Free Oreo by Fran Ross

mood anyway when you come in.
     Might he not just happen to bear down on the old drill a little harder, go a little deeper
     than he needs to? I am just asking and don’t want you to be warped for life by this thought.
     Besides, you still have your perfect little milk teeth. But since I’m on dentists, I will
     tell you about Dr. Goodbody. Dr. Goodbody starts spraying Lavoris before you even make an
     appointment. His sprayer bears a striking resemblance to a flame thrower. But who can blame
     him for his finickyness, considering the effluvium, the untreated sewage, the
ick
that issues from some people’s mouths? But Dr. Goodbody has never realized that a patient
     who is going to a dentist is like a housewife who cleans up before the maid comes. Such
     goings on with water picks and dental floss and mouthwash and toothpaste—to say nothing of
     sandpaper!”
    This digression brought Helen logically to the main topic of her letter: the oppression of
     women. “This is a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to, and I think I have the answer.
     I’ve tried to encompass in my theory all the sociological, mythological, religious,
     philosophical, muscular, economic, cultural, musical, physical, ethical, intellectual,
     metaphysical, anthropological, gynecological, historical, hormonal, environmental, judicial,
     legal, moral, ethnic, governmental, linguistic, psychological, schizophrenic, glottal,
     racial, poetic, dental [this was the logical link], artistic, military, and urinary
     considerations from prehistoric times to the present. I have been able to synthesize these
     considerations into one inescapable formulation: men can knock the shit out of women.”
    Helen’s letter went on to point out the implications of her formulation for the theory of
     the so-called black matriarchs: it tore the theory all to hell. In a later day, Helen might
     have gone on to add (with a slip of the pen owing to hunger): “There’s no male chauvinist
     pork like a black male chauvinist pork.” Now she contented herself with pointing out how her
     own mother still deferred to her father even in his immobilization, keeping on the safe side
     in case he ever came out of it. As Louise often said, “He ain’ gon [pronounced, by Louise
     and others, as if it were a French word, never as “gone”] hab no scuse to box
my
jaws.”
    Helen’s letter so impressed Oreo that it led her to do two things: adopt a motto and
     develop a system of self-defense. The motto was
Nemo me impune lacessit
—“No one
     attacks me with impunity.” “Ain’t no nigger gon tell me what to do. I’ll give him such a
     klop in the
kishkas!
” she said, lapsing into the inflections of her white-skinned
     black grandmother and (through her mother) her dark-skinned white grandfather, as she often
     did under stress.
    She called her system of self-defense the Way of the Interstitial Thrust, or WIT. WIT was
     based on an Oriental dedication to attacking the body’s soft, vulnerable spaces or,
au
     fond
, to making such spaces, or interstices, where previously none had existed;
     where, for example, a second before there had been an expanse of smooth, nonabraded skin and
     sturdy, unbroken bone. To this end, Oreo developed a series of moves that made other methods
     of self-defense—jiu-jitsu, karate, kung-fu, savate, judo, aikido, mikado, kikuyu, kendo,
     hondo, and shlong—obsolete by incorporating and improving upon their most effective
     aspects. With such awesome moves (or, as Oreo termed them,
blōs
) as the
hed-lok
,
shu-kik
,
i-pik
,
hed-brāc
,
i-bop
ul-na-brāc
,
hed-blō
,
fut-strīk
,
han-krus
,
tum-blō
,
nek-brāc
,
bal-brāc
,
bak-strīk
,
but-kik
, the size or
     musculature of the opponent was virtually academic. Whether he was big or small, fat or
     thin, well-built or spavined, Oreo could, when she was in a state of extreme concentration
     known as
hwip-as
, engage any opponent up to three times