by Kola Boof
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2011 Kola Boof
ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-96-1
eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75063-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010939108
All rights reserved
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If this book were to sell a million copies it still wouldn’t be enough to express my gratitude to Johnny Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books.
My black American adoptive parents: I love you eternally. I see you, Father, watching over me. I love you forever.
I want to thank my new King, Posar A. Posr, for loving, accepting, and supporting me. I pray you’ll always be my best friend.
I also want to thank my fans for not allowing my work to be silenced—I look forward to your feedback. The novel details the violent unfairness of identity; in a way, it’s a compendium of my secrets; the secret about hurting … So I’m grateful for your love; I needed your love and there isn’t a moment that I’m not thinking about your expectations and wanting to please you. Please know that I don’t take this work lightly.
I have to thank the legendary New York University scholar, activist, and writer Derrick Bell for believing so strongly in this book. Ditto Nicholas Roman Lewis, who loved and nurtured the novel. I thank my sons Arnofo and Wombe for their indescribable telepathic support and understanding. One of my editors at Akashic, Ibrahim Ahmad, you’ve blessed my life and will be repaid. Chinweizu the Great: you are indeed my literary father. I thank the special women who inspired and held me up: Nafisa Goma, Ajowa Ifetayo, Aiesha Turman, Zakiya Padmore, Carol Mackey, Doreen Mununura, IsisPaperzZ (Twitter), my sister Erin McCargar in Tennessee, Beth Anne Zimmerman, and Rahel Thorsten. I’m very grateful, sisters. I thank Simon Palacio—for everything. Keidi Awadu, Rakesh Satyal, and Minister Brown—bless you for such giant small wishes!
for Nyibol Bior
Chuol apieth
The white woman is the virtuous part of the Bible;
her hand is fair.
—The Christians of Ajowaland
John Theodosius van Elker
1651
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Orisha
I Have an Awful Lot to Hide
The Heat of African November
The Earth Has Parents
SON Once you open a book, it can never be closed
The Heart (Will Kill You)
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
We Who Go with the Landscape
Orisha
You may as well know everything. That there are white men in Africa who no longer come to bring us the word of Jesus Christ, but come instead to bring back the dead. In fact, the man who brought me back to life, the only man I’ve ever trusted, the man who undid my virginity and now lies here dying, his head sweating profusely in my lap, is one of them. He is the tall Ron-Howard-as-Richie-Cunningham-from-Happy-Days one in our clinic whose given name from his white people is Stevedore. He is the one who makes me read books and teaches me how to better convince people that I am the character I’m playing. Surely I don’t have to tell you how terribly young and liberal these foreign scientists are. How they bathe naked in the river with the Oluchi tribesmen, play American hip-hop music, and hang pictures of white dog-haired women in strips of cloth on their walls while they drip the DNA of dead people into flat, red-bottomed cups they call a “culture” … and cook food in this thing, the microwave. But what I do have to tell you about—and perhaps eventually the whole world—is how I have worshipped him so magnetically for all the nineteen years I’ve been alive again; and yet just this late afternoon, even as he is dying and my vision is blinded by sheets and sheets of tears, there is now nothing but the most silent betrayal and fascinating disbelief between us. It’s because I know at last that the worst is true. The things we blacks have been whispering about in West Cassavaland since King Reagan was in the White House—that our dead are being cloned by foreign AIDS scientists. And as I hold Stevedore’s last seconds of life, his head convulsing to the burnished heat of my bare black breasts, and try to keep his blue eyes from turning to glass, I know it now without a doubt that I, who never even had AIDS, am one of his clones. I feel like the monster in that book he forbade me to read as a child. But then again, this latest revelation allows me to finally call him Father. I also know now that it’s my fault he never believed in God, and that this is why he named me the very last word to part his dying lips … Eternity.
