FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Page 35

  By losing the natural characteristics given to them by God and by their unique struggle--they were, in Soraya’s ever-observant glance, becoming less of God and more of the devil. More and more...like...the flesh that hated and outlawed their own flesh until flesh and the devil were one.

  And perhaps it was natural, thought Soraya. Living so irreversibly entwined and sharing such a white, white, dark, dark shame. Perhaps it was the natural order--to become as one.

  But she turned now on her daughters in the dark, her eyes wet with emotion and her left eye and cheek twitching uncontrollably as she admonished them, “Don’t you ever believe for one minute...that love alone is enough. Or that the truth, by itself, will set you free.”

  The girls looked scared.

  Although sober, Soraya became angry and emotional in the way that people do when they’re drunk. She told them, “My grandmother, Blinky Hampton, used to sing the blues about black people in the 1930’s and 1940’s...always having to walk long distances. She called that ‘black people’s love’--the walking to see somebody. Negro people had to walk for miles just to get schooling or to get food to feed their family or to hold down the one job in town or country that would let a nigga work...black folks used to walk miles and miles, I had to walk myself as a young girl...and in Blinky’s case, she would walk miles and miles--sometimes with a black eye and a busted lip--just to take her lover man a warm smile. It didn’t matter none that after his good lov’n and sweet words, he went upside that head. She was jess a damned fool like any other woman. Second Solomon, the story goes, would be down on the chain gang. Wait’n to see that pretty brown girl with the glossy hot-combed hair come smile at him for the day. And that was ‘fo they hung ‘em from a tree for beat’n white men in a card game.”

  Soraya looked so bitter and pathetic at that moment. A lonely old yellow woman, confused and defeated. Testifying, “It ain’t never been easy or no ways comfortable...for two black folks to be in love. The whole history of modern thought has been dead set against it. So whenever blacks dared to love each other, it was nothing less than a rebellion. I want ‘chall to remember that. And even though no man never did love me--not even the ones that fucked and ate my food and borrowed my money and left me with babies--I loved them.” She broke down crying. “I loved hard.”

  “Oh, mama, don’t cry!” RooAmber gushed as she ran to comfort Soraya. Sula and Red Annie looked on helplessly, Sula covering her own mouth with one hand as tears formed in her eyes.

  It was downright pitiful.

  Soraya let it all out. “I believed everything they said. I marched and protested and did everything they said do. I cooked and washed they underwear, I painted signs. I hated the white man as much they wanted me to. Hated that honkie!! I hated myself, my pug nose and thick lips, as much as they told me to. Like a good African wife, I walked behind my man. Every time they called me ‘Red Bone’, ‘Honey Girl’, ‘Sunshine’, I thought I was cute. I screamed ‘Revolution!’ until my throat was sore with scabs.”

  She looked up with red eyes.

  “And I don’t have a thing...to show for it!”

  “Mama, don’t cry. Don’t cry, Mama.”

  Soraya got mad and straightened up.

  She said, “I promise you...love is not enough. No matter what nobody tells you--love and the truth is never enough. You have to have something more solid than that to stand on. Believe me...there is something more ...that you have to have.

  24

  •

  THE WEDDING

  Blue Egg Island, The Caribbean

  They took the wall off...and made love.

  •

  Everything was in harmony.

  The night stars and the call and response of the sea tide mixed in with their tender moans, their sweetly kissing stare.

  The ocean’s breeze gently swept over their naked flesh and brought them to rolling in its elegance, their joy sneaking in like a contagious laughter.

  In the background, a classic Blinky Hampton jazz ballad played. Turned down low, the plaintive candor in Blinky’s voice floating just above the lavish string section. A black woman with glossy hot-combed hair singing to her black good lov’n man from a certain history, a certain era, a certain moment:

  Everlasting, ever lonely.

  I walked all this way...to see you only.

  Even if it hurts

  ...I’ll be there for you.

  “Christmas”, Shane said.

  “Christmas?”

