The Sexy Part of the Bible

by Kola Boof

  “My leader wanted someone else to fetch you,” Tiberius was saying, excitedly. “One of our spies, but I said no—send me! I knew her before she was the Second Moon Cosmetics girl. She won’t be afraid to come with me—send me!”

  On purpose, I looked at him as though he were crazy.

  I had been thirty-three when Tiberius was born. My pa, a rugged blue-black factory foreman named Easter Bedee, had been locked up two years earlier over some comment he’d made at a borough meeting regarding oil drilling and tribes being forced off their land, and had ended up dying in the jail from pneumonia. Of course, he’d never allowed Mother to work outside the home, and because my brothers had jobs as well, she’d never needed to. But once Pa was dead and Ma Nonni let Kiongo take a wife and sent the other boys off for trade schooling, she’d taken up going door to door to sell the beautiful dolls she made as a hobby. And it was in one of the wealthier neighborhoods where the European diplomats and other foreigners lived that she’d been brutally raped one afternoon while showing her dolls to a Lebanese father and son.

  Out of it had come Tiberius, who Ma Nonni gave the last name Perrina in a desperate attempt at class jockeying. She would tell people that his father was Italian and not Arab.

  In my beforehand as Orisha Bedee, I could never have forgotten the sight of Ma Nonni’s white-skinned, blue marble—eyed plastic dolls, objects that she’d spent most of her life creating, stacked up outside the house as she’d ordered my brothers to take them to the woods and burn them till they became a single mass of plastic. Nor could I forget the vile disgust on her face every time she looked at baby Tiberius.

  “Ma Nonni, he’s just an innocent baby.”

  “Then you raise him. His life is a curse that the dolls put on me. Your father said this would happen—me playing with white dolls all my life. He said they’d find a way to come through me if I didn’t put them down!”

  Everyone on the block had taken turns raising the little ink-haired yellow baby, including me and my sisters Yandi and Wilma, but mainly those African women in the neighborhood who’d always fantasized about being light-skinned and having what Africans call “Been-to” hair, of a Caucasian texture, and many of them were bleachers and swallowers, so they worshipped and spoiled Tiberius rotten. But even so, with all that love and adoration from so many Ajowans, he was still rejected by Ma Nonni at every passing birthday, and in doing so, she literally destroyed whoever Tiberius was meant to be and left in his place a sad, sensitive little yellow boy, forever in search of his identity and severely traumatized by the fact that he could never be sure if anyone loved him for who he was without his yellow skin and Been-to hair.

  To my astonishment, Tiberius worshipped the ground Ma Nonni walked on; because humans are known to obsess over those who reject them. It shocked everyone that he loved her more than any other woman in the Ajowan community.

  “I’ve become an activist!” he told me that evening at the White House, his hands on my shoulders. “Like you, Orisha, I speak out against the Bastardization!”

  The Bastardization. Just as Americans say the Reconstruction or the New Deal, he uttered the common Afrikaans term that was used in South Africa, Namibia, and other colonies to refer to when mixed races started officially being called “Bastars Elite.” In our country, because Spaniards and Portuguese had mixed with some of us before the British invasion of 1640, the Bastars class renamed themselves Pogo Metis Signare in 1720 and proclaimed their allegiance to some unseen Fatherland in lieu of the Motherland (Africa) they felt ashamed of. They started the Democratic Fatherland Party at the all-mulatto township of Port Elizabeth in 1748, and embraced what we call the Bastardization as a cure for African inferiority. The original thinking went that they would breed an African superclass, the “Talented Tenth,” and destroy the image of Cassavans as savages.

  I tell you, I could hardly take it, the memories flooding into my head like rain off the sea. Orisha Bedee’s memories. I saw myself amongst that circle of Africans who secretly gathered each week in Mr. Kingston’s basement, all of us wearing solid-black armbands with a splotch of red in the middle, as Brother Kingston educated us about the two ages, the Twee-Sankofa Madal and the Bastardization.

  Twee-Sankofa Madal, of course, means “the paradise”—the world that existed not only before the white invaders, but before our kings began trading with the Arab Muslims. The world when our greatest founding father, the trickster warrior-cum-deity, Twee Obatala, had blessed the sea for the Ajowans, the sky for the God tribe, and had filled the African jungles and rivers with an abundance of tropical wonders, a richness of natural resources, and a never-ending supply of food, space, and freedom.

