by Kola Boof
Dr. Juliet cowered against the wall, then her body slumped to the floor.
“Because of something defective inside me, I’m not human! I’m a freak—I’m not even supposed to be here living and breathing right now!”
“No one asks to come into this world, Eternity, none of us! We feel just like you feel. And stop saying that you’re not a human—of course you’re a human being! Of course you have a soul! Being a clone simply means that one is a duplicate, an exact replica of one’s own self, starting over from scratch. And that’s all I was saying about Hope—that she doesn’t have to stay gone. We can bring her back!”
Exhausted by the mere reality of my circumstances— the daughter of a white couple from Ohio, with the last name Frankenheimer—I shook my head and cursed God. I refused to look at Dr. Juliet there on the floor. What, after all, do you say to a woman who was born a man and considers her physics books and journals to be Holy Scripture?
“We can clone Hope,” she repeated meekly.
“No, Mother—I forbid it. My daughter’s dead, leave her that way. This is an AIDS research clinic. Stop playing God with the bodies of the natives! I forbid you to lay a finger on my daughter’s DNA!”
I cried uncontrollably that whole night. At some point well past midnight, my mother got up off the floor and lay beside me. She caressed my brow and wiped at my tears and hummed to me, ever-gently, “And if that robin bird don’t sing, Mother’s gonna buy you a diamond ring …”
But I missed out on recognizing her defiance. At that time, it never occurred to me to be suspicious about the long hours she spent in the lab, sometimes sleeping there.
STARTING OVER FROM SCRATCH
I came to love my mother so much in those days after Hope died. Not only did Dr. Juliet let me have my way when I petitioned the Oluchi chief for Hope to be granted a traditional night funeral, she also followed custom and bared herself topless while carrying my daughter’s dead body wrapped in kente cloth to Chief Thiogo’s compound in DayyWo at the cataract of Oluchi River. Dr. Juliet was white as milk when she left but beet red upon arrival. The Africans laughed, sneered, and stared in disbelief at the sight of a topless white woman placing a dead baby into the stone mouth of the Womo Pillar and chanting in the Oluchi language, “Return to me”—but they did not refuse us a burial ceremony.
In fact, the Oluchi buried my daughter with love. But during the drinking of palm wine afterward, they were rude to Dr. Juliet. One of them called her a man, and that then became the night I chose my white mother over Africa. I vowed never to love the Oluchi people as I had before.
“There’s no way they could know about my past,” mother insisted back in the clinic as we were fixing ourselves lunch. “It’s because I’m a white woman, Eternity— and a scientist. Don’t forget how they always held that against Stevedore. The civilized Africans in the cities love medicine and training, but these rural naked ones …”
I decided to ask her something I had never before worked up the courage to ask—and not because I didn’t want to know, but because I was afraid to hear what the answer would be.
“Mother, who gave birth to me?”
“What?”
“Mother, I know you don’t have a womb. So who was the woman who carried me for nine months?”
Her mouth fell open but no words came out. She finally said, “Why does it matter?”
“I just want to know who she was. Is it someone I know?”
Tears dripped down her face. “Am I not good enough for you? Well, of course I’m not—I’m white and queer!”
“Mother, that’s not true. I love you more than anyone in this world! You’re the only family I have now.”
“She was a prostitute!” my mother blurted out. “Some little citified Oluchi girl who was begging and selling herself in DakCrete. Stevedore paid for the use of her womb. We kept her here at the clinic. You were taken away from her at birth, so she never knew you. She contracted AIDS and died when you were about six.”
“What was her name?”
“Zess Epiphany.”
“Zess,” I repeated, “delicate one.”
Later, as we sat on my mother’s bed and listened to her Fleetwood Mac albums, she pulled out a red leather box that I’d never seen before. A lock adorned the front of it. “I’ve waited years to share these photographs with you.”
