by Kola Boof
Still, the presidential campaign by King Sea Horse Twee became our people’s shining hour, galvanizing the nation with hope as he defeated President Yaw Ibrahim in the election.
The people of West Cassavaland were like a great flood rising up an ocean for Sea Horse. By the thousands they crowded past armed soldiers in the streets of DakCrete when Sea Horse spoke in front of the state library. His fists pumped in the air while he rapped his promises, brimming with satisfaction as the people chanted, “Don … chiefo … baddo!”
He was the man.
And on the faces of Ibrahim’s soldiers was that pokerfaced look of despair and regret, because they knew it was on now. No one had ever posed a serious challenge to Ibrahim or the Fatherland Party.
But even with all this good news going on, something dampened the sweetness of victory for Sea Horse. Millicent York, back in London, was dating a white man.
“She sent the goddamned photographs to my own mother!” Sea Horse hollered in a drunken rage. “That bitch! I trusted her with my seeds in her ass! Gave her a son, a mulatto! And now she’s fucking a white man!”
“But she’s white herself,” I reasoned.
“Fuck you!” he yelled. “She’s not white.”
“Yeah, fuck me, I’ll remember that. You Cassavans are always shouting about the devil white man, but you can’t wait to get the white woman’s cat on your breath!”
How did he think I felt watching him obsess over a white woman? My voice became shallow with sadness as I said, “Maybe her boyfriend after this one will be black, Sea Horse. This man’s race doesn’t say anything at all about you. You just have an inferiority complex.”
“I am superior to any white man! I am an African!”
“Well, the white man is the king of the world,” I told him cruelly. “No matter how many white girls you fuck or how high you climb, we Africans are still the ones who were conquered, colonized, and enslaved.”
“I’m no nigger—I still have the hair of Africa growing from my scalp. I haven’t been conquered. Now get out of my sight before I rip your face off, bitch!”
“Don’t come to my room tonight,” I muttered with my nose in the air as I brushed past him.
Good.
I had hurt him really bad, and as I went inside to help Tasso chop coconut, I was glad, because he had hurt me too.
DEAR EYE
I dreamt that Sea Horse and I were atop the Empire State Building, our naked bodies entwined, the cold November air chilling us to the heart … and our kisses so anxious and desperate that neither of us had the courage to open our eyes. The sky had turned as gray as dark smoke from a forest fire—and we looked like mud people up there. The parents of the earth, kissing soil, black as all black put together, for the earth has parents.
And then, of course, we fell.
We fell, but even then we refused to let go or open our eyes.
We fell.
Falling into ribbons of black silk whipping in the wind like the wings of ravens.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a small mahogany bowl containing the delicate white petals of a beautiful but cursed Central African flower called ngwago.
I was too ignorant to be insulted or outraged as any normal Cassavan girl would have been—being raised by whites, I had no idea of the significance (the nastiness) behind Sea Horse’s offering.
He seemed jealous of my relative success, and had complained about what happens “the minute an African woman gets some fame and money.” But Chiamaka wold later explain to me that in Central Africa before the 1840s, African villagers from Mbu to Takpe and NookUroo had worn the ngwago flower around the neck and bosom to ward off the wild gorillas that occasionally kidnapped newly married African women and dragged them into the jungle to rape them.
Wu-Chuchu is what the villagers had originally called these particular male nomadic lowland apes who ditched their clans and traveled solo, carefully scoping out villages for wedding parties or young girls, always evading the fire spears, poisoned leaves, and machetes of the men on watch.
Chiamaka explained that once white men discovered the existence of the species and began hunting, studying, and poaching them, the abductions of African brides stopped. Soon the Africans had to deal with a new predator raping their women: white men. And so the word Wu-Chuchu had come to mean “white man,” and from the 1840s until the early 1960s, the ngwago flower became a reef of shame, tied around the neck and in the hair of any village woman who was raped by a white man.