  Everyone—everyone who lived in paradise times, Brother Kingston taught us—was black. All kings, all queens, all griots of the spiritual world, all children, the living and the dead—everyone—had been truly African, possessing Obatala’s wooly hair and thickly sculptured facial features. The flesh of the coastal sea-worshipping Ajowans had come in shades that ran from blue-black to burnt chocolate to coffee-bean brown to light chocolate and tobacco, while the mountain- and jungle-dwelling God tribe had been wholly charcoal—some with a silvery sheen and others with a dusty matte finish, but all of them tall and royal-looking with glorious charcoal complexions.

  “There was no yellow,” Brother Kingston had said in a calm but venomous tone. “Not until the invaders came and sought to conquer and control us. And who among us, anywhere in Africa, can claim to be unaware of the white and Arab man’s single greatest tactic for dividing and conquering African people? The tactic of raping our women and thereby separating us from our ancestors by literally seizing and diluting the blood in our veins. The colonization of blood instead of land; the forced bastardization that has historically allowed white invaders to rule African people through a buffer race that is called by our name but is truly just an extension of the European hand!”

  As the basement activists applaud in Tiberius’s eyes, I heard my biracial brother presently saying, “I have joined the Twee-Sankofa Madal—the paradise, Orisha. I am now truly a black man, an African! I am aware of the colonizer’s tricks to separate us!”

  His conviction and passion for what he was saying both startled and impressed me. He held up the same pamphlets I’d once handed out to bleachers and swallowers—illustrated pamphlets that pointed out the physical dangers caused by skin bleaching, while at the same time calling for nationalistic pride and appreciation of ancestral purity to strengthen and unify blacks through self-love and self-acceptance. This was why I’d been called “The Racist.” It broke my heart as I realized that in a nation where most Pogo Metis Signare still demanded separation from the black African majority, my brother was willing to kill himself in order to be black enough.

  I found it hard to look him in the eyes and say what I was about to say. I tightened my bowels, rooted my feet to the patio floor, and solemnly declared, “My name is not Orisha.” Tiberius fell back on his haunches, speechless, as I added, “And I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But you know me—you have to! I’m Tiberius! You’re the only person who ever truly loved me. You loved me with all your heart!” Tears rolled down his face as the very fiber of his being pleaded with me to remember him—yet the memories of who I’d been were too much for me to swallow. It seemed as though I could hear the person I had loved more than anyone—my father, Easter Bedee—demanding to know why his thirty-three-yearold daughter was a spinster. Why I was always marching, organizing, handing out pamphlets.

  No, I couldn’t go back. This was just too fucking much.

  “Somehow you’re much younger than when you died,” Tiberius was saying, “but it’s you. You practically raised me until that day when the bleachers and swallowers—”

  “Get away from me!” I jerked his hands off my body and shouted, “I don’t know you! … I don’t! I don’t!”

  Tiberius desperately ignored the people staring at us because of my outbur
st and said, “Before mother died …”

  Before mother died!

  “She saw you in the fashion magazines. I brought her every one of them I could find, and she said it too— That’s Orisha! Come back to life. And now that I’m standing before you, I have no doubt in mind as to who—”

  Ka-plapp! I slapped the taste out of his mouth. “Shut the fuck up!” I hissed low, sounding just like the little possessed girl from The Exorcist. Then I turned and ran, finding a staircase that went up to a huge crowded bathroom where I quickly powdered my nose with the rest of the women.

  THREE NIPPLES, DEAR EYE

  When the car stopped and I heard my kidnapper get out from the driver’s side, I felt it again—that you would be born. Because of that I lost all fear, realizing that the kidnapper might be Tiberius. As he popped open the trunk and the roundest, pearliest white moon shone down upon me, I squinted, relieved that it was indeed my brother. But then I got frightened again when he pulled his shirt over his head, revealing his tattooed chest as he explained, “I’m sorry I had to chloroform you, but my leader ordered that you be fetched.”

  “Who’s this leader you keep talking about?”

