Life After Death

by Sister Souljah

  “I prayed that we would be in the same room,” Pretty said as I entered room seven. Instead of the roach-motel feeling I got from the convent, this room was made of pink marble and was wide and long enough to comfortably accommodate seven. At least I counted seven single beds each placed against one of the walls. There was a stand with a book holder atop. And on it was that great big book, oh no. The same unreasonably long book that Bomber Girl had given me. Beside that stand was another stand with a great big dictionary. There was one two-seater desk and two tablets laid at the center of it, as well as a stack of paper, pencils, and pens. There were five girls in the room. I was quickly deciding whether I needed to approach this situation like jail or not. The bed next to Pretty where I wanted to set up was occupied. Should I ask her to get up? Or should I just take it? Or should I just walk to one of the only two beds available? So I yanked the girl from the bed opposite Pretty’s. Her ass hit the floor. She jumped up. I expected her to back down. Instead she cocked her hand back and slapped me across my face with full force. “Who do you think you are?” she said with an unintimidated fierceness. “Your bed is there. Go to it, quietly.” She ordered me like I was her underling. I could feel the sting from the slap. If I had a mirror and a reflection, I would probably see a bright red handprint on my beautiful skin.

  “You didn’t have to go that far,” Pretty scolded the slapper.

  “You want to be next?” the slapper asked Pretty boldly. I rushed forward and pushed her with full force. She fell back. Two of the girls that were seated on their beds watching us rushed over and helped the slapper up. I sized up the situation. Okay, two against three, and one neutral bitch, seated at the desk writing and ignoring. The slapper was back on her feet and refocused. She charged at me. Pretty tripped her but she broke the fall and grabbed me around the waist and ran me towards a vacant bed. I fell back on the mattress. She landed on top of me. We was thumping. Pretty was trying to pull us apart. The two other bitches were trying to rescue the slapper. But we were entangled and jabbing each other wherever our fists landed. Pretty took off one slide and commenced to beating the slapper with it. The slapper got enraged. She mustered up some type of superpower and threw me off of her. She got close up in Pretty’s face saying, “You dare to touch me with something from off of your foot.” She grabbed Pretty’s slide from her hand and slapped Pretty’s face with the bottom of the shoe. I threw off the hooded garment I was wearing, twisted it how we twisted towels on lock to whip bitches who needed whipping. But I used it as a rope instead. It landed over the slapper and I used it to drag her back from Pretty’s face. Now the slapper was like a rebellious dog on my leash. The slapper went crazy. She was kicking her feet and flailing her arms trying to land hits and get loose at the same time. Pretty dived down and hugged the slapper’s calves to keep her still. One of the two bitches who had just been watching ran over and stuck me in the ass with a sharp thing. It felt like it pierced my ass, causing me to involuntarily let go of the twisted whipping roping garment. The other of the two walked in between the brawl separating me and Pretty on one side and the slapper and the one girl helping her on the other said, “Listen, I don’t want any trouble here. Yesterday I would’ve pounded in your face for starting this bullshit. But I’m trying. We were all getting along before you just got here. Please take one of the two open beds available.” She was talking down to me. I smiled at her to throw her off guard. I walked towards her like I was about to apologize. Soon as she returned the smile I snuffed her. When I did our residence door opened. All of us scattered to any open bed and sat. Guess we all thought it was the authorities. It wasn’t. It was Bridgette.

  She looked around at our tight, warlike faces. “What the fuck!” she said. “We are all women. We are not the villains. We are the victims who fight the goddamn villains!” she said in her passionate style, then rushed in and leaped on to Pretty’s bed and hugged her. “Come on everybody, group hug.” Pretty and Bridgette ended up walking over to where I was seated on the bed and hugging me. After the hug, we all three sat on the same bed with our backs up against the wall. The slapper and her two assistants moved back to their original beds where they were seated when I had first arrived. The bitch at the desk never even looked up from what she was doing. The way I factored it, now it’s three against three. The study bitch don’t count. No matter what Bridgette said, she was gonna be on me and Pretty’s side. I didn’t give a fuck that I rolled the slapper first and bed-jacked her. The way she slapped me was the same as if she said, “You no-class, low-class slave…” Or some shit like that. I could feel that she thought she was superior and I was way beneath her. I’ll never let nobody get away with ever thinking some shit like that even quietly in their own mind. She and me are gonna face off again sooner than later.

