The Sexy Part of the Bible

by Kola Boof

  “I bring you respect,” Sea Horse said to the mass of black faces.

  Dressed in a flowing bone-white dashiki with a Ghanaian Ashetu on his head, with Tasso and his mother Binata standing regally beside him, president-elect Sea Horse Twee ripped up a stack of official-looking papers and shouted, “There will be no more G8 for the kings and queens of West Cassavaland!”

  “You go put die! You go put die!” screamed the ooh-Luck.

  “There will be no more blond wigs on the court bench judges, no more European-tailored suits in the legislature—from now on, every African politician will attend the government of this nation wearing our traditional African clothes, the clothes of our mighty forefathers!”

  It was rumored that Sea Horse was now romancing the breathtakingly beautiful chocolate-skinned woman standing off behind Tasso, the Nigerian movie goddess Genevieve Nnaji. Eternity, in a rash of jealousy, sighed and fell back to earth.

  Sea Horse ended his address by reciting West Cassavaland’s “Poem of Patriotism,” words that had been erected by proud African men on the day of the nation’s independence: “For we are the Africans … the children of the earth’s first garden … that perfect, deliberate blackness that can only be described as the genesis of vision itself. Let freedom ring.”

  With the deepest breath, Eternity’s spirit was inching its way back. Wet between the legs, she went to him.

  GRAPE

  “Open your eyes now,” President Sea Horse said.

  Eternity did as commanded, the curves of her sensuous body quivering with guilt and shame as her lips burned with anticipation for the delectable surprise he would soon feed her.

  “Gently touch them with your tongue,” he continued.

  She knew she had no business being there in the White House—in his bathing chateau while one of the maids rubbed her body down with warm oils. She touched her tongue erotically to several juicy black grapes hanging from Sea Horse’s hand, then devoured them.

  She explained to him how overwhelming it had felt, how horrifying and sickening it had been, to come face-to-face with the newly spawned infant versions of her dead child, Hope, and her father, Stevedore.

  Dr. Juliet’s reefer-mad eyes had held her with a shameless defiance.

  Eternity, of course, had lost it upon the sight of little Hope and Stevedore peeking up from a bassinet in the nurses’ station hall. They didn’t recognize Eternity from Adam. They were so innocent; just babies.

  She had burst into tears and run out of the clinic, but Juliet tried to calm her down.

  All Eternity could think was, White people—the lonely white people.

  Lonely, restless, well-meaning, adventuring aimlessly across the earth in search of love.

  Here’s the Internet—love me. Here’s a flu vaccine— love me. Here are scissors to cut things with—love me.

  Here are submarines to submerge into another world with—love me. Here is a satellite in space to view football—love me.

  Here is my portrait of Jesus Christ—love me.

  Here, I’m taking over your country, so we can live together.

  Love me.

  Here, I brought you back to life.

  Love me.

  Stay for dinner. Mothers need love too.

  Love me.

  Eternity Frankenheimer had fallen to pieces, unable to stay angry at her mother but eager to speed away from the clinic.

  Love me.

  * * *

  Violently, he tasted her, his bone-white teeth and his rapturous tongue sucking and mowing into the yoke of Eternity’s swanlike neck.

  Eternity’s long black legs opened to receive his penis as the gob of juicy grapes fell against the floor and his large hands bore down on her bare shoulders like the paws of a jungle panther pinning down fresh antelope pussy.

  In deep measures he took it—the tight, sweet charcoal pussy that far and away had become his favorite.

  Striving, poking, and lunging until every poetic coo from her softly straining neck was a prayer rising up; grateful and sanctified by the pure, ever-aging call of two lone ancient words: Love me.

  Eternity broke.

  The ohms of her throat cracking like whiplash.

