by Kola Boof
“Do you remember the Wife of Tarzan?” I ask.
“She doesn’t count!” Fergie snaps dismissively. “Why are you always bringing up dead people? And not even good dead people!”
Patiently, I remind her that the Wife of Tarzan was not originally a human being, but a toxic poison invented by Stevedore to ward off the giant waterbugs that used to rise up out of the jungle after heavy rains and swarm our clinic’s compound. I inform her, as Stevedore had informed me back when he was perfecting the recipe for the poison, that in ancient Rome and Greece, the upper-middle-class women had achieved the illusion of being extremely white-skinned by wearing a heavy acetate foundation, a makeup created by dissolving lead shavings into vinegar, and that the consequence of wearing it was that after years of exposure, they developed brain disorders such as dementia, chronic migraine headaches, severe memory loss, and sometimes even blindness. Nevertheless, Stevedore had pointed out, the women still did anything they could to be as white as possible, because in those ancient Roman and Greek societies, whiteness was the sole marker of status, respectability, and moral fortitude, and only the royal and governing classes had been really, truly, fully white.
I then explain to Fergie that in our own West Cassavaland hillside there existed a similar ancient makeup, but a natural one, tekur mud—a bluish charcoal clay that West African kings routinely melted to darken their penises with, and that queens wore to assert higher status by transforming their midnight-black faces into even darker, smoother complexions, over which they would paint intricate patterns of white dots and drape their shaven heads with cowry shells and other jewelry, all of it to achieve maximum “Nyama” (black as all black put together), a state of precolonial being that denoted femininity in women and fertility for African royals. But, alas, tekur mud also brought on madness, elephantitis of the scrotum, diabetes, and blindness, and it was out of boredom and curiosity that Stevedore had mixed the lead acetate Roman-Greek formula with the African tekur mud and melted it down with lye, brine of sericin (silk gum), and water to create what he called Wife of Tarzan, the poison of the Gods. I remind Fergie that its main virtue for all of us living at the compound was that it was odorless and therefore the perfect insect repellent— especially since the jungle’s waterbugs often grow as big as lobsters and can run as fast as the pregnant bush rats.
She remembers now, this lethal, odorless poison that we all appreciated so much—until, of course, its name became the epitaph of a young woman.
“Dr. Juliet killed her!” Fergie whispers with a grave, blunt decree. “Just like she murdered that white father of yours—who you marked … like a lioness. The girl was a prostitute!”
“Only because her parents forced her!”
“Do not speak the unspeakable,” Fergie warns me. “There are certain things that decent Africans do not ever discuss, even amongst one another.”
But spying the stitches in my wrists, I realize now that it’s time—time to have no more secrets, at least not the ones that are forced upon us. And just as I think it, I imagine our lovely Wife of Tarzan come stumbling out of the bush as though she’s still alive.
Her name had been Aneela and she’d come from a moderately well-to-do middle-class family in the Tenuba Valley, the Woluti-Zombas. Like neighboring Senegal, West Cassavaland had legalized prostitution in the late 1960s. As a consequence, there became a strange phenomenon among the families of the African upper class—the legal registering of their very darkest-skinned daughters as prostitutes in the men’s sporting ranches that catered sexual booty along the resort coastline and in DakCrete. Aneela was only sixteen when her lawyer father and schoolteacher mother awakened her from a deep sleep one night, the mother binding her hands and covering her mouth while the father gently and robotically, but lovingly, took her virginity, after which they registered her with the state as a Career Girl, Title C, and posited her at the Air Force men’s club, explaining to the teenager that the sacrifice she was about to make was the most noble thing in the world—and that because of her earnings, the family would now be able to keep her two older brothers in college in England. They told Aneela that this was, in all discretion, a typical and honorable practice in several African countries, which it is, and that neither of her two slightly older sisters could go in her place, because like their mother, they had been born the color of peanut butter and would surely fetch fat marriage dowries for the family bank, and therefore were already in training as Needed Wifery.
