Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  We were each of us both together. Then we were apart, and sweat sheened our bodies like sweet oil.

  Sometimes Afrekete sang in a small club further uptown on Sugar Hill. Sometimes she clerked in the Gristede’s Market on 97th Street and Amsterdam, and sometimes with no warning at all she appeared at the Pony Stable or Page Three on Saturday night. Once, I came home to Seventh Street late one night to find her sitting on my stoop at 3:00 a.m., with a bottle of beer in her hand and a piece of bright African cloth wrapped around her head, and we sped uptown through the dawn-empty city with a summer thunder squall crackling above us, and the wet city streets singing beneath the wheels of her little Nash Rambler.

  There are certain verities which are always with us, which we come to depend upon. That the sun moves north in summer, that melted ice contracts, that the curved banana is sweeter. Afrekete taught me roots, new definitions of our women’s bodies—definitions for which I had only been in training to learn before.

  By the beginning of summer the walls of Afrekete’s apartment were always warm to the touch from the heat beating down on the roof, and chance breezes through her windows rustled her plants in the window and brushed over our sweat-smooth bodies, at rest after loving.

  We talked sometimes about what it meant to love women, and what a relief it was in the eye of the storm, no matter how often we had to bite our tongues and stay silent. Afrekete had a seven-year-old daughter whom she had left with her mama down in Georgia, and we shared a lot of our dreams.

  “She’s going to be able to love anybody she wants to love,” Afrekete said, fiercely, lighting a Lucky Strike. “Same way she’s going to be able to work any place she damn well pleases. Her mama’s going to see to that.”

  Once we talked about how Black women had been committed without choice to waging our campaigns in the enemies’ strongholds, too much and too often, and how our psychic landscapes had been plundered and wearied by those repeated battles and campaigns.

  “And don’t I have the scars to prove it,” she sighed. “Makes you tough though, babe, if you don’t go under. And that’s what I like about you; you’re like me. We’re both going to make it because we’re both too tough and crazy not to!” And we held each other and laughed and cried about what we had paid for that toughness, and how hard it was to explain to anyone who didn’t already know it that soft and tough had to be one and the same for either to work at all, like our joy and the tears mingling on the one pillow beneath our heads.

  And the sun filtered down upon us through the dusty windows, through the mass of green plants that Afrekete tended religiously.

  I took a ripe avocado and rolled it between my hands until the skin became a green case for the soft mashed fruit inside, hard pit at the core. I rose from a kiss in your mouth to nibble a hole in the fruit skin near the navel stalk, squeezed the pale yellow-green fruit juice in thin ritual lines back and forth over and around your coconut-brown belly.

  The oil and sweat from our bodies kept the fruit liquid, and I massaged it over your thighs and between your breasts until your brownness shone like a light through a veil of the palest green avocado, a mantle of goddess pear that I slowly licked from your skin.

  Then we would have to get up to gather the pits and fruit skins and bag them to put out later for the garbagemen, because if we left them near the bed for any length of time, they would call out the hordes of cockroaches that always waited on the sidelines within the walls of Harlem tenements, particularly in the smaller older ones under the hill of Morningside Heights.

  Afrekete lived not far from Genevieve’s grandmother’s house.

  Sometimes she reminded me of Ella, Gennie’s stepmother, who shuffled about with an apron on and a broom outside the room where Gennie and I lay on the studio couch. She would be singing her nonstop tuneless little song over and over and over:

  Momma kilt me

  Poppa et me

  Po’ lil’ brudder

  suck ma bones.

  And one day Gennie turned her head on my lap to say uneasily, “You know, sometimes I don’t know whether Ella’s crazy, or stupid, or divine.” And now I think the goddess was speaking through Ella also, but Ella was too beaten down and anesthetized by Phillip’s brutality for her to believe in her own mouth, and we, Gennie and I, were too arrogant and childish—not without right or reason, for we were scarcely more than children—to see that our survival might very well lay in listening to the sweeping woman’s tuneless song.

  I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing—not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.

  Afrekete’s house was the tallest one near the corner, before the high rocks of Morningside Park began on the other side of the avenue, and one night on the Midsummer Eve’s Moon we took a blanket up to the roof. She lived on the top floor, and in an unspoken agreement, the roof belonged mostly to those who had to live under its heat. The roof was the chief resort territory of tenement-dwellers, and was known as Tar Beach. We jammed the roof door shut with our sneakers, and spread our blanket in the lee of the chimney, between its warm brick wall and the high parapet of the building’s face. This was before the blaze of sulphur lamps had stripped the streets of New York of trees and shadow, and the incandescence from the lights below faded this far up. From behind the parapet wall we could see the dark shapes of the basalt and granite outcroppings looming over us from the park across the street, outlined, curiously close and suggestive.

  We slipped off the cotton shifts we had worn and moved against each other’s damp breasts in the shadow of the roof’s chimney, making moon, honor, love, while the ghostly vague light drifting upward from the street competed with the silver hard sweetness of the full moon, reflected in the shiny mirrors of our sweat-slippery dark bodies, sacred as the ocean at high tide.

