Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  “No, Quinn. I want somebody in my life twenty-four seven.”

  Quinn rubbed his face and looked out the window. The silence of the next few minutes seemed like days. Had we finally come to the end of the road? He sat motionless on the bed in yellow silk briefs, pressing his knee

  into his chest. His eyes appeared bottomless. I walked over to the bed and sat next to Quinn. He took my hand and pulled it to his chest. “What are you saying, Raymond? What do you want me to say? That I love you? Well, I do.” “That’s not it, Quinn. I think I’m in love with Nicole and I want to be fair to the both of you.”

  “And how long do you think that’s going to last?”

  “At least as long as your marriage,” I snapped defensively.

  “Oh, fuck this shit,” Quinn said as he raised his voice in anger and leaped from the bed.

  “Is that how you want to handle this, Quinn? Just fuck it?”

  Quinn turned toward me with a look of rage in his eyes. I had not seen this side of him. His body appeared to be trembling and tears were welling up in his eyes.

  “Why do we have to stop seeing each other? Do you want me to leave my wife and kids? Do you want me to move here and be with you twenty-four hours a day? I don’t think this is about Nicole. I think this is about Basil or some other nigger!” Quinn shouted.

  “Quinn, if I keep making room for you in my life, then I’m bound to fall in love with you. I can’t do that to myself. I can’t do it to those two beautiful kids.”

  Quinn broke into a nervous laughter. “So you’re doing this for my kids. What about me and what we mean to each other? There are times when I want you, Raymond, as badly as I want my next breath.”

  There was a certain power in Quinn’s voice and in his face. As Quinn suddenly started to get dressed, with his jeans halfway up, he sat back on the bed and began to sob softly. I stopped my search for my T-shirt and pulled him against my chest and massaged the nape of his neck as his tears fell onto my naked shoulders. I had a sudden impulse to retract my previous words and tell him that everything was going to be all right, but in my heart I knew better.

  “Quinn, let’s just take some time and rethink this situation. I don’t want to hurt you, but I can’t risk getting hurt myself,” I pleaded. “This is wrong for the both of us.”

  “What? Being gay?”

  “Not that. Quinn, you’re married. Maybe it could be different if the facts were different.”

  Quinn looked straight ahead in silence. His body felt rigid and hard. He gently removed himself from my embrace and finished dressing and walked into the living room. My body became sick with fear that I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I joined Quinn in the living room, where he was standing, just looking around the room in a daze. He walked toward me with a blank look on his face. He gently touched my face and kissed my lips with such power that the force staggered me. His eyes were now dry but slightly pink.

  Quinn looked me straight in the eyes and said, “You want the facts. The facts are that you may be throwing away the best thing that ever happened to you. Your desire for me and other men isn’t going away because you think you’re in love with some woman. I know because I live that lie every day. With the exception of the Saturdays I’m with you. What we have is the closest thing to real love that either one of us can ever dream of. I won’t let you throw it away, Raymond,” Quinn said in hurried sentences.

  Quinn gave me a last kiss and embrace and headed out my door without another word or allowing me to say more. I walked to the doorway and Quinn stared at me, then turned away and headed down the long hallway, home. I felt the tears falling from my eyes when I let myself acknowledge my real feelings for Quinn. Perhaps I was going to lose his love because I had not, in the end, believed in it enough. But what kind of life would a weekends-only relationship offer me? Why double the sin? I must admit that Quinn’s and my tidal wave of emotions surprised me. I guess I knew that he did in fact love me, but was that love enough?

