Entry 9

I'm hopelessly restless. My father's speech in honor of Canaan's anniversary is coming up. I have to attend the speech, so I'm being held off active duty. Worse yet, my father has banned me from base housing. There has been a rumor going around that I slept with the wife of a very important officer and as he doesn't want a scandal, I have been pushed into close quarters with my mother.

I hate my mother. She is a defeated shell of a woman. She rarely ever leaves the house. She scuttles nearly silently from room to room. Worst of all, she isn't used to having me around, so she feels the constant need to pamper and talk. I have no interest in pampering and no use for talk. My only solace is in the time I spend at the gym and even that seems doomed to go badly. Some fool actually made a move on me today! He tried to pick me up! Who wanders around a gym looking for a wife? Better yet, who finds one under two hundred and fifty pounds of iron on a bench press. If I was one of those hoity-toity bitches in short shorts and a halter top, I could see it. I see them with their five pound rubber weights and all I want is to smash their faces into those floor to ceiling mirrors that they love so much. I go to the gym to stay fit. Of all the places I have picked up women, I have only ever picked up one at the gym.

If the only mother I had ever heard stories about as my mother was the Safi King who bakes pies and prattles endlessly, I might not feel the way I do about her. However, years ago when I was still settling into this family, I found a picture of her when she was younger. She had a wild afro, this torn shirt, and a bullhorn. You could see she was screaming. The picture had been taken in her hometown in 2000. Thousands of people had been kept of the voting rolls and she had led a protest. I'm told she stayed at the protest for two weeks solid, until the police came out and broke the place up. Even then she had to be dragged away. There was a clipping of newspaper with her mug shot. Apparently, she knocked two teeth out of an officer's mouth when he tried to drag her off. That's a woman I would like to know. That's a mother I would like to have.

As it is, she fits perfectly with my biological mother. Both lived their lives dragged around by dumber but strong-willed men. Both stood by and said nothing as my fathers abandoned them. I don't know if it was Esau or Kali who broke Safi King's spirit, but that woman with the bullhorn is gone. I would sooner be dead than live to become what she is now.

Entry 8 - Kali

As I am still being forced to attend therapy and keep this journal, my psychiatrist has assigned me yet another topic. Strange, thought I had graduated from high school.

I was asked to "Write about a person other than my parents who has shaped my life."

This is no hard task for me. There is only one name that resounds in my head over and over again. Kali. I would say that Kali would be my sister were she still alive, but I harbour no such delusions. If Kali were still alive, I would never have been adopted to fill her place. Of course, if Kali had never died, this nation might have taken an entirely different shape.

My mother keeps pictures of Kali still. She tries to hide them from me, wanting me to believe that I am the only child in her heart. My father carries no pictures, but he makes his preference toward her clear. Kali was everything Esau feared and desired in a daughter. She had skin as dark as mine and hair more beautiful than mine will ever be. When I see her picture, the only word than comes to mind is princess. She is perfect in every imaginable way. It is clear why everyone who knew her was in love with her, just looking at her picture I find myself falling for her. Of course, she would not have been interested. She preferred men, white men.

I can only imagine how maddening that was to Esau. He did not always hold the grudges he does today, but even then he was associated with Black Panthers and though he has never professed a faith, had many friends in the Nation of Islam. Esau has never told me what he was like when he was younger, but those who remember him speak of his fire even then. Esau forbade her to date white men, but that didn't stop her. He swore that it would only lead to bad things. Eventually, he would be proven right.

Kali King was raped and murdered by her white boyfriend and two friends in an apartment in Arlington, VA. Her body was then dragged and dumped in the Potomac. She wasn't found for a month. The boys were brought to trial and found innocent. They just didn't have the evidence, they had had a month to clean up after themselves. The boyfriend was the son of a senator. Esau devoted the movement to his daughter, Kali. A monument of the two of them stands on the National Lawn in DC.

When I die, there will be no monument. There is a good chance no one will miss me for at least a month. If I'm lucky, they may find my body.

So here's to Kali King: my sister, my rival, my secret crush, my princess.