As my mother unlocked the box and rifled through the photos, a pamphlet slipped out and dropped to the floor. While she arranged the pictures, I bent over the bed to reach down and grab the pamphlet’s worn, yellowed pages. Above a caption that read Ajowaland, 1651 was a drawing of a voluptuous, naked, sex-crazed African woman, her face in ecstasy as a group of slave-trading white men groped and fondled her. On the opposite page was an image of a tall, honorable-looking white missionary, his hands outstretched as he preached to white settlers and a naked tribe of black savages. This caption read: The white woman is the virtuous part of the Bible; her hand is fair. But the black woman is the sex in the Bible; everything about her is wicked.
“Here they are,” Mother said, removing a rubber band from around a thin stack of photos. I quickly tucked the pamphlet into my pocket. “If you never understood anything in this world that I told you before, I want you to understand this: Stevedore was not a homosexual, Eternity. We were simply of a scientific mind.”
Then she began showing me the photographs—two little boys, around ten or eleven, standing proudly next to a lemonade stand; then the same two boys, now in their teens, smiling as they waxed a gorgeous classic Chevy.
“We grew up with each other,” Dr. Juliet continued, “two all-American boys who went to high school and college together and wanted to be astronauts and brain surgeons and chemists. Here, look at this.”
It was a photograph that had their names written at the bottom in blue ink: Stevedore Frankenheimer and Julian Howell. Cleveland All-City Basketball Finals, 1964.
“We were best friends, your father and I, closer than brothers. We did everything together, except have sex— we never had sex while I was a guy. No. But, of course, rarely did we run into women who thought how we thought or were obsessed with molecules and biology and physics like we were. And then there was the little secret that I had kept from Stevedore all our lives—the fact that I was in love with him. It nearly killed him when I told him I was breaking off our friendship and going away to Finland to do lab research. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to be friends anymore— so I told him the truth. That I was in love with him and that I knew, from all the girls he’d been fucking since we were like fourteen, that he wasn’t the least bit gay. And so I left for Helsinki, and then a few months later Stevedore wrote to me … asking if I would allow him to transform me into a female so that we could be together. For us, being two scientists, it was just practical problem solving. X equals Y.”
Dr. Juliet smiled and caressed my cheek with the soft knuckles of her large bony hand. Her gaze was epic coolness.
“Your acceptance of me,” she went on, “means everything to me, Eternity. Like so many scientists, your father and I came to Africa expecting to make a difference. We wanted to use our brilliance to save the world by growing hearts, lungs, and kidneys for people who needed transplants. But somehow, once you start playing behind the steering wheel of God, you realize just how powerful it is to be the imagination driving the natural world. You tap into this willful, compassionate, insane force of wonder and, well, now I fear that too many Gods can only make the world worse off. I don’t think we’ve helped anything.”
I lied and said, “Well, you helped me, Mother.”
For a moment I hugged her close. Then she pulled back from me and said, “There’s another picture I have to show you. A picture of your birth mother, Zess Epiphany.”
I grabbed it from her hands and stared at it, crying with the most conflicted agony and joy.
“She was so pretty.” I studied the young, vivacious, chocolate-skinned Oluchi girl in the photo. But whereas
Orisha and I were identical in every way, Zess Epiphany looked nothing like me whatsoever. She had simply been a human incubator; Orisha’s genetic material is what I am.
“Zess was like you,” promised Dr. Juliet. “She loved to swim.”
M MAGAZINE QUESTION #33
Yes, I love to swim—to swim away from shadows.
And later that night I lay awake in bed, not only swimming in tears for the arms that feel so empty without Hope, and not only revisiting the details of all my mother’s hard-won revelations that day, but also haunted by the words that the missionary John Theodosius van Elker had written in 1651 on the pamphlet pages that I’d stolen and read over and over:
But the black woman is the sex in the Bible; everything about her is wicked. It would be better, I say, if you gallant traders and brethren of the civilized world took some shame in what you do at night. I promise to flog the very next shiphand that comes to me, not even grown yet, professing some love for the black man’s mother and requesting that I marry them—using this Bible. For shame, I say, for shame! To be adjourned with these Jezebel lepers of the wild—these tar pagan sinners who openly flaunt their naked lust and whore-mongering and have not produced a single son that was the white man’s equal in either deed, intellect, or heart.