  He hoisted my body from the trunk and said, “King Sea Horse Twee.”

  Dear Eye, of course I was shocked, outraged, and strangely titillated to hear that it was Sea Horse who had me abducted, and that I was about to be reunited with him. But the thing that left me speechless was the sight of the Bedee family’s secret; the birthmark on my brother’s bare chest that I’d hidden from Ma Nonni all the days I’d known her—his third nipple. He had a normal one on the right side of his chest, but then two on the other side—one an inch and a half south of his left clavicle, the other a quarter-inch below and to the side of that one—with both of them completely out of alignment with the right nipple.

  As Tiberius continued raving about Sea Horse—“The greatest warrior trickster, the greatest Twee since Fela Kuti, since Steve Biko, since Malcolm X“—my stare became riveted to the beautiful tattoo that was apparently supposed to hide his freakish left nipples. In fact, the upper nipple had been disguised to form the head of the green-and-red Sea Horse that rose just above a dagger— but no matter, I knew they were there.

  He slammed the trunk shut. And as he carried me around and propped me up in the front seat, I realized that we had left the hot November night winds of the African savannah and were pointed toward the cool opening locks of the Katanga Jungle. Staring as deep as he could see inside my eyes, Tiberius kissed me very gently on the mouth. Then he said, “I had a sister once who looked like you. You’re the reincarnation of her.”

  I bristled. “There’s no such thing as reincarnation.”

  Tiberius ignored me. “I was seven. At the exact moment when her heart stopped beating, I felt it stop, and her spirit brushed right past my shoulder—I wanted to die too.”

  “But you would have been disappointed,” I told him, “because there’s no such thing as death. Our living in this world is not life; not the real life.”

  GOD AND SATAN ARE BLACK—BURNT BLACK

  Dear Eye, it would mean so much to me if I could see this night forever. But the more I memorize it, the more it changes, until each time I recall it—the further away I get from when it was real:

  … In the jungle where the road stopped black as pitch, Tiberius turned off the engine and the headlights. Moments later, we were met by seven African men, both Ajowan and Oluchi, a few of them carrying flashlights and rifles while others bore machetes and geranium torches to ward off mosquitoes. Tiberius informed me that we would have to walk the rest of the way to the stone ruins of Hembadoon, which had been the capital of the Oluchi people before slavery days, back when they’d been called the God tribe.

  I took off my shoes, hiked up my evening gown, and held my baby brother’s hand as the men led us across a narrow path of smooth, cool earth. All the way down it was like walking on dry lacquered mud, and when we reached the bottom of the hill and shot off the guns to scare away crocodiles in what I soon realized was an everglade, we boarded a long canoe and began rowing across the scariest black marsh until we reached open water. In the blink of an eye, we were being pulled into the radiance of Lake Mona Lisa, which before colonialism had been called Lake Ambi in honor of the God ruler King Katanga’s wife, Queen Ambi. I quickly realized that ours was not the only canoe. The black lake, quiet as it was, was full of flickering torches and flashlights searching the water—and all along the shores of the jungle, as I looked back over my shoulder, I saw that people were coming from everywhere.

  “Don’t look back!” scolded one of the Oluchi men sitting behind me. “You’ll wake up God Sakhr!”

  Very briefly, Tiberius explained to me, “One afternoon our people’s greatest warrior, Twee Obatala, was walking down a road with his warrior son, Twee Egubo. Suddenly, the sky over the road turned dark. Up ahead of them, peering from behind a tree, was God Sakhr— Satan—ten feet tall and black as tar with twelve dangling penises and the flickering tongue of a snake. As the warriors nodded to God Sakhr and passed him by, Obatala warned his son, ‘He will follow us in the road now, all the way to our destination, but as long as you don’t look back at him while it’s nighttime, he can’t harm you.’ On and on the warriors walked with God Sakhr close behind. But unfortunately, feeling and smelling the labored breathing of Sakhr against his neck for several miles, Egubo found himself unable to resist looking back. And when he did, his father, choking back tears, could only stare straight ahead and walk on without him.”