Dear God and Dear Satan too: I address the both of you to say, “Ife kwulu ife akwudebe ya” (If one thing stands, another thing stands by it). For I am truly a descendent of the laboratory now, and I cry that You might take pity that he has made of me an actual goddess— as pathetic as either of You—an experimental daughter raised on weekends and during playtime by the Oluchi river women, yet privately educated and reared by what the Africans call the “Caucasoids.” And just as when You created me—there’s more poetry than sense to it.
It’s my name that Stevedore calls right before his heart stops. He exhales it, passionately … Eternity! And though my tears prevent me from seeing the moment when his eyes become glass, I certainly feel it. Right now, especially, as hallucinatory memories come to me like some miracle story that the topless Oluchi women would expect tourists to believe, I can see everything that the American filmmakers have come here to make a motion picture about in my lover’s glass-pane eyes.
I see the skeletal dog with the human arm in its mouth, barely nourished enough to wag its tail as it runs away from the screaming mob. I see him, Stevedore, coming into the town square, only he’s twenty years younger and resembles Richie Cunningham even more than he does now. Stevedore steps aside as the mutt he mistook for a Dalmatian runs past with my arm in its mouth. He’s not surprised at all as he comes upon the sight of a frail, middle-aged Ajowan woman being kicked to death in the streets of DakCrete by the swallowers. To him, it is West Cassavaland desperation that causes the young people to kick me to death and stomp me and shout belligerently, “Kill the racist … kill the racist!” Stevedore is shocked, amazed, and horrified as their bony fists shake in the air, their black faces twisted with an urgent ejaculation as they, the swallowers, obliterate me—“The Racist.” And he’s lifting me now. Lifting me from my puddle of blood as my brains balloon out of my head like comic book clouds and my faint heart retires ever slowly, ever gently. My bowels release, splattering the front of his shirt, belt buckle, and zipper with warm, runny shit. And when he glances at the middle-aged Ajowan woman’s face, bloody, wet, and asleep as though she’s just been born, I can clearly see through his eyes that she was me. Me, exactly.
I can’t think for a moment. I am the rum extract, the clone of this woman kicked to death in the streets. Only it’s now again, the moment of your death, 2002, and I can’t breathe without you, Stevedore. I glance up and there, shouting in the doorway, is Dr. Quicken, our scientist from Great Britain, his wrinkly pale throat roosterred with excitement as he keeps insisting, “Eternity’s killed him! … Eternity’s killed the American!” People are coming—I hear them running toward the lab as Dr. Quicken cries out, “His shiny black bitch has killed him!”
As though peering into a puddle of elephant’s piss, I can see myself in
Dr. Quicken’s cold, hateful, gray stare— my wicked flesh black as melted coal newly sprung from the earth’s volcanic core. I can see my childlike saucershaped eyes and angular cheekbones fashioning my mouth into a blatant O, and my bare, skinny limbs bending toward the floor with your white-as-a-moon face in my lap. And for the first time, I know it’s true what you used to say about me, Stevedore.
That I, Eternity, am breathtaking.
THE WOMEN’S DUNGEON, ABENI IBO PRISON
“I testified on your behalf,” Stevedore’s wife, Juliet, whispers to me.
She’s carrying blankets and food, God bless her, because when you go to jail in West Cassavaland, they don’t give you anything but a wire cot on a dirt floor with a hole in the middle to squat over. Worse than the fat green flies congregating around your shithole are the big brown rats quickly shooting from corner to corner with tails longer than teak braids, their toothy pointed noses sniffing to detect the smell of sand crystals on your toes or perspiration salt in the corners of your eyes and mouth. There are no bars or electricity down here. Just stone walls, torches, and stinking, unwashed women strewn about like skinny worm-infested dogs, and one of them is cuddling the only thing that I fear even more than rats—a doll. No matter how far away the woman is, the thing, the fucking doll, keeps staring at me! This is why I forget all about being mad at Juliet and break into tears and grab her and hug her, holding on for dear life when she arrives at my cell.
