by Kola Boof
“Kamit-Ama was a whore, nothing more!” Sea Horse decreed in reference to the mythical Cassavan witch who’d breastfed her warrior sons until they were nearly twenty years old, which in turn, according to the legend, brought about homosexuality. Kamit-Ama’s mythical boys sprouted breasts and had to have them cut off before they could join the other men in battle. But then even with their breasts cut off, the boys had seduced their fellow warriors during secluded forays in foreign lands, contaminating the army, Sea Horse said, with gay sex orgies, and had to be hunted down and put to death by our nation’s great warrior father, Twee Obatala.
“This is why we can’t have feminism and we can’t tolerate the European faggot virus,” Tiberius chimed in, bitterly ignoring my previous announcement that I considered myself a feminist, and that I knew and loved several gay people.
But of course it’s the men who have traditionally been the architects of paradise, and the ones who decide what exactly makes it a paradise. All through breakfast, Chiamaka and I sat listening as Sea Horse and Tiberius enchanted us with epic stories (fairy tales?) about powerful ancient kingdoms where black men were smelting and working with iron eons before the Europeans stopped dwelling in caves. Of course, as always, they recounted the great love stories that our ancestors had handed down from generation to generation—tales of handsome rogue warriors invading the ancient allfemale villages of Kamit-Ama and other witches, duly kidnapping the ebony-skinned princess virgins, and romancing them until their satiny black wombs filled up the continent with strong dark sons.
“Twee Obatala had no choice but to slay Kamit-Ama. Her silly goddess religion went against nature.”
“That’s according to the men’s history!” Chiamaka retorted with a pout.
“The history of the African man is the history of all Africans,” Tiberius responded to his wife. “Sisters don’t need a separate history book. We’re already telling your story!”
Chiamaka and I were preparing to refute him when Tasso came over to clear away our empty breakfast dishes and wipe the table down. Out of respect for the men, she spoke without making eye contact with anyone at the table. Her huge fig-shaped lips admonished us: “A woman is a flower in a garden—her husband the fence around it.”
“Enshalla,” Sea Horse clapped to the African proverb that every West African child grows up with.
Tasso continued: “A cow, a donkey, a sheep, a goat, a wife—it is at five that a man succeeds.”
Sea Horse and Tiberius laughed, slapping their thighs as Chiamaka rolled her eyes with contempt.
Then Tasso, wide of hip and always angelic-looking in her flowing satin burka, lowered the boom by saying, “Forgive these foolish modern black women who’ve forgotten their place beside the black man. Just as our ancestors told us—a woman cannot see her palm. They have forgotten the natural order of things, that to beget woman is to beget man. That the man dies in the road and the woman dies in the house.”
A woman cannot see her palm.
Suddenly, I remembered the dolls lined up on the ground. Ma Nonni’s hand guiding mines as I resisted, but her voice insisting, “Heaven is the cut between an African woman’s legs.”
Bare-breasted black women with baskets atop their heads sang: “A cow, a donkey, a sheep, a goat, a wife, pleasure be the man’s life … pleasure be the man’s life … pleasure be the man’s life.”
She was cutting the doll’s imaginary vagina with her hand over mines. “Practice makes perfect, Orisha—you must learn wrist control, or you’ll kill somebody’s child.” Then, with my sister’s hand, Ma Nonni was teaching us how to make the cuts local families paid her to make on their own rows of young daughters.
“You must remove the worm of pleasure from between the little girl’s legs.”
“No, Ma … please, no!”
“The African woman is treasured for her obedience, her soulful beauty, her wide hips to bring sons, her strong back to carry kings, her voice to raise up the ocean in song. The African woman is but a flower in a garden—her husband the fence around it.”
Eternity?
Yoo-hoo, Eternity?
Blinking, I caught my breath, but not before a dozen diamond-sized tears tripped over my bottom eyelids, my mouth quivering as I tried not to cry.
“Are you OKAY?”
And when an alarmed Tiberius put his hand on my shoulder in support, I wept quietly, remembering the gnarled flesh between Orisha’s legs and told God, “I hate dolls.”