  I remember the moon rising against the tilted planes of her upthrust thighs, and my tongue caught the streak of silver reflected in the curly bush of her dappled-dark maiden hair. I remember the full moon like white pupils in the center of your wide irises.

  The moons went out, and your eyes grew dark as you rolled over me, and I felt the moon’s silver light mix with the wet of your tongue on my eyelids.

  Afrekete Afrekete ride me to the crossroads where we shall sleep, coated in the woman’s power. The sound of our bodies meeting is the prayer of all strangers and sisters, that the discarded evils, abandoned at all crossroads, will not follow us, upon our journeys.

  When we came down from the roof later, it was into the sweltering midnight of a west Harlem summer, with canned music in the streets and the disagreeable whines of overtired and overheated children. Nearby, mothers and fathers sat on stoops or milk crates and striped camp chairs, fanning themselves absently and talking or thinking about work as usual tomorrow and not enough sleep.

  It was not onto the pale sands of Whydah, nor the beaches of Winneba or Annamabu, with cocopalms softly applauding and crickets keeping time with the pounding of a tar-laden, treacherous, beautiful sea. It was onto 113th Street that we descended after our meeting under the Midsummer Eve’s Moon, but the mothers and fathers smiled at us in greeting as we strolled down to Eighth Avenue, hand in hand.

  I had not seen Afrekete for a few weeks in July, so I went uptown to her house one evening since she didn’t have a phone. The door was locked, and there was no one on the roof when I called up the stairwell. Another week later, Midge, the bartender at the Pony Stable, gave me a note from Afrekete, saying that she had gotten a gig in Atlanta for September, and was splitting to visit her mama and daughter for a while.

  We had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching.
Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange.

  I never saw Afrekete again, but her print remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo.

  SAMUEL R. DELANY

  [1942–]

  BORN TO A MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY OF NEW YORKERS, SAMUEL R. Delany was a child prodigy whose literary gifts were fostered at an early age by a solid grounding in the arts. His prolific career began with the publication of his first science fiction novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), when he was only nineteen years old. A string of Nebula Award–winning works followed, among them the queer-oriented novels Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967), as well as his gender-bending short story “Aye, and Gomorrah…” (1967), establishing Delany as the first African American science fiction writer to incorporate sexually trans-gressive themes. In spite of this success, he nearly abandoned literature for music in 1967, going so far as to move into an East Village commune with his band. Here he lived openly as a bisexual, an experience that influenced his appreciation for unconventional sexual identities. Indeed, the issue of marginalization, whether sexually or racially based, is a recurring topic in much of Delany’s work.

  The author returned to writing in 1970, publishing distinctly gay material in Dhalgren (1975), an epic-length novel whose intellectual, esoteric thrust appealed to readers beyond the traditional science fiction audience, making the book one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time. Delany’s homoerotic Nevèryon series followed in 1979 with the publication of Tales of Nevèryon, the first of four books that concluded with The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987) almost a decade later. The winner of the Hugo Award for science fiction as well as the Bill Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Excellence in Gay and Lesbian Literature, Delany has also published several works of nonfiction, including critical studies of literature, a number of hardcore gay pornographic novels, a volume of memoirs entitled Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957–1965 (1988), and the well-received Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999).

  In Delany’s most openly queer work from the pre-Stonewall era, “Aye, and Gomorrah…,” gender-neutered astronauts known as “Spacers” travel through space in search of frelk, a perverted race of outcasts with a fetish for Spacers.

  Aye, and Gomorrah….

  [1967]

  And came down in Paris:

  Where we raced along the Rue de Medicis with Bo and Lou and Muse inside the fence, Kelly and me outside, making faces through the bars, making noise, making the Luxembourg Gardens roar at two in the morning. Then climbed out and down to the square in front of St. Sulpice where Bo tried to knock me into the fountain.

  At which point Kelly noticed what was going on around us, got an ashcan cover, and ran into the pissoir, banging the walls. Five guys scooted out; even a big pissoir only holds four.

  A very blond young man put his hand on my arm and smiled. “Don’t you think, Spacer, that you…people should leave?”

  I looked at his hand on my blue uniform. “Est-ce que tu est un frelk?”

  His eyebrows rose, then he shook his head. “Une frelk,” he corrected. “No, I am not. Sadly for me. You look as though you may once have been a man. But now…” He smiled. “You have nothing for me now. The police.” He nodded across the street where I noticed the gendarmerie for the first time. “They don’t bother us. You are strangers, though…”

  But Muse was already yelling. “Hey come on! Let’s get out of here, huh?” And left. And went up again.

  And came down in Houston:

  “God damn!” Muse said. “Gemini Flight Control—you mean this is where it all started? Let’s get out of here, please! ”

  So took a bus out through Pasadena, then the monoline to Galveston, and were going to take it down the Gulf, but Lou found a couple with a pickup truck— “Glad to give you a ride, Spacers. You people up there on them planets and things, doing all that good work for the government.”

  —who were going south, them and the baby, so we rode in the back for two hundred and fifty miles of sun and wind.

  “You think they’re frelks?” Lou asked, elbowing me. “I bet they’re frelks. They’re just waiting for us to give ’em the come-on.”

