NOVELIST FISHER'S FACES in A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA (Amazon's Kindle Library, 2013) PART FIVE

NOVELIST FISHER’S FACES in A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA (Amazon’s Kindle Library, 2013)

PART FIVE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 27, 2014

Asabi Isheola

Asabi had been employed at Rose Garden Manor since 1965, although now only 19.  She was lithe of frame, diminutive in height, standing five feet tall, and shaped like a diva.  

She had black satin hair that she wore so short that it seems painted on her skull, her skin the color of Tabasco sauce, her oval face softly angular and shaped like a diamond with arched eyebrows, deep dark eyes and pouting lips that gave her a siren’s demeanor, her nose thin and shapely suggesting a perpendicular divide to her sculptured lips, complemented by small even white teeth, and a delicate chin that suggested vulnerability that hid her cunning.  

She caused pain to admirers with her petite body, small breasts, wasp like waist, accentuated with her cat like walk.

She wore her maid’s uniform as short as was decent, and glued to her body to show off her tiny waist, high set rump, and defined calves.  She weighed just shy of eighty-five pounds but had the comely command of a three-hundred pound giant, and knew it. 

Her bedroom eyes were deep and dark like mountain nights in her native Transkei.  Deeply religious, a convert to Christianity, she was a resident staff member of the Devlin household.

Born in the Transkei, she was forced to move to SOWETO with her mother and five other siblings when her father was sent to prison for murdering a man who had stolen from him.  

In SOWETO, the family lived in a thatched Quonset hut with dirt floors, and an attached aluminum room, which was used as the bedroom for them all.  Her mother cooked on a hibachi and made her living weaving baskets, and selling them in the “Farmer’s Market,” in Johannesburg.

 

Asabi was the eldest with two brothers and three sisters.  She never finished high school but found employment without difficulty with her good looks, easy smile and graceful manner.  

She dropped out of high school when the school principal, a Swahili, attempted to rape her when she was fifteen.  She never told her parents for fear her father would kill the man when he got out of prison.  Her mother didn’t protest her dropping out, as she needed the financial support now as she was the lone provider of the family.

Danger clung to Asabi like ink to a blotter.  Not only Bantu men but white men as well felt her taunting magnetism on the street, the train or the bus, wherever she was.  

She delighted looking at herself naked in the mirror with her shining ebony skin, perfect contours, touching her tiny breasts, and squeezing the nipples until they turned a deep pink contrasting with her dark body.  She would sit on the bed with a mirror in her one hand and spread the lips of her great divine, and admire the beautiful flower that held the mystery of life.

She knew she was pretty, but hated her mother for always reminding her what a curse it was.  "Why a curse, mommy," she would ask, "why can’t you be happy for the way I look?  I love the way I look.  I love the way men stare at me as I walk by, why not?  What harm is there to being pretty?"

She looked at her eyes closely in the mirror.  They were dark brown pools of wanting as she thought of Josiah, who always ignored her.  He looked the other way as she would sashay by him in the garden.  He was afraid of white authority, that must be the reason, afraid to look at her with the same desire as other men. 

She wondered.  Would the police send him to prison if it caught us making love in his little house?  He has his own place, and I could sneak out in the dead of night, and who would know?  Was making love on a white man’s property as grave a crime as being political like Nelson Mandela?  Was that why Josiah won’t’ look at me with desire?

Bahari

There were young men Asabi saw in the Rosebank marketplace who worked nearby, and they all had that hungry look when she passed, why not Josiah?

There was Bahari who worked at the Gaddison estate down the road.  One day she decided to pass by when he was working in the garden.  

Sure enough, he rushed out and presented her with a bouquet of quickly cut flowers.  It made her laugh they were so mangled.  He told her he had his own place in the attic loft, and invited her to see it sometime, all the time panting and perspiring.  

She wasn’t sure if it was ardor or his being out of breath from running to catch up with her.  She was tempted to see his loft, but said only, “Not today,” with a smile like Christmas.  Hear that, Josiah, does that make you jealous?

Thereafter, she purposely passed the Gaddison’s on her way to the market, swinging her hips, and lifting her chest out like a red robin, her head held high to draw his attention to her resemblance of Queen Nefertiti, singing to herself like a chirping robin.  She wanted the poor boy to feel as miserable as she did.

Bahari wasn’t her first choice, as he was still a boy, and not yet a man like Josiah.  She could imagine him going back to his loft and stroking himself wishing she were there.  

At times, when she was putting laundry on the clothesline, she could see him looking down at her from his loft, which was above the third level of the Gaddison’s mansion.  She suspected she must look like a tiny speck of beauty beyond his reached surrounded in white linen blowing gently in the breeze.

This went on for several months until one day she was on her way to the market when it suddenly started to rain as she passed the Gaddison’s.  Bahari rushed out of the tool shed with an umbrella, put it over her head, and said, “Hello.”

With his face nearly pressed against hers, holding the umbrella, she was disappointed to discover he was even younger than she first thought.  Short and stocky, only about three inches taller than she was, or a foot shorter than Josiah, he wouldn’t come up to Josiah’s shoulder.  