“I told the authorities everything,” she exhales. Then, just as our embrace is beginning to feel comforting, she pulls away, saying, “As a formality, they’re sending an investigator to the compound to ask some questions, but you’re getting out of here tomorrow.”
Tomorrow!?
Horrified of the coming hours and yet speechless, I gaze into Juliet Frankenheimer’s frozen blue eyes as she seems to speak her sentences in categories: “I told them about you and my husband being in love—and how you worshipped him. I told them about Stevedore’s hobby of writing plays and having you star in the sixteen-millimeter short comedies that he made to entertain the Oluchi and Ajowan people. I told them, Eternity, about how we found you abandoned on our doorstep and practically raised you from birth, and how Stevedore and I were just about to send you off to be educated in England. I told them about your high IQ and your gentle soul. I made them understand that there’s no way in hell you’d ever harm a hair on Stevedore’s body, you loved him so unselfishly. And being that I’m Stevedore’s wife and have no reason to defend you, the Gon-ghossa Protectorate has decided to release you tomorrow.”
It’s all true, of course. I would have rather taken my own life than Stevedore’s—but still, of all the scientists at the Africa Farms AIDS Clinic, why would Dr. Juliet be the one to come rushing to rescue me from the dungeon for criminals, witches, and people with AIDS? She has always hated my heart, the fact that it continues beating each day. She loathed Stevedore’s penis to the point where she’d commissioned a nude portrait of him without one.
I watch her hand, its trembling fingers whiter than usual as she runs them through her limp blond hair. Then, suddenly, I realize that the redness in her eyes might not be from crying. She seems high to me. Higher than a giraffe’s pussy, as Stevedore would say.
I blurt out two words: “Why, Juliet?”
“You think that just because you’ve hurt me so completely and for such a long time that I wouldn’t still bring you justice? You should know me better than that, Eternity. You’re my daughter, after all. No matter what went on between you and Stevedore, there’s no way that I could ever harm either one of you. Hate comes from love. As your parents, we taught you all your life that when someone hates you, it’s really because they love you so intensely. I couldn’t leave you in this dump!”
“No, I meant to ask why perfectly intelligent, rational people would want to clone other humans.”
“I should have never told you that you’re a clone.”
“But you weren’t lying.” My throat tightens and quivers as images from my screen test at the movie studio flicker in my mind like an evil slide show. And on the end of that, I call her “Mother.”
“Listen,” she whispers, pausing to think for a moment.
I am no longer listening; I am remembering. I can see myself in Dr. Juliet’s sea-blue eyes. Only I am thirteen again, standing in the shade along the River Niger, my bloody hands held up to my face and my voice screaming for help as Stevedore rushes out of the foliage and into the riverbank, his bare white chest peeling in the middle, between the nipples, because he is one of those who burn in the sun, and he calms me and washes my girl-cave and waves my hands in the water and explains to me that it is only my monthly bleeding starting, and that this means I am officially a woman now and have the power, as we Ajowan women say, to bring back the dead.
And then I can see my bedroom in Juliet’s blue eyes— Stevedore and I strewn across my bed as he holds my naked body. Like a father, he tries to soothe me into taking a nap, his strong, gentle hand caressing the gorgeous bloom of knotted African hair that I had back when I was a child—and Juliet enters the room to bring us cold sugary tea and cheese sandwiches. Stevedore cups my breasts with a single warm palm while the other rests in the curve of my hip and he says, “It was when you were born that I began to believe in myself, Eternity. That I could bend the universe.”
“But you don’t believe in anything,” Dr. Juliet reminds him, sweetly.
Then later, after we have eaten the sandwiches and drunk our tea, Juliet lies down with us, her sigh on my forehead and one of her arms caressing my skin as she whisper-sings a lullaby, the sincerity of her voice carrying me at last into a babylike comfort zone; and in that moment of heavenly drowsiness, I look up at the porcelain white skin on Juliet’s throat and notice for the first time the thin slash of pink scar tissue that runs across it like a vague pencil mark. You must pay careful attention to what I am telling you: this vague pink mark across her throat, this is where Stevedore once made an incision and removed the Adam’s apple before they were married.
