by Kola Boof
Having noticed all my life that watching me from the rear as I depart is some kind of instinctual treat for black men, I slowly walked away without looking back as his voice became a distant echo. And then it bothered me: I’ve never been with a black man! I made up my mind that very moment that Sea Horse would be the first— just once for sex, just once before I left paradise and returned to James Lord’s abbey in England. A hit-and-run.
Rector Sniff: “Well, surely you two have met?”
At my dressing table, where the candlelight can fool you into thinking I’m a doll or a lifelike puppet, I lie convincingly. As a matter of fact, my whole interview with M magazine has been a lie. Nothing that I’m telling you have I shared with anyone else on earth, and especially not with Sniff. So I lie, “I’ve seen him a few times on the beach, talking and being affectionate with his wife. But no, I’ve never met him. I really know very little about him, other than that he’s famous.”
“He’s becoming a political powder keg in this country. He makes the government nervous. What are your views about West Cassavaland’s upcoming elections?”
I smile girlishly, pretending that I’m not only dumb but embarrassed to be dumb. I say, “I’m not much for politics, sorry.”
“What about the nude photo sessions you did for Sports Illuminated—many people complain that you’re perpetuating the stereotype of the backward naked African woman.”
It is my response to this question that literally doubles my fame around the globe overnight. But I don’t know this when I answer, “I don’t see the covering of women’s breasts as clean or decent. I see it the opposite. I am not a Christian; I am not Islamic. I am not ashamed of my ancestors’ nudity. I learned from the Oluchi women that to be naked outdoors is to be closest to God; the cleanest and most decent a woman can be. I guess you could call me … the sexy part of the Bible. Though I live in England, shop in Paris, and party in New York, I’ll always be that raisin-headed little girl chopping cassava and stirring the clay pots.”
Rector raises his eyebrow ever so. “Tell our readers what brought you to modeling and to England.”
JAMES
I could feel the vibration of what was going on. Already overcome with anger and feelings of betrayal, I turned the latch and opened the door to find Dr. Juliet cooing and writhing on her bed as she was being fucked by our scientist from India, Dr. Gobi Kadir. Something in me wanted to scream out, Get off my mommy! or, She belongs to my father! But her pale white chicken legs were spread wide open and his tanned skinny body humped between them feverishly, the hairy dark gingerbread of his balls flopping against my mother’s vagina as though the nut sack and pussy were laughing at me.
“Ouuuhhhhh, Gobi, fuck me! Fuck me!”
“Take it all, Dr. Frankenheimer, take it all!”
In my whole life, I’d scarcely noticed the blue fingerprint-like shadows beneath my mother’s tired eyes or the crow’s feet and wrinkles around her mouth, until one afternoon, after emerging from being chased around the bed by Dr. Kadir, grinning and laughing and looking silly, which just annoyed me so much, the wrinkles and tiredness miraculously vanished. Attention from a man made her limber and giddy; made her someone I didn’t know.
“Mother, everyone in the clinic is gossiping about you.”
“That’s none of my business, Eternity.”
Hope had been dead about three months by then and, with not a clue about what to do with my life, I had given in to my mother’s wish that I attend the University of DakCrete. Out of the blue, she began to exhibit the most embarrassingly unprofessional behavior—for instance, insisting that the whole clinic staff eat dinner together nightly while she sits on Dr. Kadir’s lap at the head of the table, her laughing face completely oblivious to the disapproving glare of Dr. Quicken.
“I can’t take seeing you with men other than Stevedore,” I told her in private.
“You won’t have to. You’ll be at school in DakCrete.”
Even though I wasn’t yet aware of my mother’s new cloning project, I knew there were things about my mother that I didn’t want to find out. I realized that I needed to do more than go to university—I needed to leave the nest for good. But, of course, it was the way that I left the nest that surprised me.
