LATE-NIGHT SESSIONS WITH A BLACK LIBERAL PROGRESSIVE
She was already in the bed when I came home. I could smell the incense burning from down the hall. It was coming from our room. Something called Black Gold. She’d picked it up from the African spot on the corner over the weekend along with two bottles of body oil, a bar of black soap, and an African medallion. I don’t frequent this store often. From what I can see, when passing the storefront and its enthusiastic owner, the shit he sells just isn’t the type of shit that I need. But she’s always willing to give a motherfucker a chance.
I take off my coat and tie, shirt and pants, socks and shoes, and slide into the bed next to her, but I find that there’s an extra head, sets of arms and legs, between us. They belong to my second-born, aka Number Two, aka the four-foot cock-block—I love him but, damn. I pick him up by his pieces and put them where they belong. When I return, I find her in the same position, lying on her side, her head turned away from me with a black silk scarf wrapped tight around her twisted wet locks.
She’s making this steady sideways shift of her hips. If you don’t know any better, you’d believe that she is either anxious or possibly aroused. But we’ve been married for six years, enough time to see two babies climb from her womb, enough time to have had more fights than either of us care to remember, over kids, money, infidelity—the typical shit that threatens a marriage as a going concern. Six years is enough time to know that she’s just trying to put herself to sleep.
I slide across the bed and put my body up against her flannel pajamas. I kiss her behind her ear, down her neck, and along the ridge of her collarbone.
“You ain’t getting none,” she says, shrugging my lips off of her and turning farther into her side of the bed, farther away from me.
I lie there with a full view of the back of her covered head and those locks twined together like wet black ropes dangling down over her shoulders, saturating her pillow.
“So, it’s like that?” I say.
“Please get your dick off my spine,” she responds. “You’re poking me.”
“Baby, why are you acting like that?” I say, removing my erection, as she demanded, from the small of her back.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“Hunting big game, baby. You know that. I’ve been trying to put food on the table.”
“Well, I put the food on the table tonight,” she says. “The food on the table, the kids in the tub, and now I’m putting my ass to sleep,” she says, and keeps rocking her body. “And besides, you seem to have forgotten that I just got my teeth whitened.”
“Whitened?”
She turns toward me and smiles so that I can see her pearly whites, which are as brilliant as Number Two’s night-light, an observation that I feel the need to verbalize in the moment. She responds by tossing her hips and backside against my body, a gesture she knows that I like, one that causes me to kiss her again, behind her ear, down her neck, and along the ridge of her collarbone. That shit is my signature move. It’s kind of like the cheat code in Contra.
“Is there anything rolled up?” I ask.
“In the nightstand,” she says.
I reach for the top drawer, open it, and rub my fingertips over a few items until they come upon a half-smoked blunt. I imagine she burned down what’s missing in between cooking and bathing the kids.
“What took you so long to get home?” she says, slowly softening up.
“You know those white niggas, baby. They’re not letting a brother leave until he’s picked that corporate cotton.” I light the joint, take a couple of pulls, and pass it to her. “One of those motherfuckers had the nerve to walk past my cube singing the theme song to The Jeffersons.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Yeah.”
“Did he know the lyrics?”
“Every. Fucking. Word.”
“Did you sing it with him?” she says, laughing now. I mimic her for a minute before I burst into my own laugh, and then we laugh together. It’s synchronized, almost harmonized. She passes the joint back to me.
“You think you’re funny, huh?”
“That shit is funny,” she says, as she tosses her hip and butt back into me.
Outside, a siren blares down our block. Neither one of us flinches, choosing to enjoy our subtle high and to take in the vibrant life of the city that surrounds us: pit bulls barking each other out, soft-soled police shoes chasing young brothers down our block—a pursuit that never stops—rats chewing our plastic trash cans, the sporadic discharge of a firearm through the night, a couple fighting, a couple fucking before they’re back to fighting in the morning. Somehow, hearing it all never fails to remind us of us, lying here together at some other moment in time. The siren dies, and, if you listen close enough, silence comes to the forefront.
I grab my iPhone and put on some mood music. I start with something slow and old, borderline vintage, some Vandross, Guy, Sweat, even a song or two by that Chi-town nigga who shall not be named. Cats lost their way around the turn of the century, so I go no further than the nineties to avoid some new school, misguided crooner serenading my First Lady.
“You still trying, huh?” she says, hearing the first track come through the speakers. “You know, this is exactly why we have all of these damn kids.”
“But I take care of them, though. And I can take care of you . . . if you let me.” It’s a risk to proceed like this, dropping phrases, knowing they’ve got too much room for interpretation, knowing that she might come back with something like:
“You take care of me? Negro, I work, got the same master’s degree, but with a better GPA.”
See what I mean?
“You know what I’m saying, baby.” I make another run of the Contra code to get us back on track, assuming we were ever there. “I mean, let me take care of you tonight.”
I pass the L back to her. She takes two pulls and ashes it in an empty cup resting atop Frederick Douglass’s Narrative on her nightstand. She’s got his shit flagged with Post-it notes like she’s working on a book report. At last, she turns toward me and places her hand against my ear, rubbing my upper lobe between her index finger and thumb, and says, “It depends.”
“Depends? On what?” I ask.
“On if you can tell me how bad you want me,” she says, and kisses my bottom lip in a way that sends my mind scrambling, grasping for the right answer. We’ve moved past the Contra code. What she wants, what she needs, is for me to stimulate her mental.
“I want you bad, baby,” I say.
“I know you do. But how bad?” she says. “Tell me.”
“I want you . . . I want you more than you want me to have Harden’s beard and—”
“I never said that.”
“I want you more than Ellis wants a pad and pen. I want you more than our pastor wants my offering.”
“So, you’re a rapper now?”
“For you, baby, I can get down like that,” I say, and kiss her long and deep enough to taste the hemp on her tongue. “So, please, stop interrupting my flow, my rap.”
“You’re funny.”
“I know, but listen to me when I tell you I want you more than a nineties nigga wanted his first Beamer, more than a dope fiend wants to get clean or another chance to feel the love from his fam, his team. I’m talking about that love like Martin had for this place despite its racist past. The love Coretta had for him despite his cheating ass.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, baby.”
She leans into me, and we kiss again. And then she looks at me and says to me, “You know I forgive you, baby.”
“I know, baby.”
“But I still want you to tell me more.”
So I tell her, “I want you more than Hillary wanted Barack’s soul. As bad as our people crave our true home. More than Kunta wanted to keep saying his name. More than Toby wanted to choke out master with his chains.”
Suddenly her hand stops stroking my ear, and she begins to rub through my hair and down the side of my face. She kisses my lips and says, “Baby, you’re going to be okay.”
“I know, baby.”
“Good. Now keep rapping to me.”
So I keep rapping and flowing; in the background Luther keeps singing. I keep wanting and pleading until she knows that I need her to feel complete, until she slowly sheds her clothes, showing little concern for the slight chill in our bedroom. We kiss, and the way she sucks my lips is like a sobering manifesto. It’s a wet and warm embrace that grounds my high, or quite possibly is my high. It tells me that there’s no use for a Contra code. It says I know you better than you know yourself on your best day, so don’t try to control me. Just love me.
So I did. And nine months later, I loved our Number Three.