I Wonder if I'm the Mongoose
By JoliAmour DuBose-Morris. After journeying through the pervasive trauma and sexualization faced by Black femmes, Joli comes face to face with what lies beneath the surface of her psyche.
Mongoose Sale
“Buy a Mongoose Today! They’ll change your life,” an ad on Craigslist said. From where? East Village. It’s a rare creature, so it can’t be purchased on Jamaica Ave (I imagine that if it could, the sign would say: Gold! Watches! Rings! Mongooses! We take cash, cash, cash!). Instead, I took the F train downtown to where the scaffolding buildings really are just scaffolding buildings, making a right somewhere on Broome Street. I smacked on tropical gum, hands in jean jacket pockets, feet stepping into a line. I popped my head out, trying to peek at the man selling wares at a wooden table, and eventually, when it was my turn, I stepped before the table, rubbing my hands together in anticipation—
Then passed right the fuck out.
Golden eyes, like pecans. There was something like God in them; He’s in all of the animals. That’s all I saw before darkness.
My face slammed into the concrete, tiny stones pressing against my cheek. Underneath my stomach, I felt as if I were laying in pop rocks.
I heard whispers. At first, they were faint against the wind.
Then, hands touched my body—I swear I felt like I knew these hands! Fragile, gentle, chipped-nails poked into me, but their touches were very delicate around my spine. Maybe they knew about my back surgery? I’m flipped over to face the sky. Above me was one Joli. To my left, two Joli’s. Heads popcorned into my vision—Joli—Joli—Joli—Joli—Joli, all of us the same, all of us Joli’s. We shrieked, looking at each other; we were in the Spiderverse. Three-thousand of them here, in this cut-off East Village park, all of us having survived so many lives in one body.
I’m the oldest of them all.
Joli, she’s Two—white tank top, corded telephone, big forehead, one braid dangling over her forehead like a street light. Then Joli, she’s Twelve, dressed for her birthday party in Fresh Meadows, wearing the floral from Deara’s graduation, hair pressed to the bone (you could still smell the coiled heat of the flat-iron and the Dominican perm beneath it). Ten’s dressed up as a genie. Twenty with her cherry-red pixie cut, Seventeen’s wearing sunglasses, standing in her disco swag, blonde afro combed from the root for senior year spirit week. In her hand was sweet baby Jol, resting like fresh dough in a carriage. She was just spit out of the womb—three days old, recovering from jaundice, born into a New York City that literally burned with the carcinogenic heat of two towers.
A fire went across our heads and all of us dashed into different directions. I stood up, the left side of my face and ears piercing from a blistering white noise, eyes blurry; a tornado of vertigo surrounded me as I looked for shelter. I found the door to an abandoned building, and I pushed it open with my shoulder, falling inside, the floor covered in playground mulch. When I regained my breath, I looked around.
A red slide.
A childish giggle.
In the corner of my eye, a little girl stood outside of the slide, tying her shoes. “Joli?”
I think she was Seven here. She looked behind her shoulder, chubby fingers gripping the laces. “Hey! Hey! Joli, come here!”
The mulch seemed to weigh me down. I ran the two syllables over my tongue again and again. I could tell she was trying to see me.
But we weren’t alone.
From inside of the slide, a shadow of a hand twirled out, ushering her closer with an index finger.
“No,” I moaned.
She strolled towards the dark. Its hand went to her back, then looped a thumb underneath the fabric of her shorts, fingers flirting with the elastic of her Disney panties.
“Stop! What—What are you—”
The shadowed hand became a body, trauma made out of hands and legs; a mirage of predation I’ve experienced before. We made the kind of eye contact that burns through the bottom ring of eyelids.
The shadow waved, teasingly. Like—
“Hey, you. Nice to see you again.”
It looked to that me, and pointed to me, tickling her chin. I crawled towards her, thinking I could save her. At her tummy, I stood between her legs, desperate:
“Don’t go in there, Joli, stay here with me, please. Don’t go in there.”
I sat on my knees.
“Look at me!” For a brief moment, I think she did. Doe eyes squinting fiercely, she looked like she was trying to stare through the sun. “Joli,” I whispered, and her breath slowed. I thought time stopped. At least for a few seconds.
The shadow ripped her body from me, tugging her into the slide. I yelled, and I yelled, and I yelled, and I yelled: “Don’t touch her! Stop touching her!” Because I could say it now, I know she’s in there, she can’t say it—she doesn’t know how to! I didn’t know how to. I didn’t say it then.
Do You Think I’m Sexy, Mongoose?
