Scabs
Wrath James White
The lithe and sensuous cinnamon-skinned black woman whose desk lay directly across from Malik’s cubicle was staring at him again. Malik could feel her eyes crawling over him like maggots on a fresh corpse. He knew what she was thinking.
“Tar-baby, mud-duck, black scab, black dog, nigger, jungle-bunny, ugly, dirty, filthy, African!”
He’d heard it all before, not from some racist rednecks but from his own people, everyday of his life for as long as he could remember. He was getting tired of it. Sick and tired. As a teenager he’d used every skin lightning creme on the shelves and he’d done nothing more than given himself a severe case of acne and several chemical burns that had blistered and left scars.
He turned his head to catch her staring and she smiled at him holding his gaze. Malik turned quickly away. He knew she was just trying to fuck with him.
Malik’s self-esteem had been formed in the early eighties when he was just reaching puberty and Michael Jackson, Prince, and Ray Parker Jr. were the symbols of black male sexuality. Effete, sallow-toned, androgynous beings, whose voices lilted like castrated tenors and whose racial composition was as ambiguous as their sexuality. Malik was the very antithesis of that cultural aesthetic, being the color of liquid night, with thick African features, and a large muscular body that held no suggestion of femininity. By eighties pop-cultural standards he was pure ugly, a bete noire destined for solitude and depression.
The fact that the modern aesthetic now favored his complexion and physique was not lost on him. He had been amazed when he first began to see models and actors with skin as dark as his, thick lips, wide-noses, and shaved heads. He’d been even more amazed when a black woman had come up to him and called him beautiful for the first time in his life. But more than a decade later he still found it hard to believe them and harder still to forgive them and impossible to forget. The cruel mocking voices of his youth haunted him without relent.
“You so black that if you went to night school they’d mark you absent!”
“I bet when you step out of a car the oil light goes on.”
The echoes redoubled. They ricocheted around Malik’s skull building up momentum and making him feel like his skull was about to rattle apart. His chest started to feel tight. He began to hyperventilate just as he had back in Junior High School when the walls would close in and suffocate him as he watched the curly-haired, caramel-skinned crowd lord over their darker brethren, insulting them every chance they got and teaching them to hate themselves for not having more European features.
Malik looked back across the room at the beautiful office assistant and saw one of the greatest tormentors of his youth leering at him with that cruel smirk as her mind worked feverishly to concoct the next put-down. Her name was Kelly. Her cocoa brown visage swam into view, transposed over the face of the office girl. A vicious sneer twisted her lips as they moved to form that vituperative storm of insults Malik had come to expect from her.
“Ewww! You so black you look like you’ve been dipped in shit. You could stick your finger in hot water and make coffee. Ya black scab!”
The irony was that she was just a shade or two lighter than him. Definitely not the coveted high yellow complexion favored at that time. But she was not alone. Jennifer Hart, who was the color of buttermilk, added her voice to the choir.
“He’s so black that if you tossed him in a volcano for about a million years he’d come out a diamond!”
Between the two of them, they had driven him to two suicide attempts and numerous elaborate murder/suicide schemes that he’d plotted out to the last detail but had never put into action. He still heard their thirteen and fourteen year old voices in his head even though reason told him that they would be well into their thirties by now. He heard them whenever he looked at beautiful cappuccino-colored women like the one staring at him from the next cubicle. The one smiling seductively as if she might actually be interested in a black scab like him.
“She’s too pretty for you, ya ugly mud duck! You think a pretty little redbone like that would touch a spook like you? She’s looking for Denzel not Darrell…or Malik.”
No. He didn’t think she would want him. All she would do is make fun of him and his African ancestry. She would call him a spear-chucker behind his back, when all the girls were gathered around the coffee maker gossiping in the morning. She’d tell them how disgusting it would be to kiss his big lips. How his hair felt like Brillo. And how his thick arms and chest made him look like an ape. Then she’d laugh just like Kelly and Jennifer had. She’d laugh and laugh until Malik would have no choice but to kill her.
He caught her looking at him again and once again she did not turn away when he looked back. She held his gaze and smiled, batting her eyelashes flirtatiously, waiting for him to say something. She twirled a pencil in her left hand and touched it to the corner of her mouth, nibbling the end of it as she tilted her head and let her eyes slide slowly down his body and then back up again. He could almost feel the heat of her smoldering stare warming him as it traveled over his flesh, turning him on despite Kelly and Jennifer’s combined voices interpreting every gesture she made into a diatribe of racial slurs.
“You big black Mighty Joe Young looking ape!”
Malik winced as if he’d been slapped as the woman continued to stare at him. He was still turned on, but now he was getting angry as well.
“How dare that bitch make me feel like this? Why is she fuckin’ with me? Why can’t she just leave me the fuck alone?”
He whirled around in his chair turning his back on her and trying without success to go back to his work. He stared at the screen, but all the letters and numbers were running together into one indecipherable alphabet stew. He could still feel her eyes on him as intimate caresses touching him everywhere. He wanted to get up and choke the life out of her.
Malik had always made it a point to steer clear of women like the beautiful tan-skinned woman in the next cubicle. The majority of his romantic conquests had been with white women or women with skin as dark or darker than his, though even they sometimes made him uneasy. Not all of the girls who’d teased him back in high-school had been light-skinned. Even the ones with skin the same color as his had looked down on him as if his onyx complexion made him somehow subhuman. Usually when he went after Black women they were African or West Indian or even darker-skinned Cubans and Puerto Ricans. With American girls there was always the fear that some honey-complexioned gigolo with hazel eyes and wavy hair would come and take her away from him.
One of the other office girls had now joined the girl in the next cubicle. Her skin was smooth and flawless and the color of milk chocolate. Her hair was thick and wooly, though neat and well-kept the way his had been before he’d gotten tired of fussing with it and shaved it all off. Her nose was wide with nostrils flared like a wild beast scenting a fresh kill and her lips were full and thick. The very same features he’d been ashamed of all his life she wore with beauty and grace. On her that wooly afro looked stylish and trendy, that wide nose wild and exotic, those full lips sensuous and sexual. He knew that there were women out there who looked at him the same way. But they were usually not black women.
The two women were smiling and whispering and now they were both staring at him. Malik wanted to melt into the floor. He felt as if he were in an interrogation room under bright lights. He knew everything they were saying about him. He could read their lips even with his back turned. He could hear them in his head. See them laughing and pointing at him in his mind’s eye, tearing him apart piece by piece until there was barely enough left of him to flush down the toilet.
“You shit-colored black scab!”