“So you see,” Chiamaka continued, “Sea Horse is still agonizing over Millicent, a white woman, choosing a white man as his replacement. It hurts his pride. He gave you the ngwago to ward off white men he fears will be after you now that you’re a movie actress. He’s asking you not to submit.”
I gasped, suddenly realizing why all manner of African women were laughing hysterically at the recent photographs of me splashed across the world newspapers. In nearly every one, I had the ngwago flowers tied in my hair.
“Sea Horse wanted people to laugh at you,” Chiamaka surmised. “You know how it is when men love you.”
ON THE FOURTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS
Back at Sea Horse’s compound in the tropical December heat of West Cassavaland, Tasso, Chiamaka, and I delighted in the Dionne Warwick CD I’d brought back from America, the three of us singing, “ If you see me walk’n down the street, and I start to cry … each time we meet …”
Garvey, who was away from his grandmother Binata to spend time before Christmas with Tasso’s children, came running up to us.
“Mother Eternity, come quick!” the mulatto boy shouted. “It’s that doll of you—you’ve got to see this!”
By the time Garvey, Tasso, Chiamaka, and I made it up to Tasso’s bedroom, all of Sea Horse’s children were there staring at the doll in wonder.
“Look!” screamed one of the girls, pointing at it. “Somebody beat her up.”
I halted in the doorway, taken aback by what looked like fresh knots and bruises swelling across the doll’s face.
“No, it’s just the wood curling,” Chiamaka said hesitantly. But when I looked at Tasso for confirmation, the expression on her face immediately refuted any such logic. She breathed deeply, assessing the doll’s busted lip, the eye that was swollen shut—the red gash of a cut on its brow.
“Who removed the lace!?” Tasso demanded.
Garvey swallowed hard, answering, “I heard the wood popping, and I thought I heard a lady crying, so I took the lace off to see what was wrong, Mother Tasso.”
“Give me your hands!” Tasso yelled. Garvey placed his yellow hands in her dark brown ones, and she swat him five licks on the palm with a thick schoolhouse ruler. After the last hit, she asked, “You want your father to be proud of you, don’t you? You want to impress him?”
“Yes, Mother Tasso,” he cowered.
“Then why aren’t you consumed by your Koran lessons? Why are you always fidgeting and snooping around this house instead of becoming a son your father can be proud of?”
Of course, this was all about the hair on Garvey’s head—the fact that Sea Horse despised his son’s lack of an African crown.
“I heard a lady crying,” the little boy wailed.
Then Chiamaka hugged Garvey and flashed a look of disapproval. “He’s just a child, Tasso!”
At any other time I would have pressed Tasso about Garvey’s psychological health, but when I saw pus oozing from the eye of the wooden doll, I remembered that I am a clone, a kind of doll myself.
Kneeling in front of the child, Tasso said, “Allah will bring you the love of your father. Only Allah can change this.” She placed a Koran in Garvey’s hands and pressed his fingers into the cloth.
“What I want to know,” I interrupted, “is who beat the shit out of this doll.”
“It’s the doll’s way of protecting you,” Tasso snapped.
“Protecting me how?”
/> “By showing you the future!”
ON THE EIGHTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree and I laughed joyously at the weird sounds the partridge made as Tasso and Chiamaka rooted the tree next to the pond in the backyard.
I had tasted blood when Sea Horse kissed me after giving me the gift—though there had been nothing in our mouths but the usual sweet saliva. No blood, and yet I had tasted it.
“I love you more than any woman I’ve ever known,” he had pledged with the conviction of a great actor; only without acting. And then he had blithely sniffed the coconut scent of my short-cropped African hair and caressed its minklike softness as though he were warming by a fire, shielding great light, and lamenting eternity all at once.
