by Nana Nkweti
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes…. I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
—ZORA NEALE HURSTON
The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the ‘Living Infinite.’
—JULES VERNE
A day later, another farewell, in Nala’s NOLA backyard. Four women—a Mami Wata, a melusine, a selkie, and a siren—made their way into moonlight. Skyclad. Naked footfalls muted by dew-stroked grass. Wading into the warm waters of a pool, they let the change come over them, one by one by one by one. Four creatures swam. Fin to flipper. They floated. Eyes tugged skyward. Scales laid bare. Nala opened her throat to give voice to her farewell, ululating with her sister-cousins, their fin song rising to join the chorus of cicadas, a slow and strange dirge reminiscent of whale song in somber seas. Barely clinging to the heavens, the moon hung low and full. Nala waxed and waned by its leave, its lush hush pressed upon her, waiting on something, her howl perhaps. Quick as a whirlpool, she whipped her caudal fin beneath her, propelled upward with such force that agitated water roiled below. Nala hung in the stars for a moment, wild hair blotting out the moon, closer to heaven and her love.
Fin
Kinks
Relaxed
They descended as one. Lying in wait at the 125th Street subway exit, they were legion, scent coming to her on a cold gust of air, clot thick with crayfish, cracked asphalt fumes, and blue hair grease. They were three, no six, now eight African hair braiders, a bulwark of ankara head ties and fleshy, bangled arms blocking her way. Neon flyers outstretched and at the ready. Theirs the bright fluorescent smiles of big-box store greeters: artificial, flickering, gone. Voices cried out, “Sista, sista, sista. We give you good style, good price.” Moving ever closer, cutting off egress to the snow-banked sidewalks and wintry world beyond.
Jennifer Tchandep tensed at their approach, self-consciously raising a hand to her own relaxed strands, extending the other to palm three, then four, urgently bestowed business cards, smile hard-edged as she knifed through their fold. A nearby trash can caught her eye but theirs were on her still, so she tucked down her head, moving onward. She walked down an embassy row of beauty care shops: Dominican pelo salons, South Asian eyebrow threaders, and Korean beauty supplies purveying its mine ’cause I bought it hair—human, synthetic, prepacked, or by the pound, colors rainbowing from acid-green ombré to #60’s icy blond, flowing bone straight or deeply twisting, with a yin-yang of stickered prices, showcasing fire sales on Indian Remy and sky-high markups on virgin Brazilian.
Jennifer’s toes were steeped in wet, high-heeled suede boots ruined now. Each step sinking them deeper into the snow-swaddled treacheries of the Harlem streets: the crooked, bottle-shard grins of last night’s stoop revelries, the gnawed bones and fatty-rind discards of sated people, the crumpled flyers extolling the virtues of Falani’s shea butter—homemade and small batched, ancient properties prized by dusky Nubian queens— now available to you and yours for just $5.99.
She rested against the flaking-paint dandruff of a lamppost, adjusting the heft of the manuscript in her arms. Poorly bound, it had chafed through her light coat for three blocks, but she’d kept walking, seeking distance and solitude. Steady now. Breathing deep. Icicled air whistling through the deep caverns of her lungs. Damn, the women had startled her. Last night, she had shed her city skin, left its prickly-pear alertness between Egyptian cotton sheets. She felt raw, all laid bare, shivering in the tongue-ripened flesh her lover had licked and bitten till dawn, leaving her dazed and unaware of the world and its specters. Till now.
She discarded the flyers, the cards, in movements both guilty and surreptitious. Those poor braiders, she thought, working 25/8, all walk-in comers welcome, so many asylum seekers fleeing war zones and other savagery she could never fathom. For them, America might never be a land of milk and honey, their dreams curdling, life-sapping hours spent hunched over this client, then that client, then another other client’s crown. She had watched silently, complicit, as braiders rubbed and rubbed the rictus of sore, creaking fingers, had heard their stories piecemeal, in salons or in public television excerpts revealing a litany of village outrages: gun-toting sons in threadbare camo, other sons trekking in the dust and dark, penned in cages for their own protection. Like other Americans, she had borne witness to these quotidian horrors telescoped from afar. At times, she wished she could unknow, unsee. A disgusting frailty, yes, she knows, especially because she’s supposed to be African too, isn’t she? Sometimes in bed, in the deep velvet of night, she shuts her eyes tight and makes herself see, lets the images linger across the dark theater of her lids, glimpses hut-bound relatives whose woes by birthright should have been known to her, as intimate as a child’s prayers whispered, or a blow—quick and hard-knuckled—from a lover spurned.