  Looking forward, it seemed that our canoe and countless other torch-lit boats had sailed across the swishing darkness a good forty-five minutes before we detected the pungent burn of a marijuana field as it dueled with eucalyptus, peppermint, and peanut oil (antimosquito smoke) for dominance. Soon we could hear the faint thump of recorded music being blasted from speakers—the timeless jazz of Ethiopia’s Mulatu Astatke turning into America’s KRS-One, Public Enemy, and MC Lyte, before dipping into the lake and rising back up as the soulful voices of the Emperor Baaba Maal, Burning Spear, Stella Chiweshe, and Angie Stone. I smelled a dang-boy African barbeque cooking in ground holes with coal, stones, and dried leaves and began to hear the chattering laughter of ooh-Luck (black folk) socializing as the beautifully hypnotic voice of world music’s undisputed Queen of African Song, Oumou Sangare, rang out and drew us in like a mother’s prayer.

  Before long, we could more than smell the burning field. We could see the coast, the rage of orange flames flickering over monkey- and cockatoo-infested sook trees. We could see the off and on of lightning bugs and could feel the vibrations of the coming land—white ash blowing across our bodies and faces as Oumou Sangare’s lush vocals turned into Faada Freddy’s mesmerizing flow, a lyrical cook-down with Daara J, and then Daara J, too smooth, erupting like smoke from a bong as it gave way to the genius “Gis Gis” of Ifang Bondi.

  “Hell fuck’n yeah!“ came the shouts of unseeable black men along the shoreline brush. The females shouted back, “You go put die!“

  “Hold on tight!” Tiberius warned, and just as he said it our canoe crash-slid against a solid wall of blackness. Two of the men jumped into the shallow coast water and held the boat steady as Tiberius got out and carried me to the upper dune landing where other groups of people were gathering to be admitted down a road guarded by makeshift soldiers. As Tiberius let go of me, I heard an Ajowan mother imploring her children, “Do not look back!“ then felt stricken as two white women were physically blocked by the road guards and told, “No Caucasoids are welcome here.”

  “Isgom-uh da eh Sulu,” one of the women responded, respectfully.

  But her speaking the Oluchi language only infuriated the men more. They shouted emphatically, “This is a family meeting for ooh-Luck only! Get back on your boat!”

  “Go back to Europe!” people in the crowd echoed angrily, and as the two white women paid an outrageous sum of money for the boy who’d rowed them acro
ss the lake to take them back, I nearly came to tears thinking about my own white mother and how deeply it would have hurt me had she been turned away like that.

  “Tiberius!” shrieked a young woman’s voice. The most wondrously petite and pretty chocolate-skinned Oluchi girl came dashing into his arms, their faces butting like two kissing fish and her cute little onion booty wiggling as if she were a puppy whose master had just returned. My brother stopped and announced proudly, “Orisha—uhhh, I mean, Eternity … I want you to meet my wife, the beautiful Chiamaka.”

  “Well, how do you do?” I smiled in surprise. Chiamaka gushed about my celebrity, chirping away as she shook my hand. Then, as if remembering that Tiberius was standing there, she said abruptly, “The revolution is here now, sister. We’re going to be rid of Yaw Ibrahim and the Democratic Fatherland Party for good! We’re going to make Sea Horse the new president!”

  I’d scarcely had time to form a reply when another beautiful young African woman, this one a Muslim wearing a silk ivory burka, walked right up to me and stared into my face as though it were a mask that she wanted to rip off the bones.

  Startled, I put my hand to my throat, my engagement ring sparkling against my velvety dark complexion as Chiamaka stopped chirping to say, “Oh, Tasso, here she is—the one Sea Horse wrote the song about.”

  “I know who she is,” Tasso intoned. “I’ve seen the magazines.”

  “Eternity Frankenheimer, meet Tasso Twee—wife of Sea Horse.”

  Again, I felt stricken. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m his God-given wife,” Tasso explained. “We were born and raised together in the same village. We got married after he finished schooling. We have six sons and two daughters.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to meet her gaze. But I did manage to say, “My God, you’re so young and beautiful to have had all those children.”

  “Millicent York says that too,” she replied sarcastically. Just as I began wondering whether the “no whites” rule would be set aside for Millicent, Tasso added, “But his white cow won’t be here tonight. Only his African wives.”