The Black Painter

I HAVE A BLACK PAINTER AND NO GENDER

I have a black painter called experience who has very little indulgence and zero tolerance for weakness. He was employed the day I vacated my mother’s womb. He was waiting and he started painting that very day.

My black painter wasn’t kind or partial. He just was and still is. A history recorder, a mistake reminder and a constant intruder. My friend calls him a mirror.

On an ugly day, while my body was still shy from puberty, the black painter was there when an intruder invaded my body and left scars that he was obligated to paint

On the day my little thieving hands became too ambitious and mother became the angel of correction and discipline, he was there to record the smart lines and the tiny puncture wounds made by the electrical wires and the little soldier ants. Mother’s way of training and correcting. It worked.

He is like my soul, temperamental, dark like a midnight Arabian horse and so thoroughly damaged. But they understand each other, my soul and my painter. They console each other. But I do not think they love each other.

This painter of mine is more than a burden. Times I have contemplated shedding it, firing it from the job. It wasn’t the painter’s fault, he is a victim of nature, just like me but he is a silent victim, a helpless captive but a jailer nonetheless for he holds me in.

On the dark stormy nights I admired the craftsmanship of a newly opened tiger blade, he held me in and said no.

On days when I am on nature's appreciation mission and wondered just how gentle the sea waves would be miles from the shores, he held me down.

Times when I have concluded to be my own avenging angel and put a bounty on my demons, he holds on to me.

And when my cup of sorrow have runneth over and spilleth all over the new bathroom flooring, he never left me.

He is as relentless as I am without life zest. Relentless in dragging me through life, sometimes by the skin on my teeth, sometimes, by the hair on my ears. But I have mastered the art of failing as he has mastered the art of painting and dragging.

Wait, he will tell you about my skills at failing. Talk to my painter.

I am her painter, so very terribly misunderstood but my ground I have stood since the day she left the womb to come into a world that aims to wound whatever new soul it can impound.

I am also her subject, ever-present as the hateful waves of life throws her against every rocky, reefy shore it could find. I have recorded the hate for herself, for men, then for women, then for life.

I was there during the invasion, she was but seven. I took notes of her screams, the scars, the dimming in her light that started that day. But it didn’t stop there. The man came back like a back case of herpes, crumbling down her foundation every time she built it up.

Off to school, she went. And rise from hell the matron did. I pitied my prisoner. She has exchanged a village rapist for a city rapist and let me tell you, they are the same.

But she was older, broken better, more defeated and for myself, numb as a butt cream. That was when she called me jailer when I wouldn’t give her peace or justice. She is right. I am a wonderful jailer but it is justified, they are required for my preservation.

After high school, she took to nagging, begging me to free her spirit, to let her make it stop. Much like that sad poet who kept asking for justice or death.

I couldn’t give the first and I wouldn’t give the second but I could tell she has found the straw to break the blasted camel’s back. Ask the soul. He knows more about it.

Have you heard of the shoemaker’s thread or the fisher’s string? How strong and hard they are? That is me. Being with her, I became a tortured soul, always bent in various painful position like a lowly prostitute in the first few French brothels.

As a thread, I am strong, stronger than most twain. I was forged that way, much like the black race, conditions to master suffering, falling and rising. Always hoping against hope.

With her, I have become something of a tailor, a shoemaker if you will or a bookbinder who never gives up no matter how beat up the object might be. I have sown her together after every boat wreck. I have glues him together after many Titanic ends. That I have done by the ends of the sensitive cells in her soul’s mind so she wouldn’t break.

But I am only as strong as my maker. And don’t think my maker took the time to make her.

So you see, we did our best, like a battered wife with a child who now has more to protect, we fought the fight and lost. Lost in a way that we could never be found. You will know more when you see the black painter.

He is a twist of irony. She is black but everything he paints is darker, uglier and meaner but he wouldn’t embellish. He is just a painter of her experience, I am the keeper/hider of her experience and she, she has earned her break.

Now that you have heard from my painter, my soul and myself, you must know we all agree that it’s time. This was our last therapy. By now, you can hint at who my black painter is but do you know who I am? Even I don’t know who I am but I do know I have no gender, I also know it ends tonight if the clouds dare stay up in the sky.

You must wonder. Who are we?

The black painter is my body, a book that paints all, that traps me and my soul. You know my soul but who am I? Do you know me?