I say to you that Africa is a wasteland of the most backward immorality inhabited by the cursed children of Ham, and surely the Lord sent us to save her—but we cannot save her by compromising the trinity of our own purity, and we cannot rule the black man through the black man’s mother. Everything she touches is defiled by her darkness.
Let us pray that Africa repents. Let us pray for her salvation.
Even in a strange land, away from our white mothers, I say—we must uphold the honor of the white woman! For she is the virtue in the Bible, the prize above rubies, the jewel of God’s heart; her hand is fair! Those white traders and seafarers in disagreement—and I see your shameful faces throughout the crowd—you shant continue these romances with whores! We cannot rule the black world through the black man’s mother, and the black man cannot rule the white world through the white man’s mother—and so we must never lose sight of which mother goes on top. Our very survival depends on it, that we not give in to temptation … and be asunder, the utter darkness of Africa’s damnation.
A few weeks later, when my mother and I went to DakCrete to watch The Racist at the cinema, it was all suddenly clear, the brilliant scheme in van Elker’s fearful sermon. For on the movie screen, larger than life itself, my whole being had lost all representation—the beautiful African mulatto actress, whose egg-and-milk complexion and flowing hair and tenuous upper-class voice sounding and looking nothing whatsoever like me, became a symbolic image of van Elker’s truth—white men cannot rule the black world through the black man’s mother. And so on the screen, while the impassioned African mulatto actress derided the black street youths for bleaching their skin and literally knocked the whitening pills out of their hands just as I had done in a previous life, it was still the image of the white man’s mother that she represented. It was still the voice of some American writer emanating from her throat in poor imitation of mines; it was still her flowing hair swinging like the lynch rope and the rape tassel; it was still the light face and European features of white rule and white comfort—so fearful of black power that they could not depict my black body as human wholeness. I was too black to represent myself, too pure for them to ever dominate—so they lightened me. And even with the good intentions of this African mulatto actress, it was still the erasure of me and my people from our own landscape that her image represented, the removal of black humans from their own bodies. There in the dark, watching this American watering-down of my beauty, I stared at the blue sheen in my charcoal hands and arms—and came to understand that I was the sexy part of the bible. The thing that God so despised. Just as tenaciously as I had accepted that I was a clone and possessed no soul. I embraced it. I welcomed it. I wrapped myself up in it.
The sexy part of the Bible.
Thou wicked, sinful leper of utter blackness and mother of the black man. Yes, I determined, I will stand black as all black put together. I am Eternity; I am the sexy part of the Bible.
M MAGAZINE: LONDON, NEW YORK, PARIS
A foo-foo … I thought choo knew
AND TURN!!
The paparazzi click-clicked our every move, and during outfit changes backstage, rumors abounded that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were watching from the side flank and that director Spike Lee had been spotted in the audience along with pop queen Mariah Carey. But for those of us up on the catwalk, there was no time to spy who was there in the dark—and besides, the only person out there who I cared to impress was my handsome new boyfriend, James Lord.
A foo-foo … I thought choo knew
AND TURN!!
Naomi Campbell, the best in the business now that Iman had retired, locked her hips and pivoted flawlessly, her panther-perfect torso imploding the open mouths of all onlookers with a stunned silence, their very souls entranced as she drifted like some goddess they had dreamt into being back down the runway—then it was Linda floating along like some great blond fantasy apparition; and then Amber, gorgeous and elegant as living, breathing silk; and then stunning Alek as the Queen of Sheba; and then Kate giving us 1930s Katherine Hepburn; and Ling-Nara the Swan demonstrating how tall Asians can be; and then the goddess of all goddesses, Claudia herself; and then …
A foo-foo … I thought choo knew
AND TURN!!
