The Sexy Part of the Bible

by Kola Boof

  Knowing that Tasso was Sea Horse’s only African wife, I searched her face for confirmation of what I thought she was implying, but her irises turned to butcher knives, the sharp tips of them glinting.

  Then Tiberius remarked, “I didn’t know his black American wife was coming tonight.”

  “She’s not,” Tasso said. “Only his African wives.”

  And with that, Tiberius and Chiamaka looked at me with a silly hopefulness.

  KNOWING

  Now we entered the road of humming Cassavans. The longer we walked, the hotter the moon got, and the more it became a march. The men were draped in beautifully flowing boubous, walking erect, black and purposeful; the women were equally black, their soulfully thick-featured faces committed to whatever their men endeavored as they wore intricate multicolored tunics, sported natural African hairstyles, and carried babies on their backs and baskets atop their heads. Though I thought we looked impressive coming down the road by the hundreds, we could hear the thunder of thousands more who had gathered where the music was coming from, their voices drowning out the blaring sound of the Fugees, as they chanted, “No-MO White House … No-MO White House!”

  Abruptly curving through jungle and the charred rubble walls of what had once been Hembadoon, capital city of the Gods, we came upon the spotlight; a brightly lit ocean of shimmering Ajowans and Oluchis, waving and chanting while up on the concert stage sat Sea Horse, his legs arrogantly cocked open as he lounged on his throne surrounded by his hip-hop entourage and took drags from a marijuana stick.

  Dear Eye, rage filled me up! Black evil-bitch rage!

  The nerve of this motherfucker—treating me like some video hoochie he could just snatch out of a party! I swear on a stack of Bibles that if I hadn’t been so shocked about being reunited with my brother, I wouldn’t have stood there so agreeably. And if I’d had any clue what the crowd was going to end up doing to me that night, I would have run for my life and not stopped until I’d swum across the lake and made it all the way to my mother’s clinic.

  But I stayed, and at some point the music stopped. Onstage a group of topless Oluchi river women walked up to a microphone and quieted the crowd with a sovereign ululation.

  Tasso, who had left us and taken her place next to Sea Horse onstage, came to the microphone and spoke with an eloquent humbleness: “My husband needs only ten thousand signatures to register his name on the ballot for president. As a Cassava woman, a Muslim, and the mother of eight children, I remind you that this is not Europe; this is not the Fatherland. This is Africa, the Motherland!”

  The masses went wild, interrupting Tasso with chants of “Golu! Golu! Golu!”

  She shouted over them into the microphone, “And let us establish tonight the first ever United Nationalist Motherland Party!”

  Behind Tasso, as the people continued yelling and cheering, the topless river women raised a massive red flag over their heads—and in the center of it were two Black Power fists, one representing the Ajowans and the other representing the Oluchis.

  A big-screen television was then rolled out to the edge of the stage and a microphone placed at its speaker as the nearly white face of the leader of the Pogo Metis Signare, Walter Wasoon, flashed across it. “The key to eliminating racism is for all people to melt together as one,” he said. “We who are mulatto Cassavans have always understood that. It’s about evolving into a kinder, gentler Africa, a place for everyone, a brighter future!”

  On the screen, you could see the packed auditorium at the Union of World Bankers convention enthusiastically applauding Wasoon as he concluded, “Colonialism is gone, but without the white man, Africa would be lost. So please help us to keep evolving by continuing to sponsor President Yaw Ibrahim the Black, and the African Democratic Fatherland Party!”

  Europeans, Jews, Arabs, Asians, Africans, Latinos. They all cheered on the television as Sea Horse, from his big chair, lifted up a .38-caliber pistol and—PeeYOON!—no more picture tube.

  The ooh-Luck of the jungle, including me, cheered so loudly it was deafening. Then with grace and charisma, Sea Horse Twee stood before us at last and said, “My brothers and sisters, my mothers and fathers, dear ancestors and the unborn … both God and Satan are pure black. Both God and Satan are the two halves of one complete thought. Both good and evil are the ingredients of the human being—and we, my people, the Africans, are the first human beings on earth, and the most good and the most evil that has ever graced life. We are the saviors for all who need saving, because it is us and only us who can grow the nappy hair of God from our scalps—no other race has this crown!

