Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

POPULATION: 1,775,778 (BLACK POPULATION: 7.7 PERCENT)

  My mother and I leave Haiti on two different promises. I’m going to a world of well-to-do white children, 24/7 electricity without a generator, and once there will secure an amazing education, thanks to my father’s incredible foresight. I’ll perfect my French, learn English, and never be hungry. I was never hungry before, mind you, our house had two fridges, both full, but now, hunger won’t even be a presence in my world unless I actively look for it. North America is the world of one-liter Coca-Colas and 99-cent bags of chips. It’s safe there in a way Haiti isn’t.

  For her part, my mom is promised a life of things I won’t be privy to until when we can drink wine together, years later, as we drill each other for insight on what we remember of the time.

  “It would change depending on the day,” she will tell me later. My mom had done her nursing residency in Switzerland before returning to Haiti and meeting my father. “Some days he said I won’t need to work at all once in Canada, and other days he assured me that surgical nurses make $100,000 a year there. In both cases, there would be good restaurants every night. That was the big one. Never having to cook; only restaurants.”

  I suspect she always knew there wouldn’t be restaurants every night. Mostly, I think, she chose to believe those promises on my behalf. I used to tell myself that this was proof of just how much she loved me, her only son. I would later realize this was only part of the truth. She loved both her son and her ambitious husband.

  My father has Canadian citizenship from his former life there, and Mom and I can easily obtain citizenship through him. I learn I’m now a Canadian citizen by receiving a laminated mint-green card with a tiny red-and-white flag in the upper corner that says so. We’re not trying a new country; we’re emerging from a shell we will never return to.

  Mom wanted Switzerland. Two of her sisters still lived there, in Neuchâtel. But Dad had lived in Montreal before for seventeen years, the entirety of his first marriage, which I will learn about later. He knows the country, so citizenship will be much easier. He’s also older than her so, again, she defers.

  She clings to the fact that she has a few nursing friends in Montreal, too. Haitian women who studied with her in Switzerland and then settled in Quebec with their husbands.

  One of our maids cries, waving us goodbye and watching the car to the airport pull away. The other one already has her back turned to us and is walking down the road with a backpack on. It’s unclear which one of the two was a thief, but for years to come, Mom and Dad will both tell the story of how one of them was a thief who pilfered them blind for years.

  We spend a long time at the airport and then stay with Dad’s sister, my aunt Atalante. She looks like Dad with a wig on, but pretty, too. I like the snow, but for all of its novelty, it isn’t as interesting as I thought it would be when I was reaching into our freezer in Haiti and grabbing handfuls of frost from the back while standing on a chair. The cold itself is much more appealing. “Minus sixteen degrees Celsius!” someone, maybe Mom, says. I inhale until my insides are cold and I start coughing. I develop a cold within minutes of exiting into the airport parking lot by doing exactly that; breathing in the chill and letting it sit in my stomach. Aunt Atalante forces me to drink tea the moment we get to her place. A big mug and then a second one. “The last thing you need is a sick child on your hands here!”

  Her apartment is worn-in and comfortable, the way small apartments become home after decades of residence. It smells like our kitchen but in every room. I’m told we’ve met before when I was younger, but I don’t remember. I lie and say I do. She’s bought me a stack of coloring books and sneakers that are too big. She likes me and my mom and invites us to stay as long as we need, but Dad is proud and has the money for our own apartment from renting our Haitian home. He wants to find one soon. A new domain that’s his with an office I can be summoned to when need be.

  “We’re not on vacation!” he snaps when Atalante hands me a pamphlet about the La Ronde amusement park.

  Dad is restless to get some momentum on this new swing at the North American dream. I’ll never quite figure out what exactly he was trying to get started. Maybe this newly adopted North American life is simply a fiftysomething late-life crisis from a man frustrated by a country that didn’t have a Corvette retailer to sell him a phallic symbol.

  “There have been letters for you for years,” Atalante tells my dad at the kitchen table, resting a tin can of cookies between her legs and fishing a stack of rubber-banded envelopes from within the cookie tin and handing it to him while Mom watches as she makes oatmeal at the stove for us. “They’ve written me a lot.” I have no idea who “they” are.

  “These are old,” Dad notes, flipping through the mystery letters, taking in the names. A perk of being a quiet only child is that adults will grow comfortable talking freely around you. You’re expected to color in your coloring books and not listen.

  “They wrote me, and then they stopped,” Atalante says. “Because you told me not to answer.” She’s his younger sister, so like Mom, she too defers to him.

  “Nothing from Roger?” Dad asks. Atalante gives her brother a look like he just said something ridiculous. He might as well have said, “The green giraffe ate the last cloud.” That’s the level of silly she just heard.

  Dad gives my mom a quick look, takes the letters, and goes into the living room to read. He moves into every home like it’s his own, displaying confidence and ease in a way that somehow inspires deference from hosts. Years later, I will learn that this disarming coolness also makes him an excellent card player, if an unsuccessful gambler. Overconfidence will betray you.