I was on the train the other day, coming from my weekly Monday therapy appointment. For forty-five minutes, I sat in a light-bright room, smacking on a pink starburst. Some Mondays, I talk about my anxiety. Or how my bosses are getting on my nerves, making me mail galleys and shit—it’s annoying! Having to juggle so many packages. Sometimes, I talk about my boyfriend, my parents. I take her on tangents about swimming, writing club, friend problems, wanting to dance again—all of it, I’m an open book. But my therapist, she’s reviewing me, with her G-2 pen and piss-yellow scratchpad paper, and encourages me to talk about something else. In those notes of hers, sexual assault is written in silly cursive. The letters loop into each other like a timeline of events.
I didn’t tell her it happened when I was seven, I don’t tell anyone that. But she asks. If something did.
So I walked right the fuck out.
I didn’t even stop to receive my 2-swipe MetroCard.
It was a silent journey home. The train was mildly crowded, and I was in between the blur that happens when you take the L train from First Ave to Bedford. When the doors opened, something Black rolled in—a big scruff of furrish-wings. It hit the opposite doors, then shook to all fours.
The Mongoose.
It was ugly and feathery, with lint balls at the tips of its coat, and smelled of wet corners under the scaffolding buildings; the kind of animal you just want to attack with roach spray. Whatever. I looked at my hands, minding my business. In a voice as deep as the midnight hour, it made a demand: “Look at me.”
I didn’t move.
“Look at me.”
Did anyone else see this?
It proceeded to sit down in front of me, in between my legs.
“It’s just us.” Golden eyes, like pecans.
Honestly, looking close up, it might’ve not even been a Mongoose.
I realized I didn’t know what that thing was.
It copied my movement. When I blinked, the Mongoose blinked. When I scratched my arm, it dug its nails deep into its pelt. As the train sped through the tunnels, my reflection appeared in the window across.
“Do you think you’re sexy?” the Mongoose asked.
That stupid word. Everyone’s always asking that, saying it or moaning it.
“I’ve been sexy since I was seven years old.”
And it’s exhausting, being that, at such a young age. Sexiness is a gargantuan topic in the Black family, it’s always twirling its fingers in whomever has long hair. Uncles want to dance with you at the family reunions, trying to see if you’re filling out yet, older relatives want to play house; my goodness, you can’t get away from it.
At Six, my step-cousin kissed me on the cheek at Auntie Sheyla’s Virginian house; we were watching Nickelodeon. Auntie Sheyla saw it, and saw me. I was a gauntlet, tempting my step-cousin with doe eyes, it was me, I did it! And she beat me for it. A leather belt grabbed me by the waist and said it owned me. One year later, in Maryland, my sister, a couple of other kids, and I were playing bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish outside Big Cousin’s house. Afterwards, we all went running. Except me. Except someone else.
I can’t even remember it. The memory is so disfigured in my psyche, I won’t let myself ponder it long enough for a face to reappear. But something happened with my pants off. In a red slide.
I don’t know how long it went on for, it could’ve been days or weeks. These kinds of memories decompose slowly in the body, but oh, did I pray after. For a new body. A chance to be a child.
Girls go to Mars to get more bras, Ramiza signs my eighth-grade yearbook.
She commented inside the folds: “Your boobs got bigger.”
So, I started wearing bras to sleep, hoping to expire the milk. Boys go to Jupiter, I’d like them to stay there. But they don’t—they started messaging me on Kik. I answered. When on the park-bench with Allen, my middle-school boyfriend, he groaned about how sad it was that I was going to Cardozo for high-school, and he’d be benched off to Francis Lewis (a bus ride down). In weakness, he kept trying to kiss me. Why is everyone always trying to kiss me? I just wanted to drink my Arizona Green Tea and eat Famous Amos cookies.
“Erin and Bridgette kiss all of the time,” Allen said. But if that were true, if Bridgette liked it, then why did she tell me otherwise?
Some fall semesters later, I’m sitting on the F train, Sixteen, reading my Eleanor and Park. A bag of Salvation Army under my seat. Boys in their forties want to take me home and help me with my homework. Is that how to get an A? Letting the men turn you over, open-book style? Scribbling all over you? Is that what it takes?
When I blew the candles for my Seventeenth birthday, no one seemed to pay attention to the New Year I just entered, the many eyes surrounding me and staring at my mouth. Or, wondering about my experience.
“Are you a virgin?” the boys on Kik asked. The question might as well go in an FAQ packet.
My phone was an archive of Genital-selfies, the types taken in the bathroom, or with flashed lights underneath duvets.
“wyd if i was there rn?” Boys go to Jupiter to buy packs of condoms, wondering if they can stop by my house after.