  “Every natural resource on earth, every type of wealth, beauty, and wonder—it exists in Africa and exists abundantly, as though leftover from a great paradise, and only we can save Africa. We, who before the Muslim and Christian invaders forced their religions on us, were members of the two churches of our ancestors— the sun and the river. We, with the black skin, the thick lips, the wide noses, the hair like God’s—we who go with the landscape—we who should be asking ourselves, Why do we need white men and Arab men and China men and mulattoes to legislate and dictate and govern Mother Africa when it’s only the Africans who can save Africa? Why do we need the Pogo-niggers who inhabit the White House to represent us by lining their pockets with foreign aid while doing nothing for the people, nothing for the land?

  “How many times have we been told by the mulattoes of Port Elizabeth that the only way to end race is to get rid of the black people and become mixed ourselves? How many times have we been removed from our own land, erased from our own stories and songs, shut up from our own truth, and evicted … evicted from the love our ancestors shared? How many times has the revolution come? And yet still today there is no Africa for the African. No leadership, no justice, no wealth, no power, no freedom, no glory, and very little self-respect.

  “We turn on the television and only our suffering is recorded by the white man’s cameras—our poverty, our hunger, our disease. Not only exaggerated, but the cause of our downfall is never truthfully explained. And while the white man films himself saving us, medicating us, feeding and protecting us, the black man is portrayed as a loser who can’t navigate his own land, can’t love or feed his family, and can’t stand up as an African in the image, fully human, that God created him in. He’s just a backward nigger in a dying, stinking, rotten paradise— that everybody wants.”

  OFFERING

  I was to be the offering and didn’t know it.

  Sinful as insanity, I felt so ashamed about the wetness that glazed my vagina as I watched Sea Horse give voice to the voiceless, commanding the minds and imaginations of thousands. Though I was so far from the stage that he couldn’t possibly see me, I was certain his diabolical words were being fed to him by the rise in my heart, because from the moment he’d started giving his speech, that same drum from our night swims, the same one from our prayer to the ocean, had begun beating inside me—and the faster it beat, the smoother my flesh became, the deeper my fever, the drunker my enthusiasm, the stronger my promise. A part of me wanted to romanticize being kidnapped and to be fucked out of my life by him. But intellectually, because I despised his sexist rebel-rapper mystique and detested the way his stupid wives shared him and catered to him, I couldn’t do it.

  Onstage, he was like a beautiful African lion, an actual prophet for the people. But then again, also a whore, a mama’s boy, and a dictator.

  “Cretin,” I whispered hatefully. And just as I said it, the crowd erupted with applause, cheering him and promising to raise the signatures to place his name on the ballot for president. I looked around at the thousands gathered—poor people, overworked and underfed, draped in tattered rags—and it broke my heart to know how very desperate we are as Africans. The eyes of the people fearful and tired with an epic hope as they placed their very lives in the hands of a rap star, trusting in him to be who he said he was. Once again, since that time when our sellout kings bartered our own blood kin int
o slavery, African people were living at the mercy of their own black son.

  “If you elect me president,” Sea Horse continued as he coughed from a lung burn that he’d gotten from the marijuana smoke he held in his chest, “I make this vow, my people, that I come to equity with clean hands and that I will make West Cassavaland a development country. Death is better than disgrace … and I am willing to die or do whatever it takes to achieve my lifelong dream—to return honor to the African man and to restore the Twee-Sankofa Madal, the age of paradise.”

  The people had already begun cheering and applauding wildly.

  But then Sea Horse added, “And I promise when I’m president that we’re going to win the World Cup at least once!”

