Maidenhead

Elijah left the bathroom door open a crack. The light was fluorescent. Elijah’s dreadlocks fell out to each side and seemed to separate his face in two, as if he had a good face and a bad face. The tiles were swirly mother-of-pearl. The grout around them grew flowers of rust. I looked up at the ceiling, a buzzing white tube hung from two tiny chains.

‘You scared?’ Elijah looked behind me towards the crack in the door.

I was totally wet. I liked both of his faces.

‘That’s okay, Angel. Come right here. Come to me.’

I didn’t feel degraded. It occurred to me that an angel could not be degraded.

‘We’ll go slow,’ Elijah said, gripping my arm. ‘It’s been a long time.’

I was finally where I wanted to be. In a bathroom alone with this man who I wanted so bad. His hand squeezing my arm made me rush, anticipating it. Gayl, his girlfriend, was in the other room. I felt wild. She hated me.

LEE: You’ve got to be careful about a woman who hates you. Women are vengeful fuckers. Powerless women, completely the worst.

GAYL: Powerless? Who’re you calling powerless?

LEE: Look, it’s not personal. It’s systemic. Systemic oppression inherited from generations of our people being enslaved. It’s made us ruthless and vengeful, ideally. I’m a black woman too, you know. My mom’s from Zimbabwe.

GAYL: Well, your theory is bunk ’cause I’m an artist. An artist from Kentucky. Artists don’t count.

§

Lee read the first draft of my essay in the ravine, under our light. I titled it ‘Sex Slaves: The Modern, the Foreign, the Free.’ I was trying to prove that all slaves are ashamed but that within this shame there is the potential to be free. I was echoing Agamben, I think, and trying to challenge the historical information about slaves which says that they are ashamed and subjugated, thus they can’t ever be unashamed or free.

Slaves, it seemed to me, had secrets, secret lives.

I was expanding the definition of slave to suggest that there was such a thing as being enslaved and being free. I remembered the exploitative exhibition I saw with my mother in Key West. It was exploitative because it was totally from the ­viewpoint of the oppressors, not the slaves. So far I knew that slaves were ashamed, or portrayed as ashamed, because a) they had no freedom, b) they were enmeshed in wars and c) they were always kept apart and alienated from each other. Ms. Bain always told us that we needed to know our conclusion before we even started to write, that that was how you proved something, by working backwards from the conclusion. But my questions were serpentine, inconclusive: What if slaves were not kept apart from each other? What if slaves could take pleasure while enslaved?

My essay was getting more confused as I wrote it. Slaves can have a freedom within shame, I thought, if they create their own subjectivity. Agamben wrote that shame was ‘the most proper emotive tonality of subjectivity.’ (I felt like Ms. Bain would think that I didn’t understand that quote but Mr. Rotowsky would probably give me the benefit of the doubt.) I really did understand it, that emotive tonality. Because slaves can experience pleasure self-consciously, in secret, I wrote. And it is ironic that we see this displayed in contemporary pornographic actresses who subvert, very publicly, the notion that slaves are not supposed to feel pleasure. Modern-day slavery is different than slavery in the past. Slavery, I proposed, needs to be re-thought from the contradictory knowledge and expression of shame.

‘So, it’s just a first draft,’ I told Lee. ‘It’s kind of all over the place, I know.’

Lee was smoking pot. She told me she smoked first thing in the morning sometimes.

‘You have to check out the master-slave dialectic.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh man, I’m not gonna spoil it for you!’

It occurred to me right then that a master was specific, that not every slave had their own master to love or to hate.

‘I want to give this to Chris,’ Lee said. Chris being, of course, the legendary dealer that she and Aaron worked for. ‘Maybe he can publish it in one of his anarchist rags – they’re American, you know.’

‘It’s not ready for that.’

‘Why not? It’s pretty good, even without the dialectic.’

Lee held on to my essay. She didn’t pass it back. ‘Don’t, okay?’

‘But you gotta ship out the goods sometimes. You’re a good writer, Myra. You should keep doing it. Have you shown this to Aaron? He’d like the way you quoted Agamben. You should acknowledge the way he’s educating you.’

The light green-washed Lee’s beauty marks. It coloured the smoke streaming out of her nose.

‘Uh ... It kind of bugs me that you just said that.’

‘Why?’