by Kola Boof
I ignore Stevedore’s voice calling from outdoors. He is working in the hot African sun, his white flesh burning redder and redder, unaware that the baby and I are about to die.
Playing in my mind is the melody from that movie the scientists made me watch all my life—The Wizard of Oz. It’s the one where the Scarecrow sings, “If I only had a brain.” And now, opening the thermos, I think of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and my mother—Dr. Juliet. It seems that after death I have come back as the very thing that always scared me as a little girl—a doll. In fact, there’s no denying any longer that I’m a doll somebody made, which must be why I fear them so insanely. And so I begin to hum the Scarecrow’s melody, only I change the words and sing, “If I only had a soul.”
Stevedore thinks he’s God. But I intend for him to feel my power when he walks back in the clinic and finds me and the fetus dead. Yes, Father—I will show you God.
Topless in a flowing kente skirt, I pour myself a glass of rice milk and mix the Wife of Tarzan in with it. I drift out of the kitchen, sailing room to room as though sleepwalking. Then I stand there, bracing my mind and body for that moment when I will drink the poison and leave this damnable earth and all its misery behind. But just as life would have it—the unexpected—Stevedore comes into the room, his ice-cream flesh dripping from the heat and his burnt red arm wiping away the sweat on his forehead.
“God, it’s hot,” he says—and he takes my drink.
He comments that I look breathtaking with my breasts out like that—and he cradles the glass of poison with a desire to quench his burning thirst.
What a coincidence!
Stevedore: my creator, father, lover.
And as I watch him lifting the glass to his lips, the seconds moving slower than a snail, I close my eyes to happenstance and synchronicity, to God … and to all eternity.
I Have an Awful Lot to Hide
Years after my father’s poisoning, I am amazed to be alive and free. Airbrushed with a glossy enthusiasm, my face is plastered all over the world on billboards sixty feet high. But somehow, no matter the competition I’m giving Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Claudia Schiffer, I still secretly regard myself as a monster.
I’ve just arrived back in West Cassavaland for a vacation and I have the most fascinating man in my sights. I still don’t have a lot of experience with men, so I stare quietly.
The city dwellers, who in DakCrete are mostly Christian, warn me all the time, “You need Jesus.” They don’t know anything about my pretty little biracial daughter I named Hope, or about how I was kicked to death by Pogo-nigger skin bleachers and then resurrected, or how exactly I got to be so rich and beautiful. But whenever they see me dancing in the club with my white man or shopping along Gold Acre Boulevard or purchasing yams at market, they either give me a look that says it or they plain say it with their mouths, “YOU … NEED … JESUS.”
And as I watch him now—our nation’s internationally acclaimed messiah of rap music and big talk, King Sea Horse Twee—rise up naked from a clear blue lagoon, I think about the fact that my body, which has quickly become one of the most photographed bodies in the world, has not yet been penetrated by a black man’s penis. That being penetrated by a black man’s penis (a city-dwelling black man’s penis) is the one thing I’ve longed for and fantasized about for most of my life—even more than being blessed by God.
“The afternoon’s coconut wine,” my personal hotel servant announces as he sets down my drink, bows, and then shoots away without us ever making eye contact, my bony hand lifting and turning over the cover of the latest edition of Vogue Europe, upon which they’ve posed me—Supermodel Eternity Frankenheimer, it says—as some unbelievably perfect goddess; the handlebar cheekbones of my charcoal face peering out aristocratically as my flexible curves imitate the letter S; my wrists slave-chained yet clasped to my hips in chic defiance; scarab beetles made of solid gold pressed upon my fingers like honeycomb; my naked, living breasts sprayed a shimmering silver; my hair weaved into the thick, wild lion’s mane of an Ethiopian woman. Yes, I turn the cover down because should the rap star bounce over, I don’t wish to mislead him.
For days now, Mr. Twee and I have been stealing glances at one another, whispering questions in the ears of our servants and lackeys, nodding polite hellos and dutifully embossing our celebrity—but upon seeing him arise from the lagoon, bare as though newly born from a vat of chocolate, I feel most assuredly that we aren’t going to leave this paradise until we pass something fragile (to be a polite African lady) between the two of us.
