Because the Senufo people’s mental and emotional state known as Poro-Sandogo (male and female spirits as one) translates to English as “a higher fire”, Fat Tagba was literally watching the sky for airplanes.
Dutifully, she lit each doll’s water-filled puff of African hair—and when the ball of damp nappy did not putter out but rose higher into flames—her intuition was proven to be true. The ancestors were indeed bringing the state of “higher fire” back to the beds of the village (because the Senufo believe that one love touches all lovers). And for the first time in Tagba’s memory, the ancestors were bringing it through strangers. The sting of the honey and pepper fire burned in the mouths of the boys as they completed the ritual with what for Senufo men is a deeply spiritual kiss—not a sexual one. Religiously, the males entwined. And with a prayer to welcome true love between the man and the woman, Fat Tagba began to sing-chant the mantra of the Senufo people, “sewa…sewa…sewa.”
The spiritual bed had now been established. It was ready for all passions.
SPEED
Cordoba, Argentina
Adam Crown’s Formula 1 European racing Peugeot broke from the pack at Cabildo Grand Avenue. Soon he was turning through an archway in the gorgeous city of Cordoba, speeding through the greenery of Parque Samiento; a winsome smile beaming from his helmet as the traditional spate of water balloons thrown by cheering Argentinean children pelted his and other race cars merrily. But by the time his car zipped into the countryside, his smile evaporated and thoughts of his wife clouded his mind once more.
“Bliss is pregnant,” his mother had informed him back at the House of Crowns Mansion. “It’s not conclusive, but she believes she is. Your father has escorted her to Rockefeller Private Medical for testing.”
“She’s doing this because I asked her for a divorce, mother.”
“Divorce! You can’t just walk out on a Crown baby.”
“But you made me walk out on February Foster’s baby.”
“That colored girl was a cavity, Adam!” his mother had replied from a smooth dark cocoa complexion. “It’s different.”
Now all he wanted to do was escape. Though he’d won the Monaco Grand Prix at least once, it was his dream to break the records of his idols, Ayrton Senna and Graham Hill. His participation in the Parque Samiento Grand Rally in Argentina wasn’t just to rack up more trophies; it was yet another chance to escape a dynasty in Georgia that he understood less and less. Receiving his pace notes by the intercom in his helmet, he accelerated the wheels. 100 mph, 150 mph, 200 mph…it seemed that Adam couldn’t drive fast enough. No longer wearing his wedding ring for good luck in the races, he tried mating his spirit to the energy of the car’s engine for control, but it was impossible.
“Slow down,” his Homing Relay partner said into the helmet, but Adam had driven this course many times and a part of him was hoping to discover that the world really was flat so that he could drive off the edge of it.
“Your mother and I forgave you when you supported that slick opportunist Barack Obama for president knowing full well we were backing John McCain on the down low—that bit of rebellion we could overlook. But now you’re getting out of hand, son. Every eldest son of every Crown man has accepted leadership in the NACP—but you.”
“Dad—why do you keep your head shaved?” Adam had asked the preachy-voiced Otis Crown at that moment. It was a question that Adam had asked his father as a six year old and then again as a sixteen year old, but during childhood, the reason for the question had been innocent. The reason now had to do with race and the fact that Adam believed his father was ashamed of the type of hair he grew—not even the nappy stubble was allowed to show.
“What has my hair got to do with this conversation, Adam?”
“I’ve never seen you with hair, dad.”
“Your mother prefers I keep it shaved.”
In no time Adam’s Peugeot cut across miles of olive orchards at Cordoba Pass and rounded the artful rock formations at the foot of the Sierras Chicas Mountains. All in his mind was January Knuckle-Joy. The lavender, coconut and spring water scent of her skin had never left him. But now in the wilderness, it came back to him more intensely. The sparkle in her brown eyes, the way her velvety thick hair curved around her face and shoulders and the melodic sass tones in her softly soulful voice produced a wellness in his spirit whenever he recollected them. Not since February had a woman penetrated Adam’s conscious so completely. It felt as though he were coming down with something. He couldn’t shake her.
