by Kola Boof
They stared at me like I was crazy. It suddenly dawned on me that he wanted his mother and sisters and aunts to look like this—because society kept insisting this is what they should look like. And since he obviously didn’t care enough about the Cassavan women he’d been raised and nurtured by to defend them, I hated the ground he stood on. As usual, he probably thought my reaction was because he had a white girlfriend, fucking typical Pogo-nigger.
Then, right before I could run away full of selfrighteous indignation over the world’s colorist eye, his white girlfriend burst my bubble: “Aren’t you Eternity, the famous supermodel? Can I have your autograph? Your face is on every billboard in London!”
WOMAN IS, MAN DOES
As I lay strewn across Millicent’s bed in the negligee Sea Horse had picked out for me, the last thing I wanted in my state of depression was to be sexed by a black man. But I’d already promised to be the evening’s second prize.
Around midnight, Sea Horse dragged himself into the bedroom, sulking and sighing. “Did you watch the show?” he asked.
“No, I taped it,” I replied groggily, forcing myself into a sexy pose along the edge of the bed. But the last thing on Sea Horse’s mind was sex. Africa’s foremost recording star hadn’t won a single British Galaxy Award.
“This is just fucked up!” he raged, then flung a wine glass into the mirror, cracking it badly. “That fucking Lucky Dube!”
Of course, Lucky Dube was a huge South African reggae star. He’d won both the Afrobeat Album of the Year and Best African Male awards while Rokia Traoré of Mali had stolen Best African Song, Best Dance Track, and Concert Performer of the Year.
“I’m a fucking genius!” Sea Horse bellowed indignantly. “How could I not get one fucking award? My albums outsell everybody’s, but critics hold it against me that I don’t rap in pidgin!”
I wanted to calm him down, but I was afraid.
“Rub my back, mermaid!” he ordered.
Pulling his shirt over his head after he’d sat on the edge of the bed, I sunk my fingers into the heat of his back and began massaging his muscles as therapeutically as I could. His hurt was so deep that he did something that I couldn’t in a million years have imagined him doing—he wept.
“I’m never good enough, no matter what I do!” he lamented.
I knew enough to protect his pride by pretending not to notice he was crying. I said from behind his back, “You are just too much, Sea Horse. You’re going to make such a wonderful leader. I can’t wait, Mr. President.”
“But you can’t stand me!” The truth in his accusation sent chills down my spine, because before that moment I hadn’t realized such a thing. “You hate me.”
“No,” I said unconvincingly.
“Yes. You hate me. Deep inside, all black people hate each other—don’t you know that?”
“No,” I stumbled. “Some white people cloned me. I don’t know anything.”
Sea Horse laughed as I now lost my composure. I had my face buried in my hands as he said, “Well, that’s a good one, because it’s the only way to describe Africa. We speak English, French, Arabic, and its slave language, Swahili—it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, chei. The whole fucking continent is a clone.” He pulled my hands away from my tear-stained face and asked, “Now that we’ve hated, do you think we could be in love?”
To which I replied, honestly, “Woman is, man does.”
But Sea Horse didn’t get it. He said, “The natural man has many women, and if you could stop holding that against me and accept it, I could make you my queen. Not a mere wife like Tasso, Valencia, and Millicent, but my African Queen, my true love.”
“I’m already my own queen, Sea Horse—with or without you.”
Gracefully and with the most surprising tenderness, he cupped one of my breasts with his hand and lightly squeezed and bobbed it before devouring it with his mouth. His tongue aroused the nipple as he sucked and shaped the tit, masterfully, into a kind of human fruit. He then pulled away, his eyes spying mines for some glint of thought, and began to sing, “I know a girl so black … she doesn’t need clothes. I tried to find where I left her … but nobody knows.”
For the first time in all my lives, I felt as though I were getting to the good part.
Sea Horse surprised me with it—deep and soft and sudden. His sincerity tasted like water from a clear spring; the gentle caress of his hands felt like breezes that he’d gathered up from night walks by the sea and saved just for this moment.
I know I sound foolish, but it felt so good being a fool.
