Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  “Fuck, yeah. Tore that shit up. Man, yo’ sister know how to do it good, too,” said Tyrone. “I guess Jeremy warmed it up for me, ’cuz we was all over that mattress.”

  Everyone exchanged soul shakes. Even I joined in, wanting to be party to the story. Palm cupped. Slide to knuckles. Patted twice with the knuckles of the other hand. Fingers then pinched and swung up to the mouth to indicate smoking reefer, then a slide over the head and back down to a thumbs-up.

  James had shown us this shake on his first day. Every summer, another move or two were added. We had attempted, in his absence, to make our own additions, but they never held a candle to what James brought from Detroit.

  Miss Irene’s backyard was always our private place. Behind her house was a huge field that had grown wild with neglect. A barbed-wire fence separated it from her vacant yard. On numerous occasions, we had played hide-and-seek in that field, but not this summer. Hide-and-seek was replaced with the mattress in the overgrown lot, a place for sex, not child’s play.

  I’d been shown the mattress, but the thought of ever being on it never interested me. I had never “done it” with Shandra. But if she had not brought that fact to light with Tyrone, I certainly wasn’t going to broach the matter. Maybe that was what she wanted and why she broke up with me to be with him. I knew what it was. I’d seen Aunt Jess doing it one time.

  Some man was on top of her, jiggling around. She was making these uh, uh, uh sounds and so was he, but it didn’t seem like they meant disdain, as is usually the case when those sounds are strung together. No, they were continuous, drawn out, the final uh always the longest, deflating to nothing.

  On the day of my first sexual sighting, I had hidden in the closet in Aunt Jess’s room—not with the idea of spying, for I had always hidden in certain places in the house to just get away from it all. Hide-and-seek for one. I peeked out of the crack between the closet-door panels, feeling a bit sweaty up against the plastic-covered dry-cleaned Sunday clothes that surrounded me.

  When she entered the room with the man, I dared not present myself. I was trapped there. They undressed, and he climbed on top of her but didn’t cover himself with the blankets. I didn’t quite understand why she would want this man on top of her like that. The look on her face was as though what he was doing was painful, but he kept right at it. I wanted to jump out and protect her, but when he asked if she liked it, she said that she did. When she opened her eyes, I had to wonder.

  With that long last uh, he rolled off of her onto his back. She stroked his chest a few times, but just a few, because he popped up from the bed. “I gotta get goin’,” he said, motioning for his boxers on the floor.

  “You wanna wash up?”

  “Nah, I’ll do it later. I gotta get goin’. I’ll call ya later.”

  Aunt Jess stayed in bed and watched through the window as he went out the front door. I sat back in the closet, not wanting to see any more. I thought she would stay in bed forever. It wasn’t until I heard the bathwater running that I crept out of the place I’d intended for solace, soaked with sweat, feeling I should wash up, but for a different reason. Still, I couldn’t imagine Tyrone and Shandra doing that. The thought of it made me dislike her even more and hate him for his lack of discretion. It seemed peculiar to me that James didn’t mind that his sister had done this. It was as though he was proud, not of her, but of Tyrone. “Hey, if you can get them drawers, get ’em,” he said to Tyrone. They all laughed, even Clark, but I couldn’t imagine that he had ever done it. I doubt he even knew why this was funny.

  “Yeah, Jeremy, you missin’ out now, man. But I ’preciate you handin’ her over to me,” said Tyrone, hand cupped over his crotch. I couldn’t help but wonder if indeed I had really missed something. “Bitch wouldn’t suck my dick, though.”

  “Ah, man, she wouldn’t suck yo’ dick?” said James, her own brother. “Nothin’ beat gettin’ yo’ dick sucked.”

  They all concurred, as though sex and its many acts were as common to them as biting off the Styrofoam that kept the huckabuck from making cherrylike stains on cotton garments.

  I too nodded my head, yet not in agreement. I put my hands in my pockets, pushing down as far as they would go, grabbing for anything to distract me, but all I found was lint.

