by Nana Nkweti
She was ravenous.
The fish was fiery. Jennifer doused her flaming tongue with gulp after gulp of cool water, more than a tad bit peeved, as Kwame sat there oblivious, chewing with gusto, jaw movements so vigorous she thought it might unhinge. As a stray grain of rice fell to his lower lip, she practically sat on her hand to keep from brushing it away. Watched in fascination as that grain tumbled down below his waist, to parts unknown.
“A dream,” she said hoarsely. She would, dammit, she could break through this ridiculous haze with pub industry chatter, with shop talk. “You’re selling a dream, albeit a pretty tantalizing one. So we’re all supposed to take a ride in this way-way-back machine, head to a simpler time, in some fantasy, virginal motherland.”
“There are some things that should always be simple; some things that are elemental,” he said. “Look, I’m not trying to be Malcolm or Martin. It’s not up to me to lead. Our people were led onto slave ships and we followed, got Pied-Pipered right into bondage. So yeah, I’ve got a few things to say about agency and self-determination, about never being led that far astray again. Folks will or they won’t move to action on their own.”
“Sounds like a revolution,” she said.
“Won’t be televised,” he said, smiling.
“Trust me,” she said with spirit, surprising herself by her passion. “It’ll be live at eleven. I can sell revolution. You say you want to reach people—well, that takes marketing, takes a team. Your message won’t get out there as some dingy paperback on a collapsible table on the corner of 125th and nowhere.”
He laughed softly at that.
Just then they heard the adhan of the corner mosque, the muezzin calling the faithful to worship, hailing true believers.
“I believe you,” he said.
Twisted
The birthday party had been ablaze with candles. Not the anorexic, cake-topper variety—these were waxy and robust, thick with fragrance. Every surface was laden with their musk, mingling with aromas of honeydew, sugarcane, and sweets. Despite their cheerful flickers from every nook, the room somehow seemed shadowy to Jennifer. She twisted her hand in Kwame’s, squeezed tighter.
It was their seventh date. If one could call a night honoring Yoruba deities at an Orisha ceremony in the bowels of Kwame’s five-story apartment building a date. Jennifer had come to think of their outings together as cultural safaris as they hiked and trekked to all things African and Afrocentric in NYC. In the month since they’d first met, Kwame had taken her on a whirlwind tour of the locales featured in Unearthing Your Inner Ancestor. There had been a field trip to the Weeksville Heritage Center, a historical site marking the homestead of a pre—Civil War community of Black freedmen. They’d spent the day wandering among the whitewashed clapboards of people who had built a sanctuary out of nothing. Out of each other.
She would someday recall that visit, wondering how they conjured up the strength to rebuild it all, as she broke away from him, sought her own manumission.
But for now, there were other excursions: the African Burial Ground National Monument—largest colonial-era cemetery for people of African descent, a site in Foley Square she had flown by dozens of times—running errands, on her way to City Hall—yet had never truly taken notice of. She quietly admitted as much to Kwame as she read the inscriptions etched into the memorial wall, feeling Adinkra lettering ripple under her fingertips like runes.
“Sometimes it takes a bit of digging to unearth the hidden ancestors right in front of you,” he said.
She turned, ready to tease him about “sappy book title wordplay that was only panty-dropping to his little groupies,” but then she caught the edge of a look, one that made her wonder. Did he, does he feel it too?
He was all business after that, ever the gentleman, ever the dutiful tour guide. So she had shrugged it off, unsure what exactly she wanted or expected of him.
“What next?” she asked. “Where to?”
Next was holding hands in a candlelit room. He, grasping her hand to guide her through the throng. Their bodies jostled by dozens of whirling dervishes, dancing and chanting. A long-limbed woman swung past, moving in graceful parabolas that skimmed the press of bare feet and bare chests around the trono altar. Jennifer recognized her as Hanifah, whom Kwame had introduced earlier as his “spiritual gdmother.” She had a head full of flowing two-strand twists that cascaded along her spine, glass beads and cowries caught in their wake like dazzling flotsam.
“How is this a birthday party again?” Jennifer whispered to Kwame during a break in the dancing.