“What did you just say, boy?”
“I said…I don’t like what this family stands for. People in the ghetto have been pointing stuff out to me dad. Like how you moved your Crown Tires factory to Mexico taking all those jobs away from blacks in Alabama, and how bougie your publication ‘Crown Magazine’ is.”
“What are you trying to prove by hanging out in the ghetto all the time, Adam? You still trying to learn how to talk black? Or is it that you like basketball better than golf?”
“And then there’s your music video channel dad. You like to talk about how your great-great grandmother was a slave who walked ninety-eight miles with your dad and his brothers on her back—yet there’s an unspoken ‘no black women allowed’ policy in our programming at BTV.”
“Your mother’s the one who doesn’t want black women on BTV. She says black women don’t appeal to most American men and they don’t bring in the ratings. We need revenue son. It’s no different than getting those Mexican workers to build my tires for dirt cheap. It’s a business decision and that’s all it is.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why I can never join the NACP. This family has become so much about the almighty dollar that we’ve forgotten who we are and where we came from. We’re nothing but sell outs, dad.”
“Rubbish! We, the Crowns, were one of the first poor southern families to help change the face of America! We got rid of segregated lunch counters and White Only water fountains!”
“Yeah—but it wasn’t because the Crowns wanted everybody to be equal. It’s because you and mom wanted to join the establishment in looking down your nose at anybody who doesn’t have the status you have! This family is a bunch of fucking hypocrites! ”
“Why you…” Otis Crown had hauled off and smacked his son across the face. Falling backwards, Adam caught himself.
“Is that what you did while preaching about peace on T.V. and getting blasted with water hoses, dad?”
“Don’t disrespect me, boy. I brought your nigger ass in this world and I’ll take you out!”
The old black and white newsreels of his father’s church congregation singing “We Shall Overcome” floated into Adam’s mind, and with the full knowledge that his parents no longer associated with any of those country black folks who’d followed them in protest, he blurted out—“What was it you guys were trying to overcome, dad? Was it the burden of sharing space with other blacks? Was it your nose, dad—the one you had Dr. Zuckerman ah…modify? Was it poor people and people with hair like yours, daddy?”
Mortified, Otis Crown raised his fist in the air. His chest began heaving and his eyes spun with rage as he shouted, “We did the best we knew how to do, you ungrateful son of a…!”
“Face it, dad. You got rich off the racism affecting ordinary poverty stricken black folks—you made a fortune turning them into followers. And then when somebody who was actually willing to die for them—Dr. Martin Luther King, Vernon Johns and people like that passed away—you abandoned the cause. You and that tragic dark brown wife of yours went off to your mansions and your country clubs and you pretended to be ‘for the people’ when all the time it’s you and your kind that hate black people more than whites ever could. No wonder you think Crown Magazine and the NACP is still relevant. You and my mother are nothing but high class rhetoric-shouting Negro hypocrites!”
Otis had lost it, vigorously attempting to sock his son. But even with his father’s bare hands clutching at his throat, Adam woul
dn’t stop shouting it to the House of Crown rafters: “I’m ashamed to be a Crown…I’m ashamed to be a Crown!”
Angrily, the wheels of Adam’s race car sped alongside the tranquil blue and green banks of Argentina’s Suquia River.
He was gone.
~*~
Paris, France
“Now that Buck’s out shopping for souvenirs, I want to have a few words with you, January.”
“Mama, please don’t preach. I invited you to Europe, because you’re the most fun girlfriend I have.”
Because May Day had given birth to January and February at the age of fourteen, the gorgeous R.N. from Philadelphia was in many ways like an older third sister. While strolling the Champs-Elysees and shopping on Avenue Montaigne in the 8th arrondissement, people assumed that the two youthful looking dark skinned beauties were models. Many expressed sincere shock at finding out that May Day Foster was all of forty years old.
“Best friends don’t let each other be a damn fool,” May Day responded, seriously.