For weeks, Dr. Juliet had opened the clinic as a sort of bed and breakfast for her rich friends from places like MIT, London, Brussels, Copenhagen, Sag Harbor, and the Soviet Union. Most of them were nice boring scientists, writers, and socialites. But on one occasion, as I walked into the drawing room, there stood the most stunningly gorgeous older white guy, dressed up like some kind of Indiana Jones—type adventurer. His hands were on his hips and the first thing I noticed was that he had arms like Popeye the Sailor—huge and hamshaped with thick blond hair. I was attracted to him immediately.
“Eternity, I want you to meet someone that your father greatly admired—this is Dr. James Lord of Marble Arch, London. You’ve seen his name in my science journals throughout the years. He’s a cryptozoologist.”
“A what?”
“A cryptozoologist,” James reiterated in a voice so deep it went straight to my bones and warmed the small of my back. “A person who searches for cryptids.”
“Cryptids?”
He kissed my hand as a greeting. But the way his sky-blue eyes pressed against my flesh, I felt like he was eating me. I could see right away that like many Caucasian people who travel to Africa, he had an intense fascination with those of us whose skin is actually coal-black and silvery. He had a look that said, I cannot believe there are humans this black.
“Yes, cryptids. Rumored or mythological animals that are presumed to exist.”
“Oooh!” I gasped, suddenly realizing who he was. “You’re that man who led all those expeditions looking for the Loch Ness monster.”
“Affirmative,” he grinned proudly. “My late father was actually a part of the team that was able to prove that cryptids exist. The whole scientific world was under the impression that the coelacanth fish had been extinct for more than sixty million years and that only their fossils still existed—but in 1938, my father’s expedition caught living, breathing coelacanths off the coast of Madagascar. Right now,” he carried on, “I have my eye on a much bigger quarry. I’m planning an expedition for 2005 and 2006 to hunt down Africa’s legendary Mokele-Mbembe.”
Now that caught my attention, because even though the entire world has heard of the Loch Ness monster and America’s Big Foot—very few outside Africa have heard anything about the Congo’s half-elephant, half-dragon swamp dinosaur, Mokele-Mbembe (Stopper of Rivers). The creature is sometimes reported to come ashore and eat only plants and trees before vanishing beneath the superdeep waters of Likouala Lakes. But other times it has been said to kill villagers who try to catch it, or to turn over the boats of the great white hunters who have come for more than a century now to try to prove the thing exists.
“Pray you don’t get eaten,” I said, seriously.
“Oh, I’m a firm believer in prayer.” That startled me, because he was the first white person or scientist I’d ever met who believed in God while standing outside the church.
Later, I learned that my mother was paying Dr. Lord ten thousand dollars to build her a yamba garden behind the clinic. In West Cassavaland, the people refer to the highest quality marijuana as “yamba”—and although I knew that small fact, what I had never known and what James taught me is that plants, trees, and vegetables contain sperm and egg, and that they mate in the earth to create seeds, and that they come in sexes—male, female, or something called “perfect flower,” which means bisexual, or rather that the plant in question, an avocado for instance, has both sperm and egg to reproduce itself without a mate.
I found it fascinating and James Lord and I became like buddies, going out before sunlight and raking the soil before we leaked milk-tea, livestock urine, and gunpowder that the local police had donated for our project into the ground using some liposuction cannulas that we got fro
m Dr. Juliet’s selector precision box.
“You always make a batch of sinsemilla.”
“Ha?”
“Here,” James said, handing me a magnifying glass. “It’s your job to detect all male marijuana. The males don’t have any white or pink hairs—just fat little balls on a stick. In our sinsemilla crop, you remove all males on sight. They mustn’t pollinate the females if we’re to cultivate reefer with a superior kick. The Indian doctor wants it strong.”
We built a dirge with netting to separate the full-sun weed crop from the shade weed crop, and James Lord kept me in stitches with hilarious stories—such as the time he witnessed tennis star Venus Williams win her first Wimbledon trophy and how annoyed England’s royal family became when her father, Richard Williams, jumped on center court yelling, “Straight outta Compton!”
“You remind me of my father,” I told him one afternoon as we were frying bananas, coconut, and pineapple for lunch.
