FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof

by Kola Boof

  “Yourself? Mama...you didn’t?”

  “You damned right I did”, said Soraya with a whisper and a cold stare. “I sure in the hell did. Paid Smokey and Cujo two hunnerd dollars apiece to find that black dog and stomp the living shit out of him. I told them if they break some bones I got another two hunnerd wait’n.”

  “Mama! You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to let God do that.”

  ••

  On the fourth day, Sula got out of bed and walked over to her mirror. She took down the bedspread that she had draped over it.

  First, she saw her hair. The luster of its coarse darkness coiled and knotted against her scalp like black raisins. Then she noticed her nose, the sexy West African kind, wide and thick as the span of her life sustaining smile. Her flesh, deep and dark with good health and black richness. Her buttocks, from the side, the rank powerfulness of them holding up the rhythm of nature and man’s birth itself. She saw her round, full face. Celestial-eyed and perfect. And last but not least, when she called her baby’s name, she heard her quiet storm of a voice--sounding like that moan that only black woman can make.

  Repeating the words that had been spoken to her by a strange black man who had appeared in all of her dreams of the past few nights, she stated in memory of that black man, “The ax forgets...but the tree...it remembers.”

  Sonn ma Ser (dear ancestors)

  ••

  Later that day, Sula Jones was reborn...as her real self.

  It happened slow and quiet after she had convinced RooAmber and Soraya that she was alright and could now look after Trent Jr. without their help. They had slept on Sula’s living room floor and couch for three days straight and needed to get back to their own lives anyway.

  “Go on now, I’ll be fine. I’ve got my head back on.”

  And after they left, Sula had turned on the t.v., and quite unexpectedly, she did get her head back on.

  ••

  BET was on. Black Entertainment Television as they call it.

  Snoop Dogg was on there. A self-proclaimed pimp. And not just him, but other black men who preached the virtues of being a pimp, drug dealer, womanizer and gangster filled the screen--round the clock. In each video, these mainly dark skinned black men were clad by women who could not reproduce their afro-brown images, and those few women who were dark enough to be recognized as either sisters or mother seeds of these men--they were portrayed almost entirely from the back of the ass or as party poopers who didn’t fit and didn’t belong. The womb of racial whiteness and lightness was presented as “supremacy”, but the rappers were too ignorant and stupid to see it.

  How did we get here?, Sula wondered, and why are we allowing our community to be overrun with Pimps, women haters and a bunch of “Imitation” black women who condone and protect everything the “Men with Bank” do? What kind of mother, Sula wondered, produces these kinds of sons?

  They interviewed the mother of a famous rapper on television that day. A woman named Joan whose skin was deep, dark brown, but whose hair was a long, platinum blonde horse weave accompanied by fake blue lenses. After she spent ten minutes talking (and saying nothing), they showed a trio of even more pathetic black women. Their god-given eyes covered by colored contacts and their heads overflowing with blonde Eurocentric hair weaves. Desperate as hell. Hoping their imitation whiteness would catch the eye of black men. They kept saying stupid shit like, “We’re just try’n to keep it real.”

  Sula had shook her head with embarrassment.

  She thought about all the years that black women complained about the original, ancient black portrait of the Virgin Mary being taken down from the cathedrals in Europe. Taken down and replaced with a white image.

  Didn’t these black women realize that every time they put blonde hair on their heads (the highest point on their body)--they were in effect taking down the Black Madonna all over again?

  Why are we letting fucking Pimps and the television raise our children!?

  ••

  Sula turned to another cable channel and saw an African Bishop giving a speech in France. He said that black people were the “children of Ham” and had been created to be slaves and to pay for the curse that was upon their father. This African man said that white people were superior to blacks. He told the packed auditorium that if the whites hadn’t brought Christianity and civilization to Africa, then he, a Gabonian, would still be living naked in a tree.

  Sula actually saw this on television.

  She switched channels.

  Some more African people were being shown. Kenyan women who worked as prostitutes to earn money to buy “bleaching creams” so that they could become “light skinned”. Why? “To bay a bett-or perrrson.”

  A white woman interviewed them for the documentary. The dark, regally beautiful faces of the Kenyan women glowed with pearly smiles as they reported, unashamedly, that their men no longer upheld the “old ways”. They spoke about the television commercials in Kenya that encouraged African women to “become light and beautiful...the men will love you!...by using our special bleaching cream every day...you will see a change in your drab life.” One teenaged girl told the white woman interviewer, “We want to be like Michael Jackson--he is beautiful and his children are beautiful!” Others talked about the music videos that they watched from America. The women claiming, “The Black Americans are so pretty and white. They have wealth and success. They look like the people on the soap operas. Rich and light. They are the successful ones.”

  Sula found out something she had never known. That the CBS soap opera, “The Bold and the Beautiful” was the number one nighttime television show in more than twelve African nations. Blacks watched the show non-stop, fascinated by the “looks” of these rich, successful, glamorous American people.