Entry 7

I only realized las night how long it had been since I was on a real mission, a black ops mission. It had been way too long. I actually got shot. I might have died. Unlikely, but it could have happened. And standing there with blood and brain matter all over my black clothes, I realized how much I'd missed it.

I'm more alive in the field than I ever am.

I'm only really comfortable in two places, the field and the bed. The bed took a lot longer. I've felt comfortable holding a firearm since I was ten. My father, the General, saw to it that his daughter knew how to defend herself. Coming to terms with who I really am in the bedroom took a lot longer, but I feel like the me in the field and the me in the bed are the same woman now. Perhaps that's unfortunate for my bedmates. On the other hand, it's lucky for my squadmates.

Altsoba Shepherd is a warrior woman. That will not change.

Entry 6 - The Prison

I'm going to start by saying that I don't know where anyone gets off following this journal. Who the fuck follows someone else's personal journal? Don't you have anything better to do with your lives. I'd rather not be writing it personally.

Second, I haven't been writing recently because I've been in places where there are no computers, makes it hard. So the doctor can kiss my ass. He seems to think I'm going to drag an actual notebook around to enter my thoughts in when I'm not here. Fuck that. I'm a fucking soldier, when I am at work I am concerned with one thing and one thing only and that is staying alive. I don't bring a gun to your office, yet, and I don't bring the journal to the field. I'm putting up with you exactly as long as I have to to be done with this, don't forget that.

Today I'm supposed to write about my experiences as a child in the immigrant camps during the war. I don't know what to say. There was never enough food. The camp was filled with thieves, murderers, and the terminally ill -- all of whom would do anything they had to to get out of that camp. My father was one of them, my mother was just weak and fool enough to get pulled into my father's world.

They picked us up out of a small house we were all living in in the Miami area. There was my family and two others, each of them with multiple children. One family had older boys who always beat on myself and the other girl in the house mercilessly. Had we all been a little older, they seemed like just the type to try and rape us, luckily for them life is simpler as a child. The police stormed the house at three in the morning. All of them were white and they all seemed enormous to me at the time. One knocked me to the ground. I think I was knocked unconscious, because the next thing I remember is waking up in my mothers arms on the truck to the prison. She was fussing over me, but I noticed that the father of the two boys was nowhere to be seen. Mother said that he had tried to fight back and that the white men had shot him. I later found out it was my own father who had talked him into attacking the guards, he had sworn he would be right behind him. My father always hated that man.

The prison (I say prison because camp is a euphemism, camping is fun) was packed with men and women in little concrete long-houses with cheap wooden roofs. Everyone had to share a bunk with at least one other person and they never divided the population by sex. That of course meant that rape and pregnancy were rampant. It's hard to say which one was worse as there wasn't enough food to feed the people who were already there. They were supposed to have shipped out more than half the people who were there already, but we had a bad hurricane season and they had to delay the ships. The hurricane season also meant it was always wet in camp. Lots of people came down with gangrene and pneumonia. More or less, it was hell.

The camp was miles and miles away from any inhabited city, which meant there was only us and the all male guards, contracted through some government security firm. Now that I look back at it, what happened seems inevitable. Like I was fated to become the person I am today. It feels like my whole life has been drawn as a single line, leading to this moment. I'm sure it's a single line through the future as well, stopping with one sudden sharp shock.

Entry 5 – Of the Coming Storm

I don’t remember much about the old war, I was only ten at the time. All I remember is the way it felt right before it happened. We were living in a small house with several other families and not nearly enough room, but we had a TV. There was a constant tension in every program and people started talking in absolutes that would have been unthinkable a year ago. The US had it out for immigrants long before the war, but it went from a government problem to a civil one. The government action was just as much to stop people from acting as to contain the immigrant problem. But that tension, I feel it coming back. Even Esau is becoming more bold, a hard feat to accomplish if you are the leader of the free black world.

My therapist, seeing that I am “slacking” in my entries has given me another assignment. Usually, I would feel like slitting his throat for this kind of patronizing bullshit. However, the question he posed has really had me thinking for hours now. I had planned on waiting until the morning to post it, but I’m having trouble thinking about anything else. What he asked was simple enough:

Where do you see yourself in twenty years?

