by Kola Boof
Out of the traditional mantra of the African royals, Sea Horse said to his daughters: “Through our children we live forever.” Then to his sons: “Any man who doesn’t know the history of his people perishes from the earth.”
He spoke first about being a little boy in DakCrete. His father, a cab driver, was brutally beaten for filing a complaint against the government officials who he’d driven from the airport to the presidential palace after they’d refused to pay the fare. “Your grandpa died in a jail cell from internal bleeding because he was man enough to demand to be paid for his work.”
Sea Horse continued: “Once upon a time, there was a great mighty warrior, the father of all your father’s people—Twee Obatala. He lived in a beautiful paradise with his wife and kids. He mostly hunted and fished, smoked some herb, and made music on his drum—but then one day he was coming back from playing in the river with his family when he heard a thunderous voice call his name … It wasn’t another man, though—it was a burning bush. And the bush said, ‘Hey, I’m your creator man … and I made you in my image, with the crown of all knowledge on your head, and I gave you this paradise so you would always have everything you need.’ So anyway—God goes on to tell Twee Obatala that there are some strange, greedy men coming to Africa to steal his land, rape his wife, kill his children, and, most of all—to remove his crown. God says to Obatala, ‘No matter what they do to you, there’s no way they can defeat you as long as you have the crown on your head. And I gave no other race of people this crown. Only you and those with your blood possess the one true hair, the crown of wool, the greatness of beauty that is the proof that I made you first and that you are my chosen son—my symbol of wholeness, where others split apart. So in all you do, fight the good fight, but never lose your crown. Because without it, you are no longer the chosen one.
“A true African never loses his crown,” conclued Sea Horse. “It is the proof that he has not been defeated by the white man or the Arab, the Indian or the Asian. It is the proof that he is still his own man, marked separately as God’s chosen son. Now come, each of you, give Papa some sugar.”
TREASURE
In my sleep, he was staring down at me from a tree branch—a young, sweet little gingerbread boy with huge saucer eyes and a button nose. When I asked him what his name was, thinking that he was you, son—he said, “I’m Jesus Christ.”
And then somebody tweaked my nose, causing me to jump awake!
In the dark, I couldn’t really see.
“Don’t scream,” Sea Horse whispered.
“Why are you watching me sleep?”
“Because asleep you remind me of that story Sleeping Beauty—you look like somebody drew you with a steady hand.”
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
It finally happened between Sea Horse and me. A kiss that felt like a boil being lanced, it was fire. I felt like a child beneath Sea Horse’s wounded body, our searching, feverish mouths smack-crashing and blistering with the sweetest, most impatient embraces. And before I could process that it was actually happening, I felt the sharp stab of his penis taking potshots at the butterflies in my stomach. Oh God! I don’t know why I’d expected it to be a different dance than the one with Stevedore and James, but it was that same animal beauty with a black man. I moaned over his shoulder, hoping that the other women in the house (the children!) couldn’t hear what was happening. I opened my legs wider and gyrated my curvy hips in time with his muscled ones, our froglike metaphysics dampening the bed with sweat as his black dick speared faster and faster until all the spasms in my body melted like a buttery dew tranquil between my legs.
“Who dis pussy, eh?” he demanded as he sloshed in and out of me. “Who dis pussy?”
“Yours,” I’d cried in ecstasy. “Yours, Sea Horse.”
INTERMISSION
The following night, Sea Horse paced around his bedroom in a rage. Millicent York had served him with divorce papers and the West Cassavaland government was trying to cover its ass in the world community by scheduling him for a full hour’s live interview on our nation’s only broadcast network.
“You’re a candidate for president, so please wear a suit and tie. The whole world will be watching,” the representative from the White House had said. But Sea Horse seemed too distracted by Millicent to care.
“Fucking bitch!” he raged, incredulously. “She’s doing this to get herself a white man—which is what she always wanted in the first place. That’s why she’s letting my mother keep Garvey. So she won’t have any little darkie to explain.”