He runs a hand over the sexy stubble of his closely shaven head and arches his shoulders in such a way that all the muscles in his limbs and torso flex and tense, glistening in the sun like a great athlete’s body, so that his large penis and heavy-hanging balls overflow the cusp of his other hand, as he latches onto my gaze like a shaman intent on taming a cobra.
I purse my lips together and glance away in deference to a curiosity that is ancient and idyllic, rooted like an ancestor between us. And, you have to understand, because we are both famous blacks with big egos and reputations to protect—and because famous egotistical blacks are so insecure and fearful of rejection, especially rejection from one’s own kind—it’s just better, I believe, if we don’t complicate these days of heaven, especially since we’ve come to this resort to be languid, stress-free, and lazy in an African seaside paradise that traditionally caters to rich whites. And because M magazine is doing a profile on me and watching every little thing I do. But I won’t lie. Sweet lonely Jesus knows that we want to … be animals together. We both act like we’re bothered by it.
As King Sea Horse strolls into the shade of the massive palm trees, the perfect chocolate cheeks of his masterful buttocks flexing helmetlike as he kneels down to chat with one of three wives he keeps around the world—this one being Millicent York, a young white English feminist magazine writer who originally criticized the misogyny in his lyrics and called him a “hip-hop brute”—I think about the other day when government soldiers came barging into the resort to arrest him. Cuffing him and shoving him around in public for everyone to see before they escorted him to Spy Control at the local army base and detained and interrogated him for three days about his latest CD, Tarzan Was My Bitch!, and about his comments to foreign newspapers regarding the upcoming elections and his reputed pot smoking.
I think about his handsome rude-boy face splashed across the front of the newspapers the day after his arrest and my mother, Dr. Juliet, phoning me all the way from Africa Farms to ask if I was still vacationing at the Queen Elizabeth Shoreline Resort, and whether or not I knew that West Africa’s bad boy of rap music was on the premises as well.
“Yes, mother,” I had told Juliet, cheerfully. “We’ve passed each other quite a bit. He’s really cute!”
“Stay away from him, Eternity. That boy’s got a death wish. He thinks just because the young people worship him and the Europeans buy that barking rhetoric he calls music that he can say anything he wants about the government and not be killed for it. In fact, with the elections coming up, I’d feel a lot better if you were back in England with James Lord.”
“Mother, I’m fine. I haven’t even spoken with Sea Horse Twee. He’s here with one of his wives.”
“He beats women—beats the shit out of them!” my mother had said. “Not white ones, just black ones.”
“Okay, Mom. I’ll steer clear of him. James is returning to London in a few months and I’ll go home then. I have shows coming up in Milan and Spain. I won’t be in Africa long.”
“You’d be wise to stop showing off your money and get out of here!”
“Well, what about you, Mother? Why aren’t you leaving?”
“Because I’m white, Eternity!” And then click. She was gone and I had busted up laughing. I went back to being intrigued by King Sea Horse’s handsome face in the newspapers, the headlines blaring in bold black letters, INSTIGATOR … GRASS-SMOK
ING BIG MOUTH … DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS BOY … and to watching a British video cassette of the urgently spicy “dang-boy beat” music videos that, although banned in most of Africa, were making him all the rage on the European rap scene.
FEEL ME
“Ten billion in AID—dis no AID—you raped n robbed de Motherland! Your debt can never be paid! BOOSHA!” Sea Horse rapped as his video showed poverty-stricken mobs of African tribes barging into the presidential palace, forcing the government officials (who were stuffing money into their pockets) to get up and jigga-dance. Tombstones bearing their names were placed against their chests while oil refineries waving Saudi, American, and Canadian flags could be seen exploding outside the palace windows. A bikini-clad Mandingo hoochie dancer swung the most bodacious black booty I’ve ever seen, the words Mother Africa written in living dayglow against chocolate-fudge ass cheeks as her gigantic breasts jiggled like warring sea lions. The camera cut back to Sea Horse in time for him to add, “Pogo-nigger rum … is the death of the drum!”
