by Wayétu Moore
In the shower that night I thought of our conversation, her tears. I had taken my braids out because I wanted to run my fingers through my roots, my coils, to be reminded. I heard the front door open from inside the bathroom, and Johnny Boy shouted hello and what are you doing? I am washing my hair, I yelled back. I took my braids out. Oh, your ’fro is out. Your ’fro is out again, he joked. Doesn’t washing it take forever, he asked, and I could tell he was smiling. I didn’t answer him. Well, I guess we won’t be going out to dinner tonight, he said. Don’t you wish you had hair like mine? he asked. I felt a chill. Of rage, shock, perplexity, exhaustion, something. I was not finished but I turned off the faucet right away. Right away. Foam slid off my body and beads of water from my natural curls fell to my shoulders. I heard my breathing in my ears. WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY? I asked. And in the aftermath of the questions, in the silence, he could still hear my anger in my breathing, and I heard his footsteps approach the room. Wait, whoa, what? What did I? No, it was a joke. I’m sorry. It was a bad, bad joke, babe. Babe. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. And he rambled and was still rambling when I opened the door, naked but not deformed, and the water was coming from my hair, but then the water was coming from my eyes. He had done a thing. But I would not run from him. He stared at me, dared not touch me, sorry, and I knew it. But he had said a thing and that day had already broken me. And I could still hear that cutting music. So loud, it echoed, so I stood there until we both knew. Stood there until the echoes finished.
Springtime. Johnny Boy had been kind, he was good, and I lacked patience. Men like him were the men I grew up with. All-American and well meaning, painstakingly oblivious of their privilege. Most days with him reminded me of the life I traded for New York. What would have become of the day we finally moved into that house if I had closed my eyes and stayed?
On the day my family moved into our first house in America, the sun, although invisible behind the motionless clouds, had already risen onto the cul-de-sac. Knowing somehow that it was there, though she could not see it nor did she ever see it at the time she rose every morning, Mam was already awake and packing old silverware that she refused to discard and newly purchased china sets into a cupboard that she had picked out only months before. After she unpacked each box, she balled her freckled hands into a fist and released her slightly wrinkled fingers into the air. In Liberia when Papa built their first house in Caldwell, she did not reap the enjoyment of unpacking because there were always hands around waiting to meet her needs or requests as they came. And she always said that just when she began to fall for it, she left for New York. There were days she spoke of Caldwell, which she said she imagined was muddied with broken sticks of wood that formed nothing more than the shapes of Liberia’s recent chapter, that hosted nothing more than companies of squatters and their poorly strewn tents and many children.
So she and Wi had planted a palm tree outside of that Texan home, similar to one of her trees in Caldwell. And looking at the tree that day, ripe baby leaves lifting slowly in and out of sleep from the morning breeze, the voices of new neighbors clamoring around us since the cunning narrative of Y2K had finally died down, and subsequently everyone resumed buying houses in suburban cul-de-sacs and carried on waiting for Godot, I knew I wanted to leave. I could not believe the new walls and hallway. I could not believe the arched doors and frames, the clear glass windows that overlooked our new street in the home that was now our own. Not borrowed, not rented, but ours, ten years after moving to our new country. I heard them all laughing downstairs. Yet. There was that restlessness again, and then, the understanding that the quiet life outside our front door, beyond that driveway, did not match my internal melody. It never had.
I had learned Vai when I was five years old and forgotten it by the time I was six. At eight I traded fufu and soup for McDonald’s Happy Meals, although the starch had been my favorite thing to eat for years and one of my first words. At thirteen I folded the lappa suits my Ol’ Ma and aunties mailed from Logan Town and ELWA, 10 Monrovia 100 Liberia, in favor of Express and NY & Co. jeans, although they never correctly fit my too-skinny waist and hips.
Mam noticed our new interests when we were teenagers, and dishes like cassava leaf and palaver sauce took a back seat to spaghetti and meatloaf when we had friends visiting. During the week, when friends and teammates from Little League, dance squads, and basketball teams raided her house, she would come downstairs and speak, spend time listening to our stories or the laughter shared after games, and then she would go upstairs and rest.
“You don’t mind, do you?” we asked her as we turned down the penetrating drums and cymbals of Nimba Burr, Miatta Fahnbulleh, Fela and Femi Kuti for musical alternatives that our friends could recognize.
“No, I don’t mind,” she would say, smiling without teeth.
We were at my high school on an open house night. Mam wore a lappa suit with colors that nearly parted the sea of white faces in the hallway as we walked. We arrived in class and the teacher greeted me and Mam. We found two empty seats. I saw familiar faces of classmates. Most of them resembled their mothers and fathers; some of them came with grandparents. I smiled at class friends when they caught my eye. They grinned back, then surveyed Mam’s lappa suit in bewilderment. My legs shook nervously throughout. I saw them look at her as though she was from another planet, a species they had only briefly skimmed in history books and at museums. They all seemed alike. Khaki Dickies or dress slacks; button-up blouses or T-shirts with the face of our school mascot plastered across their breasts; stringy blond hair pulled back in a ponytail or worn down their shoulders with feathered bangs just above their eyelids; blue and green and brown eyes all passing by the corner where my mother and I sat; pink and red lips; white and yellow teeth; pale and tan hands; fat and skinny necks. And there was our beautiful Mam—a legend, a relic, an enigma. Toward the end of the teacher’s presentation, Mam raised her hand and asked a question. She had to repeat herself, but she was gracious, always gracious, and I, I was silent during the entire drive home.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as she parked in our driveway.