On the one hand, he insisted that he was sick of Millicent York and was no longer attracted to her—which was true; you could see it in his eyes. But on the other, he had a paranoid fear that she would now go out and choose a white man as her next mate.
Because I had been raised by a white man, it came as a surprise to me that so many black men saw their lives as a big ongoing competition against white men. Later, I was stunned to realize that Sea Horse had the same insecurities I did about being “good enough” for a white mate. Everything I held in secret, it seemed like he held too. And I felt sad that neither he nor I knew love.
NO LOVE
As the days passed, I found myself crying for no reason when I was alone. I started to get nosebleeds, and when Chiamaka and I went to DakCrete to browse the boutique windows on the boulevards, two different Cassavan passersby stared at me and said, “You need Jesus.”
“It’s what they say to women with charcoal skin who have the nerve to walk around the city with the rest of us,” Chiamaka explained from a more acceptable chocolate-fudge vantage point.
Of course, everywhere we went that day, we saw people sporting the black armband with the red splotch in the middle that Sea Horse had worn during his national television interview to chants of, “Vote for the Motherland Party, not the Fatherland.” And then on Ball Road, where we got yams and Fanta, Chiamaka brought me to the cart of an old gray-haired Yoruba woman.
“Lady Adeyemi, this is my friend Eternity.”
“What a pretty, pretty black girl,” the woman said, nearly singing it. She kept calling me “sey-su” (favorite daughter).
“Thank you.”
“Give me your hand, sey-su,” said the wrinkly woman. As if by magic, she suddenly said, “You’re a dead woman brought back to life by sorcery—an actual goddess.”
“Lady Adeyemi!” Chiamaka gasped.
But the Yoruba woman kept her gaze on me. “I mean what I say. This girl has been resurrected and she’ll be resurrected again. Tell me, Eternity—who is this man with three nipples?”
The question turned Chiamaka to stone. “My husband,” she replied quietly.
The woman then asked me, “Do you know what it means when a woman’s nose bleeds around children?”
“That she’s going to die or have a baby,” I recited.
“Rubbish! It means that she’s falling in love when she doesn’t want to. But she can’t get out of it. And children are the proof that men and women can truly love. You’re falling in love for the first time.”
“But I’ve been in love before.”
“No, sey-su. Not like this.”
Back at the estate that evening, my agent telephoned from London to congratulate me on a new contract with Second Moon Cosmetics. On top of that, I’d been offered another acting role in a big-budget Hollywood science-fiction flick.
“I’ll have to leave in a few days,” I told Sea Horse when he came to my room. “I have to get back to my career.”
“So what about us? … I want you to be my wife, Eternity.”
“I can’t do that, Sea Horse. You’re married to too many women as it is. You’ve got a house full of kids.”
He looked annoyed. “What do you want from a man?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t be part of a harem. I’m too good for that.”
“Then what about Africa, black woman? It’s your legacy, your heritage, to sacrifice yourself for Mother Africa.”
“It is?” I asked with amusement.
“You’re a black woman, a Cassavan. You should know that. Don’t you remember paradise—carrying my food on your head and my seed on your back? Kneeling at my feet and fetching my water? You, black woman, would eat the nuts out of my shit if I told you to. It’s not easy being a woman, but with me, it’s all you’ll know.”
THE EARTH HAS PARENTS
I felt like Sleeping Beauty writhing at the bottom of Sea Horse’s beautiful dream, body to body, our lovemaking contained by a bed of sickle fire floating through night on the backs of antelope. The part that made it wrong was the part that made it right. All his prayers, kisses, caresses, and all his hopes, fears, and truths seeped inside me until like an antibiotic they searched out and quarantined the part of me that was already him.
“Don’t resist being a man, mermaid,” he hummed as our bucking bodies burnt up in the fire. “You are the one raised by scientists. Half of the sea horse is a woman, never resisting wholeness. Wholeness is the roundness of the earth—the two-fold of the earth and sea, the naked love.”
Rush to meet my feet, Ocean … Wash over me, eternally.