I went on a date once in senior year, with a boy who had an afro similar to mine—I was really excited for it! We went to Central Park after school. I was looking for swans, and he was looking for a cave. I was so thankful when a little girl and her mom wanted to see the cave too—he had been staring at my mouth the whole afternoon.
On the day of my Senior Dance Recital, I received a text message from my younger cousin.
“Hey Jo, sorry to tell you, but Grandma died this morning.”
And I received another from that boy, the cave-man.
“Can I touch those titties?”
Who can I blame for all of this grief? I want to blame Stanley, my first real boyfriend. He was afraid of his skin and my skin.
Uh-oh! You like a Black girl!
Several blocks away from Junction Boulevard, we cuddled while he whispered sweet-nothings.
“I never thought I’d be dating one.” The fan of his ceiling twirled.
A quick hitch of his breath: “But, you’re not like—Black, though.”
Here comes that sexy thing again. How I’m different. Manufactured better.
Me & the Mongoose
The Mongoose and I got off the train at Dekalb Ave. My Salvation Army bag loitered over the steps, clothes sprawled across each step. Outside, I saw the park bench Allen and I sat on. And the Arizona Green Tea, and the Famous Amos cookies I never got to finish.
“Watch it,” someone muttered, bumping my shoulder. Looking back, I saw they were holding my library copy of Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park. In the streets, floating through air: my ballet shoes, Auntie Sheyla’s TV remote, the leather belt that spanked me, my eighth-grade yearbook opened to Ramiza’s signature, the twin bed where Stanley and I laid, and a phone in my hand. Where all the genital-selfies used to live.
And a hand attached to a body, where I stood on arms and legs, looking out to all of the predation I’ve experienced before. “Hey, you.” The shadow said from within me. A voice that emerges when I do my laundry, or stand in line for an iced coffee, or wash my hair. The coconut suds glide out of my curls and into eyelashes, stinging my vision, until all there is; darkness; until all there is; The Red Slide.
“Do you know what that’s like?” I asked the Mongoose. “Nibbling on me, and I’m not even ripe. How easy do you think it is to love myself? How easy do you think it is?” The Mongoose began to transform.
“For all that I have lost, I pray to just have thirty minutes, relinquished from this exile, to be myself, or what’s left of it—whatever that is, the human parts. Where are the people that love my broken parts?” I asked.
“Yes, I’ve got bad bits and spoiled eggs. I live with these things, but I am more than them, too.”
The feathers began to shed off the Mongoose. Behind its wing was an arm.
This is What I Told my Therapist
“I watched The Color Purple recently, and I hated that I loved it. When a White man like Steven Spielberg is able to capture the never-ending, undying moments of your sexiness? The sexiness travelling with you? Sexiness plaguing you, beating you, ravishing you? Sexiness is a cocktail that sucks us dry. We’re told that we asked for it because what does it mean if we didn’t? I drank it. My sister drank it. My mom drank it. Blackness and Womanness. It gave me jaundice. Some vultures call it sexiness.”
This is What I Didn’t
“That is what ate my childhood.”
I Wonder if I’m the Mongoose
I walked home the other day. Someone was having a yard sale. This was the ad I saw on Craigslist the previous night. A mirror sat propped up on a wooden table, towering over the smaller items like God observing His people. I walked past it.
“Look at me,” the mirror ordered. So I stood in front of it. My golden eyes, like pecans. I closed them, the shadow’s hand on my shoulder. But then I felt another hand. And another. And another. I opened my eyes. The many me’s were spread behind me like the feather’s of a peacock.
Seventeen, Eighteen, Fourteen, Sixteen, Thirteen, my thirtieth day being Ten, my first day being Three, and Seven. All the Jolis could finally see me. And I saw her too. I scooped up her childish wonders, her hopes and tempestuous dreams, and buried them within my smile. The type of smile that appears after one cries themselves out of an old body.
Mongooses are never just Mongooses.
“Hey! Uh, sorry about the weird stains on the mirror, we’ve had it for a long time, but it still has a lot of love left to give.” A seller said from behind a wooden table. He was brushing balls of fur from his clothes.
“I know,” I answered.
I am a rare creature.
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JoliAmour DuBose-Morris is a writer and editor from Jamaica Queens, New York. Her work can be described as evocative, energetic, and experimental; an intentional voice that adheres to the experiences of Black women and girls. She is currently a 2025 Fellow for Brooklyn Poets, a 2025 Scholar for the Lewis Latimer Museum, and a 2024 PEN America Emerging Voices Finalist.
Edited by Ava Emilione. Cover art by Ava Anglin.