January was in the mirror of her Paris hotel suite trying on a frothy Robin’s egg blue Yves Monet tulip gown. Rappers Missy Elliott and Foxy Brown played alternately in the background. January rocked her hips to Foxy’s “Oh Yeah/Tables Will Turn” before handing the tulip dress to the boutique Shower and trying on a bone colored lace Baccarat billiards gown. Her bed was stacked with designer gowns, and May Day was standing in the doorway between the balcony and the bedroom hitting a joint while nodding her head to the beat and cutting her eyes at her daughter.
“I’m serious, January,” the woman said with a snorting cough as the French Chronic marijuana burned in her chest. “You blackmailing your own husband for a million dollars is not cute. I don’t care what he’s been doing with Ho-ass Lorna and the Chinese girl. Why don’t you divorce his ass and get a new man?”
January never intended to confront Buck about his fucking around. She’d been insulted by his cheating, but she hadn’t felt he was important enough to consider leaving him. There were also too many perks about marriage to the famous boxer—chiefly his millions (shopping sprees were much more fun using somebody else’s money), his bedroom skills and the fact that she got tons of free publicity just being seen in public with him.
“Just because you haven’t gone outside the marriage doesn’t mean you’re any better than he is,” intoned May Day, hurtfully. “I still can’t get over you being a Peeping Tom.”
“I stopped doing that!” January flared, as she was trying on a Givenchy silver beaded cape. And she wasn’t lying—she had been forcing herself not to spy on guests via the video monitors.
“So you had the video cameras removed from people’s private space?” May Day challenged.
“I haven’t had time to undertake a removal operation that large, mama. But I will, I promise.”
“Make sure you do, because I have a serious problem with my daughter acting like she’s the Bush administration and shit. You are not God. You want a toke on this, sugar?”
The tall white Frenchman from the boutique nodded and May Day handed him her blunt. Deeply he inhaled; the pull of his lungs lighting up the red hot cherry tip as he sucked down the grassy flavor, held it for a burn and then let out the smoke. He nodded to the rap oldies, “Tres Bien.”
“I know that’s right,” May Day told him. “And I’m registered to smoke mines for Health reasons.”
Finally, January was thrilled by the way her brown skin glowed in a canary yellow body-fitting fall made of silk and tulle. She bought ten of the gowns with matching shoes (five of them for her mother), a cape and two coats; her credit charge reaching one hundred sixty-two thousand dollars. She hadn’t meant to buy any jewelry, as she almost always got her jewels at Cartier, but by accident the Boutique Shower dropped a very strange looking bracelet from his briefcase when fetching his stamp puncher.
“Oh my god—what is that?”
“A bit of juvenile hut carving really,” the Frenchman told her. “It’s a bracelet that’s commonly worn by the Senufo women in Western Africa all the time—nothing special. It was given to me by some Senufo Bible-Exchange Christian girls down in Madrid.”
“Spain? We leave for Spain tomorrow.”
January lifted the crudely made brass python bracelet, beholding its simplicity with awe.
“You can have it for free,” the Frenchman laughed. “I tell you, it’s very savage compared to the more intricate pieces by the Dogon, Nubians and Egyptians on Avenue Montaigne.”
Savage or not, once the brass python bracelet was on her wrist, January was overcome with a spiritual vibe.
A warm calm flushed over her body and her heart was filled with a much calmer music than the pulsing reggae-hip hop that was playing from her speakers. A voice in her head, perhaps only her imagination or even her intuition, whispered: “He danced my heart around the stars.” And in that moment, she knew that something absolutely beautiful and amazing was going to happen to her. Staring at the bracelet, January was suddenly moved to shut her eyes very tightly and whisper back into the universe, “He danced my heart…around the stars.”
~*~
Buck and January got into a fight that night when the three of them finally made it out to Paris’s wealthiest suburb, Neuilly-su-Seine, to have dinner at the estate of Papa Sinatra’s old friend, Yves Malle, and his young wife Fendi.
