by Kola Boof
The right hand of the fetus grew huge and knuckle-fisted inside me, clutched and vicious as the giant claw of a stone crab. Beating me. Ripping my flesh inside. Socking and punching with each new morning.
In the sun’s hot work day, pounding grain with my youngest child strapped to my back, I bent over cramped in pain, my eyes filling with tears as my heart--the heart of a mother--ripped like silk webs.
He opened his ass and shit all inside me.
With feet of brass, he kicked and stomped against my walls as though trying to make a window.
I couldn’t sleep at night, because his nappy headed skull would shake like a Pagomba rattle, his scream lit in my ears and mind like the bright fury of a meteor shower. His kicking and punching...killing me.
It rained the night he was born. Pure, sweet African rain.
“She’s becoming very sick”, I heard my husband wince to the circle gathered around my garden bed.
“She’s been bleeding for two weeks!” my sister complained.
“She’s going to die”, said Seed Smoker, the old family griot. “The baby’s inside her, fucking her.”
“No...not my Soraya. She’s strong as a lioness!”
“There’s too much love in her, Akiffo. Too much love kills a woman. They go insane.”
Seed Smoker lifted his sharpest stone. “I’m going to have to take the baby, Akiffo. One of them is not going to make it.”
He made a few incisions, and then as he fought to get control of the swinging and kicking baby boy, the child lunged out with a mouth full of sharp teeth and bit deep into my vagina. Biting clamp-jawed like a pit bull. But by then I was already dead, and in death, powerful enough to choke the muscles of his infant throat to a crushing close, the walls of my vagina twisting the soft bones of his skull like clay rolls as my umbilical cord snapped his wind pipe and popped out his left eye.
“...eeek!” he went, and that’s what mothers are for, too.
“Lost them both”, said Seed Smoker.
••
Into the bright blue yonder I went...both cloud of the Gods and roaring riptide of the Ajowans attending my train like sea mist and wind song. My black, black arms cradling the beautiful healthy Prince...my kiss against his dark face in tender victory, because the Moon had not won. I had won.
I had brought my dream into being.
My precious, precious insanity...with his gently kicking feet, his halo of nappy African hair and his celestial, ever-timeless dark eyes. His sweet, sweet smile laughing up at my soul like the shimmering twinkle on night-water.
To the edge of heaven I went...to its ocean.
I knelt down and placed his divine body into the cradle of the sea, and of course, he took to water like a bolt of lightning.
Earth shatteringly! Defiantly!
Eternally.
My love.
Oh!...
my...love!
•
The Kingdom of Ajowa-land
__________________
Several Thousand
Years
Later
~~~
~~
Chapter 1
•
A man, at sixteen, must marry--but the Sea wanted Prince Shango Ogun all to herself.
Warriors from his father’s vast army stood about the shoreline now, informing him that they had been sent by his parents to escort him to the royal stool at once, but Shango dove beneath the water’s clear window pane, deliberately ignoring them, his body spiraling downward like a dolphin’s. He despised his nation’s edict that he must now choose a bride, because if there was to be any marriage, then Shango would rather it be between himself and the Sea. Shango wasn’t just a Prince and a loner, he was a dreamer, and in order to dream, he needed to be underwater by himself.
These were still the days, you understand, when the Sea could gently masturbate the genitals of those who swam inside her, her silky tickling waters en-mouthing the swimmer’s sensitivity...or...a favorite plant, touched by the hand of its dearest one, could ejaculate warm jism, filling the jungle garden with birth odor and tilly bees, their droning stingers poking butterflies into falling deaths of ecstasy...or a warrior bathing in the stream at midnight could find the tight tender pucker of his asshole, as he bent to wash the bottom of his foot, delicately beam-fingered by a ray of hot moonlight.