Perhaps to erase that comparison, he boldly put his arm through hers, as they walked, with him carrying the umbrella over her head.  “Don’t, Bahari,” she protested weakly feigning to disengage his arm from hers.

Startled, “You know my name?”

“So?  I suppose you know my name as well.  So what?”

“Yes, it is Asabi, which means in Transkei one of the select at birth.”

“I’m not impressed.  Everyone knows that.”  She still allowed him to walk arm-in-arm with her.

“But I call you Binta, which means…”

“I know what it means, one who goes with God.  Why would you choose such a name?”

“Because you are divine, like an angel, and God must love you very much to make you so beautiful.”

“Are you religious?”  She felt her heart palpitate.

Bahari squirmed.  “I believe God is in all things, but I don’t go to church.”

Remarkable, the boy is honest.  “Are you a Christian?”

“No, but I know you are.”

“You know that, how?” she asked impressed that he didn’t lie about being religious or Christian.  She looked at him.  He had possibilities.

“It would have been wrong to lie,” he said deciding to take the risk.  “Besides, I hear you are clever.”

She smiled and felt terribly warm.  “Where did you hear that?”  She wondered if Josiah had told him, then decided that was highly unlikely.

“It came from Gabriel.  He sees me looking at you when you’re hanging out the laundry, watching you as you talk to Josiah in the garden, going to the market.  He warned me not to sneak around, that you were too clever for me, that I best keep my heart in my pants, and look for a less clever girl.”

“Gabriel said that?”  She couldn’t believe it.  He never spoke to her except to give her orders, never noticed her unless she failed to complete her work.  Recalling that, she said defiantly, “Gabriel's just an old goat.  Pay him no mind.”

“No, Miss Asabi, people respect Gabriel.  Gabriel was the chief of his village in Botswana, and is known as a wise man.”

Asabi had heard the same stories, and didn’t believe them.  “Whatever,” she said.  

Nearly to the market, the rain now only a sprinkle, she removed Bahari’s arm from hers and out from under the umbrella.  

“Thank you for walking with me,” she said giving him a captivating smile, “my little protector.”  She patted him on the shoulder like an adult would a child.

Bahari bristled at this treatment, and found it difficult to control his anger.  

“I’m not little where God makes men big.  God was good to Bahari.  God made Bahari powerful as God has made the most powerful men.”  

He said this with prideful anger and burning sincerity, as if he were presenting his credentials for an important job.

“I’m sure you’re not,” she added sotto voce, "not little," feeling very warm again.  'Big as the most powerful of men.'  She had been told you couldn’t judge the size of a man’s instrument by his physical size, but among the most powerful of men?  

Could Bahari be boasting or could it be true?  Bahari’s emphatic assertion felt like a stone in her shoe as she went about her errands. 

She found herself hoping Bahari was waiting for her when she completed her shopping, but he wasn’t.

Asabi and the policeman

Asabi thought of the policeman, who often came by and looked at her with lust in his eyes.  He would pull her aside and talk to her with his face nearly touching hers as he did.  It made her uncomfortable but excited as well.  

She wondered not if it would happen, but when it would happen, when the distance between them would vanish and they would be in forbidden territory like that Afrikaner policeman in “Too Late the Phalarope,” a novel she found in master Devlin’s library and had read in one night.

It excited her to see the policeman glaring at Josiah as she would touch the gardener’s arm, and laugh as she looked at the policeman as he entered the terrace.  

Clearly, the policeman saw Josiah as competition even if he wasn’t.  She always knew when he was to arrive, and used that moment to brush by Josiah, laugh and sound as if in intimate conversation.  It was delicious fun.

 

Sometimes to add spice to the intrigue she would follow the gardener into the cover of his large plants just as the policeman walked on to the estate.  Why not?  He always arrived as if by stealth, parking his vehicle some distance away.    

Asabi would come out of the garden, alone, but with a huge satisfying smile on her face.  What must the policeman think they were doing?  If he wanted to treat his visits as assignations, why couldn't she join in the fun?

The policeman was handsome enough but looked cruel with a permanent smirk on his face, his eyes covered in those aviator sunglasses.  Master Devlin didn’t look cruel, but in charge the way Josiah did.  She trembled, frightened by the comparison, then put it out of her mind.

Her mother, still a handsome woman at forty-two, once told her that white men carried the curse of the devil in their loins.  “Let them be, Asabi, never meet their eyes.  They are only interested in your destruction, or the destruction of those you love.”

Her father was a vain man who liked to gossip like an old woman.  She could see that in Bahari.  She had heard her father tell her mother of white people having sex parties where men had sex with other men’s wives, and then went home with their own wives. 

Her mother ignored her father's chatter silently thatching another hat.  Asabi wondered why her father bothered about such things, even if they were true, things that he could not change.

 

Did men like to gossip more about sex than to have sex?  She knew her mother preferred the doing to the talking by the look of her. 

Asabi didn’t want to be a mother at the moment, but she felt she was like her mother in that she would prefer the doing to the talking.  She wanted Bahari’s trunk in her box but nowhere else.  With that, she laid her head on her pillow, and had a dreamless sleep. 

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