by Kola Boof
•
At the bottom of the ship’s bowel, Shange thought that he had found the floor of the Sea at last, that he had swam into a cave and out of the real world, for his wasting body had been chained in the pitch black of the cavity for so long that a feverish delirium clouded his brain.
A young girl, her womb pregnant from rape, cried into his armpit while a captured soldier, broken by beatings and starvation, moaned into his face as though dying a slow death. Shange did not resist the sounds of doom or fear, in fact, he listened and studied the voices as though waiting to hear a certain one, and after a while, he thought that they must all be coming from his own soul. From time to time he heard his own voice floating outside his chest, the power of it yelling into a vast damnation, “My brothers and sisters--fear not--I am coming to get you!”
In each other’s urine and feces, the negro people sailed month after month with their feet and hands bound to one another.
Shange cried out, as though he had gone mad, “My brothers and sisters--this makes us brothers and sisters forever. This is stronger than even blood. This...we cannot undo.”
And even in his futile madness, he remembered that his father’s skull once hung around his neck and that he had been given a sword, the weight and power of it hanging from his arm as though an extension. The vibration in it being much like the one in his penis. 0 devil, he thought.
Kofi Hoodi, his grandfather, appeared as a great Buddha-like demon in his mind, black as tar melting in the sun and his eyes huge and greedy, his mouth strangely effeminate and his hands stubby and cruel.
Ajowans of the future would call it “The Great Unmasking”--that week in 1631 when “White Ajowan” aggression burst upon the nation like a new dance; that week when cannonballs sounded; that week when the whites became tired of sharing brotherhood with poor ass, inferior black tar negro races and formally announced their “superiority” over Africans--and no one had been able to dispute them, because Kofi Hoodi had sold more than fifty thousand of his own brothers into slavery by then, had looked the other way while the daughters of Ajowa continued to be raped by white men and had even taken the white man’s mother as his Queen, placing her white image over that of his own black mother’s. Imagine the lack of respect the Europeans had, and rightfully so, when they saw that Kofi Hoodi was willing to destroy and part with his own mother’s image while upholding the humanity of their white mother without a backwards glance.
This behavior by Hoodi and some other African males stood as proof to the European eye that the blacks were inferior and made it impossible for the whites to see the blacks as equal human beings in the eyes of both nature and common sense for self preservation. As for the Ajowans themselves, they realized, too late, as blacks are always late, that Kofi Hoodi wasn’t really the devil, but was just plain stupid, selfish, backstabbing and greedy.
Foolishly believing that he could sell his own people for guns and horses, then conquer the God tribe by force of war, and then after all that was over, coexist with a foreign white tribe that was far more powerful and heartless than any he’d seen in Africa--and still remain the ruler of Ajowa. In fact, he even expected the Ajowans to continue to exist as themselves. To be born intact, healthy and whole, with the same rich perfect beauty, the same religious and social folkways, the same claim to humanity that marked all other humans.
But none of that was possible.
It was Kofi Hoodi’s nation that fell. It was him that the white men castrated in public (literally removing his balls with gales of laughter), as they put him in chains and marched his indignant, swarthy black ass onto a waiting slave ship. It was him that they replaced with their own African King--his own son by one of his concubines, the boy called Itawambo--a boy who made history by wearing clothing and worshipping their phony asexual version of Jesus Christ and becoming a masterful student of all things European. They did not call Itawambo “nigger”. They called him “good nigger”.
And after Hoodi was made a slave, it was Itawambo who sent the Ajowan army into battle alongside the European troops in a quest to conquer the God tribe. It was Itawambo who signed a declaration with the British--establishing Ajowa as a “colony” to be called West Cassava-land.
And it was Itawambo, barely ruling the Ajowans for two whole years when his throat was slit and ripped out...his penis removed, cooked and eaten by the throat eaters as the mighty drums of King Katanga erupted out of jungles and declared that the Gods would not be defeated and that they would not accept slavery, and when speaking English, had taken up the mantra, “I shall languish in my grave, before the white man make me his slave!”