Braided
Prodigal sons and daughters of the diaspora—brought to this nation in chaos and chains, so many still shackled in prisons of the mind and the state. Emancipate yourselves! Return to the welcoming bosom of the African motherland. Go home to a place where Black lives ALWAYS matter. You may be ill-equipped for that physical journey, crippled— financially, emotionally—by the very nation that you wet-nursed and laid bricks for, the very society that would sooner gun you down than give you a job. But I’m here to tell you that you are ready, that we all can make that spiritual pilgrimage. Make that reconnection to what the unenlightened call primitive because they, in their false supremacy, privilege the almighty dollar over the lives of men and women like you, like me.
—DR. KWAME B. JOHNSON
It was 11:00 p.m. Bleary-eyed, Jennifer turned from the office wall clock, still elbow deep in editing Unearthing Your Inner Ancestor, the debut essay collection of Dr. Kwame B. Johnson—oft-quoted academic, Black blogosphere sensation, and also the man whose home she had found herself skulking from in the wee hours that morning. She was getting too old for this walk of shame shit. She was tired, good and tired. Yawning, she pushed back from a desk littered with pulp and type. The late hour had a feeling of finality, a signature of the blood pact she had made for her promotion to senior editor at Onyx Ink—a fledgling imprint providing “a hip, new alternative for the discriminating reader of color.” Or so claimed the sanguine memos of the international publishing giant that employed her. She yawned once more.
The day had been exhausting from the jump.
Howard Booker had practically been jumping out of his skin that morning.
“No, absolutely not, Mr. Booker,” she repeated, for the fifth time during their meeting. Running late, Kwame’s funk on her still, she sat listening in exasperation as the old man raged on. At her. At his own impotence. He was her publisher in name only, a man grand-fathered in with the acquisition of his self-owned press so proudly “Black-owned, Black-operated for Forty-Three Years!” Or so claimed the rusted tin window sign of his now-shuttered Harlem shop.
“It’s not just Antoine Deforest,” she continued. “We’re revisiting everyone’s contracts. You, better than anyone, know how unmerciful this industry can be. Best seller or bust.”
He grew blustery then. Leaning over her desk, his puffy gray Afro a sooty snowball hurtling toward her head. “Twenty-three years, young lady. Twenty-three years I’ve been printing that boy’s books. He’s family.”
She stood then. Squared up.
“And that’s exactly why we’ve kept him on this long,” she said, “in spite of piss-poor book sales and, quite frankly, some pretty damn lackadaisical output on his part.”
He turned from her, gazing out through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Twenty-three years,” he muttered once more, his words deflated, a winded swan song. He was a proud one, a self-made man whose press, with its backlist of Afro-Caribbean treatises and Harlem Renaissance reprints, had fought the good fight, yet ultimately lost to street lit
titles like Pimps Need Love Too and A Hustler’s Revenge: The Return of Makaveli Jesus.
She backed down. She was sorry, but it was the job, them’s the breaks, she told herself. Her new title, her oh so substantial salary, this shiny new office with its beveled-mirror Borghese desk—these all were markers that someday soon would come due. The higher-ups expected results: speedy and rocket-fueled. And yes, it had chafed at first, her role as hatchet woman for her own. She had risen through the publishing ranks on her own merit, championing and grooming a wide spectrum of emerging talents, then suddenly she was asked to head up an imprint, for—wink, wink—“her demographic.” Cotton-picked to be their negro whisperer, their urban interlocutor. It was deeply irksome, but she adapted, did the good work she could, when she could. Trying to save more than she lost.
