by Pamela Sneed
The main character of Motherland is a designer from North Carolina searching for her Black identity, who would, like me, become deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis.
There are ways I’ve come to crave Blackness like never before
search its eyes for some semblance of me
a way I watch Black shows on television
listen to the rhythm of our speech endless amounts of shucking and jiving
a way I’ve studied those Black male musical singing groups like the Temptations
fascinated by steps we’ve devised
a way I watch young Black & Puerto Rican girls on the block near my house
the way they’ve fastened gold to their ears, wear name belts
I saw this young Black girl sashaying down the street the other day
in a shirt that looked like the American flag
the way I hear the clipped and musical patois of West Indian women
and want to call some of them mother
the way I need to watch how our hips curve
our bodies move perfectly when we dance
the way I’ve gone to some offbeat dance club
on a rare occasion and heard someone playing drums along to the music
then an updated disco remixed version of Patti Labelle’s “You are My Friend,”
and me getting the holy ghost
feeling as if it was early 1991 all over again
all my brothers were still alive
they really all didn’t just die on me
I really did belong once to somewhere, something
and no matter how much I grow, attempt to move on
I never stop thinking of never stop missing those men
their hands
beautiful Black hands
hands that shaped America’s soil
Black hands
unseen hands
creative forces
purveyors of style
masterminds who’ve made much
of music and fashion what it is today
Black Black beautiful hands
working like miners in the mines of South Africa
like slaves to whom I owe almost everything
men like nameless and tireless women
working every day in the country sides and fields of Nicaragua and Mexico
Those masked fighters those men, like women and girls barely bloomed
once called them Sandino’s daughters
who risked everything to fight in a war against dictatorship
went against tradition left their families, everything
to create futures for their children
beautiful, Black Black queer hands
I know I’m just a designer
I shouldn’t know and feel all of these things
but I do read do travel
and Sebastian says, I could make a great leader.
On the topic of freedom and runaways, there was a winter, a whole season spent with a lover. We drove her beat up Volkswagen to escape the city, like runaways hiding out upstate at a bed and breakfast for ten dollars a night. We did nothing except eat, make love, and hold hands as we stared into a warm fireplace.
Years later, long after I first began to pen this story, I travelled to Ghana and met Joshua. He was twenty-one years old. He was my guide. We sat on a hilltop overlooking the beach, and kissed as he blew weed smoke into my mouth. Someone rode a bicycle on the wet sand. In Ghana, Joshua and I traveled up to Aburi Gardens, its tall trees formed a holy corridor. Afterwards, we sat in the red dirt waiting for a tro-tro, a dilapidated mini-van, and shared a bushel of small bananas. From the paths near Aburi Gardens we could look out over all of Accra and see tin roofs and tiny hills.
There weren’t many words between Joshua and me. Perhaps we both wanted pieces of each other’s identity. We were from very different cultures. When I wanted to run an errand, he’d say things in the popular phrase, “Go and come,” which meant finish your business, come here, stay here and be with me, but we did share a common language when we packed and boarded the tro-tro. He negotiated prices with the driver in Twi or Gha. We held hands as we sped by images of Ghanaian fields. We were silent. Joshua took me to the beach at Kokrobite, outside Accra and we’d swim. We were somewhere in the hills in Burkina Faso, it looked the way you’d imagined Africa, tropical, with large palm leafs.
In a small hot room, he tore my bra off and we fucked. “I like your sex,” he’d say, which was his way of saying he liked the way I moved with and beneath him.
There were times, too, with Joshua when the outside disappeared and it was just he and I in a room somewhere in West Africa fucking. There was a time too when it got serious, after I’d left the first time. He would call me and say “Come home.” He knew that for African Americans there was a wound there, a wound that had us searching all over Africa for an identity, a place to belong. As a guide, I wonder if Joshua was trained to know there was a wound in me, that in general for African Americans home was a fractured place. Time after time he’d seen the desperate looks in African American eyes, those mythologies about Africa being a homeland that made us bend down and kiss the tarmac when we arrived. Maybe there was something Joshua knew when he took me for the first time to Cape Coast Castle, the slave fort. I am not a religious person, not into ancestral worship, but I went immediately to the water banks near Cape Coast and began to anoint myself with water and pray. Joshua knew to be silent and watch.
