White. Deni Ellis Bechard

the first page, a photo was printed on computer paper in black and white. It struck me as insensitive: the girl’s washed face, her pale eyes and stringy hair—the sort of image you’d expect of a child who’d been thrown into freezing water and was clambering out, looking up. The concrete room behind her blurred away, and her face seemed blank, waiting to be inhabited by the words I was about to read.

      I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

      That where my story begin, so stop asking. Never was a mother. Never was no father but the Father, and He won’t forgive me. Only the Demon want me. He hunt me in the street. Each time the preacher try to save me, God keep quiet, and I go back to the demon’s arms. There is human flesh in my belly. Preachers take it out, but an empty belly mustn’t stay empty, so the demon, he put it back in.

      You not the first demon who catch me. Even if you trap my story in that little box, I will escape.

      […]

      I was with Keicha and Marvine, on the edge of the market, in a comfortable piece of shadow when the fruit truck come. My stomach was in my eyes, and all it hold was those fat pineapples jiggling beneath the tarp. That’s why he see me before I see him—the demon. I turn to make sure no police was spying us eating free dinner inside our heads, and there he was, whiter than a dead man in the rain, staring with eyes the color of a dead eye, the color of the grease on a puddle you never drink from.

      I see Awax and Eudes, little boys, not yet proud of their cocks, good runners but not like Marvine—she yanké.¹ She have lupemba² and speed so fast because she run in two worlds. You see just her scrap of skirt sailing and that pink bow in her hair. All of us go for different pineapple. The driver, he have wrench. He bang Eudes on the skull. Eudes always mbakasa.³ He the sweetest, like little brother, even if he yuma.⁴ He fall so fast I know he gone. The rest of us we get away, but I see the demon in the sunlight, watching.

      We find place to eat. We eating and crying. We eat till there blisters in our mouths and each golden bite hurts. I have half a pineapple and I see some older girls and run to sell it. That when I get jumped. Comes fast like being knocked down by wind. A man on me. Police man from the look of the sleeve I bite. He push my face in dirt, tie my hands, pull me up on my knees. Just in front, there’s a dog drinking from a puddle, looking at me with Eudes’s eyes. ‘Don’t drink that!’ I shout as the man carry me past. Eudes have a weak stomach, always thirsty. Maybe that why he jump in this dog. To dog, even piss is whiskey. Except dogs don’t last as long as street kids.

      I flipped the pages back to the girl’s photo. It now seemed to evoke the story I was reading—eyes so accepting of the faint light that they could be haunted or emptied to make space for determination.

      I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

      Demon tell me this first time he catch and turn me white. It was police again. They came in when we were sleeping. Police hand on my ankle like snakebite.

      Then I’m in a room with the demon. White skin, white hair, white eyes. Nothing in him have color. He was white. White like a hot sky.

      He was speaking words I don’t know. Then he talk le français, but like with half a tongue, half a tongue with a bonbon on it. He switch to Lingala. Quarter tongue now.

      Where are you from? he ask first thing, the way you do, like only that matter.

      Here.

       But before? Where were you born?

      In the sky, I tell him.

       In the sky?

      He don’t believe me.

      I come from the sky. I live in Kinshasa, but sometimes at night I fly to the forests and I dance with the spirits.

      So you live in Kinshasa? he ask, not dumb—demons aren’t dumb—but trying to trick me, to get me to say something he can use to enter me. But I come from the sky. That the kind of witch I am. Sky witch. Marvine took me to the old lady who told me that. She say that Mami Wata love sky witch because the wind makes the water move. Now we know. It give us power.

      I bought you from the police, he tell me.

      You not the first, I say.

      It was expensive, he tell me.

      Go cry blood, I say.

      The demon, he undress me. He drag me in a room so small—small as my heart when he inside it—and he pull off my clothes. He throw me in water hot as rain from hell. He was cooking me. Staring. Big white hungry eyes. Like mean cat watching fat man at dinner.

       But then, like he want to chat up his soup, he say, You’re white. He point. Where are you from?

      I look down and scream. My color wash off. I scream and hold my skin. I scream for help. I scream for spirits. I even give scream for the Father, but He don’t answer, busy with the holy people. He already know I am witch.

      The door creaked as Sola slipped in like a double agent. I jumped a little, so caught up that I felt guilty. I had goose bumps, and many thoughts—above all concerning who the man was. I couldn’t stop thinking of Richmond Hew, of what both Terra and the disaffected conservationist had said about his appetite for girls, and I wondered if he sometimes left the rainforest and spent time in Kinshasa.

      “How’s the reading coming?” she asked.

      “It’s disturbing.”

      She sat down in the chair next to me and studied my face.

      “The look in your eye,” she said, “please make it that of a man searching not for the next great story but rather for an abandoned child.”

      “I know,” I said too quickly.

      She put her hand on my forearm.

      “This is a little girl, and she’s out there, being hunted down by police right now. She’s been sexually abused. She’s been a child prostitute. And when the police catch her, they might rape her before they bring her here.”

      “I understand,” I said, though I hadn’t really. When I’d arrived, I’d wondered if Sola had a genuine interest in me or whether she’d invited me as a barrier against Bram. I realized that maybe none of this was about me.

      “Bram is so fascinated with the demon,” she said, “that he doesn’t seem the least bit bothered that the girl saw her friend get murdered for trying to feed himself.”

      I nodded gravely, embarrassed that this death hadn’t registered with me more—no doubt the fault of the text’s faux literary style. After a pause, Sola told me that she’d just listened to some of the recording in Lingala.

      “The girl actually said ‘I came here on a knife.’ And then she changed it later, when Bram asked her about the ocean, to ‘I crossed the ocean on a knife.’ He asked, ‘What kind of knife,’ and she said, ‘I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife and I used it to cut open this little girl’s heart.’”

      I ran my thumb along the edges of the papers.

      “I was wondering about that. The translation’s dialect is hard to place.”

      She laughed soundlessly, almost sadly.

      “Years back, Bram spent some time in Jamaica, as a research assistant for a professor, and he fancies himself an expert on its culture and literature. He thought that translating the girl’s Lingala and street French into standard English would be a misrepresentation, and he decided that this”—she gestured derisively toward the papers—“this lewd approximation of Jamaican dialect would render her character.”

      Though hushed, her voice conveyed so much emotion that I found myself wondering if she had some Jamaican heritage herself.

      “Anyway.”