What?
Two women, one dressed up as Queen Elizabeth and the other as Condoleezza Rice, were depicted running down a shanty dirt road, tripping in heels and losing their wigs.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
White, Arab, and Asian members of the United Nations were shown having their toes sucked by a lineup of kneeling African dignitaries. The row of black politicians, one of whom bore a striking resemblance to Kofi Annan, were shown in close-up as the naked feet of white men, pink-toed bunions and all, were fully cram-stuffed into their full-lipped mouths while King Sea Horse Twee grabbed at his crotch and rapped with a belligerent rage: “Pogo-nigger rum … is the death of the drum! … Pogo-nigger rum is the FIST in the sun!”
Then he ripped off his shirt to reveal that chest!
Sweet lonely Jesus!
He struck his fist to the sun and declared:
We need blood! We need war!
We need a bath!
They keep’n score!
BOOSHA!
I stood mesmerized, my trembling mouth chanting along with the booty-shaking video hoochie: “Pogo-nigger rum is the FIST in the sun!” Before I knew it, my fingers were popping, my shoulders and hips swinging to the beat, and even though I’d been raised in a lab by whites and therefore couldn’t dance by black people’s standards, my feet, hands, and booty just wouldn’t stop trying. The Oluchi drums and ululations that Sea Horse had mixed with hip-hop beats and chant-style rap rituals to create this new sound called dang-boy beat music was so intoxicating that one couldn’t help but feel liberated:
We gotta CEASE with the begg’n!
Koo-Noo-E-Goo!
We gotta stop with the bleaching!
Koo-Noo-E-Goo!
We must rebuke de King Kongs!
Koo-Noo-E-Goo!
You need a condom while you preaching!
Koo-Noo-E-Goo!
That night, while the real flesh-and-blood King Sea Horse Twee was locked up somewhere being interrogated by West Cassavaland’s Spy Control, I watched every pulsating frame of his music videos over and over again, and for the first time since finding out that I’m a clone, I felt as though I had a soul. Just like anybody else. Out of that enchanted moment, the most grateful tears ran down my face.
ENTER ME
At my dressing table, hours after watching Sea Horse lounge in the shade of the lagoon with his wife, the two of them saying nothing, I sit in the mirror strangely terrified about the upcoming interview with M magazine and beguiled by my own face.
I have an awful lot to hide.
I look into my charcoal face and I see … eternity— blood-fucked and irrevocable—the whole world being made. I see love, my parent’s love, the actual omnipotence of these scientists thoroughly cooked into my flesh, seeping to the bone; a love deeper and lonelier than oceans of sky, a longing so apocalyptic in its naturalness that after the penis of man falls from my lips, their sucking goes trembling into prayer. Pious passionate prayer, because I feel that I am Africa itself—captured, lobotomized, and made over through the domineering dreams of someone else’s expectations—Africa, the colonizer’s clone, the slave trader’s clone, the media’s clone. Knowing by fire that nothing ever dies and believing in my heart that beauty is evil—me and everything within me from both of me— peering into the looking-glass as my stare wanders at the speed of light over the African landscape, leaping from one village to the next, one jungle-headed child to one river to one pregnant belly to one man and his wife, the laying-down dance, his roots penetrating so deep within her that I imagine her dark body to be the earth itself. And then, just before I end my realization with “Udodo” (Amen), determining that I must hide as much of the real Eternity as I can from the readers of M magazine, my personal hotel servant appears in the doorway with a robe and towel draped in the crook of his arm, his eyes averted so as not to rupture my privacy as he dutifully inquires, “Will Miss Frankenheimer be taking her night swim this evening?”
EXIT ME
Because of water, I have the single happiest memory of my life—the baptizing of my sweet little baby daughter, Hope. I see her precious feet kicking excitedly as the chanting Oluchi Nana lowers her into the river that day, our naked breasts numbering in the hundreds under tentacles of hot sun.