For those who haven’t seen Cape Coast Castle, it is a slave fort, the dungeons or warehouse where the British and Portuguese first held sugar and then slaves, thousands of them before being shipped to the new world, parts of the Caribbean and America. There are slave forts all along the coast of West Africa, just as plantations are lined along the Mississippi. In Ghana, Cape Coast is among the most famous and a huge tourist attraction. It’s a huge sprawling castle and underneath are dungeons where slaves were held. There are different dungeons for male and female slaves and rebels. They are dark, dank rooms where a guide points out fingernail scratches in the wall where captured Africans clawed to get out. The guide also points to the window high above where food was dropped down into the dungeon where slaves stood knee deep in vomit, feces, and urine. In the last part of the tour, you are shown The Door of No Return, where you look from the dungeons onto the Atlantic ocean. Once slaves stepped through this door, they would never see their homeland again. Maybe Joshua knew a lot more than what he actually said when he took me weeks after Cape Coast to an African Village for a naming ceremony to receive my African name. It might have been a heist and a hoax gone wrong, because I was supposed to receive my name in a little ceremony, pay and go, but when they dressed me up in African garb, and the Village gathered around me and the Village priestess said, “Thank you God for returning our daughter from across the ocean,” and said to me, “You are home now, you will never be a stranger and sleep in a hotel again,” something in me like rock split apart. I started to cry as did she and we couldn’t stop.
I know Mandela used to do that—embrace African Americans. In a simple gesture he extended his arms and said, “Welcome home,” and that embrace could make men weep. I do believe contrary to all intellectual beliefs, there is something spiritual in returning. There is something that happened to my soul, making that zig zag trek across the ocean. There is something about being a survivor. There is something in my D.N.A. There is something monumental at least there was for me, standing in Cape Coast Castle, looking from The Door of No Return onto the Atlantic Ocean. There is something about seeing the first leg of our real journey and the enormous ocean we crossed.
Like Alex Haley in the film Roots and finding his people, I resisted every urge to throw myself down on the ground and shout, “I found you,” with all the tears and snot and the holy spirit jerking my body all around like the way it did to church folks. There is something about passing through these huge, newly constructed gateways, memorial arches on a beach in Ouidah that symbol
ize The Door of No Return, and next to it, The Door of Return, like arms extended to all of those descendants of slaves dispersed into the diaspora. It was part of Kwame Nkrumah’s dream, to unite a fractured and broken Black people. There is something, too, that made me feel victorious, that despite all odds we have triumphed. As Audre Lorde once said of women, of lesbians, of POC, “We were never meant to survive,” but we have and thrived. Like many, I never expected to feel anything at Cape Coast, some don’t. Some think it’s a tourist trap, but it changed me. In fact if my life were divided into halves, I would label them pre- and post-Ghana.
I had stayed in Ghana for one month. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans happened while I was away. I watched horrified from a hotel room on television how a tidal wave of water rushed through a building and trapped a young Black woman in the basement. Her head bobbed up and down, she gasped for air. I also saw while staying in the hotel a film about organ harvesting and poor people who are tricked into selling their organs for profit. The film starred a young British actor of African descent Chiwetel Ejiofor who would go on to become the star of the American film made by a British director, Steve McQueen, Twelve Years a Slave. The hotel played the mini-series Roots on rotation, about Kunta Kinte captured from his African homeland and sold into bondage as an American slave. In this way, the hotel was peddling to tourists an identity, or a nostalgia for the past, creating connections where there may be none. Many Black Africans do not consider African Americans to be their family or long lost tribe and actually resent this type of thinking.
