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
