Scabs

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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.

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