During labor, while squatting over the birth pillow as though taking a shit, the mother is allowed to chant, “Exit me … exit me … exit me.”
I remember how much it hurt bringing Hope into the world and yet how good it felt the first time I held her delicate head against my body and watched as she put her thumb in her mouth. I remember Dr. Juliet and our maid Fergie and the Oluchi Nana standing over my bed as I closed my eyes and cursed my whole stupid intellect for those times I’d so much as dared to dream of killing myself and the baby. And even when the word came from Dr. Juliet’s Afro Catholics and Fergie’s postcolonial Protestants that because I’d given birth to a “good luck” child—not a black baby, mind you, but a halfCaucasoid child—I was now invited to sit at the front of their churches where the pews were usually reserved for mulattoes and brown skins, the middle rows for chocolate fudge—colored, and the very back for the royal-black charcoals. I remember shrugging it off and not being mad, because having Hope beside me erased everyone else.
HOPE
“She looks like Stevedore when she yawns,” Dr. Juliet remarked painfully one afternoon.
“Go ahead and cry, Mother. I know you miss him. I do too.”
“No time for crying,” she replied curtly. “Now that the baby’s born, you need to get off to England—to the university. You need to figure out what you’re going to do with your life.”
I hadn’t yet lucked into modeling.
“I’m not leaving Hope, I can tell you that. And I’ve already said that I’m not going to school either. I’ll live off the money Stevedore left me and go swimming every day. I prefer being at the river with the Oluchi people. They have a world too, you know.”
“You can’t live in this world without papers.”
“Mother, I’m not even twenty and I’ve already been trained and educated to death!”
“Knowledge is the key to everything, Eternity.”
“I know that, Juliet!”
Hearing me call her Juliet gave her pause for a moment. “Then what will you do, Eternity? Your inheritance won’t last forever, and even if you find a good man, marriage is a transitory affair these days—there’s no guaranteed security in it.”
“I’m never getting married.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I have no soul, Mother!”
“Well, like I told you—you’re perfect for academia!”
And on and on it went for several days … until one humid afternoon when I was at the riverbank cradling and singing to my sweet Hope and dunking both her feet and my breasts in and out of the water. Suddenly Hope smiled with a huge, clown-scary grin, her eyes turning to glass as they beheld me with the war
mest, most chilling sparkle.
“Hope?” I called. But her lips stretched out oddly like a cat’s yawn, showing me the entire inside of her mouth and throat, tensing up as though paralyzed— her head cocked to one side like her neck was trying to stretch itself into the letter Q … and I thought that she must be having a seizure!
My breathing became like a cheetah’s and I cradled her as gently as I could and ran like a shot to the clinic for help, but by the time my family got her on the examining table and calmed me down—with Dr. Quicken, my mother, Dr. Chomsky, Dr. Yen Foo, and Dr. Gobi Kadir doing everything they could—Hope was seemingly back to normal, her happy feet kicking and her body wiggling as she made gurgling baby sounds and her little hand wrapped around one of my fingers until it was a tiny fist squeezing me with love.
“She’s blind,” Dr. Quicken informed us, coldly.
I was speechless.
“We need to do X-rays, Eternity. She appears normal right now, but she’s gone blind. Look at the bottom of her feet, they’re blue, and she’s laughing because the vibrations under her skin are tickling her. She thinks it’s us playing with her—but it’s some kind of abnormality of the nervous system.”
I threw my head back and my whole body trembled with sadness. Within that same hour, Hope was dead.
“It was a brain aneurysm,” Dr. Quicken would report two days later. “She didn’t feel any pain, Eternity. She was asleep.”
But on the night that Hope actually died, Dr. Juliet came to my room and, for the first time in my life, I balled up my fist and damn near knocked her clear into next week, outraged with her inhumanity.
“I can clone her, Eternity. I can clone your baby. I can bring you a whole new Hope—”
“NO!” I was horrified. “That’s why she was sick in the first place!”