  A group of South African boys were then shown (in half shadow) saying, “White women make better wives, because your children will come out healthier. A successful man always marries a European wife, because this proves that he is intelligent and has money. You don’t want a black wife unless you are poor and can’t do any better.”

  A Senegalese man living in France was shown next. He said, “African women are evil. They don’t like to have sex. They’re not good luck. That is why Africa is at the bottom. Because the African woman is cursed. She bit the apple in the garden! She brings nothing but AIDS and poverty.”

  The biracial singing group Les Nubians (who don’t resemble Nubians at all) were then shown singing a song about pride in their Nubian mother’s blood and culture. Beautiful Somali supermodel Iman was shown at an event with her husband, David Bowie. Congolese children were shown in a poverty stricken village--the little children lining up to have a turn brushing a white woman’s long, spider wisps of hair. Their eyes marveling at the sight of something so completely different and alien from their own beauty.

  Of course, poverty did not allow them to recognize their own beauty.

  “Do you wish you were white?” the interviewer asked the South African boys in half shadow? Half of them nodded yes, the other half shook their heads no. Some of them looked wounded and ashamed by the question.

  “Do you want your sons to be white men?”, the white woman asked.

  “Not white”, said one of the boys, “but not black either. Colored!”

  And the other boys agreed nodding. Yes, we want to be colored!

  ••

  I have to do something about this, Sula told herself.

  What can I do?

  I’m a black mother. I have to do something.

  A black Kenyan man...the one who had appeared in Sula’s dreams for three nights in a row!...was then interviewed. He was a doctor who treated the Kenyan women for kidney failure and other problems related to their chronic use of bleaching creams. He told the interviewer, “African culture has been truly poisoned by the effects of European Colonialism. Our people have lost faith in themselves. They are so poor and desperate that they are looking for a savio
r outside of themselves. The Black Americans look rich and mighty to us. They praise whiteness in everything they do. In movies they send to us to watch, their women are always the yam color or Halle Berry--never black like our mothers. The rich men of Africa no longer attend a black woman. Colonialism has replaced her with a womb that can breed the African out of us. We are human beings, and therefore, we want to be seen as successful and beautiful.

  As Africans, we have cursed the white man as an evil conqueror and a beast. But we now copy his ways. We now covet everything he has. We imitate his greed and selfishness. We now defile our own mother and pray to be born instead from the white man’s mother. No matter how we deny it, we believe that we, as purely Africans, are inferior. We have given up on our own God. We blacks, all over the world, have embraced defeat.”

  ••

  Sula decided to turn off her television. Forever.

  She also made it a point to hold her baby close to her, at different times throughout each and every day and whisper into his chocolate ear, “You are beautiful.”

  “You are a wonderful son; the only son I would ever accept.”

  “You are a gift from god.”

  “I love you, Trent, Jr.”

  “I love him African hair! It’s so unique. No other people but yours has this hair, because it’s so special and unique. It is your crown.”

  And when it was dark and they lay cuddled after she bathed and powdered him. She spoke straight forward to her baby.

  “I don’t want you...to grow up and be a nigger...I want you to be a man. Like all other men, I want you to have the courage to give birth to your own image. To honor it and to respect it as perfectly human, perfectly beautiful, perfectly deserving of its existence. I want you to value all who are made in your same image--of every race, creed and color. But above all, I want you to love your own black self...and to love your own black people. I don’t want you to be a nigger. I want you to have the courage to give birth to your own image.”

  “You are a black man. You are a gift from God. You are the only dream that I have ever had. You are not here to pimp your insecurity. You are here to heal, protect and sustain society. You are a human being. You are made out of goodness, and you deserve respect...because you respect yourself. I am your mother, and for that alone, you will honor and respect me.”

  “I want you to love your father...and to know that it was circumstances beyond his control that took him away from us. Your father was a beautiful black man with a glorious heart. He was a good man, otherwise, I would not have lain with him. I loved your father and I want you to love him, too. No matter what. I want you...to want yourself.”

  “You are a wonderful son; the only son I would ever accept.”

  Lovingly, she kissed and sniffed his tightly coiled African hair. She kissed it again and again. She held his dark chocolate flesh next to her own and she said, “You see how perfectly beautiful we are? We are the most beautiful people, in my opinion, that God ever made. God made us first.”

  And although the whole world was against her...Sula Jones had the courage, common sense and mother-wit to be against the whole world.

  If the whole world could bombard her eyes and the eyes of her child with images of white and light beauty all day and all night--insisting on the superiority of whiteness--then she could bombard her own home and living space, in support of her own black female image.

  Obviously, this was a Harriett Tubman-like thing to do. A real Sojourner Truth-like move, but she insisted on it, and the more she did it, the easier it became and the more natural it felt until she realized that self-love...is natural.

  ••

  One night, Sula came home from the grocery store and found a brokenhearted white girl sitting on the front steps of her apartment building, shivering and holding a little biracial baby.