“It’s for Ade,” he said, raising the arrow of their clasped hands to point at a man standing at the head of the trono altar. “It’s the anniversary of his initiation as a priest. His religious birthday.”
“Ah,” Jennifer said, wishing the birthday boy would blow out some candles. The basement rec room was sweltering, separated from the furnace inferno by a flimsy drywall partition. Sweat pooled in her collarbones. Her light muslin gown weighed heavily on her fevered skin, yet she was loath to roll up her sleeves and risk violating some unspoken rule for modesty of dress.
The sacred beats of the bata drums, and the warm rumble of Kwame’s murmured explanations on their meanings, were a welcome distraction. The three drummers sat serenely, colorful cloths across their laps swaddling iya, the mother drum; itotele, the middle drum; and the little brother drum, okonkolo, he told her.
“The drums are consecrated, created to talk to the gods,” said Kwame. “Their three voices combined sound like Yoruba, mimicking its tones and inflections.”
He spoke softly into the coil of her ear, his fingertips tapping her hip in time with the drums.
“They are cajoling.” Tap, tap. “Pleading.” Tap-tap, tap-tap. “Begging Yemaya to please, please leave her heavenly home in orun, come join us here on aiye.”
There was a frenzy then. A quickened tempo. Ade, the priest, strutted forward, head jutting like a preening cock’s, downing sweaty swigs from a bottle of gin before spraying the mouthful over the drummers. Drunk with heat, Jennifer swayed away unsteadily, felt stray droplets rain down on her, stumbled as the group pushed in to receive their libations, their blessings. She scrambled backward, retreated farther, stopping short to look down in horror, gasping at the sight of her left foot planted squarely, blasphemously, on the sacred mat in front of the altar—off-limits to the uninitiated and initiated alike. She jerked away, eyes darting up to search for witnesses, for accusers, but instead found Kwame, his large frame moving toward her, scything through bodies with grim determination. The pam-pam-tak-tat-tak of drumbeats punched through her thoughts, tam-tamming a secret alarm, a warning to flee now, sister, flee. She was so hot, so frantic in her need for a door, an open window, for air, a place to breathe. And still the drums pounded harder and faster, her heart thumping in sync, a crazed counterrhythm, a primal call-and-response, skipping altogether as she was wrenched from behind, tumbling backward into the dark, scream muffled by a surge of voices all around her, devotees singing out:
Iyá eyá ayaba okun omá iré gbogbo awani Iyá
She smelled frankincense and saltwater, felt a warm hand holding a cool glass of water to her lips. Hanifah. “Drink, little sister. You looked like you were about to pass out.”
Seated on a low wooden bench, Hanifah plied Jennifer with water, fed her sugarcane from the altar, kissed her forehead, her cheeks, smiling gently, somehow satisfied by what she felt there. Jennifer closed her eyes, slow inhales and ponderous exhales rocking the cradle of her rib cage. Soothed, she drifted off a few moments, maybe more, before she felt Hanifah’s warm hands on her own, pulling her up again, pulling her deep into the dance. She rose up, hips moving hesitantly at first, footsteps plodding, overly cautious, but soon a slow urgency overcame her, seeped into her bloodstream with the swell of the music, and then she was dancing, with abandon, with uncut joy. Hanifah embraced her again, spinning their bodies round and round, before presenting Jennifer back to Kwam
e with a flourish. His arms wide open, waiting to enfold her.
“Yemaya has blessed you,” he said. “It’s a great honor … not every guest gets invited to dance with the Orishas.”
“Ase o,” she replied, rolling her hips backward, beginning the dance anew.
What seemed like hours later, an overhead light flickered on, and Jennifer blinked below its sudden glare like some night thing accustomed to darkness always.
“What next?” she asked Kwame, climbing up from the well of her daze, body supple and radiant with sweat.
“Nourishment,” he said, a stalk of sugarcane grasped in his fist like a spear. “We’ll make a feast of offerings for the gods.”
He peeled back the rough skin of the cane with sharp teeth, sucked deeply before pressing it into her hands.
“Eat,” he murmured.
She licked its juices appreciatively, the sweet giggle of sap meeting the salty bite of her sweat. She licked again, then held up the stalk and its sticky meat to him.