The natural cleanliness of the sensual world was still so pure and wild back then, so overwhelmingly dominated by spirit lust and sheep laughter that human beings preferred to do most of their living outdoors, their sun burnt black bodies brushed up against by playful virgin breezes or wedges of sun, juicy-thick as daydreams or rain...blue and artful as the children it drenched. Shango Ogun loved it all and wanted nothing more from the earth.
“Royal Prince...royal prince!” the soldiers called as they followed Shango’s swimming dark shadow along the shoreline. “You will get us in trouble if you do not come along peaceably. It has been two weeks since you ignored your father’s summons!”
Shango could stay underwater for incredible lengths of time or could suddenly lightning bolt himself out to deeper sea, and thus figuring that one of them had better do something fast, one of the smarter soldiers hollered out, “This situation is taking its toll on your beloved grandmother!”
The other men looked at the lying soldier with pause as he continued shouting, “It’s breaking your grandmother’s heart! She’s been crying all the day and all the night, worried that...”
Immediately...Shango Ogun sprang up from the sea, the sea rolling down his body like sheaths of mirrors as the smartly lying soldier thought to himself--”what a perfect name that Hoodi, the ruling Kofi of Ajowa and his beautiful queen, Rain Iyanla, have given their son”. For as much as the soldier was jealous of Shango’s privileged status, he could not deny that the impassioned idealism of the Prince did remind him of thunder (Shango) and that the massive span of the sixteen year old’s chest, the heavy black fruit of his loins and the pillar-like muscularity of his legs could have very well been inspired by iron (Ogun). He was bigger and stronger than one third the warriors in Kofi Hoodi’s army, noticed the soldier. Yes, thunder and iron (Shango Ogun) was the perfect name for him.
“It is normal”, said the smart soldier to the approaching Prince,”...for a young man to be nervous about the business of choosing a proper wife.” As the smart soldier said this, his eyes darted in and out of Shango’s stare as if he were more fit to be royalty than the one born into it. His mouth saying, “A concubine can be any stray desire, but a wife must bare the fruit of his family’s blood and bring back to life all its greatest men. A wife gives us life forever.”
Shango said nothing as he boarded the terracotta carry platter upon which he would sit as the elephant carried him back to Banjula City.
“And tell us”, asked the smart soldier with a smile to the handsome prince. “Which one of the virgins is qualified to stand behind you, young master?”
“Silence!” the sixteen year old commanded the older man. “I don’t wish to share my thoughts today. I’d rather be underwater.”
“Yes, 0 master.”
The elephant was raised and made to move with a fey slap across the hinds. And onward bound they went, up from the beach and into the jungle and beyond the clay cliffs and grass flats, their trek taking them past the ruins of their once great city, Mars. Only the ancient totems stood there now and a few of the iron pits where their ancestors had once made rubber from the gum Arabic plants they purchased from the ear-stretched, plate-mouthed Africans of the interior.
“Fan my chest.”
“Yes, 0 master.”
••
Yes, 0 master.
The words lingered in Shango Ogun’s mind, because there hadn’t been a single day in his life when he hadn’t heard one of his potential brides address him that way. These were the “nobility virgins”--the daughters of rich men who had been born on the same day as Shango Ogun, but four years after him. They had been sold by their fathers to
the Kofi Hoodi, as was the practice when the son of a King was born, and raised up with Shango thereafter to be his loyal servants and to be groomed and tutored in the ways of royal marriage by Shango’s grandmother, Mother Iyanla. Now he would have to carry out the ritual of OorUtu...a marriage rite that required him to penetrate the virginity of each girl in a single night and then choose one of them to be his royal wife while the others were runner ups to the status of concubine to the Prince and servant to the wife.
Shango found it to be a thankless and painful decision to make, because after growing up with all five girls as his servants and playmates, he had truly come to love and appreciate each one for her own special uniqueness.
Tandi, the prettiest one, and the one his father liked best, was round and very thick as the Ajowans preferred their women. She had rich ebony smooth skin like Shango’s mother, large oval shaped almond brown eyes hooded by long peacock lashes and about her the most--Shango loved her smile. It was brighter than the sun, but still, she was not his favorite one.