“So be it!” responded Gulliver Swiss. His growing legion of white brethren and their white mothers, white wives and white daughters, too. Knotting their purse strings. “So be it!”
••
Shange closed his eyes, the moon being reborn in his mind as a thing of beauty, its brightness filling him with hope as he prayed that the will of his heart reach his grandfather Katanga--and that his passion inspire the warriors of West Africa to overcome...to overcome.
From the bottom of the ship, the songs of the chained Sula women washed over the men like fire.
Lamuolo
(flesh)
Atira ka lamuolo togo
(my children were made of it)
onuk osibono tala-tala
(in that way--I live forever)
woori nugo katalajook paris
(it wasn’t the rape that killed me)
tala agwarikiu joma phela moong rastim
(it was the never knowing...whatever happened to my children)
katu
(to myself)
ka lamuolo
(to my flesh)
Silence fell across the palace of King Katanga...and into his hand...he took the hand of Queen Ambi.
A dollop of honey was placed in the mouth of each--just as in marriage, so be it in war--the sweetness of honey followed by the burning rage of red pepper placed on their tongues. Then the vow of everlasting love, “I carry you into the world, I carry you out.”
Katanga speaking as Man, “In love and in war, through the bitter and the sweet...we make this vow.”
“I will fight for you”, sang Queen Ambi.
“That we shall not perish”, said the King. “Nor the riches of my hand or the children of my staff or the beauty of my Queen, my beloved, cherished Africa--fear not! Fear not.”
“I will give birth to you again, my husband. My master.”
But they were not afraid. In fact, Katanga was winning the war. More than seven thousand Ashanti, five thousand Mandingo and five thousand refugee Wolof warriors had joined with the God army in fighting against the encroachment of the European, Ajowan, Berban and Phassi forces.
Queen Ambi stayed behind in the city of Hembadoon, because Katanga demanded that she be far way from the danger of actual combat, but he himself took up arms and rode into the war’s furnace as a God and a warrior. Leading his troops on the backs of ostriches, their spears and swords arisen and their Portuguese guns filling the jungles with smoke and bullets.
“I will protect the Queen with my life”, Dinari Zezeru said as as he watched his own good loving man, Sumboo the Great, dressed up in full warlord regalia, his face hidden by the jibma Kudo (Mask of No Mercy). His voice vowing to Dinari, “My soul is yours. To return to you.”
“And my soul is yours”, Dinari said to his loved one in tender response. “To return to you.”
“Ouim-Bah!” (victory), shouted Sumboo the Great.
“Nunnu!” (faith), Dinari had answered just as passionately.
And in time, word came back to Queen Ambi, “Your husband is victorious! He is pushing the Living Dead back to the Sea!”
And she clasped her hands together as tears of gratefulness rolled down her tar black beautiful cheeks. Whispering, “That’s my man.”
But then one day...the evil march of the white invaders reached Hembadoon itself.
Fl
esh:
•
Inutbo chakanu doobi
(the living dead loved my babies)
doobi siran voobista
(I saw the white woman staring at them)
Yoomi da Saga
(in church/ritual house)
kinu sava lelotko nani PuTaissi
(her man was the holder of the Religion Book)
knon fangi nettimo nani uru noot da-ke OH sidin
(like a strand of pearls, she wanted to lick their flesh)
hodikki fetuangi saba dekinu wodo ganinoot pani otela
sarra fiol ned siran fofoo na du tala
(I protected my babies on the ship, but when we came
to the strange paradise, the white lady took them.
She called me ‘sister’--and I never saw them again)
fowditondo aruja, alus seeki ma
(I was forced to go on living...even though I was dead)
Annie Talmadge--Kingston, Jamaica (1697)
Hembadoon. 1632.
