by Kola Boof
“All women are beautiful, Shane, it just depends on how you look at them, and in my case, I try to keep clean hands, because if there’s one thing my mother taught me...people pay for their dirt.”
Shane casually mentioned, “You know, we might be able to get this out of our systems and go on with our lives together, as professionals, if we just fucked it out.”
RooAmber shook her head, unable to look at him now.
“I don’t cheat on my husband and I don’t stab other women in the back by sleeping with their men. And unless you want a sexual harrassment lawsuit, I suggest you not talk about us being romantic or sexual anymore. It’s never going to happen, Shane. Ever.”
Impulsively, without thinking, Shane reached out, as though guided from some ancient moment, and tried to kiss her--but RooAmber shook her whole body furiously and slapped the shit out of him, “Don’t you dare kiss me!”
She suddenly popped up out of her seat. She began pulling on her coat and told him, “Shane...I can’t accept your job offer. And not only that, but I can’t see you at work anymore. From now on, I’d prefer it if we never saw each other again, ever. It’s the only way to get around this.”
Her handprint stung in his cheek. “So it’s that deep ha?”
“Yes”, RooAmber admitted, breathlessly. She was so wet and so desperate for God. “It’s that deep. And I belong to my husband...I can’t go there.”
“I respect you”, he called as she quickly walked away.
••
That night, Shane drove away from Fort Washington and ended up on the shores of Sandy Point. See without sight. It ran in his mind like liquor. This passionate, incessant insanity about RooAmber. How did it begin? For, truly, it was so intense that it couldn’t have been just yesterday.
He disrobed until he was completely naked and rushed leaping into the night tide.
As though born from it, he ducked in and out of the surf as skillfully as any aquatic being. His lithe muscular body finding warmth in the silky, wet depths. His mind escaping him.
See without sight. I am waiting for you. My heart is not really...my own. Because it seems that my heart began.
Long before me.
Find my heart. Open it with your hands.
RooAmber took off her robe and slipped into a hot, sudsy tub of bathwater. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and rested her head on the basin, her chest rising and falling in an exasperated exhale.
Crackling sticks under foot, she tiptoed barefoot along the cool earth, toward the pretty moaning, and went down a path that led to a shiny, shiny...shiny black lake.
Her mouth parted when she saw them.
The shadow space of a man and a woman so black you could see the whole world being made.
Everything about it...was wet and beautiful.
And she could tell by the way he navigated her bones and curves, and by the way she moaned so soulfully, that they really loved each other. And that, somehow, their love was not a living love...but a love from where she was now, in the land after life...the other side. An eternal love.
RooAmber opened her eyes! She jumped, sitting up in the tub!
She had heard the voice of a strange man. His voice saying, “When we are alone...we will call her ‘Remember’. That is her name. ‘Remember’.”
Shane Roberts broke the surface of the night sea and gasped for air! He threw back his head and wiped the water from his eyes. He was suddenly freezing and couldn’t believe that he’d jumped into Sandy Point at night. Already he was flushed with fever.
Bitterly, he said to the black night ocean, “As many times as you’ve given birth to me. Got-baggah!”
••
“This is Dr. Yoo.”
“Dr. Yoo, it’s RooAmber Childress. I’m seeing children again. I was taking a bath...and I...”
“I’m not in right now, but if you leave your name and number...and a brief message...I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
RooAmber hung up. She tried to capture and hold the images of the hallucination this time, because it was so...otherwordly...beautiful.
She had been a child again. And she was being held up by a boy, a strong boy not much older than she, their very black bodies floating like angels at the surface of the sea, and their eyes staring down at the back of a turtle. Seeing without sight.
The lush coast of Ajowaland and its blue as a dream beach looked like some magnificent paradise then. Positively virginal.
RooAmber Childress wrote in her journal that night, “Find my prayer...and open it...with your hands.” And after she wrote that, she stared it for a long, lonely time, because it hadn’t been what she had meant to write.
