FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof

by Kola Boof

  The Ajowans, however, were insulted by that story. They insisted that everything came from the Sea.

  They taught their children that a great mean shark and a young sweet dolphin had broken the laws of nature by not swimming away from each other, but by falling in love. An “inter-species” love so unnatural and impossible, testified the Ajowan griot men, that the Moon above took pity on the animals and turned them into a new creature--humans--and brought them out of the Sea to live on land.

  And the first man had taken the name that meant Wise One, provider and father--Kofi. And the first woman took the name that meant fertility, obedience and motherhood--Iyanla. And when they made love, it erupted a great approval of pouring rain from the sky and clouds...and from then on, the Ajowan people decreed by law that all its Kings be named Kofi and that all the Queens of Kofi be called Rain Iyanla.

  And that became the tradition of the Ajowans.

  ••

  So in my lifetime, you understand, there was no memory of the Moon’s curse upon mankind or of the old days when the Gods and the Ajowans had slaughtered children as human sacrifices, presenting their bloodied necks as dowry for the moon’s forgiveness. Those days had ended--because the first white child in history had been born!

  A blue eyed, orange haired boy that their ancestors had named Foghu (the living dead). They called him “the living dead” because his flesh was obviously too pale to have blood in it and because his eyes seemed flat and soulless like a shark’s.

  His birth, however, had been absolute proof to the conjure men of both tribes that the curse was lifted. The Moon had accepted their sacrifices and forgiven Africa by sending a white baby--obviously, a moon baby.

  “Now we must give him to the Sea”, decreed the highest holy man of the Ajowans. “For this is no mere human child, but a deity. We must worship him!”

  “Worship him!” screamed the voices of both nations as their torches of fire were lifted against the blackness of night and their cheering ululations drowned out the cries of the white baby as his throat was slit.

  To all the people of all the clans in both nations, this seemed a righteous end, because there was not a single moment that a single one of them imagined that such a special oddity--a white baby from the moon--could remain living as a mortal amongst humans. Obviously, he was to be worshipped.

  So they deified, as well...his charcoal mother, a cassava picker from the lower classes, and they proclaimed him a new name--Piru Nu (King of the Sharks) and they contracted the greatest artists and craftsmen from both tribes to fashion a sacred chair, ten feet tall and four feet wide. The inner compartments of the chair having room for the bodies of both mother and child as the infant one was placed at her living black breast and anointed with the beads and amulets of all the kings, queens and spirit men of both nations and then cast into the Sea--a floating ark.

  In those days we were grateful to Piru Nu and erected a great totem in the temples of both cultures, honoring him once a year by covering our faces, arms and chests with white ash and dancing a new dance--the dance of the sharks. In honor of his mother, because she had resembled a monkey in the face, we wouldn’t eat monkey meat for an entire month!

  And that was back then.

  ••

  I remember witnessing another miracle when I was just a little girl on my honeymoon night.

  As my husband slept on top of me, the coolness of earth beneath us, I had awakened, finding it difficult to breathe, and had slipped from under him and went out of the hut, hoping to find a fresh gust of air.

  But it turned out that the sprawl of African evening was even more humid, and it seemed that somehow...the Moon was burning down against the jungle. Hotter than any sun I’d ever walked under. Languid and thick as a wild dog’s lust just before it mounts and rapes a sheep.

  I became entranced by its power and anger, and there seemed to be a creamy yoke of smoke wafting around the pearl of its white glow.

  I heard a moan that only a black woman can make. Tear-sugared and caterpillar velvet like a note she had meant to sing but choked on.

  I was freshly de-virginized that night, the ache and the blood between my tiny swollen pussy like a rash...but still, I was a little girl and I didn’t really know about sex or passion or the art that makes delirium cook a couple’s lovemaking like honey seared by brimstone.

  Crackling sticks under foot, I tiptoed barefoot along the cool earth, toward the pretty moaning, and went down a path that led to a shiny, shiny...shiny black lake.

  My mouth parted when I saw them.

  The shadow space of a man and a woman so black you could see the whole world being made.

  His muscles wrapped around her shoulders like a python embracing the beating heart of a doomed swan, and yet her throat (such a long throat!) let go of the moans...the fervor and beauty of each one resembling some part of musicality, but too indecent to abide singing.

  Everything about it--was beautiful and wet.

  The light rain, hot enough to make steam as it pelted the black lake...and the dripping white sperm of the moon. Yes, dripping like your age’s candle-wax, falling hot and white across their black embrace, their black kiss, their black dance, their black need. Cursing and hissing as it fell from out of the Moon--like spit. Upon grace.

  Moonlight. Watching the fuck.