  She fell into the realm of blindness …

  (And on the second floor of the White House, in the bedroom beneath Sea Horse’s bathing chateau, Tasso Twee was awakened by the faint smell of smoke and little snaps of bursting flames. Her eyes opened and her body jumped into sitting position as she realized that the doll was catching on fire on its stand. It crackled and popped into a blue-flamed rage while Tasso clapped her hands together and erupted with laughter, screaming and shouting, “I did it, I did it!”)

  Eternity pressed her hand against his chest—her head back in blindness as the rhythm of his hips and the large penis attached to it shook and be-danced her like gravel in a seabed.

  Diving, loving, reaching … possessing.

  Son …

  Son … my eyes opened!

  I felt … falling.

  I was falling and falling …

  DEAR EYE (OPEN)

  Son!

  Oh my son. I was back!

  Sea Horse’s erection evoked in me … a resurrection.

  Life.

  I could see it again—the soul song from my death.

  My spit dragging with his lips as he removed his mouth from my mouth and caressed the smoothness of my skin-only head, his eyes peering deep into mines, his heart calling me back from feelings and images that even now I can’t define.

  One moment, he was Sea Horse the mortal. The next, he wasn’t Sea Horse at all—but this figure the world’s men have made up to represent their penis symbol, Jesus Christ.

  The scripture unrolling like ribbons against harsh winds.

  His mouth vowing, “I love you, woman—I love you.”

  TEACHER DON’T TEACH ME NONSENSE

  I cringed hearing the words, because after being beaten to death by a black man’s hands twice in two lifetimes— there was no way in the world I would ever love a man again.

  It just wasn’t necessary.

  We Who Go with

  the Landscape

  I love you, my son, your little feet kicking and your tiny hands balling into fists as your dark celestial-eyed stare flickers like blinks of intelligence against the orbit of my own. You, the one who grew inside me for nine months—it’s you I love.

  “What will you name him?” the giggling nurses at DakCrete City Medical Center asked excitedly after you were born and were placed in my arms. Just as I’d expected, their girlish smiles turned to frowns when I gave them the answer.

  They couldn’t have understood what the miracle across your chest meant to me—the three nipples that they considered a deformity. In fact, they’d covered one with a bandage and taped a crucifix over it—superstitious bullshit that I immediately ripped away, because I wanted to see it, that third nipple.

  My God, the smile on my face as I thought of Tiberius again, and the miracle of it all—the miracle!

  Perhaps Jesus Christ was your papa and not Sea Horse or James, I thought. Then I laughed, kissing and kissing your chest with my eyes closed, sweetly blessing you.

  I told the nurses, “His name will be Eternity … same as mines. Like his mother, he’s forever.”

  “What about the father’s name?” the head nurse objected. “A boy, especially first-born, should be named after the father.”

  “I don’t know who the father is.”

  KASHA! Their mouths fell open in shock as their Christian stares turned to Christian stones.

  The wedding ring on my finger is what did it—the fact that I was a married woman. What kind of African woman marries a man while pregnant and then doesn’t even know who the father is?

  “She thinks she’s European,” one of them hissed before storming off in disgust.

  But, honestly, who needs those women?

  All I cared about then, Eternity, was that you were here and health
y and snuggled safe in my arms—your warm, tender little face against my breast, suckling, and already the dang-nap crown of our ancestors breaking through your precious black scalp.

  And all I care about now is that as my son and closest, most trusted confidante, you understand why I did what I did following Sea Horse’s assassination.

  WITH THIS RING

  Not just West Cassavaland but all of Africa was afire with elation at the victory of King Sea Horse Twee.

  Almost to the seventh month of my pregnancy with you, it was like our very own Camelot.

  Sea Horse had opened the White House for what was to be his annual “Picnic with the People.” His British record company doled out miles of free hot food as he shut down Spy Control, emptied their torture prisons, and then drafted a ten-year plan for national literacy, making it mandatory that all Cassavan children be taught to read and write if nothing else.