“Jan-Jan!” the eighty-seven year old white Frenchman shouted with gales of cheerful welcome. Being moons-ago Olympic medalist in wrestling, Yves demonstrated that he hadn’t lost a bit of his strength by grabbing January and twirling her around the cobblestone foyer of his mansion as though she were a child.
“Not bad for eighty-seven, right?”
May-Day and Buck nodded in amazement. The ravishingly beautiful Fendi took their coats and handed them goblets of delicious red wine from Yves’ own cellar.
It had all started charmingly, but once they were seated around the fireplace and Yves and January began going on and on about Papa Sinatra and what a great man he was—Buck’s jealous attitude crept up and became like a pall over his face.
“Are you alright?” the barely thirty year old Fendi asked Buck. He sneered at the porcelain-faced white former fashion model dismissively. May-Day gave her daughter a look that warned of Buck’s growing ire, so January changed the subject. But that was when Buck became even more unruly.
Knowing Paris like the back of her hand, January had told Yves that in her opinion, the famed Champs Elysees had become nothing more than a day-glow eyesore overcrowded by fast food chains, airline tourism offices, banks, cheap malls and noisy grunge musicians. In particular, she complained about the turmoil of trying to navigate through one of the newer malls, Les Halles (“They’re taking all the class out of Paris,” Yves nodded in agreement). But when January brought up Printempts and Galleries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement and the fact that her tastes were too high for her to shop there—her boxer husband lost it.
“What is it with you jet-set hoochie sistas putting down Printempts? Before I married you, I used to get all my girlfriends stuff from there! I guess white chicks aren’t as snooty.”
“Yeah, well Papa Sinatra didn’t like his wife getting accustomed to mere stuff. He preferred I shop at Rue du Fauborg Saint-Honore…in fact someone from there was over to the hotel fitting me and mama today.”
“Oh, is that right? You’re a fucking nappyheaded broad from gangster-ass Overbrook High School in Philly, yet…”
“Buck Knuckle-Joy!” May Day screamed in disapproval.
“…you’re too good for Printempts,” he finished.
“Mama, put his ass on ignore. He’s pissed because we’re big upping his competition—a dead man.”
“Jan-Jan is a gorgeously stylish African goddess,” Yves Malle told Buck in his deep French accent. He looked at Buck with a smile of friendship saying, “Don’t be jealous; be proud.”
“Man, fuck y’all!” Bu
ck sneered, disrespectfully.
“Don’t you dare talk to Yves like that, you insecure son-of –a-bitch! He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever known! And do not embarrass me in front of my friends, Buck! Stop acting like a pit bull and act like a human being for a change.”
“Bitch, fuck y’all,” retorted Buck as he stormed off through the house as though he lived there and knew where he was going.
Yves and Fendi were sad for January, because they could see that the lavish affection-filled wedding ceremony they’d attended in Las Vegas had devolved into a very bitter marriage. Buck, who had held his wife like a little princess on their wedding day, now resented his wife’s charisma and the way she embraced the culture of high life. Yves had tried explaining to Buck that through her previous marriage with Papa Sinatra, it had been impossible for her not to become a true jet-setter, but hearing that January belonged among the swanky when Buck felt so out of place only pissed him off.
“You’d better go after him,” old man Yves said to Fendi with a wink. And immediately, the gorgeous Frenchwoman was off to fetch the boxer. Yves used that moment to say, “Get a divorce, January. He’s not ready for marriage and he doesn’t love you.”
January was speechless at Yves’s putting it so bluntly.
“You better hope he doesn’t make a pass at your wife,” May-Day told Yves. “All he does is screw around behind January’s back, and she puts up with it.”
“Tres eloquent,” the old man laughed. “Jan-Jan must have some French in her. We are notorious for putting up with such.”
And it never dawned on the two American women that this was Yves’ way of telling them that he quite expected his beautiful wife to have an encounter with the sexy black boxer. At his age, he was fine with it.
SEX ON PISMO BEACH by Tweet Page 8