  “Cut it out. They’re a nice, stupid pair of country kids.” “That don’t mean they ain’t frelks!” “You don’t trust anybody, do you?”

  “No.”

  And finally a bus again that rattled us through Brownsville and across the border into Matamoros where we staggered down the steps into the dust and the scorched evening with a lot of Mexicans and chickens and Texas Gulf shrimp fishermen—who smelled worst—and we shouted the loudest. Forty-three whores—I counted—had turned out for the shrimp fishermen, and by the time we had broken two of the windows in the bus station, they were all laughing. The shrimp fishermen said they wouldn’t buy us no food but would get us drunk if we wanted, ’cause that was the custom with shrimp fishermen. But we yelled, broke another window; then, while I was lying on my back on the telegraph office steps, singing, a woman with dark lips bent over and put her hands on my cheeks. “You are very sweet.” Her rough hair fell forward. “But the men, they are standing around watching you. And that is taking up time. Sadly, their time is our money. Spacer, do you not think you…people should leave?”

  I grabbed her wrist. “Usted!” I whispered. “Usted es una frelka?”

  “Frelko in español.” She smiled and patted the sunburst that hung from my belt buckle. “Sorry. But you have nothing that…would be useful to me. It is too bad, for you look like you were once a woman, no? And I like women, too….”

  I rolled off the porch.

  “Is this a drag, or is this a drag!” Muse was shouting. “Come on! Let’s go! ”

  We managed to get back to Houston before dawn, somehow.

  And went up.

  And came down in Istanbul:

  That morning it rained in Istanbul.

  At the commissary we drank our tea from pear-shaped glasses, looking out across the Bosphorus. The Princes Islands lay like trash heaps before the prickly city.

  “Who knows their way in this town?” Kelly asked.

  “Aren’t we going around together?” Muse demanded. “I thought we were going around together.”

  “They held up my check at the purser’s office,” Kelly explained. “I’m flat broke. I think the purser’s got it in for me,” and shrugged. “Don’t want to, but I’m going to have to hunt up a rich frelk and come on friendly,” went back to the tea; then noticed how heavy the silence

  had become. “Aw, come on, now! You gape at me like that and I’ll bust every bone in that carefully-conditioned-from-puberty body of yours. Hey you!” meaning me. “Don’t give me that holier-than-thou gawk like you never went with no frelk!”

  It was starting.

  “I’m not gawking,” I said and got quietly mad.

  The longing, the old longing.

  Bo laughed to break tensions. “Say, last time I was in Istanbul— about a year before I joined up with this platoon—I remember we were coming out of Taksim Square down Istiqlal. Just past all the cheap movies we found a little passage lined with flowers. Ahead of us were two other spacers. It’s a market in there, and farther down they got fish, and then a courtyard with oranges and candy and sea urchins and cabbage. But flowers in front. Anyway, we noticed something funny about the spacers. It wasn’t their uniforms: they were perfect. The haircuts: fine. It wasn’t till we heard them talking— They were a man and woman dressed up like spacers, trying to pick up frelks! Imagine, queer for frelks!”

  “Yeah,” Lou said. “I seen that before. There were a lot of them in Rio.” “We beat hell out of them two,” Bo concluded. “We got them in a side street and went to town! ”

  Muse’s tea glass clicked on the counter. “From Taksim down Istiqlal till you get to the flowers? Now why didn’t you say that’s where the frelks were, huh?” A smile on Kelly�
��s face would have made that okay. There was no smile.

  “Hell,” Lou said. “Nobody ever had to tell me where to look. I go out in the street and frelks smell me coming. I can spot ’em halfway along Piccadilly. Don’t they have nothing but tea in this place? Where can you get a drink?”

  Bo grinned. “Moslem country, remember? But down at the end of the Flower Passage there’re a lot of little bars with green doors and marble counters where you can get a liter of beer for about fifteen cents in lira. And there’re all these stands selling deep-fat-fried bugs and pig’s gut sandwiches—”

  “You ever notice how frelks can put it away? I mean liquor, not… pig’s guts.”

  And launched off into a lot of appeasing stories. We ended with the one about the frelk some spacer tried to roll who announced: “There’re two things I go for. One is spacers; the other is a good fight….”

  But they only allay. They cure nothing. Even Muse knew we would spend the day apart, now.

  The rain had stopped, so we took the ferry up the Golden Horn. Kelly straight off asked for Taksim Square and Istiqlal and was directed to a dolmush, which we discovered was a taxicab, only it just goes one place and picks up lots and lots of people on the way. And it’s cheap.

  Lou headed off over Ataturk Bridge to see the sights of New City. Bo decided to find out what the Bolma Boche really was; and when Muse discovered you could go to Asia for fifteen cents—one lira and fifty krush—well, Muse decided to go to Asia.

  I turned through the confusion of traffic at the head of the bridge and up past the gray, dripping walls of Old City, beneath the trolley wires. There are times when yelling and helling won’t fill the lack. There are times when you must walk by yourself because it hurts so much to be alone.

  I walked up a lot of little streets with wet donkeys and wet camels and women in veils; and down a lot of big streets with buses and trash baskets and men in business suits.