lost it.

  “Get...that...goddamned...bitch!...OUT of my room!”, she hissed at her mother with a booming screaming shriek.

  “Oh noooo!”, Gerta Maria moaned in a cry. Her free hand immediately trying to cover Esmerelda’s ears as she turned, right away, and fled from her daughter’s cruelty, her own eyes breaking into tears that any child could be treated so violently by its own mother.

  Gerta Maria sat Esmerelda down in her cradle, as the little girl was crying and kicking, and immediately pulled out a rosary and began saying “hail Mary” and praying aloud.

  Rosaria didn’t want to hear the shit. Went to the double doors of her bedroom and shut them tightly closed.

  Then she went to her dresser and poured herself a vodka straight. She got that down as quick as she could and fought to catch her breath.

  “It’s time”, she told herself, passionately. “Time.”

  She and RooAmber Childress had never met, never come face to face, but it was about time, she thought.

  Carefully, she went to her secret hiding place and pulled out the duplicate key that would open RooAmber Childress’s front door anytime she wanted it to. She stared at the
key until it felt like a hot heavy quarter in her hand. 25 cents. She gasped and tried to get the smell of Donald Spears out of her nostrils, but until she took a bath, that would be impossible.

  So off she went and ran herself a nice sudsy bubble bath.

  An hour into her luxurious relaxation, Gerta Maria came into the bathroom stone faced. “Mother, I’m so sorry for how I acted.”

  Gerta Maria choked back fresh tears as she said with great conviction, “Let me tell you something, you little lovestruck selfish bitch...don’t you ever!... yell at Esmerelda like that again or I will put my foot so far up your ass, the corns on my toes will be sticking out your nose! She’s just a baby. She didn’t ask to come into this world. You and that fucked up husband of yours brought her here and now she’s at the mercy of the two of you. But I tell you one thing, Rosie. If you ever mistreat that child again, I will take you to court and get custody of her myself. I won’t see you abuse little Essie. I won’t have it!!”

  “Mother--I.” The vodka made her eyes slur.

  “Your boy child is dead, Rosaria. He’s not coming back. Shane’s divorcing you. You’ve been through a lot, I give you that. But if you would just learn how to comb and care for your daughter’s hair. If you’d just give her a chance to show you what a sweet, loving little angel God has blessed you with.”

  “I will, mother...later...I’ll learn how to comb her hair.”

  Casually, the lovely wand of a hand brought the glass to her lips. Like fire the vodka poured down her throat.

  As Gerta Maria shook her head and closed the door, leaving her daughter alone, Rosaria licked her lips and said, “I want to taste it, Shane. Just one more time, please. I want to taste your dick in my mouth.”

  The bathwater was cold by then, but the liquor kept her body hot.

  “I want to taste your dick, Shane.”

  Let me, let me.

  Let me taste it.

  ••

  RooAmber Childress came calmly out of a deep sleep. She lay in the comfort of her bed, Shane’s warm chest against her back and his strong arms holding her in a sacred cherishment, but something in the mirror...she searched for it with her eyes, her newly wakened gaze studying the reflection in the glass until she thought saw the sea. Waves crashing against black rocks at night. A woman.

  A woman. White and flowing-haired. Standing on the rocks reaching out to RooAmber. Her voice calling through eternity. Some secret lost eternity. Her voice calling out the word, sincere as a baby’s cry, “...sister.”

  RooAmber squinted. Her eyes trying to find the face of the shadowy white goddess figure. Her body moving out of Shane’s arms and rising out of the bed. Her mouth slightly open.

  The waves and the sea...sloshing endlessly.

  “Yes”, RooAmber almost called back to her. I remember you. Our sister. She stumbled in the dark, reaching the mirror’s glass, but just then, the black rocks were covered in blood, the white foam of the sea mixing with the red until moonlight shone down like a jealous spying lover.

  RooAmber touched her face and looked at it in the mirror. The “tanning” was getting ridiculous, she thought. She had never in her life been this dark. And her eyes had taken on a wild hickory purplish-green color. Violet gray one minute and darker than lavender the next.

  RooAmber tasted it.

  The taste of possum watering in her mouth as though she’d just eaten a whole roasted half of one. Moist, tender possum meat. Possum.

  Violently her stomach shook and she bent over grabbing it in pain, her throat contracting as though choking and her contents spilling out, upchucking a fountain of acidic vomit--the bones and soft white meat flowing out of her like squirting rat’s jism.

  She threw up horribly...but then, when it was over...she looked in the mirror again and saw that the black rocks were an island. An island upon which naked women lay strewn, fat and drowsy, their beautiful flesh ranging from white to honey, plum to sepia. Strange women with their mouths sewn shut with thorns and thin straw. Their nipples cut off. Their vaginas raw and open from countless gang rapes. Their dialect mixed. The charcoal colored one speaking the dialect of the Yorubans, the white one speaking a street gutter Dutch, the red one grunting an Islamic Arabic slang.

  “My love”, she called to RooAmber. “Sister.”