  Pretty, seeing the anger still moving in me, tried to dramatically switch the topics and thought process.

  “So there is this assignment that everybody in the room has to work on together,” Pretty announced. Now she sounded like a college bitch to me. I remember that she said she went to some university.

  “I hate group assignments. I hate group dorms. I hate when anyone forces me to be a part of any group anything,” the study bitch said, finally looking up from her work. “It’s always a bunch of sorry somethings. I already did the definitions. Take your copies. Go ahead, take credit for what I did,” she said and she was a bitter bitch.

  “We still have to do the sentences. We can complete that part. Then everyone will have contributed to the group assignment,” Pretty said, emphasizing the word group just to get on study bitch’s nerves.

  “Cool. So we will go around the room. I’ll write the sentences. What’s the first word?” Bridgette asked.

  “Worship,” study bitch said. “To show extreme devotion to. To hold up higher than anything else. To love and trust without question or criticism.” She defined worship.

  “My entire nation worshipped my father,” the slapper said, taking her turn first.

  “Your sentence doesn’t show that you know the meaning of the word worship,” study bitch said, challenging the slapper.

  “It does! People in my country lived and died for my father. People in my country murdered for my father. My father only needed to say that he didn’t like someone, or no longer needed someone, and by the next morning that person or those people would be found dead. Not just dead nicely. Dead in pieces. An arm here, the feet in a river. The head in a freezer,” the slapper, said sending a chill through the warm pink Princess Residence. I’m like now I know why the bitch is so bold.

  “Your father is just another dictator!” Bridgette screamed out too loud. We were all seated in the same space.

  “This is why I hate group assignments. Focus! Form one sentence which proves that you know and understand the meaning of the word,” you know who said. Everybody sat thinking.

  “People did not worship your father. They feared him. He must have been ruthless and reckless. The people feared for their own lives. That’s the reason they would carry out your father’s orders and wishes. Not because they worshipped him,” I said to the slapper, not really giving a fuck about the sentence assignment.

  “Silence! You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. Your father would have worshipped my father on his knees, making him only one of my father’s millions of servants,” the slapper bitch said. And before Bridgette could complete her outburst, “Why are we discussing our goddamn fathers? My father was a thug! He ruled over the trucking industry. So what! That’s him not me!…” I was dragging the slapper by her wrists. Her two helpers were each holding one of her feet. We were all pulling in opposite directions. Instead of saving the slapper from me, her dumb helpers were helping to painfully stretch the slapper out. Bridgette ran over and sat on the slapper’s back causing both sides to let go, and the slapper’s body to hit the floor.

  “My father, Ricky Santiaga, was top hustler. He ran a hundred-million-dollar empire. I worship him and so did
everybody else. Study bitch said that to worship means to love and trust without question. To hold up higher than all else. To have an extreme devotion to. That’s my father. Your father, from what you said, no one loved or trusted him, not even you. That’s why you could talk about him the way you do. You’re not devoted to your father. I am devoted to mine!” I was screaming. Not my usual style. I was teaching the slapper bitch a lesson. Oddly, I taught a lesson to myself. But like Brooklyn Momma said, “Your private business and your business-business, ain’t nobody’s business.” So I didn’t say nothing to no one about the lesson I just taught myself. “Without a doubt or a question, I worship my father,” I said to study bitch. “Write that down.”