“Dr. Juliet had a little talk with me this morning. She’s concerned that I might take advantage of you. She got carried away and made some threats.”
Avoiding eye contact, I said, “My mother has nothing to worry about—you treat me like a son.”
“Apparently, the whole clinic is gossiping about us.”
“Well, that’s none of our business.”
“Do you like me treating you as a son?”
Stirring the pan, I looked over and pierced his blue-eyed gaze with the most sinfully seductive biblical stare I could muster. How dare he try to dare me.
“I hear you had a child that just died,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You barely look like more than a child yourself.”
“I’ve never been a child, James—ever.”
He examined me for a moment, intrigued. “Where’s your baby’s father?”
“He’s dead.”
“AIDS?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. I’m clean and my baby was clean. The father was, uh, hiking through the jungle and got eaten by red ants. We don’t like to talk about it.”
“So what do you do, Eternity? Are you going to be a scientist like your parents?”
“No, I hate too much thinking.”
“You know, Eternity, I can’t help wondering why a girl as beautiful and enigmatic as you doesn’t have a bounty of young men coming to call on her. There’s this mystery about you. It’s quite alluring.”
Enigmatic? What did that mean?
I reminded him, “I’ve been raised, touched, and handled by white people, James—English is the only language I speak fluently. The Africans consider me worse than a Been-to. They don’t trust me. Even though plenty of their sons have tried to fuck me, they would never seriously consider marrying a girl like me. I’m a weirdo, and now that everyone wants to look like the Pogo Metis Signare, the mulatto upper class, I’m too black.”
“I love your color,” he said dreamily. “It’s so erotic to me, because it’s unbelievable. You’re literally pantherblack. I’ve never made love to a woman … that black.”
I laughed. “Tell me, Dr. Lord. Adventuring through Africa as you do—how many black women have you fucked?”
“Oh, lots,” he said. “Mostly the ones in England, though. I like African women, West Indian women, Asians, white women, of course, Spanish women, fat women.”
“Fat women?”
“Fat women give the best blowjobs, because they’re always hungry.”
I laughed again and shook my head. “I don’t know about you, James. It seems you’ve been with an awful lot of women.”
“I don’t have a bint right now.” It was apparently hip in London to use the Arabic word when identifying one’s girlfriend. “And England’s a dreary place without a nice bint, a sweet lass. So tell me this, Eternity: would you be open to an older man courting you the old-fashioned way?”
“What do you mean?”
“I want something from you, but I don’t know what it is yet. Well, other than that thing between males and females. But I can’t very well get it here in Africa with your mother on my tail. What if I treat you to a vacation in London? No sex, no pressure—just dinners out, long walks, and sightseeing. I suspect you like to dance and go shopping?”
I was flabbergasted but definitely open to the invitation. “And where would I stay, James?”
“I have a large house with numerous guest rooms. But if you’d prefer your own hotel suite, it’s up to you.”
* * *
I truly hated London at first. Because I wanted to be James’s girlfriend, however, I stayed well beyond the initial seven-day vacation. In fact, I soon moved into his house in the snooty, rich neighborhood of Great Cumberland by Marble Arch. Nobody looked at me funny for being there (mainly because James hired a white uniformed maid named Sarah to escort me around), but I felt isolated. All around me were these lily-white and imitation lily-white biracial rich girls who spent whole conversations comparing the ringtones on their mobile phones, or praising me, the newcomer, for being “so fucking gorgeous to be so fucking burnt.” They all dressed in what they called “peasant chic,” but, of course, because I know peasants and how they actually dress, I just found it pretentious. I couldn’t help but become a snob languishing behind the walls of James’s abbey, and before long they nicknamed me Garbo.
James fucked me for the first time on the night I moved into his place, just a few hours after we’d shared a candlelit dinner. Five nights later it became lovemaking. Sweetly measured tenderness with the most ferociously masculine stroke, wading into the hot pink flesh that lay just beneath my coal-black pussy lips; and, in fact, because my pussy’s so black, he liked looking at it for long spells before he’d just tear into it with his mouth and tongue—eating it like crazy.