  First Lady Tasso Twee became the continent’s model of elegance, style, and old-ways subservience. Images traveled around the world showing her and Sea Horse’s row of proud Cassavan-faced children, as well as the one child who stood out from the rest: slick-haired, light-skinned Garvey, whose heartbroken eyes stared out from the magazine covers as though he were some Lebanese neighbor’s child and not a Twee.

  I should have seen it coming, but I was too happy.

  The mullahs in the Arab industrial nations took their cues from the smiley-faced white politicians and corporate heads in the Western world, and had discreetly gotten word to Garvey’s teachers that his father was to be killed and that he—such the devoted learner of Islam because it pleased his father—was to be the vessel, the bomb.

  Explosives were strapped across innocent little Garvey’s torso beneath robes of satin, his face conflicted by honor, duty, and confusion. But still, he’d kept the secret and had taken his place on Sea Horse’s lap during a photo op on the White House lawn, and then— BOOM!—the two of them ignited in an orange and black fire, exploding into smithereens.

  And that was that.

  Allah before father, flesh, and family.

  There weren’t even bodies left to bury.

  In no time, President Yaw Ibrahim the Black was put back in office, Spy Control reopened and rounded up and imprisoned many of Sea Horse’s most ardent political deputies, and the Pogo Metis Signares returned to the legislature—every single one of them dressed in expensively cut European suits.

  Nothing but silence gripped our nation, because it seemed that everything we’d ever loved had left us.

  As a gesture to the masses, Sea Horse’s birth date was declared a national holiday by the returning government and Tasso Twee was given the honorary yet ultimately meaningless title Official Queen of West Cassavaland.

  At Sea Horse’s funeral, the press corps photographed me, very pregnant, weeping next to the casket, and the image went all around the world, reporters in every nation declaring you his unborn child.

  But not James Lord. No, James was certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are his son. And considering all the times he and I made love, how can I disagree?

  Yet staring into the casket that day, I wanted to believe that you are by Sea Horse. I needed to.

  The emotional turmoil soon got to me and I was hospitalized for depression.

  At the hospital, I realized that it was Sea Horse who had finally made me African—he had connected me and gave me a sense of being whole. Without him in the world, I suddenly felt lost, naked, and frightened.

  Not knowing what else to do, I said yes when James Lord came to my bedside and asked me to be his wife.

  He immediately sold my apartment in DakCrete and bought a bungalow for us to live in on Sabu-Nu beach while we waited for you to be born.

  Cassavans hurled bottles and cans at us when I was wheeled out of the hospital holding my wedding bouquet—“Traitor bitch!” they called. “She married a Caucasoid!” But all I had done was try to rescue my sanity.

  I had lived through so much hardship in my lifetimes, and frankly, I was tired of living.

  But you kept me alive.

  THE WHITE MAN IS NOT THE DEVIL

  As a black woman in a white supremacist world, I can’t honestly claim that I’ve suffered any more prejudice and mistreatment from white men than I have from my own black men. Both groups seem to live by the white man’s standard, so they both hate, degrade, exploit, and humiliate black women, fail to even acknowledge our presence. Yet when it comes to race loyalty, I always took the side of the black man—not because he was morally superior to the white man, but because he’s the one I give birth to, the one my womb produces.

  In Africa we talk a lot about the Great White Devil, the innate evilness of the white race, but the real truth, Eternity, is that the white man and the black man are probably the same man—the world is just ruled and trampled upon by the one who got to the gun first. And unfortunately, the one with the spear has been struggling at the foot of the one who got to the gun first ever since—but they’re the same man, capable of the same genius, the same goodwill, and the same inhumanity.

  Neither is superior to the other.

  Two days before you were born, Sea Horse’s lawyers showed up to tell me about the island he’d left me in his will.

  “Love Bird Island,” they informed me, “is four hundred miles off the coast where West Cassavaland meets Senegal, Mrs. Lord. International waters, so there’s no jurisdiction by any sovereign states. You can do whatever you want out there.”

  “An island—Sea Horse left me an island?”

