Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  “Don’t argue! I only read for the benefit of the person being read, so just keep your little ass still in that chair and listen. It’s black men or any other kind of man for you, right? Either or. You never felt comfortable, never liked or felt liked by all those beautiful, sexy, heterosexual Aframerican men who ran around, beloved by all, talkin bout playin ball and gettin pussy and my woman this and your woman that. Right? You hated them. Admit it. Hate. That’s how you felt, because they were supposed to belong to you, make you belong, right? And they didn’t. And don’t—mostly. So you don’t love them, sometimes still hate em. And you think because of that that maybe you don’t really love The Folks at all and feel terribly guilty when you read some writer talking about how much he or she loves Our People. Right?

  “But this is the thing, Kenneth: You do love The Folks. You love Aframerican women, right? How many times do we sit here and sing their individual praises? Hm? And you never knew a black gay man— that was out—before you came to New York. Right? You’ve convinced yourself that you hate you and hate The Folks, too, but like my grandmother down South used to say, It don’t make no kinda sense, baby. And it don’t. You love you. Somewhere that’s true; otherwise you wouldn’t be here, alive and healthy, today. Too many of us don’t know how to love ourselves and don’t make it, even out of safe bougie Aframerica. You love you. And you love us, The Folks. There are plenty of us out here, out there, that aren’t those boys you hated and still hate now. Women, Aframerican gay men. And I would be willing to say, even a good number of those boys that you hate and fear so much. See? All that love is right there, waiting for you.”

  I see this finger—looks huge—like a gun barrel pointed at my chest.

  “And Kenneth—in whatever way, however much, even if it doesn’t seem in hindsight like it was enough—you loved your cousin. You did.

  And you have to really know that, believe it. It almost has to show up in your dreams for it to be real.”

  And now he leans back. The smug sympathetic sinister goatee stroking expression returns. “I’d snap,” he says blandly, “but I’m too tired.” He really does have a beauty about him.

  We are silent.

  I’m a stubborn man, I’ll admit, and being read does not sit well with me. With confessed vengefulness, then, I can only say that it seems to me that I shall never be able to bring myself to obey one word of his advice, not one whit of it. It has to show up in your dreams, he said. That is what plays in my head now, as he asks, “How’re the Games?”

  He is teasing, but I cannot answer. “Fine,” is all I say. And then: “How’s your thing?”

  “Oh—!” Another fork flourish. “Good. The fucking is delicious. Makes me so thankful I’m a phallicist.” My laugh is beginning again; the smile is already there.

  “The problem, of course, is that he’s a man—as unoriginal a thing as that, and men have unfortunately all been taught, whatever their race”—he shoots me a look; his lover is black—“that they have something to say about things. Which is ridiculous, because most men haven’t anything at all to say about most things, unless it’s offensive or forgettable. Or stupid. Women are better life partners, ultimately. They’re taught they have nothing to say, and consequently they have everything fascinating and insightful to say, because they kept quiet or pretended to keep quiet and they learned something, and didn’t burble out their entire brainload before age ten. But—! ” He smiles, as pleased with himself as I am. “Men do have penises.”

  And we both laugh.

  Later, I am watching him recede from me as I stand at the corner, his slim shoulders carrying him, his step bouncing him gently away, like a little buoy bobbing slowly up and down in a sea of bodies and chatter.

  Why do I find it so easy to love Cyrus?

  THOMAS GLAVE

  [1965–]

  Born to expatriate Jamaican parents in the Bronx, Thomas Glave was raised in both New York City and Kingston, Jamaica. In 1988 he returned as a Fulbright Scholar to Jamaica, where he studied the island’s historiography and Jamaican-Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions. During his time in Jamaica, he helped found the Jamaican Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG). He is a 1993 honors graduate of Bowdoin College as well as a graduate of Brown University.

  Glave’s first short story collection, Whose Song? and Other Stories (2000), was published to critical acclaim, including the Village Voice’s selection of him as one of the most promising new fiction authors of the year. His writing has appeared in Callaloo and The Kenyon Review, as well as in the anthologies Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, Men on Men 6: Best New Gay Fiction, and Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence. In 1997 Glave became the second gay African American author, after James Baldwin, to win the O. Henry Award for Fiction.

  The title story of his collection, “Whose Song?,” depicts in disturbing detail the rape of a teenaged African American lesbian by three young black men, all of whom are struggling with their own sexuality.