It’s not a big deal to me. I am used to Dr. Juliet. She has always been my mother—jotting on clipboards, politely stare-smiling, hiding. And even though she now talks on and on in this dungeon, I can still hear her softly singing the lullaby, “And if that robin bird don’t sing, mother’s gonna buy you a diamond ring …”
“Who do you think killed Stevedore?” Dr. Juliet asks me. But in her blue eyes he’s not dead. I still see the three of us on my childhood bed, the three of us entwined, fast asleep. And then, moments later, she says, “I had nothing to do with the operation he performed on Lucky.”
Lucky was our pet orangutan at Africa Farms AIDS Clinic when I was ten or eleven. She’d been there for years, a friendly, trustworthy animal, dragging her arms on the floors as she wobbled down the hallways, her body tilting side to side, carrying faxed documents for the scientists or bringing them a syringe or a thermos of broth for a patient. But one day she just snapped. Grabbed a baseball bat and began wrecking the lab and beating Stevedore with it. In fact, Stevedore would’ve been killed if Dr. Gobi Kadir, our scientist from India, hadn’t unloaded a shotgun into Lucky’s backside.
“It was because of a growth on her brain,” Dr. Quicken informed us all days later. “Chronic painful brain spasms caused poor Lucky to become delusional and violent.”
But the Ajowan and Oluchi people out in the forest and down by the river—they shook their heads when I told them that.
“Lucky was a boy orangutan when they first got him,” insisted the tar-black and deep-chocolate faces at the river. “But your father is like God. For his amusement, he switches the animals around—down there!” And then, just as one of the blackest faces was about to tell me something, something that she looked as though she’d been dying to tell me since back when I was just a baby and my “parents” Stevedore and Dr. Juliet had first put me in the arms of the river people and asked them to teach me how to be African, her husband ste
pped up, commanding, “Sifu-siffo!” And she not only shut up, but from then on, whenever in my presence, was shut up for good.
“Sifu-siffo” (She’s lived with whites for more than two days).
And because of that, there were several times when the Ajowans and Oluchi would wait until I was skipping back to the clinic before indulging in their ritual of sitting around telling each other stuff. I or anything else touched by whites wasn’t to be trusted.
Right now I long to ask them, Who do you think killed Stevedore? But Dr. Juliet is busy in the dungeon, telling me stuff. Insisting, “When he cloned you, Eternity, it was the beginning, back when Stevedore and I were newly married and so deep in love. Making you was like bringing a child into the world for us. It was our passion, and though some of the other scientists like Dr. Quicken had already cloned Africans successfully, you were Stevedore’s first. And you’re well aware that it isn’t possible for me to … make a baby. When you were Orisha, the dead Ajowan woman lying on the observation table, I knew that you would make a beautiful daughter. I wanted you even more than Stevedore … I wanted you to exist.”
Orisha. Oh God. Orisha.
Juliet touches my face so lovingly, yet the butterflies in my stomach seem to suffocate and thicken my urine until it is heavy in my bladder like syrup and straw. I don’t feel like a human being anymore.
When you were … Orisha.
I struggle to say it, my first-life name … Orisha. For some reason, I can’t get it to form in my lungs, let alone rise in my throat or fall from my lips. Fresh tears fill my eyes and I can’t stop blinking, because Dr. Juliet is crying now. Telling me that I must let go of the rage, disbelief, and bitterness that has consumed my entire being since a few days ago when she first told me what I am.
She is saying, “You shouldn’t hate your father, Eternity. He was a good man. He created us. With his bare hands, his mind, his heart, and his imagination, he created us. We are a family, because he loved us.”