It was as though I’d lived every moment just to get to this one. Our first kiss, I swear to you, was so illicit and so meant to be that I couldn’t believe we’d never kissed before. I felt the goodness of his heart, and tasted the raindrops in his dream world, and I liked it.
Sea Horse said to me, “I can wait until you’re ready.”
“A woman is never ready,” I laughed back at him. Then, all too soon, he was asleep—gently snoring on the pillow like some prized lion, his body crouched against mines (an African man from the city!). I still hadn’t been penetrated by Sea Horse—and still didn’t know if I wanted to be.
OTHERS
Tangled on the bed, we were sleeping deeply when the most hideous telephone call came. It was my agent saying he’d just gotten off African Airlines flight 457 from Senegal and had been served by a stewardess who he insisted was me—not just a girl with an uncanny resemblance, not a look-alike, but quite literally me. He was extremely shaken up by this.
I felt like throwing up. My worst fear was a reality: Stevedore and Dr. Juliet had cloned other Eternities in secret. I wondered if my mother had even cloned Hope.
I couldn’t sleep for the rest of that night, and confronted my mother over the telephone first thing in the morning: “You sick, twisted bitch—you fucking bitch! You can’t clone people and play God and—”
“You’re being paranoid, Eternity. Nothing of the sort is going on.”
REMEMBERING ANDY WARHOL
Sea Horse and I flew to America on separate flights, hoping to keep our secret flame under wraps in New York City. Out of nowhere, while Sea Horse was busy appearing on MTV and raising foreign interest for his presidential bid, the avant-garde American movie director Quentin Q. convinced me to appear in his new movie, The Film About Andy Warhol.
I was to appear in a cameo as iconic 1970s singer, model, and actress Grace Jones, a close friend and muse of Warhol’s. I couldn’t imagine it—my soft and feminine temperament was very girlish in comparison to the photos and footage he showed me of Jones—but Quentin was convinced that with my strong bone structure, he could make me into her. After a full day of rehearsal, I shot my two scenes with a husky voice and wore a slinky-sexy outfit.
I returned to our hotel in Manhattan that evening and listened to the sounds of this enchanting American stylist, Dionne Warwick. I relaxed on the terrace and sipped wine as I floated on the wings of her amazing 1960s bossa nova songs.
Sea Horse soon returned and made me dance to long steamy remixes of “Mombassa” and D’banj’s “Tongolo.” He tried to use contagious laughter to set the mood for our lovemaking, but I felt frigid and distracted. I was fighting against falling in love with him.
He whispered in my ear, “Being in a film means you’re immortal now.”
I know what that word means, and it’s awful.
GET DE FUCK OUT
With the news that Sea Horse’s name had been successfully added to the presidential election ballot came violence.
Sea Horse and I had decided to chance it and return home on the same flight. In fact, I was still on the plane after landing back in DakCrete when gunmen fired on him. Sea Horse and his bodyguards had exited the aircraft and were heading down the staircase when I heard the shout, “Get de fuck out!”
Then gunshots: POP! POP! POP!
Peeking out the passenger window, I glimpsed the shooters’ raggedy jeep speeding away.
I ran down to him, stopping in my tracks where his body and those of his bodyguards blocked the narrow steps. There was blood splattered everywhere, but I could tell they were all alive. Emergency personnel from inside the airport were racing to the scene.
“Don’t move,” I said to Sea Horse. “You’re badly hurt.”
“Mer-maid,” he mumbled in a blur before going unconscious.
As he was put on a stretcher and lifted into an ambulance, I was too distraught to care about the cameras click-clicking photographs of supermodel Eternity Frankenheimer crying, kissing, and clinging to Sea Horse’s hand.
“I have to go with him!” I screamed at the paramedics. “I’m his wife!” I lied.
And whoever was lucky enough to be there with a camera that day made himself a pretty penny, because before nightfall the photos of me attending to Sea Horse’s assassination attempt were all over the television and Internet, and, by the next day, all over the front pages of the major European, Australian, Middle Eastern, and African newspapers.