THE NATURAL MAN HAS MANY WOMEN
Will Sea Horse be disappointed that I’m not circumcised?
I wondered about that, and especially because he claimed to be Muslim—although, in all fairness to the Muslim people, I have to say that he and Tasso were the most unorthodox Muslims I’d ever met (they were more like river people). But then again, Sea Horse did make it a point to pray five times a day facing Mecca and often greeted people with, “As-salaam alaikum.”
“Come,” Tasso said to me one afternoon while carrying a huge platter of marijuana that she’d washed, dried, and baked and was about to chop and roll into fat white cigarettes for Sea Horse. “You can help me prepare Big Papa’s smokes for the week, and this way you’ll learn how he likes things done.”
Big Papa? It had taken everything in me not to crack up laughing in Tasso’s face. But I contained myself and helped out. Her elegant rolling of the weed in delicate white tissues and then the tip of her tongue cat-licking it into a blunt didn’t seem to go with her rich woman’s burka, but nonetheless Tasso accomplished it expertly. She informed me, “Sea Horse is taking you to London next week. He’s nominated for the British Galaxy Music Award, and he wants you to watch him win.”
I can’t be photographed in public with Sea Horse Twee—I’m engaged to marry James Lord! And of all places, London. The press will have a field day giving me the same black eye they give Naomi Campbell.
Tasso was trying to warn me about something, but I was distracted and hadn’t caught on yet. There was an undercurrent of polite hostility as she said, “And while you’re in London, Sea Horse wants to make love to you in an environment where no one from the press can spy on you. So … you’ll be staying at the cobblestone walk-up that he keeps for Millicent York and her child Garvey. This means that Millicent has to leave her home so that Sea Horse can romance you in London.”
“I can’t go to London with Sea Horse.”
“Well, Millicent is extremely upset,” Tasso whispered. “She’s threatening divorce over this. What’s worse is that she’ll be here tomorrow. Sea Horse is making her bring Garvey to Africa.”
The next afternoon, when Millicent swept into the compound with her pale, chalky complexion draped in a colorful West African tunic with traditional gele and cowry shells, it was impossible not to stare. She had the look that white women can’t shake in Africa—that of being unnaturally out of place to the African eye, bringing clarity to Sea Horse’s saying, We who go with the landscape.
“Millicent York, this is Eternity Franken—”
“I know who she is. She was cavorting with Sea Horse at the resort last season. Hello, dear. You’re a full black one, aren’t ye?”
Up close in the face, Millicent reminded me of tough white girls who worked in canning factories. Though she’d been very skinny when Sea Horse first met her, she was now thick and box-shaped with a wide, flat ass and traveled everywhere with a pack of macaroons in her purse. Her white flesh kept her from being accused of having a bad attitude, but there was a permanent scowl on her face. The more you stared into her hazel-gray eyes, the more you could see that she counted as one of her only victories in life her stature over black people in their own communities.
“She’s very bitter because she thinks I ruined her life,” Sea Horse would tell me months later. “She comes from a notable family in England, but out of their three daughters, she was the one who had to be smart to get attention. She was a feminist writing against the sexism in rap music when I met her; very angry at her
father. I don’t lie about it—I was barely a teenager with a huge hit in the UK, and all I did in England was put my tree branch up in white girls. I thought I’d gone to heaven, you know? Me, this nap-haired dang-boy from Cassavaland being chased and put on a pedestal by the daughters of the colonial white boss father! Great Christ, the fuck! I thought every one of them looked like a goddess, because you know how white women are—they just have that mystique, that running-horse beauty; they look just like the women you see on television or in movies, just valuable, you know? And besides, my ma always wanted a Fanta baby. You know this type of African lady, the ones in the cities who wear wigs. Well, that’s my ma. She swallowed arsenic wafers and kept her skin rubbed down in Nadinola skin-bleaching cream because she believed that God loves light-skinned people more. So I did it with my ma in mind. Tried to get five or six of those white girls to marry me, the prettiest ones, but I didn’t have the money then like I have it now—and if they were going to marry black, they’d rather marry a black American celebrity, because he’s the richest kind of black and he’s already a member of the European culture. But Millicent was different from the pretty white girls. She wasn’t interested in money. She loved me for me and was fascinated by my music and my culture— she started writing articles in the British press about slavery in Sudan, debt relief, racial injustice in Brixton, and the white race’s evil against African people. She said she wanted to escape being seen as a white woman, because that’s not what she is—she’s a human being—and love knows no color, no race between individuals. And really, Eternity, that’s what we were by the time I got over my phase of idolizing white skin and long hair— two individuals in love.”
