by Kola Boof
Red Annie stared at the cowardly white people now.
The whip slashing through black flesh one last time before they cut loose Queenie Hampton’s hand ropes, her backside split open like the red in a cracked watermelon bleeding through--her beating having gone on for what seemed an eternity to Red--and after they cut her down, Red Annie and Raggedy Man and their daughter Jemima Sullivan took hold of her and got her back to her cabin and fixed her up best they could, but she shivered with chills and shock for three days straight.
“I hope she don’t die”, Raggedy Man had said with worry.
“She ain’t gone die”, replied Red Annie, bitterly. “In this world...a black woman’s expected to be strong and take it like a man. She know dat.”
••
On the twelfth day...white patrollers dragged Shango Carolina and little Zion back onto the plantation.
Jemima Sullivan dropped her basket of apples, screamed out, “No Jesus!”...and ran around the mansion to the back door that led into the kitchen. She went up to Red Annie and say, “Mama, dey got Shango and Zion!”
Queenie Hampton had been sitting on the cot in her cabin, her one sore arm dragging the other limp one into alignment. Her backside covered in wax, the open slits stinging (still) like ten million bee kisses. But when she heard the slaves begin to moan and scream that her man had been bought back, she filled up with the strength of ten women and jumped up and ran.
Her jet black skin cursed her as she arrived, because it was that sweaty, greasy looking skin and that face and that wild nappy hair, the royal face and nappy hair worn by the vast majority of black women in slavery days, that made everyone on the plantation, including her fellow slaves, figure she must surely deserve it.
They murdered Shango Carolina that afternoon.
He had spit dead straight in Miss Britney Jane Sullivan’s beautiful white face and told her through his fat nigger lips, “You don’t own my soul, white lady! I own my own soul! I’m a man!”
“You spit on me and curse me, nigger?”
Miss Britney Jane ordered his tongue cut out, ordered him castrated, ordered him hung and ordered him burned. She said to the slaves, “I don’t want no singing and carrying on over this savage brute. I been right fine to him all his life and this is how he repays it.” She burst into tears, proclaiming, “My feelings have never been so hurt in all my life!”
The fat Mammy women come and hug her, hold her, tell her they loves her. Tells her what a good, good pwer-son she is.
One of them cleaned up Zion while his mother lay passed out from witnessing her man being lynched, and just as the child was being put on the wagon to carry him away to his new plantation...Queenie Hampton came to...and started begging and crying all over again, grabbing and reaching out to her baby boy, but the whites, and the black overseer, Hog Mall, took a big piece of wood and knocked her to the ground...I say they knocked her to the ground...and when that didn’t stop that black nappy nigger woman from running after that wagon as though her body was in flames, they just let her run til she fell out--and dragged her back and strung her to a tree and whipped her some more later.
Centuries later, dignified and so called smart black male leaders would stand at podiums and decry the “rape” of the black woman in slavery days. The part that meant the most to him--the rape of his property--by the white man. And how black women should never forget that they were raped.
But in truth, black women had known systematic chattel rape and bodily mutilation long before they ever set foot in the Americas or set eyes...on white men. It wasn’t rape that marked slavery days for the black woman.
What marked and destroyed her, time and again, was the selling of her children. What marked and destroyed her, for generations to come, was being systematically taught to hate the dark color and African hair of her own womb angels. To wish them be less and less of what God made them.
What marked and destroyed her was her inability to love and protect them like she wanted to....to see them sold right out of her arms, to never see
them again...to have to go on living and living, aging and aging, with that emptiness, that fear of loving the ones born after the sold ones...and the pain of living in this world and dying in this world and never ever knowing...whatever became of ones own child.
If anything marked and destroyed black women--that was it.
••
On and on till winter, Red Annie took the juice of hot boiled apples and her knitting out to Queenie Hampton’s cabin at night. She held Remember, as sisters have always held sisters, Red Annie’s yellow house woman’s skin embracing and surrounding the beaten flesh of the jet black field woman’s skin. Her voice humming music that needed no words, no lyrics, because what the singing meant was exactly the same as what it would have meant had they been a light skinned negro woman and a black negro woman rocking each other back in Africa--”You and I, sister...we are much of the same muchness.”
••
In the field of cotton, Queenie Hampton opened her hand. In its palm was a cotton worm, wiggling at her mercy.
She spoke now in Dutch. That white language that all the black slaves of New Netherlands (where she was from) had been required to speak before the New Netherlands became a place called New York.
She spoke now in her former master’s Dutch.
Thinking of the grandly beautiful white woman who need never defend herself, because each and every week for a million years--the new novel, the new play, the new song, the new daguerreotype (filmed photo), the new magazine--the revisionist history of both white sons and black sons--would defend and uphold her perfect white honor. While Queenie Hampton and Red Annie would be considered merely “jealous”.