“Look, Mr. Booker, Howard,” she began again, voice softer, tactful she hoped. “We can still push his ebooks. We can—”
“Twenty-three years,” he said, for the final time, arms flapping upward toward the cloudless blue sky, somehow winged in his billowing dashiki as he turned away and took flight.
The clock read 11:30 p.m. now. Another yawn went smothered and palmed. If she hurried, she could finish the last chapter, finally on page 737 of all eight-hundred-odd pages of the manuscript. She would need to make substantial cuts; he did go on so, this man. He liked the sound of his own voice, but fortunately so did she, so ready she was to gamble, throw a hot hand of dice, that her readers would too.
Thumb bookmarking her page, she absently scratched a phantom braid that itched like the memory of a lost limb. The hairstyle had barely lasted a week, a brief seven-day countdown, before the Brillo-pad itch and scratch drove her back to the braid salon to perch on the lumpen leather of a swivel chair once again. The braider had harrumphed and tut-tutted her disapproval even as she clipped and unraveled each byzantine plait from Jennifer’s head. Lanky Kanekalon extensions inched across linoleum floor tiles, like worms gone to ground.
Midnight, 12:00 a.m. It was a Wednesday. Kwame would be free to see her. She hurriedly wrapped up—logged off screens, replaced files—before resolutely shutting the office door behind her. That itch again. For his sake, she sometimes missed the braids. He had loved to twist them, fist them as he took her from behind. At times, she still felt the sting, that urgent tug at her temples, the quick snap of her neck backward as he took it all, had his way with her—his a hard way, one of gutters and gritty cries.
Locked
Jennifer’s best friend would later deny it all, threaten to swear on a stack of Bibles, Torahs, Qur’ans, grimoires even—that she was innocent of the whole affair. Egobunma, best known as Ego, also known as Jennifer’s bestie, brought Kwame into her life. She had strong-armed their crew into attending a “Get Up, Stand Up” reading series one Wednesday night, part of an ongoing campaign to transform their clique into social justice warriors (she was determined to single-handedly reclaim that title from those who hurled it insultingly). Only loyalty to their friend had pried Jennifer and Jada, her co-editor/work wife, from their desks and looming deadlines. They fully embraced the chance to support Ego’s altruism. On the weekends. But this was an emergency. Ego was getting grief from her parents about her ill-paying nonprofit “work,” their long-distance chagrin fulsomely expressed in weekly $3/minute phone diatribes from their hilltop Lagos estate. Their brilliant daughter was still unmarried, still “squandering” her Ivy League degree on do-gooding: a variety of projects on the continent. In February, she was relieving Third World debt; in August, eradicating FGM; this winter it was famine relief. “Adulting” was a bitch when you wanted to change the world.
So there they were, in a packed community college auditorium, hands daisy-chained as Ego tugged them forward, squeezing through the audience on a hunt for three empty seats side by side. There were none adjoined, so Jennifer landed on the aisle, next to an older Black woman who was such an avowed fan she’d snuck off work early and caught two buses to be there that night, she shared. She offered Jennifer half a corned beef sandwich, apologizing profusely for the smell of her delayed din-din, whipping out an unbruised Granny Smith apple from a Ziploc baggie in place of the first offering Jennifer declined.
Munching on apple, Jennifer scanned the program and its brief bio for a sense of this Kwame Johnson who had ladies playing hooky from their jobs to be there. Her first impression was not good. The program was already twenty minutes behind schedule and Jennifer wished she was back at the office. Reviewing manuscripts on her phone was a nonstarter and she’d already dispatched all her pending work emails. She looked at her friends, seated together, three rows back. Ego gave her a look of chagrin. Jada, ever the optimist, gave her two effusive thumbs-up, her trusty knitting needles in each hand, stabbing the air. Jennifer cackled at the disturbed look of the man to Jada’s left who leaned away as if Jada had yelled “en garde.” Classic Jada. She used any moment of downtime to stitch away and recently had started making whimsical cozies for her two ornate box turtles, Porgy and Bess.
The stage lights flickered and Jennifer’s row mate whooped in excitement. “You going to love him.”