“Something wrong, babe?” Scotch asked her.
14
•
TWO YEARS LATER
Sag Harbor, New York
Although Shane’s mother had married a rich black upper class gentleman with the sir name “Roberts”--she herself was from an even wealthier, more powerful upper class family of negroid nosed mulatto blue veins--the infamous “Boules” of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
To everyone’s despair, her grandfather, Waldo Boule, lay dying of testicular cancer in his summer retreat mansion in East Hampton, and although Shane usually enjoyed his summer visits to Sag Harbor, his recent fights with Rosaria concerning their new baby’s hair and her inability to see him as he saw himself--black--only intensified the growing rift between them.
“This house is more than a hundred years old”, said Shane’s mother, Namibia Roberts, as he carried his family’s luggage into the guest bedroom on the third floor. She was really speaking to Rosario and Sergio, but as usual, avoided eye contact with them, because like so many high-bred manorborn New England women, she only looked at a person after she had spoken to them. “You’ll hear creaks in here at night, because of the age and because it’s so close to the ocean, but don’t be alarmed.”
I used to love the ocean when I was a little girl, Rosaria thought as she looked out one of the widows. Now I hate it. In both Washington, D.C. and in Sag Harbor, it seemed to her that Shane only wanted to be in or near it. She turned around and said in a sweet voice, as she cradled the baby in her arms, “This room is absolutely beautiful, Mrs. Roberts. The view is stunning.”
Namibia Roberts looked at her daughter-in-law with a bright smile and an elegantly restrained nod. The single strand of white pearls, the clasped hands and the coiffed hair made her seem like a tour guide.
“I used to run through this house as a small child”, said Namibia. “But now that Master Boule is dying of cancer, we children...”, and she looked at young Sergio with a diplomatic smile, “will need to excersize restraint.”
Rosaria sat down at the bedroom’s letter desk holding her new baby, twenty month old Esmerelda, while Sergio stood behind her, his cold brown eyes staring at Namibia’s flesh and wondering how it was that his grandmother could call herself a black woman. She looked almost whiter than his mother and had hazel eyes, but she always referred to herself and the other Boules as being black people. It was one of the reasons he couldn’t stand her.
And as Namibia looked down at young Sergio...she thought about Shane’s other son. The one he didn’t know about--because Namibia paid good money every month to make sure he never found out. The black nappyheaded Denzel Washington-looking boy that had come out of that sinfully dark negro girl, Tangie Brown.
Bastard.
Namibia wasn’t about to let Shane’s beautiful family be broken up by such a pointless revelation. He and Rosaria, as far as Namibia was concerned, were a match made in heaven, and the soft olive and egg nog complexion of Sergio only proved that Shane was fully capable of making beautiful, perfect Boule-like progeny to keep the family fair. The fact that poor, sweet Sergio was suffering an identity crisis and didn’t want to be burdened with a title so heavy as black was something “minor” and normal in Namibia’s mind. They could deal with that later when he was an adult.
&nbs
p; “Who’s that?”, Rosaria asked as she noticed a rather distinguished looking painting of a woman who looked very much like her Puerto Rican mother, Gerta Maria, hanging over the fireplace.
“That’s my great, great, great grandmother--Letty Boule”, said Namibia. “She is one of those very few members of the Boule family that came directly from slavery. The majority of our family blood comes from free blacks, but right here in Sag Harbor in the late 1700’s, there was a family of Alongquin Indians that made various products out of whale blubber. They owned twelve slaves, pure...Africans. One of them was a woman the Indians called “Black Magic”. She had nine children by her Indian master, and one of those children--Raisin Hair--married a new slave that the Indians had purchased from a shoe store in Manhattan, a mulatto named Charles Uniteus Brister. Charles and Raisin Hair gave birth to Letty Brister in 1827, and of course the north freed their slaves much earlier than the south--so Letty Brister was one of the freed slaves that went with Sojourner Truth down to Washington, D.C. after slavery was abolished up north and helped with the formation of the women’s suffrage clubs down there, mainly on U street which was something special for negro people in those days, and that’s how Letty Brister met a free black man that owned his own hotel on U street, Samuel Boule.”