•
Dinari Zezeru awoke that morning as though still in a dream. The white army surrounded the city of Hembadoon, their native drummers calling out by drumbeat for the Queen to appear and surrender.
There was no way not to know, at this point in Africa, that the whites intended to capture and kill Queen Ambi. And within minutes, the whites had the whole city of Hembadoon bursting with flames!
Cannon fire collapsed the palace and the stone buildings that Dinari had designed for the central complex came tumbling down in a cloud of dust. It ripped something in Dinari and made him do something he almost never did--cry.
Furious and determined to protect his people, his home and everything that he had been born into or ever loved, Dinari grabbed a handful of poisonous mouth darts, his feet jetting like a runner’s, and then all of a sudden...he came to a dangerous halt...because he saw...a giant black stain buzzing in the air. The Swarm! Of course, Dinari was one of the ones who witnessed it and would commit the story to folklore.
Queen Ambi’s killer bees rose up like some murderous black choir, and to everyone’s shock, Ambi herself came charging out of the rubble--her thick, curvaceous black body fastened atop a speeding white horse as the African bees covered her from head to toe. She screamed a song of resistance, her ululation ringing throughout the city as the charcoal pod-headed God people grabbed whatever weapons they could find and took courage from their Queen’s valiant cry.
By the time Ambi was done screaming, the white invaders lay dead by the thousands. The killer bee stings puffing their bodies into swollen pink pod puddles. Ambi’s leopards, not the two she kept on leashes, but the hundreds she bred as pets in an underground lair--they had rushed into the graveyard of white meat and ripped the flesh from the bones, their jaws tearing the men limb from limb, the Caucasoid blood pouring like a sweet gravy against both the black earth and the paws and whiskers of the Queen’s most loyal.
She had not perished. Queen Ambi stood before the people of Hembadoon that evening, her radiant mud-complexioned negroid ultra-beauty reflecting the humanity of the Gods as she proclaimed in the words of her brave husband, “We are not animals! We are not slaves! We are not inferior!”
Dinari joined the masses as they cheered, calling her name vigorously. “Ambi!...Ambi!...Ambi!..Ambi!”
And it became a lingering magic, electrical...as King Katanga arrived at midnight with his embattled, downtrodden army and grabbed Ambi by her waist and pulled her atop his horse and rode off into the night with her--the waving sword of Katanga admonishing the people of Hembadoon to evacuate the city and go east.
Dinari held his breath in rebellion, his teary eyes seeing...goodbye.
Flesh:
When my older brother tried to speak to me
in our own language--the white man
cut out his tongue and sold him off
to a Dutch family in Vermont.
He said: “niggers” have no language but
their master’s.
Second Boy Lewis--in what is now New York City (1687)
••
Carolina Colony 1635
Mr. Bob Sullivan’s Plantation
•
Roo Ife Ife opened her eyes...to see that high above her was the most beautiful, perilous white moon. Carefully, she bared her breasts to it and began an illegal act--the speaking of an African language. She whispered to the moon softly, “Sonn ma Ser” (dear ancestors).
Standing look out as she prayed was the person she had least expected to meet on arrival at the plantation in South Carolina--Mother Iyanla. The whites had given Mother Iyanla a new name, “Ain’t Sarah”, and she was the plantation’s oldest Mammy and resident moan singer. Of course, Roo Ife Ife had been overjoyed to see someone she knew and loved when she’d first been brought to the Bob Sullivan plantation and reunited with Mother Iyanla, but then again, it was a shock--that the mother of a King had not escaped the wall of Kofi Hoodi (the doorway to hell through which thousands passed), the plank of the slave ship, the auction block. And to see what Mother Iyanla now looked like all these years later--it was the final thing that made Roo Ife Ife stop believing in the Creator.