The only answer I can come up with is dead. I see myself dead. Buried in a military cemetery with a statue praising me as Esau’s daughter and a Commander in his great army. I can only imagine there will be no flowers there, as there will likely be no one left to mourn me. Esau may still be here, but I doubt he will visit my grave unless he makes a show of doing so once a year as he does Kali’s, but I am not so ignorant of his disdain for me to think that is a probability. As for Safi, my adopted mother, I don’t think she will live that long either. The only people that will leave are my jilted ex-lovers and bitter ex-soldiers. They may come to the burial itself out of a sense of duty, but I doubt they will bring flowers.

I’m not sure if I’m sad or not. There is no one I care enough about to hope they are there and a military death is how I want to go. If I can’t go down on the field, I’d have to kill myself. The last thing I’d want is to die in my bed in a loveless marriage or paralyzed from too many battle wounds.

What else is there for a woman like myself? No, I think death is all there is. I can’t even get a picture of myself at forty years old. I guess I’d better get my fighting and fucking in while I still can huh? There’re still a lot of poor repressed girls out there to corrupt before the end.

Like I said before, I think the battle’s coming soon. I can’t see myself living through to the other end.

Entry 4

Apparently, I'm finally taking this seriously enough. My psychiatrist was very impressed by my last post in its "honesty" and "raw emotion". He says I should try and bring more of that to my journal and that only through that process can I truly work out my "problems". I then shared with him the raw emotion I was having at the time. He didn't seem as bothered as I thought he would be at the image of my scooping out his eyeballs and feeding them to him. I think he's been threatened before.

So, today I am supposed to write about my father. Not Esau, who is my adopted father, but my real father. I don't know exactly what he wants me to say, but I have to start somewhere.

My father was a scumbag. He was a thief, a liar, and a con-man. After I was born and he was forced to marry my mother, he had the bright idea that America was the land of opportunity. He made my mother pack up and leave her life in Port-au-Prince to enter the states illegally. At that point, the fires in the west were at their worst and with all the people fleeing from the Midwest he was sure that no one would ever know that we weren't locals.

I suppose it worked for a few years, until they started rounding up all the immigrants and putting them into camps. That camp in Florida was the last place I saw him. I figure he died with the rest of them, not that he ever meant anything to me. His last great act as my father was to sell my mother to the guards for extra rations.

Do I hate my father? Yes, but not nearly as much as I hate my mother. That man at least gave me something useful, the skill of survival. Had death come for him in any other form, he would have dodged it no doubt. Meanwhile, my mother was one of those helpless wives that just let herself and her daughter get dragged into the abyss.

Entry 3

You want to see some fucking anger, I'll show you fucking anger. I'm and sick and fucking tired of people assuming that the fact that I'm angry has something to do with the fact that I'm a lesbian.

I like women, love them, have since middle school and that is that. I'm a lesbian because I like women. That's how that works. Suddenly some asshole wants to call me a "bulldyke" behind my back because I make him do laps. If he had the intelligence to do what he was supposed to in the first goddamn place he wouldn't be running laps. The fact that I then have to discipline him for fucking around has absolutely nothing to do with whether I like dick or pussy. I'm tired of it.

Yes, I broke his fucking arm, serves the son of a bitch right.

Of course that earned me a second trip for the week to the psychiatrist, who naturally noted that I hadn't written in my journal the night before, so that must be why I had so much pent up frustration. Yeah, that must be it. It's not the fact that the motherfucker was talking about me, he superior officer, behind my back. It's not that somehow when people know you're gay they think that's grounds to disrespect you. It certainly has nothing to do with being an orphan since I was six years old who got to watch my mother raped in front of me. NO IT'S CLEARLY BECAUSE I DIDN'T WRITE IN MY FUCKING JOURNAL.

Doctor, I know you're reading this. Don't you sleep too fucking deep tonight, cause one of these nights I'm going to come into your house while you're asleep and I'm going to slit your fucking throat. Did you lock your door when you came in tonight? Better go check again.

Fuck it, I'm going to the gym.