Let me be the shepherd of your sea, Ajowan woman.
Goddess … becoming more and more of herself.
I didn’t want it to end, the masterfulness of his love stroke or the deepness of the dream that he was planting inside me. But out of nowhere and beyond my control, our bodies shook like an earthquake, my hand atrophied like a seashell pressed against his lava-hot chest, and the roaring wind song of all seven seas—the sweetest sound I’ve ever made, son—swept us back into the real world. As his penis went limp and I tasted the salt of his sweat glazing over me, Sea Horse sucked a drag of his marijuana cigarette and whispered, tenderly, “This is why people stay mad at God … too much life and not enough lovemaking.”
STAY
I’ve heard that in America, the black people have a saying, “Stay black and die.” It fascinates me, because in Africa we have the same saying, only it goes, “Stay black and live.”
Stay black and live.
My baby brother had been pumping his fist in the air and chanting those words when they killed him.
I found out about Tiberius by phone.
“Eternity—it’s Tasso. Are you sitting down, dearest one?”
A mob of swallowers and skin bleachers had gathered around Tiberius on the streets of DakCrete, brandishing bottles and tire irons. They wanted the boxes of pills in the raggedy Chevrolet station wagon to be set free, and were prepared to move him by any means necessary. But they’d arrived to find a half-caste, biracial protestor—the very vision of what they themselves dreamt of becoming.
Tiberius shouted out, passionately: “Look at me! You really think I like being a color that separates me from you? You really think I’m proud to have this blood in my veins, this scarlet letter that represents the white world’s defeat of my own ancestors? Do you really think I’m beautiful—after so many Africans had to die of broken hearts just so I could be called beautiful? Do you really think this is the natural order when you stand here, on African soil, and look at me?”
“Good speech, na!” hollered a nut-brown girl with a blue-black baby on her hip. “But you move out de way now. I need de Michael Jackson pill for me baby!”
“Doonu!” shouted a university boy. “Open de boxes and start to sell that shit, half-breed. I got classes, man. Hurry!”
But according to Chiamaka, Tiberius had ignored their demands to turn over the loot, pleading with them, “You don’t have to look like me to be a human being. You don’t have to confirm for the Europeans that you want to be white like them. You don’t have to curse your own ancestors, your own African children, and covet their white ones. It’s not right for an African to become a nigger. It’s not right for an African to become a nigger. It’s not right for an African to become a nigger—stay black and live! Stay black and live!”
Chiamaka cried as she related the story. “They started chanting, Eternity. Crowding in on us and chanting, Kill the Racist! Kill the Racist! And something in Tiberius just snapped … and he welcomed it. He was insane. His eyes clouded with tears and he pleaded against the people’s rage. I love you, my brothers and sisters … I love you as you are! You don’t need this! But they stomped and trampled and beat him—for lifting a mirror to their inferiority, for judging them, for loving them, for standing in their way, for being right, for telling the truth, for being racist against whiteness—they killed him.”
I couldn’t believe it. Killed like I was killed. How could God keep being so cruel?
Supermodel Collapses on Runway
GLOBE ENQUIRER
Add the hot young Eternity Frankenheimer to the list of models rumored to be on drugs. The statuesque West African beauty affectionately known as “Charcoal Barbie” recently collapsed on the runway during Giovaldi’s show in Milan, and rumor has it she pissed off designers in Paris with the edict that she just couldn’t get out of bed—for a whole week. Could it be that she’s heartbroken over the recent photos of bad-boy rapper King Sea Horse Twee dancing close with a blond, blue-eyed bombshell in Berlin? Tsk, tsk. We thought we’d seen it all with Naomi Campbell, but now there’s a new drama queen in town.
WIMBLEDON 2004
The match seemed to go on forever, but it was the best women’s tennis the world had seen in a long time. Russian teenager Maria Sharapova was giving it everything she had, yet in the end was unable to overcome the pure magical athleticism of an aging Venus Williams.
