NYU Black Renaissance Noire Fall 2012 | Page 11

And finally O’Page. It had to mean something that the two men who took the children looked like O’Page. Not just white, but wide white men. Under six feet tall and sturdily built with torsos like trees. Square heads with cleft chins like O’Page and little Samson. If tall and thin men had taken the children, Cherie would have said so. How had Jasmine and O’Page ever found each other? As a closet black nationalist, Daddy Peaceful had quite frankly raised his daughters with instructions to marry men darker than themselves. He wanted chocolate brown grandchildren, he told them. At age twentytwo, Jasmine had dutifully complied, marrying Arrington, a handsome dark brown man, who reacted to Jasmine’s rise in computer circles by snorting cocaine and one night nearly strangling her. Jasmine left the marriage immediately and divorced without looking back. After that she began to date white men, getting her heart broken at least once, and decided to make a fresh start in her social life by moving to City Island, off the east coast of the Bronx. Sitting in the Rodeo Bar on City Island avenue one night she struck up a conversation with the club’s part time bouncer, a master carpenter with amber eyes named O’Page. They dated for a time, tried living with each other, then rented apartments around the corner from each other, and for reasons which Daddy Peaceful accepted without quite fathoming, though Nana-Lily seemed to understand, got pregnant. So along came mighty little Samson. BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE Jasmine had seen more of the world than Tulip, so she might have made enemies whose names Daddy Peaceful did not know. She grew up singing and had prepared for a career in singing but while waiting for her big break had begun temping. Temping here and there, she had acquired a vast knowledge of computers and how they work, their care and feeding. After a while places where she temped started trying to hire her away from the temp agency. Finally she took one of these offers, and began to make more money than anybody in the Peaceful family had ever made, going back to the time when the first African Peacefuls farmed the Harlem flatlands for their Dutch owners. Someone might think she had enough money to pay ten thousand dollars for the two kids, except that Jasmine had a clothes and shoes habit. Until the birth of Samson five years before, all her money went to filling her closets. 9 Tulip had waited for five years before she got involved with the Weasel, Bloombloom’s father. He had a name of course, but nobody used it any more, because by calling him the Weasel, they could talk bad about him around Bloombloom and not confuse her too much. Besides the Weasel suited him; he popped up from time to time and usually left a mess. At first, like Latour, he seemed legitimate. He sold new and used cars at a dealership on Fordham road in the Bronx. Working on commission explained the fluctuations in his income. Actually he gambled compulsively, got involved in marathon card games, and usually lost. But his infidelity and tendency to impregnate the other women he had sex with, not his gambling, broke Tulip’s heart. When all came out, Tulip discovered he had six children by six different women, three before Tulip and two after. She had known only about one before herself and had forgiven the first after Bloombloom, but after the second, she threw his clothes into a dumpster and set them afire then smashed his car with a crowbar. Subsequently she had sworn off men, losing confidence in her ability to pick a good one. Tulip lived the hard life of a single mother of two, working part time in telemarketing, going to college at night, living in a rent subsidized housing project in Queens. BRN-FALL-2012.indb 9 9/7/12 11:26 PM