  Maybe I was giving him an ultimatum. What if Quinn hadn’t been married with two children? What if we were just two single gay men? Would our relationship have stood a better chance of surviving? I knew one thing: with Quinn I felt safe. I could talk about work, sports and things that even Kyle didn’t understand. It was a friendship similar to those with my fraternity brothers, but with sex. Torrid sex. Plus an undying devotion to each other and the ability to share a tenderness rare in both men and women. I was pushing Quinn away because I was afraid to love another man that deeply. I think when two men like Quinn and myself meet, there is a fear of losing one’s self. Although we didn’t play roles, it was apparent that we both were used to being in charge. In previous relationships with men, I had always held back, never giving myself totally. AIDS had a lot to do with that, but in many ways it became a man thing with me. I used to listen to Kyle talk about the total rapture he felt when he gave himself to another man. He would describe it like

  a woman talking about multiple orgasms. It sounded like a dangerous addiction that I could live without. I remember meeting a supermacho guy who supposedly had been turned out in prison. The next time Kyle and I saw him, Kyle remarked that he looked like “a queen without a country.”

  Maybe Quinn touched buttons within me that I didn’t want to acknowledge or believe existed. I had to get out now!

  SHAY YOUNGBLOOD

  [1959–]

  BORN IN COLUMBUS, GEORGIA, PLAYWRIGHT AND NOVELIST Shay Youngblood graduated from the MFA in Creative Writing program at Brown University. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Lorraine Hansberry Playwrighting award, several NACP Theater Awards, and the Pushcart Prize for her short stories. Among her works are the lesbian-themed short fiction collection The Big Mama Stories (1989); the plays Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery (1994) and Talking Bones (1994); and novels Soul Kiss (1997) and Black Girl in Paris (2000). She lives in New York, where she teaches creative writing at the New York School for Social Research.

  This excerpt from Soul Kiss opens in 1968 with seven-year-old Mariah and her emotionally unstable mother shortly before their abrupt departure for the South. There, Mariah is unexpectedly left in the care of her mother’s aunts, who become responsible for the girl after her mother goes off with a boyfriend. Notable for the vivid descriptions and the lyrical tone of Youngblood’s prose, the book also deals subtly with sexuality, especially as it is presented through the eyes and thoughts of a child.

  from Soul Kiss

  [1997]

  When me and Mama lived together the world was a perfect place to be a little girl. I adored Mama and she adored me in return. No one else mattered. One of my first memories was watching her dress for work. Next to her reddish-brown skin, softened each night with a thin layer of Vaseline and cold cream, she wore a pink satin slip. Pink was romantic, she said, the color of love and laughing. Mama’s slanted eyes, a gift, she said, from her Cherokee grandfather, were dreamy remembering how my father told her she looked like a princess when she wore pink. On the outside she wore white. Her nurse’s uniform was starched, white-white, a petite size eight, with a tiny white cap perched on her short, tight, nappy curls, dyed blonde not quite down to her dark roots. White silk stockings veiled her long thin legs. Silent crepe-soled white shoes she’d let me lace up held her perfect, size six feet. Every weekday morning, on her way to the military hospital, she would walk me to school past the gray army barracks to the steel, bread-shaped huts, where we lined up for the pledge of allegiance to the flag.

  Armed with a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a word written on a small square of pink paper folded twice, I was ready for anything. The word was written in blue ink in my mother’s fancy script…pretty… sweet…blue…music…dream… Sometimes she gave me words in Spanish… bonita…dulce…sueños…agua…azul… The word I kept in my mouth, repeated like a prayer when I missed her. Mama told me that she would be thinking of the same word all day. That thought made our time apart bearable. Before she lef
t me at the door of the school she would whisper the word into my ear. I’d close my eyes and she would kiss me quickly on my neck, then let go of my hand. She always watched me through the window as I walked to my seat near the back of the room. We would mouth our word to each other once more before she disappeared. When Mama came for me in the afternoon I would take her hand and swing our arms as if we were both little girls on a walk.

  “Blue. B-L-U-E. Blue is the color of sad music. Blue.” I would pronounce, spell, and give the meaning of our word. Sometimes on our walks we invented words and spoke to each other in new languages. As praise, Mama would tickle me under my chin, then cup my face in her warm delicate hands and close her eyes. She would press her lips full on mine and give me what she called a soul kiss. My whole body would fever from my mother’s embrace.

  “I love you, Mama,” I would say, looking into her eyes.