“Delicious,” he said. His head bowed now, somehow solemn, as he leaned in close to take everything she was offering.
Pressed
When Jennifer was a child, her mother had pressed her kinks with a hot comb each Saturday night. By Sunday morning she was pew-bound, hair as prim and starch-straight as the pleats of her somber navy skirt. When she was bright-eyed and Sunday-schooled, Jennifer saw her obedience as Christlike, saw the lick of holy fire in the blue flames of the oven range. Grew to welcome—hands meekly folded in her lap—the molten hot comb as God’s shining instrument. It was about enduring, a test and a testimony. She never squirmed, though her mind filled with premonitions of hellfire during the brimstone sizzling of her strands. Still, there were signs and wonders to be had in the steadiness of her mother’s hand. She was never burned. Bore no errant mark of Cain. Her mother was faithful to this evening ritual, these kitchen vespers. God forbid the Rapture came and her child was found nappy and wanting.
As a young woman, Jennifer, much like her hair, grew unruly— roamed free and unfettered, nights wild and her own. This was how she felt now on the Saturdays that Kwame came to her demanding many things—both monstrous and delightful. She learned to relish Sunday morning’s bruises and welts as signs and wonders of their sweet tussle. Knowing she had likewise marked him with tooth and nail and the slick of her tongue. Only with him did she discover her appetites. How she liked the rough mouthful that was the word fuck on her tongue almost as much as the thing itself. Liked to trace her toe along the seam of him just to watch him grow shivery—becoming a herky-jerky creature, a thing unspooled.
After he had gone, back to parts unknown, she would lie there short of breath, yet finally, fully alive, her face pressed to the sheets to catch remnants of his smell—a smoky, spicy thing that brought to mind foreign altars where the righteous sacrificed loved ones to their insatiable gods.
Blowout
He kept her in bed for days at a time. Sweating out her blowout. Edges and toes curling again and again. In moments between, she would lie along the stalk of him. Tracing twin scars along the hollow of his side. Battle wounds, he’d answered to questions unspoken. Ear to chest. Hairs tickling her cheek. His voice a grumbling lullaby telling tales of ancestors: of kings, of queens from Africa past. He claimed them by birthright. No genealogy sites traced his DNA across the diaspora. Yet by his estimate, he was descended from Sheba and Sundiata, from Makeda and Menelik. He joked about his credentials—a Morehouse, Princeton, and Harvard alum. Bread-and-buttered on the stoops of Bed-Stuy, where your street cred—the only pedigree that truly mattered—was measured by number of shots survived, by who and how many feared you.
He was cocky. Completely at ease in his skin and his identity. It was seductive as fuck. Head on his chest, Jennifer sometimes bit down on his nipple till she drew blood: craving him, suckling in that knowing ease for herself. She, the child of a timid mother, ever grateful for kitchen scraps. One of two Black girls in Scarsdale elementary class portraits, backdropped against classmates with skin the color of flash paper, burning memories of her away. Her mother had stayed mute on the subject of their culture. What did she know of her heritage? Her brilliant ancestry. No matter how many boardroom doors Jennifer walked through, sometimes she felt her steps falter—in the Ghanaian beauty shop, at Awing tribal meetings, she felt like a counterfeit African, felt the unworthiness of the maid’s child tiptoeing through the servants’ entrance, lightly, quietly, like she was walking on cowrie shells.
“You’re already African. Period. Point blank. That man is brainwashing you.” Ego—natural-hair guru, early convert to the cult of the “Big Chop”—was at her condo greasing her scalp, offering up unsolicited wisdom on maintaining a 4C TWA and your sense of self.
“Ow,” Jennifer cried, kneeling bedside, head bent in unwilling supplication to her friend’s ministrations. “Could you scratch any harder? I think you got some brain with that.”
“Stop with the whining,” Ego said, scraping toothy comb to scalp. “It’s not my fault you’re so tender-headed. Blame your addiction to creamy crack. You know all those chemicals leach right into your skin, right?”