  “Let’s get married on Christmas eve.”

  “O.K.”

  And with that, RooAmber rose up to look down upon her own good lov’n man. His ruggedly handsome face--the eyes that searched for her always.

  She ignored the blood escaping.

  So liquid dark, so full like the bladder about to burst in coffee beans.

  The ax forgets...but the tree...it remembers.

  There is no blood in paradise, yet no matter how much of it she saw, no matter how it poured--RooAmber remained festive with love and happiness. Caught tangled in his kindness.

  Asking her beautiful black man, “How many times...have you made me a woman?”

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

  Then they kissed. Like swords crossing.

  Their tongues flowing like robes.

  The darkness and the moons and the sea.

  The naked pain of sweet eternity.

  Like a chariot...taking them...to the wedding.

  ••

  Deeper and deeper, Shane fucked the still lake inside her. Until she could hear his rich Ajowan voice saying: “ugola masu tafaboni” (I walked all this way, through the jungle).

  She remembered the bus full of jazz musicians. Route 66.

  Until she could hear Blinky’s drug-induced tearful begging, “I don’t care...if you beat me. Just don’t lee me...please.”

  Until she saw boyish Shange chasing Roo Ife Ife’s naked black body through the jungle, the two of them laughing and diving into blue sea.

  Until she heard Queenie Hampton calling from the cotton field, “Come quick, Shango!...Massa say he gone let us jump the broom next week!”

  Until she heard the leopard-leashed Queen Ambi addressing the Gods, “If my father dies...I will give birth to him again.”

  Until she, RooAmber, cried, “Find my prayer...open it with your hands.”

  Until...the hands holding on were more than blood. Until the remembrance itself...was alive without them. Alive without them.

  The whole 26,000 years of Sky touching Sea; the whole magic passion of mother’s blood running in the earth, ruining sensible American dreams and European-taught rationality. African insanity. Blackness. The whole 26,000 years continuously coming for them. Fucking with their wonderful wonderland, slitting the throat from which its lies flow. Opening their eyes...these two yellow Africans/their eyes seeing the... bright ...burning...sun.

  Seeing the King’s ear melt--because he had been too stubborn, foolish and selfish to listen to his mother.

  Seeing the crucifix.

  Or was it supposed to be a tree?

  Cut into stone by white men.

  West Africa’s door of Kofi Hoodi. The door to hell. The devil’s door. His feet, both black and white. Kofi Hoodi, the negroid and Gulliver Swiss, the Caucasoid. The two serpents of Satan.

  The door...sweet dirty bitch...the doorway to hell.

  Cut into stone by white men.

  The crucifix.

  The cross they used for fucking their white women.

  In Jesus name. In the name of God.

  “African women”, the white Slave Traders told their sons. “Will make your worm grow into a big snake. Look at their own men’s snakes.”

  ••

  Count on the ocean...to find out women.

  RooAmber felt no shame standing there naked. Yellow goddess, she was the sun. The wind gracing her bare flesh like a scarf of angel’s breath.

  From the cliff overlooking t
he ocean, she could see the slaves again.

  Endless chains of flesh. Hair knotty and wild as matted wool. The skin uniformed in a perfect beauty. Jungle black. They looked nothing like the modern t.v. images of dark afro men paired with lighter skinned brown looking women. That new world and post- colonial image whereby the black

  man is shown as a darkly masculine negro-featured male with African hair, yet his female reflection portrayed, almost always, as box-brown with delicate ambiguous looks and hair short, but not quite negroid. It’s like putting Denzel Washington and Halle Berry together. This constant, therefore abnormal post-colonial representation of every black couple through both media and class to serve white supremacy by rendering the authentic black woman, black people’s womb and “way...into this world”--invisible...a non-reality by exclusion--while promoting the Eurocentric rule of darkness as masculinity, lightness as femininity. In other words, the outlawing of “blackness...as wholeness”.

  The devil’s children upholding the devil’s caste system.