  And my own young body trembling, the bell of woman’s damnation throbbing in my stomach like a growing need to urinate...as I saw her fall slow like insects do when they die in flight, her body taking to earth with the yield of a female panther, her dark shadow creating the canvas...for dreams.

  And I could tell by the way that he navigated her bones and curves, and by the way that she moaned so soulfully, that they really loved each other. And that, somehow, their love was not a living love...but a love from where I am now, in the land after life...the other side. An eternal love.

  It had something to do with me and all mankind, the slapping fart sounds that I heard as he fucked and kissed her at the same time, their necks twisting like vines up a tree; his eyes closed, hers open to stare at him; the shards of creamy moon jism smelling like sea anemones and burning jungle gardenia as it hit their cooking dance and steamed with the shiny shine of the lake.

  It rained African rain...and the drops were sweet as sugar!

  And once I could smell the fresh wildness of her pussy, and mistook it for oysters, I wanted it, too--him inside me. To take me and twist me and love me that way. I wanted it, too. But the closer I moved towards them, the more I saw the shine of the lake. The light playing tricks on me and my heart beating like a drum, louder and louder with each step I took.

  When I got there, it was just children...kids! Two black, bony little naked Africans wrestling and laughing. Two boys for all I could tell, but no...I don’t know.

  I hated myself for years for not staying where I was, because I never saw them again. Or felt the beautiful energy that shined out of them like points of light flickering in a lavender diamond.

  And I never got a taste of what she got, but always fantasized that perhaps in some other lifetime I might find him...touch him...next lifetime.

  ••

  Children of Africa will remember that our parents explained romantic love between a man and a woman in an animalistic way. They called it--“the insanity”.

  “It comes over you”, they would say, “like heat stroke or rabies or a lion leaping out of a bush. You have use of your mind, but the feeling is so powerful, you dismiss your mind. You are high from the insanity. It’s too good to let it go. Your insecurity needs it, your mind needs it, your body craves it. Your soul, which comes from the other side and not from this world, remembers it. The insanity. It is not a growing love.”

  But being a female, I didn’t get to choose the man that I felt “the insanity” for. I had to marry the one who paid my parents dowry...and in time, I grew to love him and need him and respect him and cherish him...and there was nothing insane about it, but our par
ents called this kind of love--growing love--and this was the kind they meant when they said, “Love wisely…not...insanely.”

  But wise or not, I can never forget the way that the shadow man’s charcoal hands handled the sloping curves of the panther woman’s charcoal body. She may as well have been one of those violins the Europeans caress with their chins or a precious stone from under the sea mud. There was something more naturally human than humanly civil about it. And yet, the two of them together, had rocked my soul and melted the Moon.

  ••

  Only in death have I appreciated my name. Soraya--the observant one.

  Tonight, I am watching the ritual again.

  The “Night of the Living” festival.

  The Gods and the Ajowans coming in legion, by foot, by oxen, by royal carry platter and by the thousands, the Gods dressed in flowing chains of cowrie shell, gold nugget neck collars and ebony-carved masks while the Ajowans came buff and naked with ornate headdress and red clay-painted faces...the ritual congregating along the coastline of the Ajowan’s great city, Mars. There they stood, the torch bearing architects of the modern world--a thousand years removed from the lovemaking of God and Ajowa. No longer remembering that there ever existed a curse or a white moon baby to remove it, and certainly no such legend as a flying underwater time when there was...no such thing...as time.

  I was always there for the ceremony in Mars.

  Three Ngba girls (God virgins) and three Mars girls (Ajowan virgins), united only for that night by a white dot on their foreheads, walked as bare skinned slaves into the ocean tide clutching poisonous berries in their hands and raising their voices in harmony as their young eyes fastened on the Moon, their dutiful suicides by sea lying the foundation as the God nation and the Ajowan nation stood for all humanity and unbound the ritual of call and response:

  “We come from the Moon!” sang the Gods. And their legions of tall, thin sinewy charcoal men raised the newly born sons of their nation above their heads and presented them to the full moon.

  “We come from the Sea!” replied the Ajowans. And the new fathers amongst their pure chocolate Adonis men raised the newly born sons above their heads and presented them to the moon.

  Each father let a little blood from his son.

  Erupting from silence, the women of both nations ululated wildly, their noise growing until it was epic enough to scare all animal life out of the jungle’s light and into deeper blackness, the ivory moon-glow glistening against the long, bouncing titties of the ebony brown Ajowans and reflecting as silver against the bare elegant shoulders and blue black faces of the charcoal God women.

