Ethic

by Ashley Antoinette

The reward for a good life lived was to meet that soul that was intended to be your mate.

He was effortlessly deadly, callously calculating, and unforgivingly deceptive.

Young love was potent, like crack to a dope fiend, like relaxer to new growth, like good dick to a nympho, like chocolate during a menstrual; when you needed it, you needed it.

His height, his sturdiness, behind her was what she needed. It was what every woman needed… a man to carry the weight when it got too heavy. Too many black queens were forced to play the role of king because of the absence of the men in their lives.

A woman couldn’t change a man. He had to change himself. For the right woman, he would.

Ethic wanted his wife to be a sister; black, mixed with blacker, full of sweet juice and scented like shea butter. He wanted the woman he ended up with to be able to relate to his experience, to know what it was like to have strength and resilience, not because it was learned, but because it was inherited from generations of black people who had to be strong before her.

“A man that have you cooking food he doesn’t provide is not a man,”

A man without a woman was half of a man, emotionally stunted, and overcompensating in every area of his life to make up for what he lacked in companionship. A king could not reign without a queen to keep him strong. If man was the walls of a house, holding everything up, bearing the weight of all that inhabited it, his woman was the foundation. You could tear down walls, but a foundation was rock solid.