“Nothing,” I answered and turned toward the door to exit the car.
“You haven’t said anything. What’s wrong?”
The moonlight bounced off her cheeks and her breath grew rapid in the silence.
I said nothing, but then I said something stupid, like she could have asked me rather than having to repeat herself, because some people didn’t understand her accent. She was taken aback because she was a teacher, a successful teacher recognized by the state, and she spoke all day, and she said her students had no issues with her accent. I said it wasn’t a big deal.
“It is a big deal. You brought it up,” Mam said.
“Well, maybe next time just ask me afterward. I hate those things anyway and didn’t want to stay longer than we had to. Nobody did,” I said.
“They make you not want your mother to sound African in school now, then? That’s what we sending you to school for?”
“No—”
“I am African. And so are you!” Mam’s voice cracked as the locusts cried outside our car, along the narrow driveway that led to our new house, a house that never quite blended with the rest.
“Look at me,” she said. “Are you ashamed of me?”
“No,” I must have said.
“Good,” she continued. “Because if you’re ashamed of me, then you’re ashamed of yourself.”
I wanted to argue with her but I had neither the energy nor the courage to lie to her that I had not been proselytized, that I was not a victim of an education that did not have her in mind.
“You are African,” she said, tears streaming. “The book, the book they show you with Africans in jungles with no clothes. You know better. Don’t let them make you shame, yeh? You are African.” The words hurt more than I had imagined. I had never heard them until that night. You are African. You are African. You are African: together so profoundly accus
atory and judgmental that I wanted to run out of the car screaming. You are African, and it made me want to clench my fists and fight. And I did not know why.
“You hear me?” Mam stepped out of the car and slammed the door. I watched her lappa suit disappear into the house before I opened my door to the night’s chorus.
When I entered the house, Mam was still in the foyer, frozen in front of the television that blared throughout the living room. Papa was leaned forward on the couch, carefully minding a BBC report on Liberia.
“They may start fighting again-oh,” Papa said, shaking his head.
A reporter spoke over a camera shot of civilians running from crossfire with small bags of belongings and children on their backs and waists. They looked like Papa and Mam. They looked like my sisters and brothers, like me. According to the reporter, people had begun to evacuate after a bomb went off in Monrovia, but ECOWAS—a regional union of African states—and the United Nations had recently stepped in to negotiate with Charles Taylor and his rebel opposition. The civilians ran quickly as pieces of their belongings fell on the road behind them.
“They may start fighting again,” Papa repeated himself, hypnotized by the images on the screen. “Ay-yah!” Mam said as the tears from outside dried on her cheeks and new ones took their place. Mam’s shoulders shook and she surrendered to her sadness. When Papa noticed that she was crying, he stood straight and put his arm around her. He looked over Mam’s dropped head at my face for answers.
I shrugged and went to my room. And that night I had another nightmare. I woke up, nearly a woman now underneath my thin nightgown, and I pulled open the door to my parents’ room where a thin stream of light ran across their bodies. I wanted to sleep between them, as I had done as a child, but Mam felt so far from me—my denial of her now a disheveled bridge across a wayward stream of our misunderstanding. I lay at the foot of their bed, and it did not take long for Mam to rise and grab me a pillow and throw, find her way to me, and hug me back to sleep.
SIXTEEN
“Guess what!” my friend Tina yelped as soon as I hugged her hello. I welcomed her excitement after the monotony of blank screens and wasted time in front of that novel, and the writer’s anxiety it caused. We met at a local museum and I knew as she approached, by how quickly she walked toward me with the anxiousness of those who are running away from one thing while running toward another, that there was news.
“What?” I asked, entering the building.
“I found out my ancestors are from Ghana.” I smiled as she sang the country’s name.
“That’s cool, girl. DNA tests are great.”
“Oh my God, I’ve been there before but I’m going back with my cousin by the end of the year.”
“That’s dope,” I said, still smiling, and we proceeded through the exhibit while I brought up another topic of discussion, which Tina freely indulged.
That night she called me, energetically low, unpredictably upset.
I was, as Tina explained, not as supportive as she had imagined I would be. As an African-American whose history and heritage had been stolen during the transatlantic slave trade, she reminded me that her family had no place on the continent to call home in the way that mine had, and she expected that I would be happier for her.
“I was happy for you. I am happy for you,” I insisted. “What was I supposed to do? Jump up and down?”
She said nothing, so I knew the answer was, perhaps, yes.
“I’m sorry,” I said when the silence made a home. “I’m so sorry.” For not being as supportive as she needed. For that history and those ships, I am so sorry.
“I guess I don’t know what I was expecting,” she said. But I knew. I understood.