Jennifer replied with a tepid smile as the lights dimmed. She waited.
It was his locks Jennifer had noticed first, coiled high atop his head like drowsy fattened cobras. Then the man spoke. And oh mercy and my, my, my, she was mesmerized, fucking gobsmacked by the play of muscle and mudcloth and spotlit brown skin. He strode across the stage. Fearsome and convicted, like some warrior-priest of old.
Something shook loose in Jennifer’s throat, she swallowed, felt starved, ravenous.
Afterward, she shook loose from her trance, readied her business card and her spiel. Cut through the coterie of ankh-chained women who swarmed the author, clinging to him with worshipful eyes and the cloying stank of their patchouli.
“Jennifer Tchandep. Carbon House Publishing.” She extended a gold-embossed card. “Give me a call and let’s get you onto bookshelves.”
Kwame scanned her face, then the card. “It says Onyx Ink.”
“We’re an imprint,” she said, “catering to premier readers of color.”
His smile, slow-coming, was sharp. “So they put you in charge of the publishing ghetto. Books for the ‘Coloreds-Only’ crowd.”
Her fingers curled into a fist.
“Relax now, relax. I’m just playing with you, Queen.” His second smile was high wattage, full of blinding, mind-numbing charm. “I respect the hustle. We’ll talk.”
She noted spitefully that his right canine was slightly longer than the left. At least there was that. But this was business so she collected herself, unfurled fists gone too tight, felt exiled blood light into her fingertips, here and there and here again, like frenzied fireflies, mating. Hands behind her back now, she rubbed and rubbed the rictus of her fingers, then willed them back to lie harmlessly at her sides.
She would someday recall that moment, could chart the evolution to her smaller, hush now self, to that woman who conceded all, every bit of her body his, down to the marbled skin of her very own teeth.
But this was the beginning so she flashed those pearlies. Smiled wide and somewhat true.
“You could say that,” she answered him brightly. “Or you could say that our readers and writers need a room of their own. They need—”
“—affirmative action, the Black literati edition.”
“—market share, the might and the power of numbers.”
At that he went quiet. Money no laughing matter, this much she knew. She looked him over, took his measure, leaving the weight of her gaze on his bones, then took leave with one parting shot. “Call me, Dr. Johnson. Ask around, I’m very good.”
They met for lunch at Joloff, a popular Senegalese restaurant in Brooklyn, and Kwame’s favorite eatery according to a glowing profile—he’s Ta-Nehisi Coates meets Marcus Garvey!—in the New York Amsterdam News. Though she was fifteen minutes early, Jennifer found him table-side, already seated a
nd waiting.
“Right on time. Come, come,” he said, beckoning her.
She walked over, stood by her chair a moment, which lapsed into another, expecting Kwame to stand. He took a long sip of his drink, a viscous, bloody concoction—bissap, she later learned. She seated herself.
A waiter approached the table with a menu in hand that Kwame waved away imperiously.
“She’ll have the tiebuu jeun,” he told the waiter, then to her, “Trust me. It’s the only thing worth eating here, almost as good as the one I had in Dakar. You know, the restaurants downtown are whitewashed, more about candle lights and crisp linen than your meal. Joloff keeps it real. Authentic.”
The waiter’s face was placid, noncommittal. “Anything to drink? We have a superb house white.”
“A glass of red,” said Jennifer, her tone daring Kwame to order for her again. She was filled with irritation and a strange charge she had yet to identify.
“So, you think your book is going to free Black folk from mental slavery?” she asked.
“I think eating should always be a communal experience,” he said, that right eyetooth of his flashing.
What in the world was this negro taking about? Jennifer thought. Now what she actually said was much more well measured, succinct. “How so?”
“Eating,” he said, “is an act of nourishment. It’s not about this spoon. It’s about coming … together.” He licked said spoon clean—neatly and thoroughly.
Lord.
“What it’s about is tradition. About families gathered in a hut, sitting around one dish or one fire, telling their stories, eating as a whole, nourishing their souls. That’s what the book is about. Nourishment. Are you hungry, Ms. Tchandep?”