Shane looked up. “I thought great grandpa Sam was a slave, mother.”
“Samuel’s father Sam, not Sam, and his sister Ruth, had started out as house slaves in Virginia, but their mother was an octoroon, real pretty slave named Mariah, and she had another set of children over in Kentucky by a previous master--Ulysses and Freda, who could pass for white, and those two did pass for white and earned enough money to come back and buy Samuel and Ruth’s freedom. They tried to buy their mother Mariah’s freedom as well, but she wouldn’t leave Hugo Boule’s side. She loved her white master.”
Gently, Rosaria leaned down and kissed her baby daughter’s forehead--trying to get used to its ever darkening tan and trying not to obsess about the raisin-like nap beads that covered the girl’s tiny head. She said to Namibia, “We have African blood in our family, too, but I don’t know the history of any of our negritos. My mother didn’t want us raised with that stigma. She said that in Puerto Rico, the Africans weren’t allowed to sit in the front of the church or sit next to the light skinned and Spanish people on the buses.”
Namibia nodded, because as the wife of a Professor of Sociology, she knew all about Puerto Rican society and their tradition of placing white Spaniards on the first two rows in church, light skinned and mixed people on the third row, brown sugar-skins in the middle and pure Africans at the very back. Of course, a blue-eyed blond hair Jesus Christ hung above them all.
“My mother said that it was hard to get an education or a good job in Puerto Rico if you came from too much African blood. She said that the only reason she ended up a maid was because her skin was so tanned.”
“I guess that’s why she made sure to get pregnant by the married white man she worked for”, Shane said sarcastically.
“Shane Nathaniel Roberts!” Namibia gasped, incredulously. “You apologize to your wife right now!”
Shane looked at Rosaria like she was a piece of shit. He said, “I apologize to my children--and Rosaria knows exactly what I mean by that.”
As Shane turned and stormed out of the bedroom, a sudden chill went through his mother’s bones. It was the exact same chill she had gotten on the day that she’d had an argument with Shane’s father--and he had walked off angrily and vanished to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in California, sending divorce papers a months later.
She told her grandson, “Go after your father, Sergio. Wherever he goes, I want you to follow him, stay with him, hold his hand!”
As Sergio reluctantly ran after his father, Namibia Roberts shook her head and thought silently--”life’s unfairness...just imagine how it would be if the presence of children were enough to deter it.”
Namibia had always known that her son didn’t truly love beautiful creamy white Puerto Rican Rosaria, but had merely been infatuated with the idea of possessing and being wanted by such a creature that the whole world of white men and their slaves had designated as “magnificent”.
The truth, Namibia had always known, was that out of her four children, Shane, although not nearly the darkest one by color, was most definitely the black one, and that this was his way of rebelling against her. By marrying a white woman instead of a nice white-looking black Sag Harbor socialite like her regal blue veined self. But still, Rosaria was a wonderful girl and had the right genes and Chromosomes. The right light that was blessed and recognized by the white supremacist world in which they all had to survive. Love had nothing to do with it. “Come, Rosaria. You and the baby should lay down.”
“Shane’s having an affair you know.”
Namibia paused, speechless.
“Not by flesh”, said Rosaria as she carried Esmerelda to the bed. “But in his mind, there’s this black low class D.C. girl he used to know at the Washingtonian. My mother went against my wishes and hired a detective. He told us that this nappy girl left her job at the paper a long time ago, but for the last two years, Shane’s been having an affair with her--in his mind.”
“Well better the mind than the flesh.”
“You’re right about that”, said Rosaria ominously, “because if your son ever left me for another woman...I think I’d have to kill her.”
••
Ocean windows. Her emerald green eyes sparkling beneath the glass.