So, you understand, it mattered not that she had a bad attitude or that she hated her oppressors without pretense (as rightfully she should have) or that she went insane. Her black face contorting to a pecking motion as she imitated the chickens of the yard, thinking herself a chicken, and believing it and having faith in reality until she really was a chicken head pecking at the ground and spouting crazily:
Het onweerheeft overstroming veroorzaakt
(the sea rose up against the earth)
de sterke wind heft de boom weggeblazen
(the strong winds blew the tree down)
Kunje me wat geven voor de pijn?
(can you give me something for this pain?)
Ik ben ziek geweest
(I have been sick)
Je moet mij niet dissen
(You don’t want to fuck with me!)
Ik sloop je
(I will kill you)
Ik trek je arm er af en sla je ermee
(I will rip your arms off and beat you with them)
Je moet je bek houden
(so shut the fuck up!)
un Eet pinguin poep jij kontgraver
(and eat penguin shit ass-diggers!)
kun je me helpen
(can you help me?)
mooi zwart moeder
(beautiful black mother)
mooi 0 dolfijn
(0 beautiful dolphin!)
mooi zwart moeder
(beautiful black mother)
And, of course, as was usually the case in those days, Red Annie and Jemima and the other slave women nursed and held and sang to Queenie Hampton until, eventually, she was back to her old self--a slave.
••
Washington, D.C.
RooAmber’s bedroom
Love knows no color, and yet, as Scotch Childress stared down at RooAmber’s body on the bed--he could see that she was getting darker.
He had taken her house keys from her dresser one night and made duplicates and had been sneaking into her bedroom for months now on those nights when Shane wasn’t around. Watching her.
She was definitely darker.
In fact, every since she’d run into her boyfriend in Sag Harbor over the summer, it seemed that her honey-pineapple complexion tanned deeper and deeper, turning a beige g
olden brown, and her once emerald green eyes seemed to be deepening as well, getting richer and richer, filling up with the passion of Shane Roberts until they were almost violet in color.
And as she lay dreaming each night, Scotch wondered when, or if ever, he would get up the courage--to go on and kill her.
21
•
Sula’s wedding went off without a hitch. She came down the aisle with her figure-8 shaped chocolate fudge colored body draped elegantly in white antique lace and her glossy springy African hair pulled back beautifully in neat, tight cornrows. In her hands, instead of flowers, she carried a fountain of silvery paper mache and on her mouth she wore a shimmery pecan-colored gloss and RooAmber found it positively amusing to see Sula, for once, with long, sweeping eyelashes, the mascara just right. She looked gorgeous.
“Do you take this woman?”
Trent looked at Sula with a combination of love and pride. His heart beating wildly with fear and his mind staving off the slurs and put downs from his colorstruck cousins and basketball buddies. “Yes.”
“Do you take this man?”
Sula looked frightened and doomed. Her needy stare forever trying to possess acceptance from the man that was her own reflection. “Yes.”
Suddenly, as the stunning dark black skinned couple stood in the archway making wedding vows over the preacher’s bible--RooAmber remembered them from another reality.
She saw them, or people who looked just like them rather, being walked through the crucifix that was cut in stone, their jet black necks, by the thousands, chained into a oneness, the white men flicking them with whips as they walked together...black men and black women...through the crucifix in stone. The door of Kofi Hoodi. Out of paradise and into oblivion.
“Babe?”
Shane nudged RooAmber out of her vision.
“You O.K.?” He wiped a tear from her cheek.
RooAmber nodded that she was fine, but then another vision flashed in her mind. Katanga and Ambi making love. His masterful charcoal body seeping inside the riches of her chocolate fudge colored flesh as though the thrill of fire on fire was the thing responsible for beauty in the first place.
“My King”, said the African Queen.
“My Queen”, said the African King.
And when Katanga pulled Ambi atop his horse...Trent and Sula kissed. And though RooAmber knew in her gut, without knowing how she knew, that what they symbolized was doomed in the winter wonderland of America, she cheered them with the wholeness of a secret God, her very soul chanting as she wondered in agony--”why have I lost you?”
••
Namibia Roberts rung her son’s cell phone that afternoon during Sula’s wedding reception. She thought it was time, and perhaps way over due, that she inform Shane that he had another son alive in the world.
Rosaria had already phoned her, crying emphatically, and telling her that Shane was abandoning her and Esmerelda for a black mistress.
“Shane would never do something like that”, Namibia had stated calm and curtly. “He’s a Boulle husband. They err, but they stay married.”
“The court papers came by hand delivery this afternoon. He’s divorcing me, Mother Namibia, and he doesn’t care how much you want us together.”
It greatly annoyed Namibia Roberts to think of Shane leaving such a perfect wife for the Tangie Browns and RooAmber Childresses of the world, but now that his mind was made up, she felt he ought to know about the little Denzel Washington-looking boy.
“You’re coming down to Georgetown, mother? Wow. This must be important. You haven’t left Sag Harbor in ages.”
“Just for the afternoon”, she said. “It’s imperative that we have lunch.”
Instantly, Shane worried that she was coming to tell him that she had cancer or something. “I’ll be there on time mother...and remember, no matter what you have to tell me. I love you.”