In his eyes, I could see it was true. That what he and Millicent had stumbled into was genuine love. But then Sea Horse said, “Things changed when Garvey came. If he’d been a girl, it would have been different—but that type of hair on a boy, it’s not African. It scared me that this white woman could dominate my African seed. That’s why I named him after Marcus Garvey. I know it’s silly, but I don’t like his hair. Garvey not having African hair makes me feel like he’s not mines. That’s when our love started to die. Millicent’s a smart woman and she picked up on my coolness toward Garvey. Luckily, my ma idolized him. He was the child she’d always wanted to have herself—bright orange skin with curly Been-to hair. My ma helped a lot, because Millicent’s family wasn’t too thrilled to see Garvey. I mean, they were always polite, never racist or anything—not necessarily against us, but just not interested in us. And that’s how they treat Garvey, like they’re not interested. It causes Millicent to be angry and resentful all the time. Mad at me, her family, Africa, the whole world. She expects society to just accept her interracial relationship as normal. But beyond the surface political correctness, ain’t nobody trying to love no feminist white chick with a black baby, chei. Plus, with all that, there are moments when you can tell she wishes she never had Garvey, like she just wants to run away or something. Like I said, I wish she never had him too. She hates me for wishing that—so we’re always mad at each other.”
In front of me, however, Millicent never acted angry toward Sea Horse. Instead, she worked overtime to laugh, preen, share inside jokes via ricocheting eye contact, and be as fresh in her affection and ownership as possible. She spoke in Sea Horse’s language, then looked at me like I should be impressed. When he wasn’t around, she lectured Chiamaka and me on the importance of feminism and claimed “sisterhood.” I shrugged at the thought. In fact, I mostly ignored her. My goal was to fuck Millicent’s husband, not take him. I had nothing against her personally.
Several hours after Millicent York’s arrival that day, when I saw Tasso kneeling in front of her on the living room floor like some slave, her girlish black hands vigorously massaging the fish-belly white feet of this frothy European, I realized that I was prejudiced—that save for my mother, I despised white women. Not because of their cultural tourism or their great boundless luck with the hearts of African men, but for their unfair position in the world—for being considered “the virtuous part of the Bible.” The white man’s mother: the superior womb of earth, imbuing humanity with whiteness and light; awarded privilege, respect, and freedom; valued and loved by sheer genetic caveat and by the utter echo of her white son’s world domination. And yet standing in the doorway, what I felt for Tasso as I studied her washing and rubbing Millicent’s feet was ten times worse than what I could ever feel about a white woman. Knelt down before some white bitch like a slave, I hated her.
PASSPORT
“I want you to come with me to my mother’s clinic and have an AIDS test performed, Sea Horse. Dr. Juliet’s results are the only ones I can trust. We won’t tell her who you are—you’ll be completely anonymous—but we must get tested.”
ERASURE
On the plane to London, Sea Horse carefully choreographed the way in which we would first make love. He explained that it was very important to him that he fuck me right after he’d swept the British Galaxy Music Awards. I had refused to be photographed with him in public while in London, and forbade him from revaling to the media that the song “One Night Angel” was about me, so we agreed that he would attend the award ceremony with his usual entourage of bad boys while I waited at his secluded cobblestone town house, draped across Millicent’s bed in sexy lingerie he would pick out for me.
“I get a trophy for writing the song,” he explained while tenderly nibbling my ear, “then I get to come home and finally make love to the girl I wrote it about.”