  And oh my God—why did he have to say that? It became like an earthquake! The feet stomping, the screaming, the dancing, and the chanting of his name. The last time I had seen Africans so excited was the day Orisha was stomped to death, and because of that I couldn’t get the holy ghost, and it seemed that the heat of the moon bore down against me—an omen of bad luck. But I wasn’t listening to my intuition.

  “My people!” Sea Horse called out to quiet them. “Let’s not forget the offering, the ancient ways of our ancestors, the ritual from paradise days when a dark young virgin would be plucked from the masses and offered up to the king!” I couldn’t believe his words, but immediately there were several women raising their hands and screaming that they should be the offerings. And then a spotlight moved toward where I stood next to Tiberius.

  “I’ve asked for a special lady tonight …”

  The light was so blinding I had to put my hands over my eyes. People were screaming, clapping, and chanting the word “Blacka!” (lady who the moon has chosen), and all of that would have been just fine. But it turned very ugly when my brother Tiberius reached over and began ripping my gown off, painfully tearing the fabric from my body as he shouted like a religious fanatic, “My sister is the offering!”

  Then, as I fought, kicking and screaming at the pure shock of being butt naked in front of ten thousand strangers, he lifted me up—and it became everybody lifting me up, a mass hysteria, screaming and shaking the earth, hands and palms and fingers and more hands passing me over a sea of nappy heads until all I could do was clamp my eyes shut and pray to wake up.

  But I didn’t wake up. I was crying, terrified, revisited by the memories of Orisha, peeing on people’s heads while I tried to fight back. African drums beat as though they were emanating from the center of the earth, and one woman hollered out to me, “Do eeeet for yah ann-cesstas!”

  The ocean of hands levitated my naked body against the sky and moon, passing me from one wave in the crowd to the next, rolling me forward until I reached the stage—at which point their excitement reached fever pitch, their screams deafening, and Sea Horse smiled down on me as his guards fetched me from the armstilts of the mob and placed my cowering body onstage in front of him, the two of us immersed in white light, with me trying to cover everything up.

  “You’re the offering!” one of the topless Oluchi women shouted, and she pried my hands from between my legs with a bamboo pole. “Don’t cover yourself!”

  I felt so humiliated, as though I were a slave and Sea Horse was King Kong, but the people only cheered with unbridled delight while I stood there crying, fuming at the wild masculine bravado of Sea Horse’s stare. I realized that even when black people endeavor to rise up Africa and restore it to paradise, there remains this thirst to debase its mother—which is what keeps Africa from rising.

  “We’re only going to dance and be patriotic for the crowd,” Sea Horse whispered to me.

  “Fuck you,” I replied.

  His wife Tasso, sensing that I would not be made to behave as a woman from paradise days, eased up to me from behind, embracing my nakedness, and said in my ear, sensuously, “In the dance of the water-fly, the drummer is underwater … and cannot see.”

  A witch doctor danced up to Sea Horse and me as though he’d come to marry us. He handed Sea Horse a gob of chain-link and then snatched my arm upward, giving my wrist to Sea Horse to be chained—the crowd went crazy, screaming and dancing to the drumbeat of my debasement.

  “He’s not going to hurt you,” Tasso whispered in my ear as she continued to hold me from behind.

  For a moment, I resigned myself to remaining calm, but then, while lusting and appraising the silvery rich contours of my naked flesh, Sea Horse said to me, “A black woman’s body isn’t built for conservatism.”

  To which I slapped him hard with my free hand.

  After I did that, the whole jungle became so quiet you could hear the trout pissing at the bottom of Lake Mona Lisa.

  EXPENSIVE SHIT

  Every room in Sea Horse’s estate flowed into the next like an airy maze of red-tiled adobe copper-tone bungalow suites—the sponge walls accentuated by trickling fountains, lush gardens, and panoramic baby-blue skies that blessed the top of your head as you passed below the sunroofs of certain rooms and hallways.

  I refused to stay unless Tiberius slept in the same room with me for protection (leaving his wife Chiamaka with their room all to herself), though I don’t know why I trusted him. We slept, hugged tight, front to front. But after the unexpected fun of being there the first two days, I decided to luxuriate in the vacation-like atmosphere and accept the fact that Sea Horse and I weren’t going to be satisfied until we’d gotten the holy ghost out of our systems.