My son: if Sea Horse Twee is your father, then this is important to me, that you see the ngwago petals blowing in the breeze and our black bodies clinging and humping into one another’s like dolphins humping in the ocean’s blue clavicle. It is crucial that you see the grace of his hands—because Sea Horse’s hands were beautiful and moved not like boxing gloves, but like butterflies—the hands that would soon kill me; murder me; take my life; mangle me. These were the hands that caressed and loved my flesh that day as though my neck were God’s finest fabric, they were the hands that held still my mouth and chin so as to plant his kiss of forever. That sweetest of true love kisses that rang in my head and mouth, my throat and bosom, with every thrust of this passionate man’s penis, until all we could do was lay still and hold hands, our dark eyes staring at the ceiling as the ancient Dionne Warwick ballad I told you about coated us in robes of light.
PROOF
I hardly ever thought about my mother anymore—so it startled me when I was suddenly consumed by a desire to kill her.
One moment I was perfectly fine, and then the next— Tasso and I spotted a clone of myself in afternoon traffic; an exact replica of me and Orisha.
Perhaps a year younger, perhaps a year older, I don’t know, but it was me, a prostitute wearing a hole-ridden cotton sundress, a waiflike sparrow darting cautiously and barefoot along the rubber plants at Mars Bay. The sight of this clone literally paralyzed my imagination and my eyes drowned in horror—all I could see was Stevedore and Juliet, the two of them naked in the laboratory, smoking marijuana, snacking on deep-fried breaded pineapple, and duplicating human genes in culture cups; making up people like it was nothing at all. For here was another Eternity, her face withered by the AIDS virus and her head Q-tipped by a shock of raggedy hair—but still it was me, unmistakably.
And as I wept, wondering dreadfully why my parents had kept me but apparently thrown other clones of my DNA out into the wilderness to fend for themselves, I promised God that I would return to Africa Farms and murder my mother.
Sea Horse stood on a podium that New Year’s Eve afternoon, the banner and flag of the United Nationalist Motherland Party backing him up as we were surrounded by thousands of Cassavans along the wide clay ruins of Ajowa’s ancient city of Mars, the people chanting when he swung his fist in the air and promised them that soon the Twee-Sankofa Madal, the paradise, would be restored.
To Africans, these are impossible dreams, things to be truly thrilled about. And yet there was only a thud in our stomachs, a slow turtle’s silence in our eyes—and in the car on the way back to the compound, we held hands so tight it hurt.
Upon arriving home, Tasso’s children ran barefoot to the car when we pulled up.
The chauffer stopped the Mercedes and Sea Horse rolled down his window so they could stick their dusty nappy heads through. “She’s gone!” one of them yelled. “Oni says she saw her walk into the woods.”
“Saw who?”
“The doll, Mama. The doll you made of Eternity. She got up and left the house! She’s gone, Mama—gone!”
“Where’s Garvey?” Tasso asked.
“Studying his Koran. He would have come down and searched in the woods with the rest of us, but he didn’t want you to be mad at him, Mama.”
FLYING BACKWARD
Last night I drowned in the most horrible dreams. I saw clones, replicas of myself, marching up the road single file toward Mother’s AIDS clinic. They were being led by Orisha’s mother, Ma Nonni, all of them carrying dolls that were dripping from the vaginal area where they’d been cut. Dr. Juliet was watching from the clinic porch. But when the clones reached her, Ma Nonni was really Stevedore, and the clones were of my daughter Hope, not me. This is what she would look like as a young woman. In greeting, Dr. Juliet handed each clone a chilled glass of Wife of Tarzan poison.
DEAR EYE
I saw a soul song with my eyes. Right before I died, I saw a soul song. Rhythm and adrenaline and fingers popping. The lyric as it was living and not yet composed. I saw a shade of blue more dreary than the “off-key” in true love. I saw the wail caught in his throat, moaning notes of blood. I saw a soul song.
NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2005
I hate this day.
Sea Horse had men tailing me for protection, but I didn’t know it. And, of course, the last person I expected to see at my mother’s compound was James Lord, but there he was.
He and Dr. Juliet and two of her colleagues, Rolf Switzer and Edwinna Kelp, were clustered together outside the clinic eating watermelon, their white flesh transformed by the noonday heat into a strawberry icecream complexion, their eyes beholding my approach with surprise.