After meeting and traveling with Joshua, I returned home. My worldview had changed considerably. The first film I saw upon returning was the remake of King Kong. It was offensive to me, the fact that Hollywood would adapt and release a film with very racist origins. Though couched in science fiction, it was about a Black man (a monster) who was infatuated with a white woman, Naomi Watts as Faye Wray. In 2005, this film was regressive. I was appalled as were several Black men in my neighborhood who saw it. I decided to write a satire as a protest of that film titled Kong. What I saw after returning from Ghana was Kong’s voyage, stolen from Africa, lured, drugged with chloroform, chained, made a slave, loaded unto a ship, a journey from his homeland through the middle passage to America. “This Kong,” I wrote, “you want to be free.” What became evident to me was not only the racist caricature and configuration of white men’s fear, but Africa’s displaced and missing son.
The only saving grace for Peter Jackson’s King Kong was that Kong was not just a racist fantasy or byproduct. He was resurrected in a post 9/11 world. In Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Kong is an American soldier, handling business in the jungle. He works on behalf of justice. In the famous scene where he is shot down from on top of the Empire State Building by ironically tiny planes, we are meant to see America’s vulnerability. He is the American people, a Great Goliath being slain by the young David. Kong is America’s innocence.
When I left Africa for the first time and returned four months later, Joshua had become a man. When we first reunited I teased him and asked, “Where’s my little boy?” I saw his shirt sleeves rolled up, the muscles and veins in his arms strong. We were in a room with a thatched roof, on the beach next to Cape Coast Castle, the slave fort. “Come here. Move here. Be with me. We can travel,” he said. “Travel,” was the word that got me. I was tempted by the idea of leaving everything behind, going with him, traveling, but I was ultimately just passing through. “Your eyes don’t say forever,” he’d say. I’d quickly look away as if caught.
At the beginning of this story, I spoke of Shaun Lyle, whom I met in the season of Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.” In the end, he doesn’t qualify as a real boyfriend, but he was a first for me. I’d known him long before he’d ever noticed me and long before that fateful night we kissed on a balcony overlooking the city. I’d already spotted him. I was a freshman in junior high school and he was a senior. Like spring, Shaun arrived late in high school years. The first time I spotted him he stood outside on the top steps of my school. He wore a fashionable brown tweed tailored suit, which was uncustomary and sophisticated for a student in our small town. His face was turned away in profile smoking a cigarette. He resembled the Romans or a Greek God, a bronzed statue you’d see turning pages of an ancient history book, face turned away in profile with a sharp European nose, only Shaun was Black, mixed-race, with caramel skin, hazel eyes, and hair a mosh of soft brown ringlets. He hadn’t noticed me, but I’d noticed him and his beauty. I was deeply desirous and promised myself, one day he’d know me.
In fact, from that day forward, I went out of my way to walk downstairs in the high school to the ground floor near senior lockers, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I prayed our eyes would meet and truly he’d see me. Besides being in different classes, we were in different leagues. I’m sure in his eyes I was some gangly young freshman, no one who could be of consequence and merit to him. So based on these facts, neither of us could have guessed he’d be the man introducing me to destiny, would be the vehicle I drove and ultimately arrived at myself. He was my introduction to a new world.
Shaun was that beautiful, but he had problems that had to do with family and history. There were scandals and rumors that preceded and followed wherever he went. His family, the Lyle’s, were the most notorious of our small town and surrounding ones. Some of the problems had to do with his mother, who was also beautiful, a white porcelain-colored Black woman with the elegance and chiseled features of an Egyptian Nefertiti. It was suspected she was addicted to prescription painkillers, often in car crashes, and spent months out of work, living like a reclusive heiress. She seemed interested in men only for what they gave and had the erect posture of a kept woman. I felt there was something incestuous between Shaun and her, never actualized but an uncomfortable union. There was also his sister Roberta who’d been in and out of jail, notorious for hooking up with criminal men. Then, there was Shaun’s slightly younger brother, Scott, who might have been beautiful, but in stark contrast to his flamboyant family, was remote and lifeless. Shaun, in his early twenties, had been in and out of jail, which was the reason he’d never finished high school and had to go back. He rarely talked about his past, but these were the rumors surrounding him, mystery that created fear of him and his entire clan. I heard his father shot someone.