“Okay, enough,” Jennifer said, breaking free from the tangle of Ego’s knees. “I’ve got like zero time for your anti-perm PSA today. I’ve still got to beat my face, do my nails, iron my dress—”
“Okay, okay. Calm down, Ms. Lady,” said Ego. “All you need is a light touch-up. I’ve got some press-ons in my bag if you’re pressed for time. And I’ll iron the dress. Is it that little kente confection over there?” Her comb pointed accusingly at the offending garment, hanging boldly on the front of Jennifer’s closet door. “Who bought that? Your mother. No. Of course not. It’s from him. Girl, if you read that So Afrique blog piece I sent you, you’d know better than to put up with this five-percenter bullshit. My girl Lapis knows what’s up.”
“I read one,” Jennifer said, chuckling softly. The article was a pan-African ranking of men from all corners of the continent—from Naija and Camer to Zim—rated on everything from ding-a-ling size to level of “wokeness” on gender roles. “She’s funny.”
“She’s the truth. You need to learn something. That man’s got you twisted. Doubting everything about yourself. Mr. Back-to-Africa, High Priest of Hotep is what he really is.”
“I told you not to call him that.” Jennifer met Kwame’s watchful eyes in the framed photo at her bedside. Ego had barreled over from her next-door apartment so quickly she hadn’t had a chance to tuck it away in the top drawer, a knee-jerk reaction, she realized, so accustomed she was to hiding evidence of their relationship from her colleagues at work.
“Pass me that iron,” Ego said, sticking out a hand. “And I’ll call him what I like. He gave you a name.”
“It’s just a pet name,” Jennifer countered, grabbing her makeup and a mirror.
“Whatever you say, Jumanji,” Ego replied, then said “ow,” singeing a finger as she tested the heat of the iron.
“See, that’s what you get,” said Jennifer. “God don’t like ugly. And the name is Jamila. It’s Arabic for ‘beautiful.’”
When they met, Kwame had been surprised by her lack of a traditional “country” name. But he had yet to meet her mother. Innocent Tchandep had come to America thirty years prior as a domestic live-in for the Cameroonian ambassador. She had been grateful, very grateful, to the ambassador, a man from her village. After all, cleaning a mansion was better than cleaning a hut. Ultimately, her expressions of gratitude had resulted in a pregnancy and an invective-filled discharge by the ambassador’s wife. But her mother had still been grateful to be in the land of opportunity and began her lifelong quest to guarantee said opportunities for her daughter by giving her newborn the only gift she could afford at the time, a marker for access and entitlement: the blondest of all-American names—Jennifer.
“Anyway. You’re one to talk. I thought you were into the whole African renaming thing,” said Jennifer, darkening
her smoky eye.
Ego snorted, a weak rebuttal given her proclivity for boyfriends named after dead African presidents. In the past year alone, there had been a Nkrumah, a Lumumba, and a Kenyatta né Michael, Douglas, and Romeo, respectively.
Jennifer scratched the base of her hair where tiny fire ants still danced a devilish jig. She was going to be late.
“Stop that. You’ll get grease all over that dress of yours.” Ego rummaged through her worn ukara cloth bag of potions and tricks, triumphantly producing a jar of the tea tree oil concoction she swore by. “Move your hand and let me rub this in,” she offered softly, her hands moving through Jennifer’s hair. “It’s not about the name. It’s about you feeling like who you are isn’t good enough, not African enough. You don’t have to jump through all these cultural hoops and hair loop-de-loops for some man you just met. I love you just as you are.”
Jennifer felt something inside her chest shift. She laughed to shake it loose.
“Ego. You change your hair like every other day! Folks can barely recognize you half the time. And Kwame’s not telling me to do a damn thing. My hair, my choices.”
Feeling Ego’s hands stilled in her hair, she turned her neck to look her friend in the eye, hoping to convince her, to convince them both.
“If you say so,” said Ego, her own eyes doubtful, even as she answered her friend’s silent plea to change the subject. “What’s all this dress-up for again and how come I wasn’t invited?”
“It’s an NAACP fund-raiser and I slid an invite under your door a week ago.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. ‘Oh.’ Anyways, I’ll see you this Friday night for the Kwanzaa celebration,” she said. “And don’t even think about canceling on us again. He’s really looking forward to meeting you.”
“I’ll try … you know I’ve been swamped with work this month.”
“Work.” Jennifer suppressed a snort of her own.