  The compromise...that never stops compromising.

  This was how RooAmber knew that what she was seeing was real, because when she looked down at the shore, she saw the slaves as they really looked arriving in the new world. Chained together like a mass of ashy black coral dragged up out of the sea. Muscular, booty-thick people. Black as all black put together. Reminding her of Katanga and Ambi. Reminding her of Ife Ife and Shango. Pure. Negroid. African-headed.

  Fully perfected...in the image of God.

  Authentically Black human beings.

  RooAmber’s heart sank, because she wished more than anything else in the world that she could go back in time and rescue her beloved ancestors.

  Save them from having their precious blood defiled and altered by rape. Save their minds and souls from being conditioned and taught to hate their own perfect beauty. Save them from coveting and worshipping the yellow flesh and slick hair that although “called” blackness, had not the power to redeem blackness, and in fact only reinforced white supremacy and was really an imitation of white looks, simultaneously refuting African looks.

  RooAmber Childress, a yellow African whose ancestors had been slaves in America, could only spy her ancestors through emerald green eyes and hang her head, wishing...wishing...that they could have known how perfectly beautiful and human they really were.

  Fuck me, Shane. Ouh God! Ouh, I like it!

  Shane’s brawny hands cupped the cushy contours of RooAmber’s thickly magnificent bush woman’s booty-cake. His dick...dicking all inside her, until the whole 26,000 years pounded within her like the white bottoms of ashy black feet dancing against dark earth. She turned her head to the side, trying not to vomit, because in her mouth she could taste the rat-flavored flesh of the cooked possum. Feel the membrane of its bone, the meat falling off the bone, against her tongue. The salinity of a perfectly seasoned broth.

  Merry Christmas, RooAmber. Don’t vomit.

  She put her hand against Shane’s chest and did as young Sergio had done on the day of his death...recited the lord’s prayer, continuously.

  0 crucifix.

  “Fuck me...fuck me...fuck me!”

  And, of course, Shane was a man. He fucked her out of her mind. As lovingly or as brutally as she wanted it. Christmas...was for her.

  ••

  A Sore ache echoed in her twat-sugar when they swam that afternoon. Their eyes opened underwater, holding hands, cutting through sheets of clear blue green water. The sensuous silkiness of the water masturbating the both of them like jellyfish tickling the whiskers of sea lions.

  Side by side, their naked buttocks pumping in the water like the hump of the dolphin’s leap...they came upon the magical turtle’s back. Their mirror.

  And in it...they saw our mother, Ajowa.

  “Was it a beautiful wedding?” the sea goddess asked them with a smile, and although RooAmber’s name meant Remember--she could not recall any wedding. That they had already had it. Nor glistening Christmas tree.

  RooAmber looked at Ajowa intensely. First noticing her hair, the luster of its coarse darkness coiled and knotted against her scalp like black raisins. Then she noticed her nose, the sexy West African kind, wide and thick as the span of a life sustaining smile. Then her flesh, deep and dark with good health and living richness. Her buttocks, powerfully holding up the rhythm of nature and man’s birth itself. RooAmber beheld her round, fully African face. Wishing to steal it, because it was celestial-eyed and perfect. And she got goose bumps hearing the quiet storm in goddess Ajowa’s voice. Asking, “How was the wedding?” Ajowa’s voice possessing that timeless moan that only a black woman can make.

  Perhaps...the wedding had not been much fun, thought RooAmber.

  She looked to Shane.

  Do you remember us having a wedding?

  ••

  I remember I love you, went the song in Shane’s eyes.

  Count on the ocean/ to find out women:

  thing of beauty/Time/unchained in my heart

  find my prayer

  Open it with your hands

  I carry you into this world/I carry out

  my one

  Ife Ife, my dearest

  my endless love

  An American word that I like very much--”Remember”.

  I thank you, Ife Ife...for 26,000 beautiful years.