While outlining my lips with a single finger, he asked if I suck dick and swallow, and I demurely nodded.
He whispered in my ear: “Can I lick your asshole?”
Embarrassed by such a question, I shook my head.
When some horribly violent fate is just about to befall an animal in the wild, it runs for the high ground— leaving the area where death is about to enter. But having died and been brought back to life only to realize that the world was even more fucked up than when I’d left it, I found myself desensitized to my intuition; and knowing there’s no such thing as death, I no longer feared it or expected it.
“Tasso likes calling me Master. She likes to be slapped around when I fuck her—and Millicent likes me to spit in her face at the moment when I cum.”
“I sleep with my panties down,” I told him.
Sea Horse made me touch it, pulling my fingers toward the bulge in his pants leg until I could make out the hardened shape of his beer-can cock. With his free hand, he fondled one of my breasts through my blouse, plucking and teasing the nipple until some internal rain mist wet up the rose between my legs and made me throw back my head, trying to arrest and control the ecstasy.
The day of the awards ceremony, London was covered with rain. Sea Horse still went out and shopped for the lingerie he wanted me to wear that evening, but by the time he returned, he had to head right back out to the show. There were press junkets and parties to attend, and when you counted the four-hour ceremony and all the preevents leading up to the broadcast, it stood that Sea Horse would be gone at least twelve hours. So I decided to entertain myself by donning large sunglasses and a floppy hat and taking a cab to the Thames Cumberland Museum to see an exhibition of the latest works from black American sculptor Decco Douglass. In particular, I was dying to see his newest piece, which was a cloth painting of West Cassavaland’s legendary fire witch, Kamit-Ama.
The baroque-styled jazz of Thelonious Monk floated in the hall as my short heels click-clacked around the parquet floors, my eyes searching aimlessly for this grand salute to my countrywoman or myth or whatever she was. I glanced over and realized that the oblong image attached over a plate of baobab wood was supposed to be the rendering of her.
Slowly, I walked over to behold Kamit-Ama, this deity of both good and evil that we Cassavans speak and sing about as much as we do Twee Obatala and Ajowa, goddess of the sea—but the woman depicted looked nothing like an Oluchi goddess. The black A
merican artist had muted the facial features, slenderizing the nose and removing the West African lazy brow that I’d been told to look for all my life. He had given Kamit-Ama the most absurd yellowish-brown complexion and long, masculine plaited hair. Her breasts, which would have surely been exposed to the sun, were covered with cowrie shells, the shape of her eyes European, and only her ears were accurate—the stretched lobes flowing past her shoulders. Tragically, the sculpture failed to honor the Kamit-Ama that our elders and griots had passed down. Once again, I felt the same crippling feelings of erasure that I’d experienced when The Racist premiered with a half-caste girl in the role of Orisha.
I floated back to the movie house where the African audience had thrown bottles at the screen, chanting, “Without our real mother … we cannot be born!”
Why? I wondered. Why couldn’t they show an African woman as both beautiful and fully black as she is in real life? And why couldn’t they ever show a movie that featured a pure-black man in love with a pure-black woman? Why is that taboo even for the eyes of the biracial? Why not celebrate black people’s wholeness, instead of glorifying images of fully white men in love with fully white women as the height of normalcy?
I sickened as I reached conclusions about how systemic and diabolically planned the division was between black humans and real power. Just as I was about to turn and leave, a twenty-something guy from my country walked up, holding hands with his white girlfriend. He said of the portrait, “Isn’t she beautiful? She makes me proud to be a Cassavan.”
The girlfriend chirped, “Remember that movie we saw, The Racist? This sort of reminds me of her.”
Before I could catch myself, I’d invaded their space, hissing at the boyfriend, “That’s not what Kamit-Ama looked like! Don’t you even remember what your mothers and sisters and aunts look like? How can you call yourself African? And that watered-down bitch in The Racist doesn’t look a goddamned thing like Orisha—I am Orisha! Don’t you see what’s going on here?”