Right after losing her virginity, Aneela tried to hug her mother. But the mother, the same mother who had held her down so that she could be raped by her father, only flinched away, uttering the rebuke, “Don’t touch me.” Her demeanor toward her own child was one of setting out the trash; and naturally, in that moment, Aneela was transformed into a kind of monster more tragic than any prostitute. “You,” the African mother had whispered, “came out looking like your father and your brothers. Jet black—with hair that doesn’t grow.”
“They really work. I’m lighter,” Aneela tells me years later when we’re in the clinic’s den watching Stevedore’s videotapes of Happy Days. In her palm I see the pretty cream-colored pills and the faint blue film lining her gums from years of toxic buildup—and then I cringe, wondering as I watch her ingest them if they taste anything like the creamy drops of semen that she enjoys swallowing right out of Stevedore’s penis, her willingness to do it being the reason that he hides her in our clinic, nevermind that she’s registered to the Air Force men’s club, a prostitute without AIDS living in and working out of an AIDS clinic. And, of course, most baffling of all is that she has such a stunningly beautiful dark-chocolate complexion, considerably lighter than my charcoal coloring, and that even with her round princess face and gazellelike eyes, she considers herself deformed and needful of erasure.
A few weeks later she dies by accident after Juliet jokingly tells her that the mysterious thermoses in our injections refrigerator that have POISON—DO NOT DRINK written across them in bold letters are in fact filled with the secret formula that caused Michael Jackson to fade from black to white. I tell Aneela not to believe it, that Juliet’s just teasing her, and that it’s actually a poison Stevedore calls Wife of Tarzan—but she gets up in the middle of the night, a whole weft from her poorly sewn hair weave clinging to her pillow, and swallows down the grayish-white death milk anyway.
At the Wife of Tarzan’s clinic-sponsored funeral, I notice that so many of the city Africans who have come to mourn her have their own faint blue gums and peeling Nadinola-covered faces. Skeletal hands are draped habitually over the spot on their torsos where their kidneys ache, and it occurs to me that no matter how many thousands of AIDS-infected black bodies I’ve seen piled up by the authorities and torch-burned out of this world, AIDS is not the only disease killing off an entire race of people.
THE RACIST
Suddenly, I remember who killed Stevedore. I’m afraid to tell Dr. Juliet who took him away from us—she wouldn’t believe me! But as I think back to the casting of the film the Americans made, every explicit detail of my father’s death crawls back to me.
This is right before I frightened Juliet into telling me that I’m a clone, it’s right before my monthlies stopped coming, it’s right before I discovered that the reason I felt so haunted by the passion of Orisha after studying her and screen testing to play her in the film was because I had actually been her in a previous life. It’s right before I slit my wrists.
It is the night in which I am having a dream, only days before I discover I’m a clone; I will then know that it wasn’t actually a dream, but rather a memory. In the dream, I am a young Ajowan girl of around thirteen. My mother’s blue-black arm is pulling me behind her and we are entering a movie house on a dusty red clay avenue in DakCrete. You must take note that in the dreammemory it’s 1969, just one year after our nation’s independence from Great Britain. For the first time, the seats inside are filled with black African people—Oluchis, Ajowans, Mandingos, Ashan
ti, Wolofs, Hausa-mon, Yorubans, Igbo, and the “pot liquor” (city-stock mixtures of blacks, chocolates, and purples). We are, indeed, a theater full of common people. Then, suddenly, up on the screen, out of total darkness come the first images of this film that purports to tell the story of one of West Cassavaland’s greatest ancestors—our beloved Mother Iyanla. But instead of applause, an audible gasp of shock ripples through the audience.
The actress on screen is the color of a yam’s yellow innards, her nose pepper-shaped rather than flat, wide, and sexy like a West African’s. Her lips are juicy, but not as everlasting as ours. She is not us, but rather an echo of us, a watered-down Europeanized imitation of our mother’s essence—and sure enough, some skinny nappyheaded African in the front row immediately jumps up and shouts at the screen, “That’s not our mother!”