  The whole day in the Princess Residence went the same way. Every single word in the twenty-one-word word list set it off. When we first started the assignment the alliances were clearly drawn. Me, Bridgette, and Pretty versus everyone else. But as the talk and anger, debate and fighting escalated, it highlighted how different we all were, even though Bridgette claimed we were all the same. Overall, the self-reflection word game did what I imagine they wanted it to do. It caused us to think about ourselves more intensely than we had ever had. It caused me to go a few layers deeper than my look, which is still extremely fucking important. It caused me to look much more closely at what Young Drummer, Bomber Girl, and these people here are trying to do. They want me to love my family and friends and things that I do really love. But, they want me to worship only Allah. I understand. The problem is this. I now realized that worship contains love, trust, and devotion without question. The truth is, because I am concentrating extremely hard not to lie… The truth is I do not love or trust Allah. I do not even know Allah. How could I love and trust one who I don’t know? Therefore, I cannot worship only Allah. Worship contains love.

  30.

  Lights-out. The seven of us were more comfortable with one another in the dark. In the light we had each shown our real faces and fists and ways and means. Tomorrow we would face ourselves one on one.

  “Bridgette, how did you end up here at the City of Mercy?” Pretty asked.

  “My aborted son had told me a long time ago that it’s the only way out. After bouncing around the entire Last Stop Before the Drop, I realized he was right. Hell, I went to the Last Stop synagogue first. They wouldn’t even let me in! Talking about I’m not one of them. I was like, ‘Well, open the goddamn door. Maybe I can become one of ya.’ Nope, never happened.” She laughed. “Then I went to the convent. They let everybody in. I used that place like a hotel and a headquarters. But the convent still wasn’t a way out. Then my son, he’s one of the UBS you saw on the stage. He was the first speaker, bright blue eyes like his father. Anyway, on his third mercy, he was like, ‘Time’s up, take it or leave it.’ I said yes, and then the magic words, Lah-il-la-ha-illah-huwa, and he brought me here to the City of Mercy. Interesting place. Good looking. But way too many goddamn rules. I mean it’s a high standard, and a lot of requirements.”

  “You sure never answer a question without doing a whole soliloquy,” study bitch said to Bridgette. “And those weren’t magic words you said to get here. They were sacred words from the Quran that we all need to study.”

  “Soliloquy!” Bridgette spit back.

  “It just means like a long solo speech. Just you doing all of the talking,” Pretty explained.

  “Study bitch is another college bitch,” I said, ’cause I could recognize the type and her style.

  “Ivy League, Dartmouth,” study bitch said proudly. Whatever that meant.

  “Oh you went to Dartmouth! I went to University of Pennsylvania!” Pretty said, excited. “Well, my daughter brought me here. She’s one of the UBS. I can’t help but love her. She’s very precious to me,” Pretty added.

  “Stop lying,” slapper bitch said to Pretty. “If she was precious you would never have killed her. All UBS are aborted souls. Your daughter included.”

  “Just stop!” Bridgette’s voice boomed. “I told you we are all victims. We are all the same. That includes you,” Bridgette said to slapper bitch. Slapper bitch laughed hard. I mean she cracked up.

  “Hell no, we are not! I’m not the same as any bitch, living or dead. And, I had to kill my son. How else could I have explained that I am his mother, and his real grandfather is his father also? I did him a favor,” slapper bitch said, then stopped laughing. Then the shit slapper had just said made everybody think twice and feel sorry for her. Everyone stopped speaking for some time.

  “What’s your M.O.D.?” Pretty asked aloud into the darkness, softly and suddenly, but without saying who she was speaking to.

  “M.O.D.?” Bridgette asked.

  “Method of death,” Pretty explained, like it was a casual question.

  “I killed myself,” Pretty then added softly, confessing into the dark air.

  “I killed myself too,” study bitch admitted. “I jumped right into the gorge and got impaled on a sharp rock,” she said without any emotion of any kind.