  The King of the God people and the Kofi of the Ajowans then came together, each one bearing a wooden female doll in whose belly compartment their great spirit men had placed the richest, darkest soil from the most sacred earth representing each of their finest growing fields.

  The King of the God people took a nugget of his dirt and placed it in the waiting mouth of the Kofi leader, saying, “I give you the mother.”

  Then as the Kofi leader was eating the dirt in his mouth, he took a cluster of Ajowan soil and placed it on the tongue of the God King and reciprocated by saying, “I give you the mother.”

  All Africa cheered as the Kings ate dirt.

  And on the body of Ajowa, African soil, stood the whole world of humanity. Where it had always stood.

  That much they did remember.

  ••

  By the time my sixteenth child was born, my breasts were hanging long and flat as curtains of raw liver. Milk dripped against my waist from the nipples...and huge green flies gathered on my hip bone to drink it.

  I would swat them from the precious faces of my babies, and from my face as well. My curious gaze always longing for that secret door that opens and shuts at any given moment in black children’s eyes. I call it the soul door, because it’s not just silver light atop black inky eyes...no...black children are celestial-eyed.

  Black children are celestial-eyed.

  I was Soraya--”the one who is observant”--and I gave birth to seventeen healthy, mudd-fine, jungle-nappy sons and daughters. And let me tell you...

  Black children are celestial-eyed.

  Everything that ever was and everything that ever will be...is in their eyes. They look just like God. Living and dreaming at the same time.

  And that...was why I wanted him to exist, you understand.

  Me, Soraya.

  I wanted him. Not my village husband...but him.

  ••

  Black women always want him.

  That’s all we want. That’s why our pussy is so sweet.

  Hoping it’s him coming out of our good wild stinky stuff.

  Even at the start of the world, when African women laid around naked in dens hugged up with other women, it was that part of him that’s in a woman’s “plans” that we wanted. Like the white lizard seeking honeysuckle, we will do anything...dream trees into being, dream up new colors until the sky shows them off, make drinks out of fallen rain and slash our pussies with jagged rocks, stitching them tight and tiny. Put plates in our mouths and stretch our lips and ears past our knees--like slaves used to do back east.

  Walk into the sea swallowing poisoned berries.

  Weep and weep...because only we know that no woman can love a man like a black woman can. Yet...it’s the finding him.

  And even if they never find him, African girls are walking women. That’s why the African maiden is the least obese on the planet, even surpassing the strong but boy-shaped Asian in “harmony of shape”. She walks everywhere.

  Because the village mothers told her, “Do not...look for him!”

  But there are so few of him...that he almost never exists anyway.

  So while the other village mothers were saying, “You’ll never find him”, I decided that it made more sense to just...give birth...to him.

  As an African woman, let me tell you...this is the greatest earthly power that any woman has. The power...to give birth to the people that she needs. And you will notice that whenever a woman forgot that power, she was alone.

  I wanted him.

  I wanted him for my daughters and for their daughters and for the whole world of sweet, sad women. I dreamt a dream for them.

  While my husband was on top of me, and while my sixteen children slept in ground dug-out floors, their bodies safely netted from insects, I dreamt “him” into being. His body forming in my uterus like a curl of smoke--no, it was more like sea mist and wind song. The bones in his back not coming until my husband collapsed atop my black ocean of a body, sweating profusely, his moan enchambering me with a helplessness...and the cut and tied-together muscles of my pussy clutching and clenching his staff...so as to milk out every precious drop of the new king.

  I wanted him...so that other women could be touched by dreams, and so that the love in us could fill the earth with our longing.

  So that there could be insanity.

  But my only mistake was that in longing for love...I had become insane. And that night, when I left my husband sleeping in the hut and went out into the moonlight...I was startled by a sudden, sharp slap across my face.

  It felt like my mother’s old black hand. Stinging the shit out of my cheek as the fingers and the palm of it, invisible as air, just flung out of nowhere and popped me across the face, hard and belligerent!

  “Insufferable fucking humans!”

  In shock I held my cheek, the pain bringing tears to my eyes as my heart began to beat like a drum.

  I looked up at the Moon, its galaxy-bright whiteness so overwhelming that I thought it would blind me, and with each breath...I knew that I was insane and that I had been slapped and that I was pregnant with it, my dream, and that the Moon wanted to reach down and rip it out of me.

  But I held my belly and I loved my dream; I loved it.

  “Love and dreams belong to me”, said the Moon.

  I shook my head, delirious with ecstasy. I said,
“No...I am woman. I am the mother of God. I am more powerful than the Moon. My dreams belong to me!”

  The Moon laughed and said, “Then dream about this.”

  And when I fell backwards...I fell awake.

  ••

  It became a pregnancy licked by tape worms.