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 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 1

My psychiatrist has recommended that I keep a journal. My father wants it somewhere he can access it, so here it is. This is the journal of Altsoba Shepherd.

Entry 1
I've been told that I have anger issues. The psychiatrist said so on my visit this morning, but it's not the first time that I've heard it. In military school I broke a lot of noses and put a lot of lesser cadets in the hospital. Some times I got in trouble. Some times I was applauded. I'm not sure that I preferred one over the other. Military school ought to work the same way the military does. If you're strong and smart, you survive to fight on. Teaching cadets any less than that is doing them and the soldiers they fight beside a disservice. I know that better than anyone, I am a child of war.

My parents were immigrants in the early days of the camps. We had to fight just to stay alive. Those experiences are the basis for everything I have become from there one out. I am the one who survived. I am always the one who survives. For it to happen this many times is not luck. I am talented at survival. I have little patience for those who believe they are owed something from the world. I believe I am owed nothing and have received just that.

Am I angry? Why wouldn't I be? Anger, suspicion, strength-- these are the reasons I'm still alive.