  Whose Song?

  [2000]

  Yes, now they’re waiting to rape her, but how can they know? The girl with strum-vales, entire forests, behind her eyes. Who has already known the touch of moondewed kisses, nightwing sighs, on her teenage skin. Cassandra. Lightskinned, lean. Lovelier to them for the light. How can they know? The darkskinned ones aren’t even hardly what they want. They have been taught, have learned well and well. Them black bitches, that’s some skank shit, they sing. Give you VD on the woody, make your shit fall off. How can they know? Have been taught. Cassandra, fifteen, in the light. On her way to the forests. In the light. Hasn’t known a man yet. Hasn’t wanted to. How can they know? She prefers Tanya’s lips, the skin-touch of silk. Tanya, girlfriend, sixteen and fine, dark glider, schoolmatelover, large-nippled, -thighed. Tanya. Who makes her come and come again when the mamas are away, when houses settle back into silent time and wrens swoopflutter their wings down into the nightbird’s song. Tanya and Cassandra. Kissing. Holding. Climbing and gliding. What the grown girls do, they think, belly-kissing but shy. Holding. She makes me feel my skin, burrowing in. Which one of them thinks that? Which one flies? Who can tell? Climbing and gliding. Coming. Wet. Coming. Laughing. Smelling. Girlsex, she-love, and the nightbird’s song. Thrilling and trilling. Smooth bellies, giving face, brushing on and on. Cassandra. Tanya swooping down, brown girls, dusky flesh. How can they know? The boys have been watching them, have begun to know things about them watchers know or guess. The boys, touching themselves in nightly rage, watching them. Wanting more of Cassandra because she doesn’t want them. Wanting to set the forests on fire, cockbrush those glens. How can they know? They are there and they are there and they are watching. Now.

  Sing this tale, then, of a Sound Hill rape. Sing it, low and mournful, soft, beneath the kneeling trees on either side of the rusty bridge out by Eastchester Creek; where the sun hangs low over the sound and water meets the sky; where the departed walk along Shore Road and the joggers run; where morning rabbits leap away from the pounding jogger’s step. Sing it far and wide, this sorrow song woven into the cresting nightbird’s blue. Sing it, in that far-off place far up away from it all, where the black people live and think they’ve at last found peace; where there are homes, small homes and large, with modest yards, fruit hedges, taxus, juniper trees; where the silver hoses, coiled, sag and lean; where the withered arms hanging out of second-story windows are the arms of that lingering ghost or aging lonely busybody everybody knows. In that northerly corner of the city where no elevated IRT train yet comes; where the infrequent buses to Orchard Beach and Pelham Bay sigh out spent lives and empty nights when they run; where the sound pulls watersmell through troubled dreams and midnight pains, the sleeping loneliness and silence of a distant place. Sound Hill, beneath your leaning trees and waterwash, who do you grieve for now? Sound Hill girl of the trees and the girlflesh where are you now? Will those waters of the sound flow beside you now? Caress you with light-kiss
es and bless you now? The City Island currents and the birds rush by you now? O sing it. Sing it for that yellow girl, dark girl, brown girl homely or fine, everygirl displaced, neither free nor named. Sing it for that girl swinging her axe through the relentless days, suckling a child or selling her ass in the cheap hotels down by the highway truckers’ stop for chump change. Sing it for this girl, swishing her skirt and T-shirt, an almost-free thing, instinctual, throwing her head back to the breeze. Her face lifted to the sky. Now, Jesus. Walk here, Lamb. In thy presence there shall be light and light. Grace. Cadence. A witness or a cry. Come, now. All together. And.