  “Two hundred and seventy-four acres of white beaches, exotic plants, towering palm trees, and a twostory cottage mansion.”

  “You could start your own country,” another lawyer joked.

  THE RIVER PASSED, AND GOD FORGOTTEN

  Dreams that you thought were impossible and had long ago given up on, my son, you’ll find that they tide back into your consciousness, and no matter what you’ve been raised to believe or how you try to fit other people’s expectations of what you’re supposed to be, some of the dreams inside you are much bigger than just you—in fact, you’ll find that there was a you before you were you.

  I couldn’t shake it, Eternity. My people’s dream of the Twee-Sankofa Madal—their dream of paradise.

  The London Guardian was the first to break the story: Bitter Supermodel-Actress Files Petition to Establish Her Own Nation.

  People thought I was crazy.

  In America, there was a headline plastered above my face: No Bitch Is an Island!

  “Why do you want a divorce?” James demanded.

  “Because I don’t want just one man anymore,” I told him, honestly.

  “How many men do you want?”

  “I don’t know, James. I adore you and I don’t think I’ll ever stop adoring you, but I’ve finally realized that I could be a lot happier if I had my space here on the island and kept multiple boyfriends around the world.”

  “A bloody cum-catcher!” he cursed. “You’d rather be a whore than a respectable married lady?”

  I nodded.

  He stared at me as though I were diseased.

  “What’s happened to you? You’re not the same woman. What about my love for you? I love you!”

  “I don’t love men anymore, James. The whole religion of male rule … I’ve died and gone to heaven and come back and now I don’t love men anymore. I want them … when I want them. Just like you are your own man, I want to be my own woman. I want to enjoy a variety of different men—when I feel like being bothered.”

  LONER

  Finally, to the world’s shock—I did it!

  Due to the fact that my island lay in international waters and was under a non—property tax—paying jurisdiction that constituted terra nullius, sovereign state laws and federal courts in both West Cassavaland and Senegal officially recognized me as a micronation and allowed me to rename my island what my Ajowan ancestors had originally called West Cassavaland—Ajowaland.


  I started my own country; founded my own nation.

  I named my capital city New DakCrete and sent immigration offers to half a dozen young, hard-working African dock boys who began building a village of thatch-roofed dome houses for themselves and their girlfriends to live in. I would call my citizens “Eternalists.”

  I was the nation of Ajowaland’s standard of beauty! Charcoal me! A flag that looked like the starry blackness of outer space waved from a pole in front of my mansion and was duly registered as the official flag of Ajowaland.

  I couldn’t think of a national motto right away, but my country’s national anthem was Sea Horse Twee’s final hit single, “We Who Go with the Landscape.”

  If there is memory, then there is a mother

  Blood of the ancestors … their blood uncolonized

  Black as all black put together

  We who are left … we who go with the landscape

  A black American woman in Chicago wrote me an e-mail:

  Girl, my name is Ronette Marie Sheridan. I’m a bookkeeper at Chicago City Hall. I read in the newspaper you done had the nerve to start your own damn country. Can I come be a citizen? I’m black, thirty-four, two children—a boy and a girl. I heard your requirement for full citizenship is nappy hair and brown-to-black skin. Well, I’ll tell you this, Miss Charcoal Barbie—we may be yellow, but we got some nappy-ass hair, girl.

  Then two brothers from Kenya wanted to immigrate— and Chiamaka and her new husband came.

  My favorite photographer, Casper, visited with his boyfriend, Israeli gymnast Zorn Lieber.

  Rector Sniff from M magazine arrived with his cameras and asked me, pointedly, “I’ve heard of recluses, Eternity, but do tell—what made you so bitter against the rest of humanity? What made you a separatist?”

  HOLLYWOOD

  Some months later, I went to visit that flat, never-ending, lights-on-a-pizza city known as Los Angeles to make the television miniseries Kamit-Ama, African Goddess, but they did it to me all over again.