“Oh, sit the hell down,” responds a group of men— slick chocolate ones from the upper ranks—and that of course stokes the hurt feelings and betrayal that the African women in the audience will come to almost always experience when they sit through movies made about them by Western men. On screen, the insult against our mother seed continues issuing itself as the husband is shown to be a very dark-skinned West Cassavan, and the children, miraculously, even darker and more “uslooking” than the father. Only the mother has been whitened and watered down, and as the audience bristles heatedly, one of the Mandingo sons at midrow yells out, “Without our real mother, we cannot be born!”
“Silence, black boy!” shouts a slick chocolate man.
But then a Yoruba wife jumps up and demands, “How can we sit and watch this colonialist donkey shit? They could have at least cast a woman who goes with the landscape!”
“Without our real mother, we cannot be born!” calls an Ashanti man from the back, and it turns into a riot. Bottles fly across the theater, people are up on their feet hissing and cursing at the yellow woman on the screen.
“Without our real mother, we cannot be born!” the Africans of 1969 chant with rage.
And as my own mother hurriedly pulls my siblings and me out of the theater’s pandemonium and into the hot sun, I immediately notice a skeletal dog coming up the street with a human arm in its mouth, a Dalmatian I think at first. But as it gets closer, I realize it’s just a mutt, and it’s right then that a green bottle hits me upside the head—waking me from the dream—and there we are, Stevedore and I, entering the sound stage where they’ll soon begin shooting The Racist, where I’ve been astounding the production crew with my auditions for the role of Orisha for weeks now.
Strangely and ominously, they applaud as I enter stage B-12. Some of the African members of the production crew shout out, “You are Orisha—in the flesh!” But as they’re clapping and saying these things for only God knows why, I glance over at the director’s chair and standing behind it is a tall, slender, elegant biracial girl possessing honey-pineapple fashion-model good looks. Her head is hooded by a fedora and her eyes fasten to mines with an apologetic nervousness. I know instantly that this is the mutt with my arm in its mouth. She has been brought all the way to Africa to play the role of Orisha—to erase any memory of the real me.
Suddenly I taste my color. In prepublicity releases, the American studio claimed to have chosen to shoot the film in Africa because they wanted authenticity. They said they wanted to cast the female equivalent of Djimon Hounsou—a girl who really looks the part.
“What the hell is going on?” Stevedore demands as one of the film’s black American producers comes running up. He thanklessly informs us that the studio in California received a call from their financial backers in New York and London. “They loved your screen tests, Eternity—they couldn’t get over how much you actually resemble the real-life Orisha. But they don’t think American moviegoers are ready for your look.”
My look, mind you, is not chocolate like Lauryn Hill, Whoopi Goldberg, or Naomi Campbell—it is pitch black and shimmering like the purple outer space of the universe. I am the charcoal that creates diamonds. I am the blackest black woman.
“You could at least cast a woman who goes with the African landscape!” Stevedore snaps as he too notices the mixed-race actress standing behind the director’s chair.
“The part of Orisha has been rewritten,” coughs the producer. “She’s now the biracial daughter of a British naval officer and an African princess.”
“But Orisha was a pure Ajowan!” Stevedore protests, emphatically. “A real-life blue-black Ajowan woman who died fighting against skin lightening—and now you go and lighten her skin for the movie!”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Frankenheimer, but our orders come from Hollywood.”
Haw-lee-wood.
On the ride home, I am silent and sick to my stomach. I’ve basically just been told that although I look exactly like Orisha and gave a riveting performance, I’m too black to play her in a film. A beautiful African woman can’t possibly be charcoal. Even deeper than that is the implicit message that my African features are deformed and my bald head is a joke. I am no longer my people’s real mother. For that lie, I hate the world. I feel the activist Orisha still inside me. And because of that message I need to have sex immediately, as passionately as possible.
I make Stevedore pull over to the side of the road—I need my skin touched and my features kissed and my smooth skull massaged. Only by human touch can this denigration of my body be healed back to wellness—but just as soon as Stevedore’s lovemaking reassures me of my human form’s normalness and desirability, Dr. Juliet snatches away my humanity altogether.