  “Don’t go puttin’ yo’ hands in yo’ pockets. It’s too late to be gettin’ hard now. You could still be pokin’ that, but you were too busy ackin’ like a l’il ol’ punk, so I had to step up to the plate. Batter up!” he said, laughing before adding, “Hank Aaron ain’t got shit on me.”

  Punk.

  Tyrone had a responsive crowd now, and they followed his lead, hooing and hawing, even Clark. I took my hands out of my pockets posthaste and though I wanted to say something in rebuttal, like “Fuck you” or “Yo’ mamma” or one of the many puerile insults that I’d heard thrown around, I knew that coming out of my mouth, they wouldn’t carry the same vituperative heft.

  “You wanna see somethin’?” asked James. Our excitement was piqued for a moment, for the way he posed it was as though he was going to show us the most amazing feat in the world. If he was going to be supping with the queen of soul, then anything was possible—and it had to be if it was going to top Tyrone’s grandstanding.

  The yeahs of everyone followed—everyone except Clark, for he rarely answered. The only sound I’d ever heard him make that wasn’t laughter was like a yelp that came from deep down. I thought of it as a baby crying in the night, frustrated because no one could understand what the problem was. “Come on.” James shot off the step. He went down to where the middle line of the barbed wire had been cut out of the fence. Tyrone placed his foot on the bottom line, then pulled up the top one as we all stepped through, free of puncture. We walked through the field, me looking down rather than ahead, certain that a ground rattler or some other creature of the grass was ready to defend its home. Later on, I knew I would have preferred that.

  We got to the mattress. I wondered how many others had been on it, whose stains covered the striped fabric, and did they too just roll over and wash up later.

  James looked around to see if anyone else was in view, as though what he was about to show us was going to be mind shattering. When he saw that the site was secure, his hand found its way to his zipper and he slid it down. With the thumb of the other hand, he pushed down his underwear and kept the zipper’s metal teeth pried open. He took his other hand off the zipper and pulled out his dick. There it was, without a thought, privacy relinquished. He began to wiggle it up and down, and in no time, it began to inflate like an inner tube in a bicycle tire until it looked as though it would pop.

  “Watch this,” said James, as he sat Clark on the mattress. He stepped up onto the mattress, a hand on Clark’s shoulder so he could maintain his balance on the worn springs. Clark just sat there, watching us all. James put his dick near Clark’s face, and as though they had done it hundreds of times before, Clark took James into his mouth, just like a child sucking on his thumb.

  None of us made a sound. I had unknowingly stopped breathing. Clark’s eyes just wandered from corner to corner, not at all out of embarrassment or to see if anyone was approaching. They just wandered because that’s what they always did. When he looked at me with those old eyes, I wanted to see a tear fall, but none was to be seen. I wanted to do something to stop James, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. The air was thick and lost, as if a belt squeezed to the last hole was around my neck, making my heart pound frantically. James put his hands on the sides of Clark’s head and began moving back and forth. I was not to escape to the comfort of a rocking chair.

  “James!” It was Miss Irene. All heads turned at lightning speed. We expected her to be standing over us, but she was calling from the front of the house. James looked up and tried to pull himself away from Clark, but Clark wouldn’t let go so easily. James punched him on the side of the face and finally, like a baby burping, Clark released his suction. He looked up at James. The punch was more
devastating to him than the deed I had just witnessed; yes, at last, the tears came.

  “James!” screamed Miss Irene again.

  “I’m comin’.”

  “Hurry up, then. Ya momma’s on the phone.”

  James zipped his pants and began running back through the field, with the Baker boys closely in tow. Clark tried to find some spring from the mattress to get up, but he was so big that leverage weighed against him.

  There we were, together. I walked over to him, trying to help him up, and he reached for my zipper. “No! Clark—no! Don’t do that!” My scream shook every strand of overgrown vegetation in the field, and Clark again began to cry. I sat down on the mattress, forgetting its filth. I stroked his back, telling him it was all right, the way Mama B or Aunt Jess had done to me every time I cried. He began to rock back and forth as I always did, and after a while, he stopped crying. I stood, and it took all my strength to help him from the mattress. We began to walk through that field. He grabbed my hand and I let him hold it, and I didn’t care about snakes or anything else. We just kept walking.