  “I love you more,” she answered every time, looking deep inside me. I could read books before I could walk, Mama said. By the time I was three years old I was sitting on her lap reading to her from the newspaper. I don’t remember all this, but Mama said it’s so. I was so smart I got special treatment in school. “Teachers’ pet” they called me, and other names I grew to hate. I didn’t make friends, but I didn’t need them, I had Mama. All my days at school were spent passing the time, waiting for Mama to free me from the steel breadbox. She taught me all the important things there were to know.

  We lived on a military base near Manhattan, Kansas. Flat squares of grass occupied by long flat gray squares of apartments one after the other for miles and miles. There was a swing in our backyard where Mama spent hours pushing me into the sky. Sometimes I sang songs into the wind, catching pieces of cloud in my throat and swallowing them for safekeeping.

  We lived in a tiny apartment. The bare walls were an unpleasant weak shade of green transformed at night by Mama’s colored light bulbs into a pink velvet womb. In the living room an overstuffed red crushed velvet sofa sat in the middle of the room on gray-flecked linoleum tiles. There was a table at one end of the room and a lamp with a red-fringed shade and a big black radio on top of it. The radio’s antenna was wrapped with aluminum foil so we could get better reception for the blues and jazz music that came on in the evening from someplace so far away that pulsing static accompanied each song. Mama kept the plain white shades pulled down past the window sills “to keep our business to ourselves,” she said. The living room opened onto the kitchen where a bright yellow and pink flowered plastic tablecloth was spread over a wobbly card table surrounded by three silver folding chairs. A bare white bulb hung from the center of the white ceiling. White metal cabinets lined one wall and underneath them, an old-fashioned double sink with one side deeper than the other. Mama said she used to wash me in the deep part of the sink when I was small enough to hold in one hand. It always made me laugh when she said that because I couldn’t imagine being that tiny. Sometimes I wished I were small enough to crawl back inside her stomach where she said I was once small enough to fit. I could imagine no greater comfort. The bedroom was just big enough to fit the queen-sized bed and chest of drawers which held all our neatly folded clothes among fragrant cedar balls. A clean white tiled bathroom had a toilet that ran all night and a sink that dripped but also a deep, creamy white enamel tub that was big enough to fit me and Mama together just right.

  At night we would eat directly from tin cans heated on a one-eyed hot plate while we listened to music on the radio. In summer she said it was too hot to light the oven, in winter she said she was too tired to cook. On special days we had picnics, selecting cans of potted meat, stewed tomatoes, fruit cocktail, applesauce, and pork and beans to spread on saltine crackers or spear with sturdy toothpicks and wash down with sweet lemon iced tea. Mama just didn’t have any use for cooking and I never missed it because this was all I knew. After supper we would take a bath together, soaping each other with a soft pink sponge. Sometimes she let me touch her breasts. In my tiny hands they felt like holding clouds must. Like delicate overripe fruit. Her nipples were dark circles that grew into thick buttons when I pressed them gently as if I were an elevator operator. I kneeled in the warm soapy water between her legs letting water pour over her breasts from between my small fingers and watched her as she leaned back in the tub, her narrow eyes closed, hair damp and matted, mouth slightly open as if she were holding her breath. I felt so close to her, as if my skin were hers and we were one brown body. She didn’t seem to mind my curious fingers touching and soaping every curve and mystery of her body. There were no boundaries, no place I could not explore. After our bath we lay on the sofa in our clean white pajamas, listening to the radio until we fell asleep. I loved sleeping with her warm belly pressed into my back, one arm across my waist. Sometimes she would hold my hand as we slept.

  On weekends me and Mama played Ocean. Around bedtime she would get dressed in beautiful clothes and go out dancing. She left me alone with instructions to stay on the sofa, warning me that if I got off, even to go to the bathroom, I might drown in the ocean. She gave me toast left over from breakfast which I tossed bit by bit to the sharks in the dangerous waters all around my island so they wouldn’t nibble on my toes when I slept. I remember a pink lamp with a pink bulb burning and the radio turned down low. A few drops of scotch and lots of

  pink punch swirled in a chipped blue china cup burned sweetly in my throat. I drifted further out to sea than I imagined I could swim. The sharks began to circle as my eyelids dropped and the horizon across the ocean grew hazy. The sound of small waves rocked me like arms into the deepest part of sleep. Usually I began dreaming right after Mama left.