“There are over two hundred American tennis fans here and they all rooted for the Russian—not their fellow American,” I pointed out to Sea Horse.
“Oh stop it, your girl Venus won!”
“But the Americans cheered for the Russian girl!”
“Well, aren’t you cheering Venus because she looks African like you?” Sea Horse countered. “They cheered Sharapova because they want to see someone who looks like them win. It’s human nature, Eternity.”
SWEETER AND SWEETER
Tasso Twee, draped in a flowing sky-blue tie-dyed summer dress, matching burka, and huge sunglasses, greeted me at the airfield when I returned home with a huge hug and kiss (“I’m so glad you’re back!”). Her eight children welcomed me, tugging and chirping and helping to carry my stuff to the chauffer-driven Mercedes—a comforting arrival. But then, just as we’d gotten my things loaded and I’d climbed into the back of the car, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I noticed a doll—one that resembled me and was the size of a five-year-old child … propped up in the backseat.
“It’s just a doll of you that I made. Your own likeness,” Tasso said sweetly.
“Mama put some of your hair in it,” one of the girls said.
“I can’t ride in this car, Tasso. I just can’t stand dolls. I’m so sorry.”
“Eternity, it’s a very special doll. We can’t leave it here on the airfield. It’s your protector. It’s taken me months to get the skin color just right, and I took a patch of your clothing and some of your hair. I worked so—”
“Tasso, I just told you, I hate dolls!”
She clutched it tightly as she awaited another car to fetch her while the children and I rode away in the Mercedes.
I hadn’t meant to yell at her, but everything was about to start going wrong.
From the moment we entered Sea Horse’s estate, I was besieged by the worst cravings for something sweet. When you’re a supermodel, they give you these allnatural mineral pills to keep you from being hungry— chromium niacin and chromium picolinate—only I was out of my pills, and my bony little hands were shaking.
DEAR EYE
In the dreams, it was the stench, the odor of death and sour water, that pervaded all senses, more so than the dead-eyed fish bodies.
CUT YOU
“I made this doll to protect you,” Tasso said gravely, her burnt-chocolate fingers undoing the lace that covered it like a Christmas present. I wanted to run ou
t of the room, but Tasso’s goodwill had come upon me like a net. Her voice was tender as she explained, “While you were gone, I saw you in a casket with your white ma standing over you. Along with ablutions and prayers to Allah, the God Most High, I started carving into the wood with all my willpower.”
“You put roots on Sea Horse, Tasso. That’s witchcraft.”
“No, that’s love. And this is love too.”
The thing looked just like me.
I told Tasso, “I once had an African mother who made plastic dolls for a living. And she made me practice circumcision on them.” A lump grew in my throat, I saw the tiny hands from another life being guided again by Ma Nonni’s, cutting the barely developed vaginas of other little girls. I saw blood as deep as chocolate squirting through fingers, braiding the blood-strings. I smelled dead fish, their glass eyes staring at me, I saw hands covered in blood.
And as I fell down on my knees, soulfully weeping at the lives I’d altered in that other life as Orisha, I suddenly realized that Tasso felt threatened by the power of love between me and Sea Horse. She intended to kill me through the doll—which is what traditional jungle wives used to do to people all the time, I’d heard—and I fought to regain my composure.
I said to her simply, “Fuck you, bitch.” Then I ratcheted up all the snot and saliva I could muster and spit it straight into Tasso’s startled face. “I’m not a believer in what you do! And I don’t like dolls!”
Tasso wiped her face. “This doll was to protect you, not cut you.”
“Protect me for what, Tasso!?”
“For Sea Horse!” she shouted, incredulously. “Because we’re women and he needs us! And for Africa.”
KING OF THE WORLD
As the war in Iraq turned into a quagmire of suicide bombings and world protest against the Bush regime, the presidential primary in West Cassavaland went nearly unnoticed. It seemed the long-ignored genocide in Sudan, coupled with the defiant expulsion of whites from Zimbabwe by President Mugabe, took center stage in Western coverage of African news.