  White as the belly of a caught fish. Her face flat and thin, the eyes blue and cold as a dead person’s. Her hand reaching out like a magic wand.

  RooAmber lifted her own hand...slowly, reaching out.

  Cuna matongo, RooAmber said in the language of the forest people. Her skin suddenly dark as wet wood. Her heart heavy for the strange foreign white creature that she...loved so deeply.

  Cuna matongo.

  Swiftly the men disembarked from their boats and flooded the island. Tall, skin and bones black men with spears and painted faces. The women were too fat and drowsy to get up and run.

  Godo, one of the men called to the white thing. Godo! (slave)

  Yes...RooAmber remembered now. They, the women, were slaves. The bandit men owned and collected them.

  I love you, sang the white woman’s dead eyes. I am with you.

  RooAmber saw the man’s hand--black as night--reach around the pale moon white flesh with his cutting stone. He slit her throat.

  And the blood was pretty. So very extravagantly pretty.

  Yes, RooAmber whispered breathlessly. “I loved you once.”

  Like waves they rushed into one another. Their lovemaking ravenous and pure. Their funk spittle-like and rank roaring like hunks of shit shooting like brown fudge from a whale’s ass. Kissing and combining, rubbing and licking and living inside the balm of a secret, sacred ecstasy.

  The sight of the blood made RooAmber scream...and she leaped up out of the nightmare, her legs kicking in the bed wildly. Her breaths labored and panting, her eyes searching the dark room like giant flash lights.

  She was alone.

  Shane had gone home to the room he had rented since asking Rosaria for a divorce.

  RooAmber realized that it was only a dream. She lay back on the bed. Completely unaware that her husband was laying butt naked under her bed. His blue eyes nervous and frozen, his hands cupped around the shooting orgasm that splattered against the panties he’d stolen from her dirty clothes hamper like slingshots of hot spit.

  He tried hard not to spasm, not to breathe.

  Many nights had come with the intention of killing RooAmber and taking her back to Oklahoma to be buried in the secret hiding place with his high school sweetheart, Heather Lebowitz.

  RooAmber calmed herself and went back to sleep.

  ••

  The mirror welcomed her as though it had been waiting a long time to behold her.

  By midnight, Rosaria Roberts was out of the tub and stood there, in front of it, dressed head to toe in the full cascading glow of her wand white wedding dress. She stared at herself in the mirror, the $2,500 price tag hanging off one arm as she modeled for herself and tried to arrest the taste in her mouth.

  Dick flavor. Most American women know the taste of their man’s penis. Rosaria knew hers...and she could taste it just as assuredly as his head and staff had poked in her mouth that night.

  But he hadn’t, of course. She just...had a taste for it. A craving.

  Knock-knock.

  Gerta Maria came in peering around the corner. The sight of Rosaria in a flowing wedding gown made her frown up her face in frustration. “What in the hell are you doing now?”

  “Trying to figure out what outfit I should wear to meet...”

  Rosaria smoothed down the front of her gown.

  “To meet who?”

  To meet Shane’s mistress for the first time...but she didn’t say it. She looked absolutely beautiful. Like a paler-skinned, light-white version of Salma Hayek--save for the places behind her thighs that dimpled like cottage cheese. The gun was in the drawer, fully loaded, and the key to RooAmber’s home, her domain, was back in the secret hiding place.
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  Gerta Maria studied her daughter’s eyes through the mirror. She said, “You’re planning something ain’t you? Planning on trying some shit with that black RooAmber girl.”

  Rosaria’s white flesh got paler as her own eyes told on her.

  Gerta Maria shook her head. “Well, you better make sure you plan it real good, ‘cause I can tell you right now that black women ain’t the ones to be fucked with. Being part nigger myself, I oughta know. You get one mad enough, to where she just doesn’t give a damn, you’re done. Not even God can save you from a black woman unhinged.”

  “I’m not scared of any black bitch, mama.” Rosaria said it heavily and with the confidence of a white scrapper who’d been raised all her life around black people and their flair for drama and bravado.

  Little Esmerelda began to cry from the room down the hall, but Rosaria was immune to the sound. She was so used to Gerta Maria taking care of the baby that she just stood there running her hand through her feathery dark waves of flowing hair.

  “You’re damned good”, Gerta Maria said clearly and then left abruptly to care for the baby.

  Rosaria’s heart sank, her eyes lowering, but in her mouth--she had a taste for Shane’s dick. The feel and flavor of it. And on top of that, she was wearing the hell out of that wedding gown and didn’t want to stop looking at herself in the mirror.

  ••

  They had once been in love. RooAmber and the Caucasoid woman.

  Slowly, the dream placed her in front of the mirror again.

  She saw herself among the other women, only she was very fat and much darker skinned...perched upon the African men’s island of slave women, the lot of them naked and laying around like sexy stuffed whales.

  And, of course, they were indeed stuffed. Constantly fed on fried coconut. Fried in goober oil. Fed on fried whale’s blubber and fried turtle’s meat. Some of them were able to talk and laugh, while others had their mouths sewn shut and their eyes poked out.