The Earth Has Parents
Of the three of them, I still haven’t figured out which of my men is your father. With skin my color, the daddy could be the whitest penguin from the North Pole and the baby would still come out pure chocolate. But one thing I can honestly say is that I loved all my men with all my heart. Not in the same ways or for the same reasons or even with the same intensity, but I found out that nothing was more important to me than to love and to be loved in return. And, since none of the men in this new journey had actually been offering me what most people would consider “true love,” I was forced to take what I could get, which is usually how a woman ends up with more than one man in the first place.
Do you understand what I’m telling you?
WATER LILY COFFEE
I slipped into the room, quietly crying, as I’d just broken up with James Lord over the phone and had thrown his ring away. Sea Horse lay asleep, his chest and leg bandaged, with a pan of water lilies on the table next to him and another beneath his bed.
ROOT MAGIC
“Water lilies are not used as table food by Europeans and Americans,” Tasso explained as I assisted her in preparing a traditional spiritual recipe for Sea Horse. “Only people of color—we are the ones who know about the special power of water lilies and how delicious they are. You pay attention to what I’m teaching you now, sister.”
As requested, I brought fresh brown eggs to her—no white ones. Tasso cracked four of them into a bowl of waakye (red beans and rice), then squished together the yokes and waakye with cous cous using her bare black fingers.
“Brown eggs are good for the brain—white eggs are bad for the heart,” she instructed. “When outsiders plot to kill your son, a mother remembers that the earth has parents. Nothing is above her; she is the black mother. Let me see the protein.”
I lifted the pale of crayfish that Tiberius, Chiamaka, and I had netted from the river, but first they had to be seasoned the Cassavan way. Tasso boiled several ears of corn, then added the live crayfish, stirring them with a wooden spoon until their shells became a brilliant red.
“Hand me the water lilies.”
Lightly flicking palm oil on them with her fingertips, she spooned the fufu and waakye egg mixture into the leaves, rolling them up on a cookie sheet as one would stuff cabbage leaves before sliding them into the oven. She then brought out a loaf of bread into which she’d baked the seeds from the lilies.
“For the spell to work,” Tasso continued, “it is crucial that we mix a teaspoon of the chopped root of the water lilies with a teaspoon of each of these herbs.”
I watched as she combined the chopped lily root in a cup with the two most important of the herb blends: geech (burdock root and red clover) and sula (common rue). She then added red bush (Rooibos), chervil, the shavings of white willow bark, pulse cassia (legume), and kola nut, then topped the mixture with the aniseedflavored herb, sweet cicely.
“Hand me the blood.”
The bowl of “blood” was actually a poor people’s coffee the villagers made from the roasted seeds of white water lilies colored with red palm oil. Before mixing the blood with the magical herbs, many of which taste unpleasant, Tasso whipped up a delicious spicy sauce by adding into the red coffee a cup of fresh honey, spicy red pepper, musa (sweet bananas that have been fried, mashed, dried, and shaved to a powder), trout stock, and tamarind. Out of the tubers (the delicious potato of the water lily, which can be eaten raw or cooked), Tasso made sliced cheese wafers.
“I want you to take it up to him, Eternity. Go to him respectfully—barefoot, and keep your head bowed. Do not look at him, and do not speak unless spoken to.”
OLD WAYS
I took the tray to Sea Horse’s room. He smiled broadly when he saw me enter with it. After I set it up in front of him, I leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, much like a young girl kisses her father.
“They want to kill me … to stop our people’s revolution.”
KILL SWITCH
The U.S. State Department called them the “African mafia.” Of these two notorious killers, one was a make-shift Christian, the other a makeshift Muslim. Sea Horse stood on his porch, his muscular chest bandaged elaborately, and stared down into the men’s faces.
“Ya steel gawn run for prez-ah-deeent, baby boy?” one of them asked.
Tiberius stood directly behind Sea Horse with a sawed-off shotgun. You could see it in his face that he disapproved of Sea Horse calling in the mafia, but here was life.