  I look like my mother. My hair is dyed blonde, my eyes are narrow, shaped like almonds and lined in black ink. My lips are rich with soft, pink kisses. Her hair. Her eyes. Her lips. I even have my mother’s breasts. Her thick, delicious nipples. In my favorite, secret dream I dress in her clothes, tight-waisted, sparkly, pink dresses, and dance in a circle of light. I dance until my feet become so light that I float across the dance floor up toward the ceiling of moving stars, then fly out of my window into other oceans.

  Mama was always there when I woke up. One time she woke me in the middle of the night crying. She told me that a special friend of hers, a hospital doctor, was being sent overseas and because Mama wasn’t his wife—he had one already—she couldn’t go. Because Mama was sad, I was sad. Her tears were mine. When Mama was crying, it seemed as if the whole world were crying.

  Before long, right out of the blue, Mama began to change. I was scared and confused. After school I wanted to tell her about my new classmates in second grade: the Korean girl who put her hands to her face and cried quietly all day; the red-haired, blue-eyed boy from Arkansas who talked like he had rocks in his mouth; the dark-skinned, wide-eyed girl named Meera with clouds of jet-black hair she let me touch at recess and whose mother was an Indian from India. I had a new friend, new books, and a new teacher, but Mama wasn’t interested in any of it. She seemed to be sleepwalking through our lives. More and more I was in charge. She let me do everything. In the afternoons I led us home. Her movements became slower, she walked as if strong hands gripped her ankles. Her eyes were dull and her voice weak. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak to me, but would mouth our word for the day while I untied her shoes and kneaded feeling back into her toes. I unhooked the stockings from their garters, rolling the silk carefully down her exhausted legs. She would fall asleep, and I would fill a small blue pan with warm water and soak her feet, massaging them gently. I would unbutton her white uniform and hang it in the closet. The wig she had started wearing was curly and dark. I would slide it off her head and place it on its stand. I would take a comb and scratch the dandruff from her scalp, oiling it with bergamot while she dozed, wondering why her hair had begun to fall out. It was dry and coarse and no longer blonde. I would watch her, slumped into the sofa in her pink satin slip, watching the rise and fall of her breasts. Curling up in her lap, I would smooth
the satin over the rise of her breasts with both my hands pressing the shape of her body from shoulders to waist, over and over again. Her eyes stayed closed, her breathing raw and hollow. Sometimes Mama would sleep for whole days when she wasn’t working. When she woke up she wanted water. Cool water.

  Mama had an answer for everything even when she didn’t know.

  “Where is my father?” I would ask her in the lazy pink light before we fell asleep at night.

  “In Mexico, painting the sky blue.” She drew pictures with her answers. “Is he handsome?” I asked, secretly hoping for more.

  “Very handsome. You have your father’s hands,” she’d say, kissing my fingers, each one.

  Her voice was twilight, and the stories she told me about him sounded like fairy tales that found their way into my dreams. Did I remember them or did I dream them? She never spoke of him outside of these times between waking and dreaming.

  I would close my eyes to listen, seeing every detail, my imagination filling in all the blank spaces.

  “How did you meet him? Tell me everything about him,” I demanded. Mama closed her eyes and drifted beyond my reach. She tossed me bits of stories to nibble on. I devoured the nights, the days of her memories, growing fat from their richness. The details of her stories changed over time. The season, the city, the natural disaster that took place the day they met, the color of his eyes.

  “I was happy then,” she would begin each time. “I was so happy then.” One legend began: “It was springtime, in California. A light breeze was blowing off the ocean. I had just come on duty when he walked into the emergency room. A cut from his head was bleeding. He had fallen off a ladder. There was pale blue paint all over his face and arms. I thought he had fallen from the sky, he was so beautiful, like an angel.