  The white mother was really white with pale freckled skin, huge glacier blue eyes and long, ratty red hair. Irish red. In fact, even her eyelashes were red as rust!

  “What happened to you?”

  “I took my baby and ran away from my old man.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Red Annie”, she said. “I’m Red Annie and this my son, Jason. I guess

  you can see his father is a black man.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that”, Sula replied.

  Red Annie smiled. She said, “My sister is the white girl on the second floor who lives with the black guy. I’m waiting for them to get home, so I can see if Chill will let me kick it with them.”

  Oh god, thought Sula. Those two were a violent couple, always fighting. The white girl worked, but Chill mostly hung out with his buddies sell’n weed and talking his African pride shit all day.

  “Those two won’t be home for hours”, Sula said, “It’ll be two in the morning before she gets off work. You’re gonna freeze to death out here. It would be better if you and little Jason came inside with me and Trent, Jr. for tonight. We’ll have some hot cocoa and lay the boys down to sleep.”

  Red Annie was left speechless by Sula’s kind suggestion.

  “You don’t do drugs or sell your ass do you?”

  “Oh hell no!” said Red Annie. “I worked at WalMart in Richmond. I took what I had left from my welfare check and caught the bus up here. My baby’s daddy found him another girl--some bony blond runaway--he moved her in our apartment and claimed she was only his ‘platonic’ friend and needed a place to stay. They been fucking all over the place--excuse my French. When he start stealing my food stamps and pinching off my welfare check to wine and dine his runaway high school bitch, I decided to jet.”

  “Men have issues”, Sula told her. “They got self esteem problems, and black men have extra, ‘cause the whole world is against them. Don’t let it get you down and don’t hate the guy, just be glad that you were woman enough to leave his sorry ass and change your situation.” She unlocked the door of her apartment. “Kick your shoes off and make yourself comfortable. You like burritos? Good. That’s what we’re having for supper. I threw my television out, ‘cause I don’t want my son raised on white and nigger media.” Red Annie looked at her like...whuuut? “ But I do have Erykah Badu’s new CD. You play Yahtzee?”

  “Girl, I love Yahtzee!” Red Annie told her.

  “Great.” Sula smiled as she saw Jason rubbing Trent Jr.’s nappy hair.

  Days turned into a week and a few weeks turned into a month. Sula kept making excuses for why Red Annie and little Jason shouldn’t leave just yet, and then while talking one day to her friend Stephanie (who everyone called “Love Bug”), Sula was able to secure a job for Red Annie working part time at a perfume boutique in the mall.

  “Check it out”, Red Annie finally said. “We’re two single moms rais’n little black boys. We both got no man. We both got dogged like shit by the men we did have, in fact, neither one of us has ever had a man that didn’t kick us to the curb or dog us like shit. We get along fantastic and we’re both lonely. We both agree that t.v. is a social drug and poison. Why don’t we just become roomies and be like ‘Kate and Allie’ on t.v.?”

  Sula had laughed. “O.K. den. But Annie...drop the welfare check and food stamps, please. You gotta change your cycle. I’ll help you get up.”

  And Red Annie had immediately cancelled her welfare benefits.

  ••

  One night when Love Bug (Stephanie) was visiting with her little boy Keyshawn and her daughter Kwanzaa, Red Annie made the comment, “Wouldn’t it be great if we started a club for single mothers? I mean, shit, we might be ghetto, but a lot of us are really smart, a lot of us are artistic, we all have big dreams and we’re all struggling to raise our kids without fathers. It would be real cool if we started some kinda organization.”

  Mary J. Blige sang “If You Look At My Life...You See What I See” in the background as Love Bug threw a 9 of Spade over their red King and red 7 and collected yet another book. ‘Ol heffa. She said, “I bet if you served hot wings and maybe gave a
way a few bags of kinky straight, a whole lot of sistas would show up for the meet’ns.”

  Free bags of weave hair! Sula rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  “Sula you’re so politically inclined and passionate”, Red Annie told her. “You should be the one to start it and run it!”

  Love Bug said, “Call it ‘The Sula Women’, like I read in a history book!”

  Sula laughed. “Girl, please. Yall bitches ain’t gone have me doing a whole nother job.”

  “Well you preach to people all damn day long anyway”, smirked Love Bug with a neck swirl. “You always try’n to tell somebody how black women need to stick together and get their education and don’t have babies and...blah, blah, blah. You might as well go on and become a public politician. We sure as hell need one in the ghetto, ‘cause don’t nobody give a damn about black single mothers and white ghetto mothers with mixed babies no damn way. We definitely on our own, the black snooty people done moved off, got they ‘nigger front’n as House Nigga checks’ and forgot that all black people basically came from the ghetto. The black churches ain’t said shit worth listening to in thirty years and the so called black organizations and politicians need they sellout asses whooped. What we got for inspiration and leadership? Iyanla Vanzant, bell hooks and Dr. Grace Cornish? Thass about it. We could use some inspiration and leadership. Don’t nobody give a fuck about poor people.”