I had come to kill my mother, to trick her into drinking a glass of Wife of Tarzan. But the moment I caught her gaze—her aged face marked with such loneliness—all my anger began to dissipate, to splinter with confusion.
As I reached over to embrace her, I hadn’t known that James Lord, red-eyed and reefer-smelling, would place his hairy white arm around my waist, falling against the small of my back, before kissing my cheek. “Good to see you, Eternity. You’re looking beautiful.”
It was so innocent. But Sea Horse’s men only saw me being touched by the white man.
I hate this day, because it can never be in the past.
Turning to Dr. Juliet, my rage got the best of me and I demanded, “How many did you make?”
Only she knew what I meant, none of the others, and of all the marblelike eyes in their European heads, hers became the coldest, the most blank.
“I saw Orisha,” I hissed at her. “A different one.”
“Darling, we can talk about this later.”
“No, Mother, let your guests entertain themselves and we can talk about it now. And what have you done to Hope?”
“Hope is dead and resting and you know I respect that.”
I broke down: “I saw myself prostituting—it was me!”
Dr. Juliet kept her calm. She didn’t deny it this time. Like a front-office receptionist, she said, “Stevedore’s dead, Eternity. He’s not here to answer your questions.”
Dear son: when your grandmother said those words to my face—to Orisha’s face—I slapped the shit out of her.
The smack was a certified incident of the taste being knocked out of someone’s mouth; Dr. Juliet forgot her own name as her skin was marked in red by my palm and finger imprint.
And I would learn a lot later that when Sea Horse’s bodyguards saw the slap from a far-off hiding place, their imaginations had assumed ridiculous things: for instance, that I’d come unannounced and found my “white devil cheating partner” James Lord shacking up with my mother. And by the way he grabbed me and pulled me away from the others, who wouldn’t have thought the same foolishness?
It looked that way.
A JEALOUS GOD
It’s a terrible way to die—to be beaten to death with a person’s bare hands, but as you know, it wasn’t the first time for me. People had put me out of the world before, a whole mob of them. But this time was much worse, because it was the person who I now loved more than anything on this earth.
His bodyguards gave their inaccurate report, and he met me half a mile
before I arrived at the compound. He yanked me from my car, his fists, transformed into stone Dobermans, crushing and pulverizing my face; breaking the bones so that my screams were guttural, gurgling full of blood, and my eyes fell out of their sockets and my brain drew up into a frozen rubbery numbness, ballooning out of my head as he moaned, “White man’s whore!”
And yet, because I was outside my body and saw what I call the “soul song” when it happened, I can tell you that there was no hate in his punches. Every single hit was imbued with the most pitiful possessiveness, the naked anguish of need. Fueled by rage and jealousy, of course, but at the same time love.
Love.
Love.
Dear Eye: I know you are shut.
Sea Horse killed me.
Dear Eye: I know you are shut.
Sea Horse killed me!
And because of him, I stopped loving men. Not some men, but all men. There was no hate or dislike—just indifference. And I would never be able to love or hate them again.
I was not afraid or the least bit sad. Heaven is peace, my son. The genesis of vision itself. Darkness—black as all black put together, the harmony of goodness in the good, clean dark.
SON
Once you open a book,
it can never be closed
To die is to awaken.
A silvery tide crashed against the black-sanded shoreline, and though I felt weak and tired, nothing could overcome me. I was all-powerful and safe, and I felt not only as though I’d been suddenly freed up from the most exhausting dream, I also felt Sea Horse’s love, fighting to follow me.
A tar-black boy, barely twelve with stick arms and knot-boned knees, lifted me and carried me through the jungle. I asked him, “What is this place?”
He said, “Reality.”
“Do you hear an old scratched-up Dionne Warwick recording?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” the boy replied. “This is heaven. Mother plays those all the time.”
The boy walked me to the end of a pungent wisteria forest and stopped just at the edge of a cliff that dropped at least fifty miles into the earth.
