Free When All Hell Breaks Loose by Camika Spencer Page A

and teachers, right? These women ain’t trying to hear about the bills you got to pay if it’s not their bills. All they do is take from you until you can’t give no more, then ride your dick until it goes limp.”
    “Women are simply trying to take back what was originally theirs. They just don’t know it,” Jamal interrupts. “Women are the mothers of civilization. Surely you don’t believe that story about the snake in the garden, do you?”
    “Jamal, what are you talking about?” I challenge him.
    “Adam and Eve.” He takes a drink from his bottle. “That wasn’t a snake in the Garden of Eden. That was another man.”
    “Aw, shit, there you go talking that Malcolm shit again.” Tim adjusts the cap on his head. “What’s the truth this time, Brother Bilal?” he asks sarcastically. “Enlighten me, my brother.”
    “The truth is that when the Good Book was rewritten, man was called a snake because he whispered in Eve’s ear and it was unlike anything she had heard before. Women had no reason to whisper when they were the only ones walking the face of the earth. Have you ever noticed, when people whisper, it sounds like a snake?”
    “So you’re saying that there were two men in the Garden of Eden?” Tim laughs.
    “There was more than just two people walking the earth at that time, but before then women were here first and they created man. All existence comes from a womb, not a nutsack,” Jamal proclaims. “Adam and Eve were a civilization of people, not just a man and a woman. What do you think God meant by ‘in
Our
image’?”
    I’m listening to Jamal, trying to understand where he gets all this crazy-sounding radical information from. It makes sense to an extent,as all theories do, but to totally accept it goes against everything I was raised to accept as a Christian. I shake my head at his question. “I don’t get it, Jamal.”
    “Have you two ever paid any attention to how women react to a smooth-talking brother when his game is tight?” he asked. “The way the man slides all up on her and leans in, letting the heat of his breath tickle her earlobes? The sister gets like butter and will do damn near anything for that man, that’s the truth. Imagine him asking her to close her third eye and use the two on her face to see his logic and ignore her own innate wisdom. That was the knowledge right there. Wasn’t a tree with apples on it, but rather it was the actual act of the spiritual being overtaken by the physical.”
    I sit back against the booth, trying to absorb what Jamal just said. All I can think about is my sister and how she reacts to Reverend Dixon. Like butter. Just like butter.
    “Jamal, you can’t be serious, man!” Tim’s voice breaks my thought. “You can’t possibly be insinuating that women were running around here first, when it’s a known fact that men were.”
    Tim looks at me.
    I have a blank look and offer no support for him.
    He continues to try to convince us. “We were!” he argues. “Man was doing fine until the wind blew and his dick got hard.”
    “Dang, Tim, do you have to be so graphic?” I ask.
    “Greg, you grew up in a Christian home and you know that Adam was the first man on this planet and God took his rib and made woman.”
    I shrug my shoulders. “All I know is we here and we gon’ be here and we got to figure this out before the system and AIDS kills us all,” I say emphatically.
    Jamal folds his arms on the table and leans, in staring at both of us. “The oldest living human bones in the upright position that have been found to date are those of a woman. A black woman.”
    “He has a point, Tim,” I tease.
    “But that means that reproduction could never have happened.”
    “Tim, women have in their bodies only X and X chromosomes. That means, if you break it down to a simple science, they possess allnatural abilities within themselves to create a female nation, brother,” Jamal says. “There was probably a time they could