  “I murdered myself,” slapper bitch, daughter of the dictator, confessed, which is the same as suicide, but I guess she needed to state the same thing in some unique way for some dumb reason.

  “I was raped and murdered,” one of the slapper’s helpers said.

  “My mother killed me,” the other slapper’s helper said.

  “My goddamn husband murdered me,” Bridgette said in her wide-awake voice.

  “I was shot dead. That’s four murders and three suicides,” I said.

  “And don’t forget to add on that we each killed at least one of our children, so that’s at least seven dead kids between all of us,” one of slapper bitch’s helpers said.

  Then came my second realization on the night of the same day. I could never have committed suicide. I love myself to an extreme. I trust myself. I am devoted to myself. I worship myself. I was not thinking a lie. I was thinking only the truth. Young Drummer said that he loves me, but that he does not worship me. He worships and fears only Allah. There is a separation between love and worship then. Even though love contains love. Worship contains love. But love of anything or anyone else should not contain worship, even love of self. For me and for all of these souls to get out of the City of Mercy, which is an incredible “temporary” place to be, we have to make a sincere prayer to Allah, the One who created all souls. Sincere means “genuine, real, not mixed and not deceitful, pure.” I was blown away by that definition. Especially when I put two and two together and understood I had to make a sincere prayer. No one knows better than me what genuine, pure, not mixed means. This is the law of high fashion. If I want a mink coat, it should be 100 percent the fur of the mink. Not half or a quarter of or three-quarters of or a pinch of rat or dog hair or faux fibers or fillers. Genuine means genuine. The same goes for pure gold versus 14-karat gold or 18-karat gold, or etcetera. That’s not pure. Pure means pure, period.

  So to make one sincere prayer could take me forever. But I don’t have forever. The City of Mercy, Young Drummer said, is temporary in preparation of a sincere prayer, made by a soul who is not pretending and not playing. Bomber Girl said that the Last Stop Before the Drop had a population of five million souls. I had laughed at that. I never believed that. But now that I saw that the only way out was to make one sincere prayer, I saw why five hundred million souls are stuck there in the Last Stop Before the Drop. The only way up is sincerity. The alternative is down, which is the Eternal Fire. I don’t ever want to be a burnt bitch. I’m clear.

  The Eternal Fire was created by Allah. It is the place where souls who refuse to learn, grow, and change for the better are dropped and forever tormented. The Eternal Fire was created by Allah for those souls who refuse to worship Allah. “That’s me!” I shouted like a person rudely awoken from a nightmare terror. I sat up in my bed. It was not a nightmare because I was never asleep. Do not tell a lie, I reminded myself. It was not a nightmare. I haven’t gone to sleep yet, I confirmed. So the third realization was th
at worship contains love, yes. But worship also must contain fear. I reflected on what Young Drummer had said, I love you, Ma. I do not worship you. I love and fear only Allah. Bingo, that was it. In order to worship Allah, a person must have a genuine love for Allah and a genuine fear of Allah. Only with the genuine fear and genuine love can it be sincere worship.

  Thinking further, with my hustler’s mind, which is the mind I must use in order to figure out any complicated thing, Allah created evil. Allah created Shayton and all of Shayton’s army, which Shayton pretends to have created himself. Allah created the Eternal Fire. The same Allah who created the beautiful purple wisteria trees, the powerful sun, glowing moon, and shining stars also created the devil, the devil’s army, and the Eternal Fire. Pure genius! Because a bitch like me would never ever love Allah without fear. A bitch like me would never ever love Allah without knowing Allah personally. A bitch like me would never ever love Allah without first fucking with evil, actually fucking the devil and his son. A bitch like me would never even recognize evil if I saw it face-to-face, and I did, unless evil slapped me violently, then raped me with full aggression and hate and disregard the way Iblis did. I wouldn’t recognize it. And I didn’t. A bitch like me would have never had even a slight chance at Heaven, without an extended stay in the Last Stop Before the Drop.