Roo Ife Ife herself had been sold to the Bob Sullivan plantation, because she had grabbed a garden utensil and attempted to stab her master on the first plantation she’d been owned by, and sadly, that disgruntled slave master had taken a fire poker and disfigured the girl’s face. Her facial beauty was completely gone now and her spirit broken on arrival, but through prayer and song, Ain’t Sarah (Mother Iyanla) was trying to rebuild her.
In the dark of night, the two women attempted to fill themselves with spiritual fortitude, and one of the only things that gave them some glimmer of hope was to speak their own language. They were lucky (blessed) to be paired up, because English was a hindrance that the slaves mostly grunted, the words still not mastered as they used it mainly to perform chores and to pitifully address their enslavers, and as it made the whites in America feel more comfortable, the slave tribes were broken up and integrated into one another so that a Wolof could not understand his Mandinka breeding partner and so that an Ashanti could not hold a conversation with a Denkinyira. And this helped, too, when it came to rape.
A Zulu slave was not likely to give his life defending the honor of a woman from a foreign tribe such as the Fulani. A God slave was not likely to care if a woman from their arch enemies, the Phassi and the Ajowans, was being assaulted. And always...always...the slave men blamed the slave women
their own rape. Even in those early days when the majority of the negro women came to the new world vaginally infibulated, their vagina’s circumcised and their clitoris removed, they were accused of wanting it.
But still, the tribes were beginning to see themselves as one united sameness...black...a color. The one true thing that held them in bondage. For as they lost their names and languages, they began to gain sight of the fact that their negroid features and dark black skin and wooly nappish hair bore no resemblance to the people dehumanizing them. They were hated...because they were black, and anyone who had a single drop of black...was declared a nigger--there was no Berber or mixed race tribe that arose from it.
These were the days of slavery when Africans mostly hummed to one another as they slept ten to a cabin on cold dirt floors at night or hummed to one another in the fields as they worked the cotton and tobacco plantations, their hymns and songs uniting them in a secret perseverance--and a deep realization, too, that they had become something more than human--the eye watching the devil, the infant observing the parent, the something less human that transformed them into ‘the living dead’.
For whenever a new child was born, the whites forced the Africans to teach the baby, starting at birth: “...you are a nigger. That is who you are. That is what you are, that is what I am. God created you to be a slave.”
No tribal affiliation was allowed, no ritual scars, no African nickname, no words of love from the parent’s own language
and no drums were allowed. Africans were not allowed to attend church in what was not yet America or to have any visits from missionaries. They were not allowed to learn how to read, because as the white overseer explained to them, sometimes compassionately, “If your children don’t learn to understand that they’re niggers--they won’t live very long.”
And this was the place...that was not yet called America.
This was the place where Roo Ife Ife had given birth to two white men’s children, both from rape. Strange, beautiful light as yams children, neither of which Roo Ife Ife was able to bring herself to hold, name or pray for. Like most African women, she hated the sight of them. The fucking shock of it! Seeing them come out white like her slave master, their screaming heads reminding the mothers of the brutal rapes that created them. Above all humiliations, these babies were the African woman’s proof that she no longer owned her own body, was no longer free, was no longer African and no longer whole. Roo Ife Ife, who wanted to curse every time the whites called her by her new name--”Hattie Mae”--would turn her head, wince and vomit as they were born.
But it was Ain’t Sarah who midwifed the second baby, the high yellow girl child with the West African bell nose and the thick lips. Ain’t Sarah took her and washed her off and called her, “Red Annie”.
Red Annie with the cute little pink feet, the tanned fist. Her African mother’s tragic stare. Pure, nappy lustrous orange hair!
It dawned on Ain’t Sarah that not only had they, the Africans, been herded up and walked through the door of Kofi Hoodi, but so had this new race of children that was springing up. They represented the burning sun that she remembered seeing when she herself had been pulled through the wall in chains. The wall with the crucifix-shaped entrance. The door built by Christians, because no matter a man’s claims on righteousness, flesh and the devil are one.