  True to form, I never considered speaking of what I had seen. Though they were all too old to play cowboys and Indians, they still used the word tattletale as if it was Mr. Webster’s finest. I didn’t want to be likened to Precious. I didn’t know what the word punk meant, but I knew that if it meant that I wasn’t like James, then I didn’t at all mind being called that word.

  The next day, Miss Irene sent her grandchildren on their way. Because my life had been filled with things not said and frequent goodbyes, I had become accustomed to it. But never had I been so happy to see someone leave as I was when James left for Detroit, where they played cops and robbers, not cowboys and Indians.

  A few weeks later, I came in from school and Mama B was in the kitchen, but she wasn’t making cornbread for me. She was frying fish. I always considered fish to be our Friday meal, but it wasn’t Friday.

  “We’re having fish today?” I asked, brushing against her side. But she remained distant. No hug hello or questions about my day.

  “No, Patience, this ain’t for us. I’m makin’ it for Miss Irene.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “No, she got a bit of bad news today. I’m just takin’ somethin’ over to ease the burden.”

  I knew Mama B wasn’t telling me the whole story. She always tried to protect, as was her nature. The truth always came from Aunt Jess. I knew the only two reasons someone took someone else food was when they were ill or someone had died. Since Miss Irene wasn’t sick… I ventured out of the house in search of answers, not at all caring that I would miss Flipper’s adventures that day. I went to the rental house to talk to Miss Claire; if death was involved, I knew she would be privy to the information.

  As it unfolded, James had been associated with a gang back in Detroit. “He was killed dead, just like his no-’count daddy,” said Miss Claire. “I don’t know how his mamma kept him outta trouble this long. Now, she could send them down here to Irene, Lawd bless her soul, for the summers, tryin’ to get him away from that foolishness, but who was watchin’ him the other nine months? I truly feel for Irene.”

  It was different for me to think that someone thirteen years old, the age of manhood in certain cultures, two years older than me, could be shot. I supposed Detroit was different and we were backward down here. But if this was backward, it was what I wanted.

  I can’t say I was disappointed by the news about James, for though I couldn’t envision him on the ground with bullets in his body and bloodstained clothes, I could remember Clark’s eyes.

  When Mama B returned from delivering the food, she was out of sorts. She sat in her rocker as if even its frame couldn’t support her, an oak turned into a willow.

  “Are you alright, Mama B?”

  “Yes, Patience.”

  I could tell by her posture that she didn’t want to speak any more about it, so I let it and her rest. I went and sat on the back steps and I looked out into the day. Later that evening, I found Mama B in better spirits.

  “Mama B?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s a punk?”

  She stopped her brush midway through the length of her hair. She brought it down to her lap and pulled off the excess from its teeth. She balled the hair between her fingers then placed it in the ashtray and struck a big wooden match, setting the oiled hair ablaze. A sizzle and the smell of burn filled the air for an instant. When the hair had shriveled before me to nothing, she blew out the match. Holding it up she said, “This is a punk, Patience. It’s a piece of wood—just a piece of wood.”

  MARCI BLACKMAN

  [1969–]

  NOVELIST MARCI BLACKMAN, AN OHIO NATIVE, BEGAN HER literary career by reading the novels of Toni Morrison and writing poetry, to which she attributes the lyrical quality of her work. However, it was during an epiphanic moment while bicycling near Florence, Italy, that she committed herself to writing a novel. The work in progress was shaped through readings given with Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Road Show, a lesbian performance group Blackman helped found, and was later published by Manic D Press as Po Man’s Child (1999). She is also coeditor of Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (1996), and her fiction has appeared in the anthologies Signs of Life, Fetish, and Brown Sugar.