RooAmber Childress hadn’t seen Shane Roberts in two years and had no desire to see him, but somehow, fate arranged itself so that she, too, drifted like an autumn leaf down Sag Harbor’s ephemeral Main street, the summer sun blanching her honey-pineapple complexion until it turned a toasty cinnamon color.
She had left her job at the Washingtonian Post more than a year ago and had followed Brynn Duke to his new editor-in-chief position at Atlantic Living magazine. It was Brynn, in fact, who had given RooAmber such a cushy research assignment in Sag Harbor. She was to spend a full week gathering data about the history of the port’s whaling days as well as take some time relaxing on the beautiful beaches of the Hamptons.
Casually, she stopped now in front of the Old Whaler’s Church and Museum on Main street, her eyes in awe of the beauty of the landmark white columned building. She went inside with the other tourists, slowly, listening intently as the tour guide explained that the first floor of the building was still used as a church, the Masonic Temple.
And that’s when Shane Roberts saw her. He stopped dead in his tracks, initially shocked, but then not remembering RooAmber’s skin to be that rich, but then again realizing that it really was RooAmber.
Sergio, who was standing right next to his dad, looked up at his father’s zombie-like stare and then followed it across the wooden relic of a room, his own eyes landing on the beautiful green eyed black lady with the long, wavy light brown hair and the cinnamon skin.
“Dad?”
“Oh...uhm. I want you to meet someone, Sergio.”
RooAmber was listening to the guide and glancing around, when suddenly, she felt, not saw, but felt this incredibly comforting, familiar presence moving towards her, and immediately, her pulse shot up, because intuition said that her husband, Scotch, had surprised her and was in Sag Harbor, following her. All of that happened within the confines of a single second, and when she looked to see the man approaching--it was someone she didn’t immediately recognize at all. Tall, elegant, deeply tanned a dark bronze.
Oh my God, it’s him.
Shane smiled, his handsomeness much darker than she remember, and he teased, “You must be following me now. There’s no way you should be in Sag Harbor of all places. This is my family’s territory.”
RooAmber didn’t know what to say. He looked so good and he had this little latino boy with him--RooAmber wasn’t sure who the child could be.
“RooAmber, this is my son, Sergio.” She tried not to
react with surprise, but there it was out in the open--Shane’s wife wasn’t black. “Sergio, this is a very good friend of mines from high school and life, Miss RooAmber Childress.”
“That’s Mrs.”, RooAmber said to Shane as she shook the boy’s hand. She smiled at Sergio, disappointed that he looked nothing like his gorgeous negro father, and said kindly, “You are a very handsome little somebody.”
Sergio blushed. “Thanks.”
Like magic, the smell of sea anemones suddenly sprang in the air between Shane and RooAmber, their energy forever in hybrid flux whenever sharing one another’s presence.
“Please, RooAmber. You’ve got to let us treat you to lunch.”
“Uhm...I can’t. I’m here on assignment, and I have to be back in my room in thirty minutes to get an important phone call. I walked so I could sight-see and get some sun, but I really need to start walking back.”
“What hotel are you staying in?”
“I’m renting a room at the Bullova Carriage House”, she said. “I really have to go.”
“Well, hey, why don’t we drive you back to the Bullova Carriage House and have lunch in their abbey. They serve incredible seafood sandwiches there. Wouldn’t you like that, Sergio?”
Sergio stared at RooAmber, suspiciously. “How come you’re a reporter expecting an important call and you don’t have a cell phone?”
••
Sergio didn’t like RooAmber. It took him no time to realize that there was something indecent between her and his father. The sweet evil of adultery could be felt like a ray of hot sun, and on the utter strength of feeling, the twelve year old found it necessary to silently pray throughout the entire lunch.
Shane and RooAmber sat across from one another, Sergio positioned next to his dad, the interaction of the adults frightening the young boy in that their speech and body language seemed compatible rather than adaptable, as though they were the same animal, the two halves of one complete thought.