She was not the first friend I had who had tested their blood for traces of a stolen home. I would often get calls about either DNA results or news that they were dating an African, usually a Nigerian guy who had just become comfortable with his foreign identity after years of being teased in grade school. Being from Africa was now cool and those boys knew it. My cousins, my friends, the boys I met in college who hid their too-long middle names with ritual emulation of their American friends, overusing “nigga” to camouflage the smell of okra sauce and fried fish, now changed their profile icons to West African flags and I wondered: What took us so long?
“I mean, I guess you’re pretty Americanized anyway, so I get it,” Tina said. “You don’t talk about Liberia that much.”
And where could I begin to tell that story? I ignored the comment because the admission would feel like rocks in my mouth—that Liberia lived with me every night, in my dreams, that I wear it on my skin and in the rhythm of my love stories. Where could I begin to tell her that there were dragons there too? That going to Ghana could give her a kind of peace, yes, but not the kind she was looking for. To say that would be to break her heart and I could not. She did not want or need the truth of her homegoing—not the whole truth. Tina wanted Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa and William Tolbert’s Africa and Thomas Sankara’s Africa and Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s. And we dream perhaps one day their versions of Ghana and Liberia and Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast will be resurrected. But those of us who have been pushed into new homes, new countries, know that our dragons killed those places too.
After Johnny Boy, there was the dream again of Satta and the jug of palm oil and when I woke up, every time I woke up, I felt like I was floating, like I was being carried, but to where?
Johnny Boy would say, “You’re black, but not in the same way.” As if it was both an indictment and a compliment, and it always made me look down, mostly in guilt, because he said it as more of a compliment than an indictment. A friend once told me that this was the same for the Blackgirls who were asked if they were mixed, or praised for their thin noses or their eye color—but what was so wrong with being black “in the same way”? “You’re African, not really like American black. So why do you take all of this race stuff so seriously?” he asked.
That man at the store that day, the one who said that thing, he did not see African girls or Creole girls or girls who could trace their lines to Carolina plantations. He saw us, all of us, as Blackgirls. As the same. “Most people process the world not as they are, but as they are treated,” I said to Johnny Boy. What I did not admit was even at that table and the years after, even after adopting the rage of my new sisters, I sometimes felt like an impostor. And similarly, my breathing would never temper at those family reunions and Monrovian elsewheres, hearing those stories of Liberia older than my years, than my memory.
So we—transplanted from Liberia and Nigeria and Ethiopia, from Ghana and Senegal and the DRC, from Kenya, from Zambia and elsewhere, pushed over the ocean by those scales and gnashing teeth, some before our parents and some after, some undocumented and some the first in their families born with blue passports—we practice what it is like to be black, to be white, to be American, to be anything other than who we are. Learn the words, the customs, the rage, the ways that our parents have not been here long enough to pass down. We took the teasing, the name-calling, the misunderstanding, the “Didn’t you ride giraffes in Africa?” the “Did y’all have houses there?” the “Africans are too aggressive” the “Y’all Africans think you’re better” the “Well, you don’t look African” the “When I said that thing, I was talking about other Africans” the “Does anyone in your family do 409 scams?” the “Are you even American?” the “blue black” the “You sold us” the “damned Africans” the “Did they have multiple wives there?” the “Do you know voodoo?” the “Why is Africa so poor?” the “Why do Africans smell?” the “Mutombo” the “Grace Jones” the “National Geographic” the “African Booty Scratcher” the “You don’t sound like a black person” the “My parents donate to Africa” the “black people are so sensitive” the overeager “YESS, girlfriend!” the “How did you know that?” the “Where did you go to school?” the “I’m not a racist, but” the “damned black people” the “But why do t
hey have nice cars and live in the projects?” the “My mom didn’t really mean that thing she said. You know how the older generation is” the “Did you get any help on this paper?” the “If you talk about being black too much, you’re the racist” the “We won’t be able to give you that promotion this time” the “I don’t see color”—we took it all.
What I saw in the eyes of those first-generation Americans and young black immigrants like myself was the stress of never arriving, the impatience, the disconnect, the madness of identity. I admit I escaped, I whispered on a call to Johnny Boy, weeks after, when he was still calling to see if time had changed me. I did look for this home on the shoulders of love. I could not help it. That was my inheritance. But by spring, after fall, after Johnny Boy and those calls, when I made room for my thoughts, for myself, I knew I could no longer look for my reflection in the men I chose. And home, my first home, was the beating drum.
“Are you well?” Papa asked and his voice pulled me from the waves. I had called Mam’s phone but he picked up, and I was better for it.
“I am,” I answered softly.
“Mam says you got a dog,” he said and I imagined him smiling.
“I did. A black Lab,” I said.
“Hm. They are the best dogs,” he said, then seemed to loiter in the silence, like those who were far better at showing their love than at navigating its words.
“Mam says you started working on your book again. That’s good.”
“Yeah, I’m trying,” I said from my fire escape, the laptop and empty screen scrutinizing me from my desk. “Writing is hard. It can be hard, Daddy.”