So, perhaps the Shaun I’d met after our brief visual encounter on the high school stairs was a young man trying to redeem himself, trying as hard as he could like a prisoner or slave to break away, escape from family and the air that surrounded him. Perhaps he was attempting to master his own destiny by going back to finish high school and attending the same church as I did, where his grandparents were prominent figures. Perhaps church was his very public attempt to turn his life like a vehicle around, to gain the acceptance he and his family had never had.
On the day he and I officially met, he was sitting in church with his back to me in a front pew. It was a Saturday rehearsal for baptismal candidates, people who had in very traditional terms accepted Jesus as their savior and were willing to follow the path of Christianity. I have no idea what caused me to be baptized. I can only say it seemed like the thing to do. I was moved one Sunday (as much as I was moved hearing Luther Vandross) when the preacher extended his arms and asked the congregation as he did every Sunday, “Won’t you accept Jesus as your personal savior?” There was something very theatrical about it all for those like me, numb to the ways of Christ, when the floorboards opened, the pulpit moved, and you stepped into a shallow pool with a preacher fully clothed in white robes, who dunked you into the water.
However, I was now eighteen years old and a high school senior. I was also thinking about plans for the prom. I was certainly not the first pick as a 6-feet-2-inch tall, dark-skinned Black girl amongst white boys. Prospects for a good prom date were slim. I had asked James, someone’s cousin of a cousin, but as time grew closer, I explained to my cousin Lisa that Saturday in church, “I’m not so s
ure about the prom because James is waffling in his answer.” Perhaps it was spring and I had purposefully planted information, because it was right then that Shaun turned to me and said, “It would be an honor to take you to your senior prom.”
No one and nothing could have prepared me for the most beautiful man I’d ever seen volunteering to take me to my senior prom. I can’t tell you to this day or in a thousand years what motivated Shaun to do this, if it were his newly reformed sense of Jesus and desire to do a good deed, if he’d wanted to rectify himself in the eyes of Jesus or the church, or if by some remote chance he’d seen or witnessed in me some possibility of beauty, a beauty which escaped eyes of my small town, parents and boys alike. Perhaps Shaun saw potential in my tall, gangly form.
It was soon after I loved him. I loved him hard and became one of a string of women who loved him, though I was definitely the youngest and most naïve. The rest were porcelain, older, green-eyed, and glamorous like his mother.
There was something soft and magical he’d awakened in me the night of my senior prom. I was dressed in an ivory gown, he was in a tuxedo. We stood late night on a balcony. He kissed me openly and gently. Afterward he informed me, quite officiously, “Let’s see each other,” which like a late spring night was a cool way of saying, Let’s date, but by no means be exclusive. “Sure,” I said, playing cool while my heart nearly exploded. Perhaps I’m skipping around now as I did then, but I don’t remember any fear when sometime after the prom, in early summer, while riding in the backseat of a car with Shaun as someone else drove, he lifted my pant leg from the bottom and stroked his fingers up and down like a paintbrush effortlessly. Like a light bulb my skin prickled with electricity.
My mind flashes and races to the first time in his apartment above his grandmother’s. We were not fucking but he’s naked as I lie beneath him, topless, whispering into his ear breathlessly like a radio, turned on. In the end, he sits naked, back propped against the pillows, muscular arms and legs folded looking like those pictures of the Romans or a Greek God, only Shaun is smoking a cigarette. I stand at the edge of the bed in full view getting dressed. His eyes like the lens of a camera surveys my body and breasts. Though it’s my first time naked with a man, somehow I am unafraid to show myself. Like an artist or sculptor Shaun looks at me appreciatively and says, “Your body is beautiful, Hun.”