  ••

  When RooAmber and Shane came out of the sea again, their darkly wet bodies moving into sand and jungle shade, she thought of the black people in her country--America. She heard her mother’s shrill voice demanding, “Love and truth are not enough. There is something more...that you have to have!”

  And she heard the voices of the modern black book intellectuals. The writer Walter Mosley describing all descendents of chattel slavery as, “part of a new race.” And John Edgar Wideman decreeing that...there is no race, but the human race. And the genius womanist writer Alice Walker writing about, “...the American race...the new tribe.”

  And when RooAmber heard them saying these things in the jungle shade of Blue Egg Island that afternoon...some long forgotten African woman deep inside her responded ever clearly, “YES...but not without my curse”.

  “Against you and your children forever. Against every stolen vocal cord and hair follicle...that it took to kill my own black perfect babies...so that the bastards of the Crucifix and its Possum could feast off my sorrow, my suffering and the physical and mental destruction of my people and my man and my children. A curse. Plain, deliberate and perfect...as love.”

  Because it Is love.

  A curse that goes: “I want my black babies. Nothing else...will ever do.”

  25

  •

  CHRISTMAS EVE...Washington, D.C.

  RooAmber’s Townhouse

  •

  Neither the wind nor the speed of sound could keep up with them. They stayed naked as much as they could, their warm brandied bodies entwined before the living room fireplace, twisted together like a pretzel made of flesh. Their brains blown out...and beyond the windowpane, Washington, D.C. looked like a snowy winter wonderland. The brutal...brutal gunshots. 0 night divine. The President had lit the national Christmas tree and carolers could be heard singing in the night...”Faaaallllll on your knees!”

  The wedding was beautiful...Shane and RooAmber enjoying the sweet brandied egg nog and the breath of hickory with the silver bells that sparkled on the pine tree that she and Shane had decorated weeks before.

  All around the Christmas tree were beautifully wrapped, velvet-bowed boxes of black dolls and doll houses, clothes, swing sets, easy bake ovens and other knick knacks that Shane planned on delivering to his daughter, Esmerelda, come Christmas morning. Rosaria had forbid him to put his presents for Essie under her tree, so he had kept them under RooAmber’s and added to them day by day. The swing set and the ruffled Sunday school dress with matching ribbons and ruby slippers was from RooAmber and the Cabbage Patch doll with designer baby lotion
was from Sula.

  But the gunshots...RooAmber couldn’t remember who those were from. In fact, she and Shane hadn’t even noticed it until she got a burning desire to “pee” and got up to the bathroom.

  Once upstairs, entering her dark bedroom, she had noticed the bright...ultra-bright light of the moon outside the window. It shocked her into stillness, because there wasn’t just one moon--she saw two! RooAmber stared in disbelief, her mouth wide open. Going closer and closer to the window, until she realized that the hallucination was not going to go away. It was real. And as she looked down into the snowy, ice and sludge filled streets...the city was unusually barren. As though it were an abandoned movie set.

  “Hurry up!” Shane called from downstairs.

  What the fuck? RooAmber’s eyes searched wildly. Still unable to close her mouth. She couldn’t understand how this, if it was a hallucination, could be lasting.

  She turned around and ran, super fast, downstairs. She went in front of Shane as though about to announce that the sky was falling.

  “SHANE! Look at this shit! Come outside!” RooAmber took off out the front door.

  Shane got up naked, tried to remind RooAmber that she didn’t have any clothes on, wrapped himself in a blanket, and then followed her outdoors. Right away, he saw it, too. Two glowing, beautiful white moons.

  Completely barefoot, they stood there in the warm, warm snow.

  The air and the earth all around them...tropical as a jungle.

  Shane’s eyes beheld the moons as though he were seeing space aliens landing on earth. He was shocked speechless.

  He looked to RooAmber...sure that she was seeing it, too...but then upon seeing her, he almost jumping out of his skin! She was black now. Not brown, but black and shimmering as night water. A trickle of blood running down the side of her face slow as smoke--from where she had been shot in the head.