Chapters (31)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Room in the Dark I
- Fawns of the Diaspora Court Liliane in Paris, While Tabou Combo Whispers “Coq Qualité” in Her Ears
- Room in the Dark II
- “I Usedta Drink, Smoke and Do the Hoochie-Koo,” or What’s a Girl to Do When Her Mother Looks Like Ruth Brown
- Room in the Dark III
- “El Bochinche” es que only Fe Cortijo Knows or All the LeBron Brothers Know If Victor-Jésus María Sang Lili to Her Freedom
- Room in the Dark IV
- And Where Is Garnett Mimms?
- Room in the Dark V
- I Know Where Kansas City Is, But Did Wilbert Harrison Ever Get There?
- Room in the Dark VI
- Zoom Went the Strings of Liliane’s Heart, But Arsenio Rodriguez Could Have Told Her the Music Sounds Just as Sweet When We’re Blind and Still We See
- Room in the Dark VII
- I Know Where the E Train Stops But I’m “Sendin’ Out an S.O.S.” and I’m Not Edwin Starr Either
- Room in the Dark VIII
- “Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby” or Wouldn’t It Be Great If the Lead Singer of The Crests Wasn’t a White Boy and I Could Be My Mother?
- Room in the Dark IX
- Every Time My Lil World Seems Blue, I Just Haveta Look at You and Learn Eye-Hand Coordination
- Room in the Dark X
- “That’s Why I Love Her So and Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I Want to Know” or Why Jackie Wilson Died in Silence
- Room in the Dark XI
- There’s No Use Cryin’ “Forever” or Hyacinthe Returns from a Very Blue Holiday for Real B(l)ack at Ya
- Room in the Dark XII
- Lollie Struts Her Stuff Thru “The Sea of Love” or the Brides of Frankenstein Catch the Bouquet
- By Ntozake Shange
- Acknowledgments
- Copyright
If only my mother could see me now: Jean-René meticulously placing strawberries, blueberries, kiwi, grapes, melon balls in a crescent round my vulva. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. My cat has yellow eyes. Now my pussy has lime-green ones, amber pupils, slits.
Casablanca was hot, noisy, trashy, roadblocks everywhere, the war in Spanish Sahara. We retreated like Anaïs to the countryside. This Guadaloupean velvet spur of a man and me, Liliane. I travel a lot. I look at men and take some home or leave the country, borders have never intimidated me. My passport is in order and I carry letters of credit, perfume, four fancy dresses and six nightgowns. I always sleep naked alone at least once a week. I pray and say hail marys by some window at dusk. It’s always best for me to deal with the sacred when I’m naked. For me it has something to do with humility.
I found Jean-René eating souvlaki at the fast-food place next to the Moulin Rouge. I was flirting with some Brazilians from the Folies Bergères. I’d just left Lisbon, and Angola was on all our minds.
In my last paintings, before I left New York, I superimposed AK-47s over fetal transparencies under Frelimo banners. La Luta Continua was the name of the show. There was no way to stop my fingers, my arms, I was jumping up and down ladders to get the touches of blood and fresh corpses finely detailed so there’d be no doubt that the Portuguese left a country the way vampires leave blond white women: drained of life and scarred. I paint. I don’t talk too much. The world overwhelms me. I can give up what I see. I see a lot. I believe in honor, color, and good sex.
Machado and Axel from the Folies were doing their best to entice me to La Plantation, an Antillean discotheque near St.-Germain-des-Près. I looked Jean-René in the eyes once and knew that would never happen. Why would I want to dance in a plantation anyway? Even in the presence of the singularly defined muscles of Latin dancers, one on either side, the man I was slowly seducing across the room just kept looking at me, knowing where I’d be going. I like that. I like a man to know what the deal is going to be in an instinctive, absolute, lyrically facile manner. I like a man with confidence. Take me from these two sweet muthafuckahs simply by looking. Do that and I’ll be gone. Wherever we are going. I mean, if a man’s up to that. I love double entendres, double negatives, duels. Some cocks have triggers; others are freckled or uncircumcised.