Nina Simone (1933-2003) helped to popularize the natural look in the early 1960s.

Into the void, she walked in unconcerned. It seem that she actually floated.

Men didn’t want to stare but it was hard not to.

The women looked, gaped and held laughter in their throats. Eyes slid like slingshots towards partners.

There had always been beautiful women among the community or what was left of it. And as sure as the seasons changed, a mysterious woman brought feminine tempers and accordingly male temperatures to a boil. People got mad, ended up pledging love anew or drifted apart when a woman who had this intangible gift emerged. Among the elders, grannies smiled, toothless and amused.

But Twilight wasn’t at all who or what many conjured in their minds.

As her name indicated, she was no less than four shades darker than the most deep brown woman anyone knew. Dipped in ink, somebody said, wonder and slight fear in his voice.

What kind of woman, people asked themselves, wore her hair that way? It wasn’t right.

Keeping to herself unless she was spoken to, the medium height, not especially curvaceous Twilight had her own focus. Her speech, rich and musical, was from the place and people all of the town were from, African America. Her ebony face only gave her eyes a wide peering illusion, her lips the pronounced pout of someone with a red plum held in their mouth. From the rented apartment that once housed an elderly man, she gingerly made her way down from the wooden porch peeling with light blue paint chips seven days a week at 8 o’clock. Her face was blank. Her destination was unknown, but by seven in the evening Twilight’s slow loping figure, returning from work or wherever she had gone, was homeward bound.

Rooted within to the point of apparently not hearing women who cursed her under their breath or the sizzling invitations whispered by men on street corners, Twilight was an enigma.

Then one bleak morning, at the dusty street’s gossip tells it, she was gone, hurrying as if late for buses that didn’t even run that early. Fog enveloped her vanishing form.

From the corner of her bedroom window, the neighborhood broadcaster of Twilight’s daily habits muttered a sincere wish that she never came back.

“African !”

17 January 2008

From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002