  Winner of both the American Library Association’s 2000 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Book Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Best New Fiction, Po Man’s Child was inspired by a news story about teenaged sex workers in Brazil who cut themselves to feel. In this opening chapter, an S/M sex scene between Po and her girlfriend, Mary, slips out of hand, seriously injuring Po. She places herself in a psychiatric hospital for observation, and the novel unfolds in flashbacks to the young woman’s past as she recuperates during a seventy-two-hour rest.

  from Po Man’s Child

  [1999]

  Aunt Florida is angry and it’s not a good sign. Yesterday the picture of her that adorns my mantel—the one with the cigar in her mouth, and the nickel-sized tar black eyes that glare at you no matter where you stand in the room—tipped over three times. Today all the books on my bookshelf conspired to fall at the exact same moment. And now three mocking liquid shadows dance violently upon my wall even though the candles that cast them burn calm.

  “When the Po ladies start turnin their faces down on ya,” my mother always warned, “you know they are not happy.” It is four a.m. Mary lies flat on her back, knees bent, hands clasped behind her head, breasts off to each side. I’m propped up beside her, leaning on one elbow, my finger circling the labia stencil tattooed across her navel.

  “Tell me a story,” she whispers in a sultry voice, stopping the motion of my hand with her own.

  “Not tonight,” I answer, refusing to bite. “Not in the mood.”

  “Oh,” she says coyly, still holding my hand, “but it’s not a request.” She pinches the skin on the soft side of my forearm, then uses it for leverage as she sits up. It doesn’t hurt when she pinches me. It never does in the beginning. We’ve been through this before. “Tell me the one about your family,” she demands.

  I let my head fall and rest on her shoulder. “You’re not tired of that one yet?” I ask, yawning so she knows that I am. “How many versions have you heard now? Three? Four?”

  “So,” she answers, still pinching my skin, “tell it to me again.” Then letting her mouth slide into the crooked grin reserved for these occasions, junctions in time when she knows she’ll have her way, she pinches even harder.

  My forearm is starting to burn and it’s kind of annoying. I don’t want to do this tonight. Something about Aunt Florida’s picture lying face down doesn’t feel right. “I said I’m not in the mood,” I answer again, sternly. “Besides, I’m all out of fresh ideas.”

  At this last comment, she sits up, tosses her head back and laughs. Her stringy black hair wafts in the breeze stirred up by Aunt Florida. Flanked by the in-your-
face arrogance of dancing shadows from the candles, she narrows her pale green eyes and says, “Then try telling the truth this time.”

  “The what?”

  “The truth,” she laughs again. “How’s that for a fresh idea? Novel concept, isn’t it?” The laugh halts abruptly. “When’s the last time you told me the truth, Po?”

  I sit up on my knees to face her. “Oh, I get it. This is supposed to be some kind of dare.”

  “No, Po, no dare,” she says, coldly. “Just a simple question. Can you remember?”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  She just stares at me.

  “You don’t think I can do it?” I ask, acting insulted.

  Still she says nothing.

  “Okay,” I smile, responding to the challenge. “The truth? You got it. Starting from where?”

  “From the day your parents first met.”

  On Mary’s order, I scoot to the edge of the bed, lay my forearm face up on the nightstand and start talking. “My parents—Gregory Taylor and Lillian Louise Childs—met and fell in love in 1958. Lillian’s last name was Smith then, and at the time she met my father, she had no intention of changing it…”

  It’s an act, a game we play. Mary picks a spot on my body, any spot; tests how hard she can pinch or bite it, how deep she can cut it, or how long she can burn it. While I recount—without flinching—a story that’s never happened.

  It must be the fifth or sixth time we’ve played this game. Mary got the idea from a book one of her fag friends loaned her called Intellectual S/M. At first the idea was just intriguing. Kind of like one of those endurance tests the Fitness Council makes you take in junior high school. I was curious to see how long my imagination would hold out. How long I could keep the story going. It wasn’t something I expected to like. But being forced to focus so intently on something outside the realm of current pain seems to make the endorphins kick in sooner. Before I know it, for a while anyway, the numbness is nowhere to be found.