“You said this was only a vacation!” my mother screamed by phone from Africa.
“But Mother, I’m his woman now.”
“James Lord is a rogue serial-fucker, Eternity! He doesn’t have one woman!”
I tried not to believe her at first, but then came all the signs, the first one being his stern admonition, “If you get pregnant, love … I’ll kick you out and never speak to you again. I don’t want to be box-tricked by anybody’s snot-nosed brats.” And then after that, it bothered me that we never drove out to the country to meet his parents. Additionally, his work as a cryptozoologist took him on adventures all over the world: Nepal one minute, Hiroshima the next. The Black Sea, Mexico, Siberia, and his preparations to hunt down our lake monster in Africa.
“You’re always gone,” I complained one morning after he’d made the most ravenous love to me.
“I can’t stop until I find it.”
“Find what?”
“I don’t know, but it’s out there. Something the world has never seen. In a lake or a cavern beneath the earth, in the jungles, under the frozen ice—I don’t know where it is, but I won’t feel like a real man until I’ve found it and captured it.”
We did have a golden period where we held hands everywhere we went, working out together at the gym over by Ally Pally and going to see popular local bands like the Others, Bolt-Thrower, and Bathory. But he soon started what my mother calls “spotting” (sneaking occasional extra pussy from hit-and-runs with anonymous women). Then one week—when I had been led to believe he was on assignment in Greenland looking for an ancient bearded prune lizard—his glassy-eyed party grin suddenly turned up in every London gossip sheet from the Mirror to the Sun, his arms draped around a thirty-something blond, pointy-nosed East of the End soap actress.
The caption not only said that they were dating, but for the first time I became aware of James’s son, Ian. According to the newspaper, Ian lived in Australia with his mother, retired model Christy Twelvetrees, who the paper referred to as the love of James’s life. Truly, it was a blow for me. When I went out to get air and weep beneath clouds, which is where I thought God (who I didn’t believe in) would surely give me some idea of what to do, I realized th
at everyone in Marble Arch had seen the gossip rags. More than that, they were thrilled that such a rich, gorgeous white catch as James Lord was apparently dumping his African novelty piece for a more appropriate dime!
I called James, of course, demanding to know what was going on and why he didn’t tell me about Ian, but all he did was make fun of my hysteria. He said that I should stop reading the newspapers, make myself busy around the house, and start looking for some piece of jewelry that I’d like him to get me. Not an engagement ring, mind you, but some bauble. He said, “I love you, Eternity. You’re in my house because you’re the one I want to come home to.”
And like any other stupid girl in love, desperate to hold on to I-don’t-know-what, I tried to make do with that—until the doorbell rang one afternoon with an unexpected surprise.
Sarah answered the door and dutifully announced, “There’s a Miss Juliet Frankenheimer to see you, madame.”
My jaw dropped open in disbelief as my mother swept in like the Queen of England—or worse, America’s Hillary Clinton. Her shoulders were tense like a hawk as she clutched in her hand one of the gossip rags with photos of James Lord and his soap actress.
“Mother, you came all the way to London!”
“Yes, Eternity, we need to have a little chat—about white men and black men.”
Over roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, I noticed that my mother was now a full-fledged pothead, her watery blue eyes calm and pinkish after I’d given her permission to light up, her tongue and fingers rolling up a marijuana cigarette like an expert, lighting, sucking, and exhaling as though it were second nature. She offered me a hit, and after I declined, she began to speak in the same clinical science-lady logic that I’d grown up with.
“The white man and the black man are both men, and, of course, men like as much variety in life as they can get. But there’s a major distinction, Eternity: the white man is the lord and ruler of this world, and the black man has no power. There isn’t a black ruler on earth who can make a political decision, internationally, without the permission of white men. Be it Europe or America, somewhere he has to answer to white men. So it should be obvious that the white man has something of value to protect—and that is his whiteness. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