  How could we know? Three boys in a car, we heard, but couldn’t be neighbors of ours. Had to be from some other part of the world, we thought; the projects or the Valley. Not from here. In this place every face knows every eye, we thought, what’s up here in the heart always is clear. But they were not kind nor good, neither kin nor known. If they were anything at all besides unseen, they were maimed. Three boys, three boys. In a car. Long legs, lean hands. In a car. Bitter mouths, tight asses, and the fear of fear. Boys or men and hard. In their car. Who did not like it. Did not like the way those forest eyes gazed out at those darker desert ones, at the eyes of that other who had known what it was to be dark and loathed. Yo, darkskinned bitch. So it had been said. Yo, skillet ass. Don’t be cutting your eyes at me, bitch, I’ll fuck your black ass up. It had been said. Ugly black bitch. You need some dick. Them eyes gone get you killed, rolling them at me like that. It had been said. Had to be, had to be from over by Edenwald, we thought. Rowdy, raunchy, no kind of class. Nasty homies on the prowl, not from this ’hood. How could we know? Three boys, fretful, frightened, angry. In a row. The burning rope had come to them long ago in willed and willful dreams, scored mean circles and scars into their once-gorgeous throats. The eyes that had once looked up in wonder from their mother’s arms had been beaten, hammered into rings, dark pain-pools that belied their depth. Deeper. Where they lived, named and unnamed. How could they know? Know that those butterflies and orchids of the other world, that ice-green velvet of the other world, the precious stones that got up and wept before the unfeeling sky and the bears that slept away entire centuries with memories of that oncewarm sweet milk on their lips, were not for them? So beaten, so denied, as they were and as they believed, their own hands had grown to claws over the years; savaged their own skin. Needles? Maybe, we thought. In the reviling at large, who could tell? Pipes, bottles? Vials? So we thought. Of course. Who could know, and who who knew would tell? Who who knew would sing through the veil the words of that song, about the someone-or-thing that had torn out their insides and left them there, far from the velvet and the butterflies and the orchid-time? The knower’s voice, if voice it was, only whispered down bitter rains when they howled, and left us only the curve of their skulls beneath the scarred flesh on those nights, bony white, when the moon smiled.

  And she, so she: alone that day. Fresh and wet still from Tanya’s arms, pajama invitations and TV nights, after-dark giggles and touches, kisses, while belowstairs the mama slept through world news, terrorist bombings, cleansings ethnic and unclean. Alone that day, the day after, yellow girl, walking out by the golden grayswishing Sound, higher up along the Shore Road way and higher, higher up where no one ever walks alone, higher still by where the dead bodies every year turn up (four Puerto Rican girl-things cut up, garbage-bagged, found there last year: bloated hands, swollen knees, and the broken parts); O higher still, Cassandra, where the fat joggers run, higher still past the horse stables and the smell of hay, higher yet getting on to where the whitefolks live and the sundowns die. Higher. Seeking watersmell and sheen for those forests in her eyes; seeking that summer sundown heat on her skin; seeking something away from ’hood cat calls and yo, bitch, let me in. Would you think she doesn’t already know what peacefulness means, contains? She’s already learned of the dangers of the too-high skirt, the things some of them say they’d like to put between her knees. The blouse that reveals, the pants that show too much hip. Ropes hers and theirs. Now seeking only a place where she can walk away, across the water if need be, away from the beer cans hurled from cars, the What’s up, bitch yells and the burning circle-scars. Cassandra, Cassandra. Are you a bitch out here? The sun wexing goldsplash across her now says no. The water stretching out to Long Island summerheat on the other side says no, and the birds wheeling overhead, okay, okay, they cry, call down the sky-tone, concurring: the word is no. Peace and freedom, seasmell and free. A dark girl’s scent riding on her thighs. Cassandra. Tanya. Sing it.

  But they watching. The three. Singing. Listen: a bitch ain’t nothing but a ho, sing those three. Have been taught. (But by whom?) Taught and taut. Taught low and harsh, that rhythm. Fierce melody. Melodyless­ness in mixture, lovelessness in joy. Drunk on flame, and who the fuck that bitch think she is anyway? they say—for they had seen her before, spoken to her and her kind; courted her favor, her attentions, in that car. Can’t talk to nobody, bitch, you think you all a that? Can’t speak to nobody, bitch, you think your pussy talks and shit? How could they know then?—of her forests, smoldering? Know and feel?—how in that growing silent heat those inner trees had uprooted, hurled stark branches at the outer sky? The firestorm and after-rain remained unseen. Only the lashes fluttered, and the inner earth grew hard. With those ropes choking so many of them in dreams, aware of the circles burnt into their skins, how could they know? How could they not know?

