Teddy Perkins as a Girl

I don’t remember why exactly, I was on a killing spree, why I shot him the back after telling him to run. When someone gives me flowers I keep them until they turn into dust, I half-whispered, and nudged the trigger like a friend I hoped would stay for one last drink. Hope is crazier than revenge, but braver. Bravery is feminine revenge, I chanted, as I shot the last minstrel and left him in Bel-Air as bait and baby daddy. Sun Ra’s  I’ll Wait for You was playing its dazed romance of omens blinking in a rhythm with the shepherd of shadows our bodies danced against the wall. Outside it was 73 degrees and an easy low yellow, the frown of the palm-clowns melting into whistle. It started as self-defense, the planter who called himself massah had forced himself on me so many times I finally snapped and took him out. It was so sad and so satisfying and then I had the whole house to myself and no one left to blame so I started a small band of former slaves, music men, but they all wanted the same thing, fame and fortune, me for a mistress and a doomed mother, and to dance on big stages for all their former massahs and call that revenge, healing, integration. And every time they got what they wanted they’d come back drunk and high and with a group of white women and forget how the play the blues and forget how to improvise. Only the blind black men survived   American promise. As black women, we had to disguise our near constant rescue mission as small daily acts shaking that ass, moaning, wearing khaki and sequins, making the kitchen smell like forgiveness. This freedom shit was more and more of a menace, our men were turning into broken children and we were becoming angry gods. I’d been trained as a classical ballerina as part of the perks of my role as massah’s sometime-muse, but it was more like the men in the band wanted me to spread across the instrument naked while they stomped out the spiders of their minds and I was one, underfoot, they never asked me to play, never ask what the confederate ghosts told me about the stark noteless hymns of their rallies. Lately, the broad edge silly smiles of the ones who come home at dawn looking for grits and asking me to grease their scalps, don’t seem like the mercy of surprises they used to be. And the Julius Eastman refrain came true, I am playing all of these niggas. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for love.