I tell her I didn’t get the part, but she doesn’t give a shit. She’s edgy and upset because I still haven’t had my monthly.
“If you’re pregnant by my husband, Eternity, then we need to begin thinking about an abortion right away.”
An abortion? I shake my head. The Oluchi river women have raised me with the belief that abortion for African women is evil and wrong.
“Sleeping with your father is one thing,” Juliet continues, “but I won’t have you giving him children. And besides, your first semester at university is coming up. You can’t attend an English school pregnant.” She is hurting inside like a wounded animal and unable to control her rage. “I can’t be reminded of your betrayal on a daily basis by having this child loitering round the premises!”
“I didn’t betray you! I didn’t know it was wrong!”
“I am your mother! Why are you loyal to Stevedore but not to me? I helped make you in that goddamn lab!”
The words seem ridiculous: I helped make you in that goddamn lab. But as her blue eyes turn jagged, darkening as though filled with blood and fog, I can see that this is what she’s been dying to say for years. Her heart is sliced in pieces by Stevedore’s fornication. She wants to cut me, get inside me, wound me back.
“You were made!” she says. “You were engineered. Didn’t we teach you not to believe in coincidence? No one left you on the goddamn doorstep! You’re one of your father’s science projects. You’re a fucking clone … a clone!”
Her words are insanity—hilarious, cruel, and hurtful.
Yet I know it must be true after living all my life with Stevedore and Juliet. The signs have all been there. The shock of it causes me to vomit in disbelief. “How could you!”
It suddenly all makes sense: the Africans neighboring the clinic have always regarded me as an outsider and hidden their conversations from me. I can’t help but wonder whether or not I have a soul. Then Juliet reveals that it’s from Orisha, “The Racist” herself, that I am cloned. That’s too much. I faint.
“Do you hate him now?” Dr. Juliet asks when I come to. I can tell in her bitter, blank eyes that she hopes I hate him. “Do you hate your father now that you know it’s because of him you’re knocked up like a plantation wench and don’t have a soul? He violated your DNA, engineered you, fucked you—took your soul.”
I’ve lost something after fainting. I can’t speak. I can barely fathom my nothingness. I am shatter
ed.
“You’d better not tell anybody about what you are or what he did,” Juliet hisses. Lab business will continue as usual, she says. “The World CDC Federation has laws against cloning. Africa Farms could be shut down and Stevedore imprisoned for the rest of his life if this gets out.”
Come midnight I slit my wrists.
I LOVE RICHIE CUNNINGHAM
Stevedore threatens to kill Dr. Juliet for telling me what I am. He tends my wrists and puts the whole clinic staff on vigil around me. But I can’t tolerate being in the same room with him. He has to go.
I coil in fetal position pregnant with his child.
I regret that I survived the suicide attempt.
I strain to remember when I was dead. The whole world is chilling madness. I’m not myself, yet I have the knowledge of two selves. I am not a coincidence, yet it turns out I am just as much an oddity as my monstrous parents. I am beautiful, yet after being told I’m too black to play myself in a film, I now know that beauty, like race, is a social construct—and it’s evil. I know that black people and white people both are Satan’s pride. Stevedore has always joked that “trust” is when two cannibals can give each other a blowjob. He finds that cute. He says he wants this baby.
I want out.
“Our child,” Stevedore predicts as he holds my face in his hands after kissing me in the clinic hallway, “will be born with nice hair and a good color.”
He lifts my chin, staring into my black-magic eyes, and says, “All my life, I’ve really wanted to love someone, Eternity—to have someone I can completely trust. That’s why it was necessary. Hours in the lab creating you put love inside me.”
“But you’re not God, Stevedore! You had no right!”
“Of course I’m God,” he jokes. “I’m a white man!”
And it’s because of this small joke, you see, this tiny joke that actually has enough truth in it to be funny, that I decide the only way for me to own myself is to drink the Wife of Tarzan. This time, the suicide will give me relief. And just an hour later, even with my barely healed wrists stinging against the pull, I open the refrigerator where we keep the thermoses marked POISON—DO NOT DRINK.