  We had that stupid thing—chemistry—between us. And no matter how often I glanced at the engagement ring on my finger, I knew that James Lord didn’t love me and that he’d never been faithful to me. I really didn’t have a man. In some ways, the more successful my modeling career had become, the more I didn’t want one. I had money, planetary freedom, and fame, so it followed that good sex alone could be an adequate stress releaser, or at least that’s what I was telling myself.

  “You didn’t have to slap me so hard,” Sea Horse laughed on the third morning as he stood over the patio grill making breakfast for everyone—egg stew, trout, yam, plantains, and white bread fried in cinnamon and butter.

  I rolled my eyes, glad that he could joke about it. But I kept my stare trained on the rock-lined swimming pond where six of his children by Tasso were frolicking. The sight unsettled me, because the white wife in London had a son by him and the black American wife, Valencia, had a son and daughter in Miami.

  “So tell me, mermaid—when?”

  “When what?”

  “When did you realize you were falling in love with the king?”

  I rolled my eyes again, but also turned my head around so he wouldn’t see me grinning. Then during breakfast we became like children, unable to stop smiling, chuckling, and flashing the whites of our eyes at each other, much to the delight of Tiberius and Chiamaka. But not Tasso, who ate her breakfast pondside with her children and, in front of everyone, painfully pretended that she didn’t have a problem with my being there.

  I had gone to Tasso several times and insisted on leaving, but she’d forbidden it, grabbing me by the shoulders and pleading, “If you leave, it will only make me look bad in front of Sea Horse.”

  “But your husband plans to fuck me, Tasso—and I’m attracted to him too. It’s like we have to do it.”

  “You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last,” she’d said with a low, heartbroken giggle. “He brings Millicent and Valencia and their children here for vacations as well. I clean up behind them too. They’re just not as nice about it as you are.”

  “You’re so young and beautiful—why do you stay?”

  “I’m a Cassava wife with eight children. Where am I going to go? And besides, the love between me and Sea Horse blossomed while we were teenagers and then died with the birth of our first child. My commitment is no longer to Sea Horse, but to Allah and my culture. I am an African wife. My husband and I were born in the same village and given to each other by the elders—till death do us part. As usual, this
bond means everything to the African woman … and absolutely nothing to the African man. You’re an African girl, Eternity. You’ve seen this all your life, everywhere. Sea Horse is a gifted musician, a wonderful father, and a devoted leader for our people’s causes. But when it comes to the fate of the female, he’s just like any other black man—selfish. It’s not going to help me for you to up and walk out—especially since I was the one who asked him to bring you here.”

  “What?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “After he recorded the song about you and kept talking about you, I told him that his next wife had better be African or the ancestors would wreak havoc with his political ambitions. I told him he’d better find an Ajowan girl who knows how to pray to the ocean.”

  “Sea Horse intends to marry me?”

  “Don’t say it like that, and don’t reject him,” Tasso begged tearfully. “Let him possess you, and let us claim as much of him for Africa as we can. The white woman and that black American Akata bitch are driving his seed to complete corruption—these people are like a disease infiltrating our blood.”

  “I promise I’ll stay a few days, Tasso. But I can tell you right now that I would never marry Sea Horse under any circumstances. I would rather go through life as a whore, free and on my own, than be walked on like a pair of sandals clinging to the bottom of a man’s feet.”

  Tasso gently placed her hand against my face and cried, pathetically, “Don’t hate our men, chei!”

  DON’T HATE OUR MEN

  My son: Sea Horse argued with us over breakfast, demanding, “What child wants to know the personal details of his mother’s life?”

  “But women are not just mothers,” Chiamaka countered. Her usually childlike face took on a startling seriousness as Tiberius redid one of her cornrows that had come loose. “They’re human beings. No woman can be only a whore or a saint, or just dumb or just smart. Women are complex people.”