  Robbie. Dee. Bernard. Three and three. Young and old. Too old for those jeans sliding down their asses. Too young for the rope and the circle’s clutch. Too old to love so much their own wet dreams splashed out onto she they summoned out of that uncentered roiling world. She, summoned, to walk forth before their fire as the bitch or cunt. So they thought, would think and sing: still too young for the nursing of that keening need, the unconscious conscious wish to obliterate through vicious dreams who they were and are, have been, and are not. Blackmenbrothers, lovers, sons of strugglers. Sharecroppers, cocksuck-ers, black bucks and whores. Have been and are, might still be, and are not. A song. To do away with what they have and have not; what they can be, they think, are told by that outer chorus they can be—black boys, pretty boys, big dicks, tight asses, pretty boys, black scum, or funky homie trash—and cannot. Their hearts replaced by gnashing teeth, dirt; the underscraping grinch, an always-howl. Robbie Dee Bernard. Who have names and eyelids, fears, homiehomes. Watching now. Looking out for a replacement for those shredded skins. Cause that bitch think she all a that, they sing. Word, got that lightskin, good hair, think she fly. Got them titties that need some dick up in between. The flavor. Not like them darkskinned bitches, they sing. (But do the words have joy?) Got to cut this bitch down to size, the chorus goes. A tune. Phat pussy. Word, G! Said hey-ho! Said a-hey-ho! Word, my brother. My nigger. Sing it.

  So driving. Looking. Watching. Seeing. Their words a blue song, the undercolor of the nightbird’s wing. Is it a song you have heard before? Heard it sung sweet and clear to someone you hate before? Listen: –Oh shit, yo, there she go. Right up there. Straight on. Swinging her ass like a high-yellow ho. Said hey-ho! Turn up the volume on my man J Live J. Drive up, yo. Spook the bitch. Gonna get some serious pussy outa this shit. –Driving, slowing, slowing down. Feeling the circles, feeling their own necks. Burning skins, cockheads fullstretched and hard. Will she have a chance, dreaming of girlkisses, against that hard? In the sun. Here. And.

  Pulling up. –So, Miss Lightskin, they sing, what you doing out here? Walking by yourself, you ain’t scared? Ain’t scared somebody gonna try to get some of your skin? Them titties looking kinda fly, girl. Come on, now. Get in.

  Was it then that she felt the smoldering in those glens about to break? The sun gleaming down silver whiteheat on her back? And O how she had only longed to walk the walk. To continue on and on and on and through to those copses where, at the feet of that very old and most wise woman-tree of all, she might gaze into those stiller waters of minnow-fi
shes, minnow-girls, and there yes! quell quell quell quell quell the flames. As one of them then broke through her glens, to shout that she wasn’t nothing anyway but a yellow bitch with a whole lotta attitude and a skanky cunt. As (oh yes, it was true, rivers and fire, snake daggers and black bitches, she had had enough) she flung back words on what exactly he should do with his mother’s cunt, cause your mother, nigger, is the only motherfucking bitch out here. And then? Who could say or know? The 5-0 were nowhere in sight; all passing cars had passed; only the wheeling birds and that drifting sun above were witnesses to what they could not prevent. Cassandra, Cassandra. –Get in the car, bitch. –Fuck no, I won’t. Leave me alone. Leave me—trying to say Fuck off, y’all leave me the fuck alone, but whose hand was that, then, grabbing for her breast? Whose hand is that, on her ass, pressing now, right now, up into her flesh? –Stop it, y’all. Get the fuck off before screaming and crying. Cursing, running. Sneakered feet on asphalt, pursuit, and the laughter loud. An easy catch. –We got you now, bitch. –Who can hear? The sun can only stare, and the sky is gone.

  Driving, driving, driving on. Where can they take her? Where will they? They all want some, want to be fair. Fair is fair: three dicks, one cunt. That is their song. Driving on. Pelham Bay Park? they think. But naw, too many people, niggers and Ricans with a whole buncha kids and shit. (The sun going down. Driving on.) How about under the bridge, by Eastchester Creek? That’s it, G! Holding her, holding, but can’t somebody slap the bitch to make her shut up? Quit crying, bitch. Goddamn. A crying-ass bitch in a little funky-ass car. Now weeping more. Driving on. –Gonna call the police, she says, crying more; choking in that way they like, for then (oh, yes, they know) in that way from smooth head to hairy base will she choke on them. They laugh. –What fucking 5-0 you gonna call, bitch? You lucky we ain’t take your yellow ass over to the projects. Fuck your shit in the elevator, throw your ass off the roof. These bitches, they laugh. Just shut up and sit back. Sit back, sit back. –Driving on.