Against an orange sky, their dust-covered black Mercedes resembled a license-plated vulture awaiting the death of a starving infant. Chiamaka nervously served them chunky wedges of watermelon as I leaned against a tree staring at Sea Horse’s Adam’s apple, the boldness of his throat, the tenseness of his jaws.
“Your story is all over de world media,” said the tall, skinny Oluchi Muslim wearing a suit and dark glasses.
The fat Christian one added, “De world community is outraged at these kind of political scare tactics. Just like what Bush is doing in Iraq right now—people don’t like it. But it don mean shit, boy. America and Europe still pud dey money behind Yaw Ibrahim. You got no sponsor.”
“I need protection,” Sea Horse admitted. “An army of black fuckers wid guns ’n shit, man. I’m going for the presidency.”
“You want a money deal with the Arabs?”
“But Arabs are backing Yaw Ibrahim!” Tiberius chimed in.
“No, no, some different Arabs. These ones would need you to promote Islam in the villages, teach West Africans Arabic instead of English. Bring the poor people discipline,” the Muslim said. “Ibrahim’s got his white man, and you need your white man—you can’t be a president of Africa without de white man.”
“I can’t roll wid the oil militias. I’m against sharing oil!”
“How about the Chinese den? The Chinese need a good boy in Africa even more den de white man does.”
“I’m not ruling as no Pogo-nigger, chei!”
“You have to rule as a Pogo-nigger, baby boy. What, you think you’re Mugabe? You want to end up dead like Lumumba or Steven Biko, or would you rather retire someday in peace, like Obanjo, to de chicken ranch?”
The Christian said, “Chinese is a hard language to learn, but they don’t force their religion on you like de white and de Arab. They let you make up your own prayers.”
THE CROWN
On the night that all eleven of Sea Horse’s children were gathered around his bed to hear the single most important fable in African history—“The Story of the Crown”—Tasso insisted that I be present in the row of wives. I already felt uneasy in the presence of Sea Horse’s mother, Ma Binata, who had been disgusted by my pitch-black coloring from the moment she laid eyes on me, saying, “You’re too black to be a good person.” The funny thing was, she wasn’t too far from the same color herself.
As we gathered
behind the children in Sea Horse’s bedroom, all ears ready to take in his bedtime story, I smiled sweetly at Ma Binata’s synthetic wig—wearing, squat, tugboat self, watching as she nestled close to Sea Horse’s black American wife, Valencia, who she did adore because she didn’t look anything like a black woman. Valencia possessed sparkling violet eyes, skin lighter than yoke custard, and long, fluffy dark hair. She looked Hawaiian. Her children by Sea Horse were pretty—tall and brown toast—colored with clean, even features.
“Come to Nana,” Ma Binata cheered affectionately as her favorite grandchild, Garvey, who I also considered to be the sweetest of the children, entered the room with Millicent. Ma Binata immediately nudged Valencia out of the way to sweep up Garvey in her flabby black arms, pecking him with kisses and flashing her eyes approvingly at his white mother.
“Hello, Mother Binata.” Millicent reveled in the fact that her white genes and chromosomes made her the favorite daughter-in-law. (But, of course, we would learn the next day that Millicent York was filing for divorce— not because Sea Horse had taken me to London to fuck me in her bed, but because the whole world had found out about it.)
To my surprise, Garvey then handed me an African violet he had plucked from the river and said, “For my tallest mommy.”
But out of all the batches of children, Tasso’s were the most familiar and gorgeous to me, truly West Cassavan. And as I watched them, I understood why Tasso, the first time we met, had introduced herself as Sea Horse’s “God-given wife.” Not only had she and Sea Horse come from the same tribe and village, but their sons looked almost like clones of Sea Horse, while the daughters were a rich, muddy Mandingo brown with slender bodies, close-cropped hair, and faces as delicately rind-thick and enchanting as those of our Cassava ancestors.
It was also clear that all the different mixtures of children were absolutely desperate for their father’s love. You could see in their eyes—that ultrabright dead retina that possesses children who feel inadequate and unloved—both loving and hating a parent until all goodness grows numb.