When Shane and his mother hung up, he looked at RooAmber as she stood across the room laughing with friends and looking relaxed. It all seemed so easy once you knew who you loved and what you wanted.
And Shane was so convinced that they would be together forever and that nothing in this world could stop them.
In fact, having RooAmber in his life made him feel indestructible.
••
“I’d rather kill them or have them killed”, Rosaria Roberts said in the lawyer’s office as she slipped a pair of $300 gloves back on.
“You shouldn’t say things like that, Mrs. Roberts”, retorted the tall, stout black divorce attorney, Donald Spears. “If one of them was to suddenly end up dead.”
“Look”, said Rosaria with eyes colder than ice. “You’ve been giving me a speech all morning about how to drain my husband’s finances dry, and I’m telling you--I don’t want his money. I want him, damnit! Why is it that no one in this world can believe that a white wife can truly be in love with her black husband? I’m not interested in money, Mr. Spears. He says he wants a divorce, fine. I’m not seeking alimony or child support.”
“But you and your daughter can’t let him walk away scott free. You should get the house, the cars--half of his bank account, his assets...”
Rosaria burst into tears shaking her head. “I just want a lump sum settlement so I can disappear. One hundred thousand would be fine.”
Donald Spears came around his desk and handed her some tissues to wipe her eyes with. He sighed heavily and said, “Listen...you’re just emotional right now, but in a few months, believe me--you’re going to wish you had taken this yellow pretty boy motherfucker for every penny he’s got.”
The attorney’s passion startled Rosaria and she looked up at his round, darker than night black face. He told her, “You’re a beautiful woman, Mrs. Roberts...I don’t know why you settled for his sorry nigga ass in the first place. With your looks you could have landed an NBA player or a brother with millions. Look at Montel Williams, Marcus Allen, Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones. Those are fine upstanding rich as hell black men, and those are the types you should have been aiming for. You’d be sitting on easy street right about now if you would have played your looks the way you were supposed to.”
Rosaria’s mouth fell open wide. She stared at Donald Spears in disbelief. “Do I look like a gold digger? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if a brotha is stupid enough to dog out a woman like you over some weave-wear’n, green eyed dime-a-dozen black bitch, then his ass needs to be taught a lesson.”
Donald knew from Rosaria’s own testimony that her husband hadn’t touched her in months. Not even to kiss.
So he reached down with one of his chubby black hands and stuck it right inside her milky cleavage. Instantly, a chill of shock went through Rosaria as he groped the warm, soft titty and ran his middle finger over the nipple til it was hard. Then he bent down and dove his wet, sloppy tongue deep in her mouth. His spit tasted like Planter’s peanuts.
Rosaria wanted to jump up and run out, but something inside her wouldn’t allow her to budge. She let Donald Spears kiss her and squeeze her titties, and then before she knew it, he had her up out of her seat...turning her around and laying across his desk.
“Noooooo”, she cooed insatiably. “No, I can’t.”
“You need some attention, Mrs. Roberts.”
Donald pulled down her pantyhose with one hand and poked and prodded the moist cleft of flesh between her thighs with the other. He could tell that it was the first time in months that her pussy had been wet. He fingered up in her, dragging her pantyhose off, and then as she cooed and cried that she shouldn’t be doing such a thing, he unzipped his trousers and fumbled around inside to bring out a massive pinkish mushroom head, thick as a squash and black as his face. He spread her legs and penetrated the wetness.
“Ouh god!” she moaned, helplessly. “Ooooooh...fuck me, Shane!”
Slap, slap, slap. He banged inside her, his kisses covering her neck. Slap, slap, slap.
As Donald banged inside t
he juicy open flesh, he accidentally knocked over the picture of his wife Mai Ling that sat on his desk. Catching sight of her accusing stare, he went on and slid the picture off the desk and onto the thick carpet of the floor. He didn’t want her looking at him.
In and out of Rosaria he pumped until suddenly he exploded all over her loins, her dress and the paperwork on his desk.
“Ouh that was good”, he said wiping sweat off his brow.
He could see that Rosaria had a look of devastation on her face, as though she wanted to shrivel up and die at the realization of what she’d just done, but he pulled her up to his chest and held her, allowing her to cry and cry. In fact, she cried like a baby.
“Why is he leaving me?”
“Because he’s a fool, that’s why.” Donald took his wallet out and opened it. He counted out five brand new $100 dollar bills. He took Rosaria’s hand and forced the money into it. “That’s five hundred dollars, pretty lady. Now after you leave here, I want you to go down to your favorite boutique and buy yourself a new dress. You hear me?”
“I can’t take this.”
“Yes, you can. Listen...” He held her face and stared deep into her eyes, his voice speaking with conviction. “I’m a black man...and I’m here to tell you that most of these black females calling themselves women today are a complete bunch of buzzards. That’s why you don’t see brothas like me giving them the time of day. We’re tired of wasting our futures in the dark. But a woman like you deserves better. And don’t you ever forget that a black man told you that. I know a diamond from glass, your husband’s just a fool. I wouldn’t fuck a black woman with somebody else’s dick.”