His mother’s pick, Keisha, was extremely black-skinned (which meant, as many African tribes believed, that her womb would be more likely to produce an abundance of athletic warrior boys as opposed to sentiment sons or girl-childs), and she, too, was soft, cushy and thick, but her interest was more in sitting up under his mother than going with him underwater to catch crabs.
Beeni was the intellectual one. She liked to go down to the abandoned lion’s dens and read their foot prints to see who they had been in a past life. She also had gigantic breasts and had fascinated Shango all his life with her stories about the baboon elves that lived up under them. Anat, the skinny one, was the finest cook and the most artistic, but then again, she talked incessantly and hated swimming.
That left only his grandmother’s favorite--Soraya.
Soraya was the quiet, observant one. She had light honey colored skin, which was extraordinarily rare and was considered by many tribes to be the sure sign of a spirit living halfway in the human world and halfway in the next world, or as the Ajowans would say--”the color doesn’t show all the way because the person’s spirit lives in two worlds, simultaneously, without committing to either”--and because these rare light skinned people tended to darken in old age (a sign that they had finally chosen the tribe), it was believed that they were magnets for good spiritual luck and prosperity, so this was why Mother Iyanla told her grandson, “Soraya will bring peace to your house. She will bear healthy sons and be a warm cushion beneath your feet. It’s been a hundred years since our family had a good luck bride.”
Shango Ogun nodded to himself now--then Soraya it is, grandmother. And yet, he was very sad.
“What is this sadness, great Prince?”
“I’m too lonely to be married”, muttered Shango, thoughtfully.
And upon his arrival at the mud flats which led to the walls of Banjula City, his saddened eyes fell upon the very poor lower classes and his brow raised, because it was quite obvious that the entire minion was waiting to glimpse him as he returned to his father’s stool.
“What’s going on here?”, Shango asked the smart soldier as the others guided his elephant down the road. Shango had never seen anything like it. The poor and disadvantaged were everywhere, their usually overworked bodies separated from their tasks, bare breasted women with babies strapped to their backs and baskets atop their heads, their shiny black eyes staring up at him as murmuring voices announced that the Prince was passing through, but not a single smile or nod. Just curiosity and fear. “Why is everyone out to greet me? Why are they looking at me that way?”
“There’s been a miracle since you’ve been gone”, replied the smart soldier, guardedly. “A great...unbelievable...shocking...miracle, 0 master.”
“What is this you say?”
“I cannot explain it to you, Prince Shango. It is up to your father and the Spirit Rulers to explain it.”
Shango’s blood raced and he felt fearful and nervous, because in all his life, he had never seen the people so united by murmur and stare. He picked up his drum from the drum holder and began to beat a message to his father...
the Prince is arriving at Banjula City. I want to know of the great miracle before then! I am not a baby, tell me what has happened?
But after he beat it out and the echo of it was played again and again by a network of drumming black hands, the message being passed up the road, village to village, until it surely reached his father’s house...there was no reply from either the Kofi or his drummers.
Someone is dead, thought Shango. Why else would there be no reply? They were afraid, obviously, to tell him something. His heart began to beat wildly. Grandmother? Sheer terror gripped Shango’s handsome face. He leaped from the carrying platter!
The soldiers were caught off guard and looked at him like he was crazy as he bolted towards the southern walls of Banjula City fast and furious, his rugged voice calling out, “Mother Iyanla!, Mother Iyanla!”
It was just a miracle. Plain and simple.
••
Within half an hour, Shango reached the walls of the stone courtyard of the royal compound of the reigning Kofi, his father, Hoodi. He couldn’t believe what he saw! More than three thousand people were lining the road leading to the Kofi’s compound and all around it they were stretching their necks as if to get a better view as they whispered awe-filled remarks. Shango dashed along the route, his thunderous voice announcing his royal status as he parted the civilians and soldiers blocking the entrance way. Then upon entry, he saw the Spirit Rulers of the Ajowan nation gathered already out in front of the clan porch, their heads bowed in prayer.