I was out there! My fifty-inch legs moving as though they had come into Paris with an agenda all their own, thank God—my legs were working it. Hands on hips, mouth puckered aristocratically, and my little Negroid caboose adding a touch of “woman-got-damn” to my six-foot starving-African figure, I felt as though I were some glorious meteor crashing to earth while two white girls in front kept screaming out my name: “Eternity … you’re the bomb! Go, Eternity!”
I stopped in the middle of the runway, the popping flashbulbs catching in my glass slippers like champagne froth as I pivoted with an exasperated underaged sexiness and expertly held a glamour pose mere seconds enough for the paparazzi to click-click the flowing white silk and lace Dane Goddard evening robe I was modeling. Then, as quickly as my outer space—colored body had become the center of the universe, I undid the belt, unleashing my shapely charcoal legs, and sashayed back down the catwalk, my onion-booty swinging like a pendulum and my mannequin-perfect face never once betraying that elitist expression that goes so well with decadence: I’m the shit, and I know it.
But backstage, when I broke into a triumphant smile and exhaled as though my joy had been bottled up for centuries, a fan suddenly came running up to me, his voice praising me excitedly as his arms stretched out in my direction. His white hands gripped a chocolatecolored, child-sized plastic doll, its glassy marble eyes and smiling goo-goo mouth boring into me as though it might tell.
Caught by surprise, I screamed in horror, my knees giving way as I fell into my own hollering, my heart and veins trembling beneath the skin, and I peed on myself.
“Eternity!?” the other models and stylists called out in concern.
“What the hell is wrong with her?”
“Is she on drugs?”
I bent to the floor, hyperventilating and attempting to keep my eyes to the carpet so that I wouldn’t have to see the doll again, but the fan was trying to help me up, and the doll’s cold plastic legs and hands kept poking into me until I thought surely I’d have a heart attack.
I heard James Lord, my handsome Brit, coming to my rescue. He shoved people out of the way and yelled, “Get that away from her—she’s got a phobia about dolls!”
Then the doll dropped on the floor, its glassy, curly lashed eyes locking directly into mines. I passed out.
RIGHT NOW, 2004
Rector Sniff, the reporter from M magazine, is asking if I’m aware that “sexy superstar rapper” King Sea Horse Twee is staying i
n the same resort that I am. When I gently nod that yes, I’m aware of it, Sniff’s mouth waters as he points out that Sea Horse and I are two of the sexiest celebrities from the African continent right now, and what a frenzy of publicity it would ignite if the world thought we were circling one another.
As he fishes in my eyes for something to nibble on, I freeze all memory of my night swim the other evening when Sea Horse had come up behind me in the dark waters, his black fists pouncing against the nose and gills of the baby shark that had innocently waded into the shallows and was just about to sideswipe me. That was how we finally met—his muscular naked arms clamping onto my topless upper torso and guiding me back to shore despite my haughty protests about being adept at igun, the art of flipping a shark over on its back, which completely paralyzes it, in or out of water.
Yes, I freeze the image of Sea Horse and me standing on the warm starry beach, his eyes on my flesh as I toweled down my bare breasts and flat-as-a-flounder stomach—his ashen chocolate lips shaped like a butterfly pursing with a hunger to kiss. I arrest all memory of the feeling that I had left one shark in the sea only to come to land with the king of the species. I obliterate the touch of his fingers caressing my face as he gushed in wonder, “You are so … black.” I disassemble the penetrating fascination in Sea Horse’s words: “I thought you were a mannequin or a doll that they painted up like this in magazines or generated with a computer. I thought, no woman is that beautiful, that celestial, but in dreams.”
“And of course you’re a liar,” I had laughed. “Don’t fuck with me, rap boy—I’ve killed men!”
Which had caused Sea Horse to laugh back at me, proclaiming, “You can’t be a killer. You’ve got the face of a nurse, the most spiritual eyes I’ve ever seen, and your voice is tender like the lonely hearted.”
“And you have a wife!”
“I’m a true African, I have three wives.”
And though this encounter took place against an African sky, our brief enchantment symbolized the new world’s greatest taboo—the hand of a very black man caressing the face of the blackest woman, with no shred of light entering into it, utter darkness alone representing God.