Royal Guardsmen beat a quick drum message to alert the Kofi and Rain Iyanla that their son had arrived, and immediately, the Spirit Rulers came out of prayer and the women of the clan began to descend from the cluster of cone dwellings, all dressed in their finest gold, pearl and cowrie jewelry, their bare breasts glistening beneath painted faces and elaborate geles.
Shango stopped in his tracks, because he saw his grandmother, Rain Iyanla--alive and well!--exiting the huts with a huge joyous smile on her face and clasping her hands together at the place where her long, flat breasts drooped beyond her waistline. She was followed by all five of his potential brides, and after them came his father’s concubines.
Shango’s mother, the Queen of Ajowa, Rain Iyanla, then sashayed out, her plump round chocolate body animated by regal confidence. She, too, was smiling, her hands raised in the air as she clacked together finger bells and proclaimed, “Our son has returned to witness it. For our people have been chosen to host a miracle!”
Shango gave a blank stare of confusion, but then coming behind his mother, a young girl--a girl that he’d never seen before in his life--appeared in the doorway of the largest cone hut and then sauntered out, nervously. She was carrying what appeared to be the shape and movement of an infant wrapped in a royal kente cloth, but what truly alarmed Shango was that a girl of her status would be in the company of his mother, because she was quite obviously a dirt eating girl from the lower classes (and no one had memory of the old days when Kings ate dirt).
Shango stared at her, quizzically. Her head was not shaven or decorated with spirit paint or expensive ornaments as was the style for proper women of upper class Ajowan society. Instead, she wore her hair thick and full like a cloud of black cotton, and her skin was jet black and swarthy from an obviously hard life picking cassava in the sun jungles. Her features were thin and spare. She had no voluptuous lips, no feminine bald head, no sexy flat wide nose as pure Ajowans did.
“This is Namibia”, Rain Iyanla whispered to her son, urgently--she whispered, of course, because her husband was about to be presented to preside over the courtyard and the legions of onlookers who crowded the compound walls. Rain Iyanla leaned into her son’s ear and reported quickly, “Namibia is from a poor family in the mud villages...Namibia, this is my son, Prince Shango Ogun of Ajowa-land.”
And when
Namibia raised her eyes to meet his for what seemed a micro-moment, Shango found himself strangely humbled by the plain attractiveness of the lower class girl. In her dark eyes he saw a meekness that eluded even the most obedient virgins from rich families. She was very natural.
As was custom for a first meeting between royalty and a commoner, Namibia dropped down to her knees, securing her infant as best she could, and bowed her head to kiss the top of the Prince’s feet, the right foot first, because it represented the Kofi’s good health, and the left foot second (and longer), because it represented her blessings and well wishings for the ongoing seed of the family’s penis.
Just as Rain Iyanla and Mother Iyanla helped Namibia back to standing on her own feet, the drum roll began for the presentation of the Kofi.
She and Shango exchanged a locked glance, but then Namibia lowered her eyes as though she were inferior.
By mere chance, Shango looked over at his row of potential virgin brides and caught sight of Soraya, the light honey colored girl that he intended to choose as his bride since his grandmother liked her so much--he thought--”that’s odd, why is she staring at me with tears in her eyes as though she will never see me again?”
Soraya said with her eyes, “I love you...goodbye.”
And a chill went through his body.
••
Rain Iyanla rose the titchi totem feathers over her head and announced, “Let us be joined as the nation of Ajowa!” The soldiers and gathered civilians rose their right firsts into the air and responded, resoundingly, “Ajowa!” Then Rain Iyanla banged the totem three times against the clan porch. The Spirit Rulers bowed their heads and the women ululated.