  That night, I learn that I have five older half-siblings somewhere in this vast new country. Mom whispers it to me when I ask about the letters as she’s putting me to bed. Bit by bit, I will come to piece together the tale of Nicolette, my father’s first wife: how she moved to Canada with him from Haiti the first time, gave him five children here, and then died rapidly of a disease no one mentions.

  Nicolette left children behind. Some grown, others teenage. The youngest was fifteen, another had drowned. I understand they became resentful orphans when Dad moved back to Haiti, alone and without warning, where he was introduced to a young bright nurse laughing seamlessly through the dance clubs of Port-au-Prince. The whispers of my father’s former life are strange and convoluted. They feel like soap opera fiction. Not even a classy one. Something bawdy where puppets come to life and pregnant women are kept in caves.

  My father is a man of stories. I believe all of them.

  My mom’s nursing friends are thrilled to see her. They invite us to their houses and I play with their children. They want to take her to this salon, or that one. Within a month in Montreal, she would have been a part of weekly book clubs and throwing parties. Her life would have filled up quickly because that’s just the type of person she is; a chatty social butterfly with stories, jokes, gossip, and impressions to spare.

  My mother was always more popular than me. She was an extrovert before Myers-Briggs would become a religion to the nineteen-year-olds in my life trying to turn themselves into trading cards statistics. Over time, I realized that this was also because she was a lot lonelier than me. This particular psychological nuance means that she doesn’t simply like people—bizarre as that is—she needs them. On her birthday the phone would ring from morning to night with calls from across the globe. Haiti, to Florida, to Switzerland. If I never minded having a mom who was more sociable than me, Dad certainly minded having a wife more sociable than him.

  “Not here,” Dad declares, finally, disappearing one morning and coming back in the evening with a newspaper from a town neither Mom nor I recognize. “Montreal isn’t the right place to raise a kid. You don’t know this country like I do.”

  Mom agrees, sad but hopeful. This will be a recurring theme for her, my poor mom.

  “We’ll meet people there, too,” Dad says. A quiet town will le
t us rent a bigger apartment. I won’t grow up surrounded by drugs and city noises. Again she defers. He’s the experienced parent, after all.

  We move to the municipality of Sherbrooke, two hours away from Montreal by car. There are 136,600 people in Sherbrooke with a 2.2 percent Black population: the largest visible minority population, by quite a bit. Next are Latin Americans at 1.5 percent.

  I don’t know the word yet, but I learn the meaning of downsizing, moving into the third, middle-floor apartment of a building totaling six units on a quiet street. Our house in Haiti is an estate compared to the three-hundred-square-foot apartment at the corner of Fisette Street. We were wealthy by Haitian standards: a big house and electricity more often than not. (That amounts to wealthy in a country where entire families live in piles of trash.)

  In the end, the maid’s house in the back was a little bigger than the sum square footage of our new Canadian life. There are no restaurants every night. This new life comes with a brutal currency conversion rate; affluent in Haiti and now made lower-middle class in Canada. He would never have admitted it, but I suspect that one of the key differences between my father and me was the fact that he was, deep down, an optimist. His inner white woman, if there was one, carries a copy of The Secret with highlighted sections and an unwavering certainty that there’s always a bigger picture at work. Thank God that genetic trait didn’t imprint.

  Five

  Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Foreign Kid

  It was programmed into me early: white kids are the good kids to hang out with. Back in Haiti, my best friend at the Le Petit Monde kindergarten was Dimitri. His parents had loose ties to the Bill Clinton administration. I remember nothing of Dimitri except his blond hair, tanned skin, and this fact that his parents had loose ties to the Bill Clinton administration, which Dad commented on often. The more white and light-skinned people you had in your school picture, the better your preschool was regarded back there. That’s no longer a factor in Canada. I’ve been dropped into a good bucket of whiteness. Tiny little pink heads peek through the banks of snow-scribbled sled tracks that flank my new neighborhood on our way to my new elementary school.

  “Speak French there, not Creole,” my dad reminds me in Creole as he drives me to school on the first day of second grade, navigating the new rented car and snow tires. It’s his version of Have a good day, it’s okay to be scared while Mom interviews for a job she will not get. Creole is only allowed at home, never in public. Two of my new classmates even speak English, that key to the world that Dad will later insist that I excel in. At the time, English looked equal parts complicated and annoying in my books, having all the same letters as French but in the wrong order. Some words looked needlessly complicated, others suspiciously incomplete. Rhythm. Publicly.

  My brain was first Creole, then French. At age eighteen, sitting on the Greyhound bus to move into the United States, with Mom sleeping in the seat beside me, I will realize that my inner monologue is now in English and that while I still speak it, I can no longer read Creole without sounding out the words.

  I’M SEVEN years old and now Canadian—the paperwork is in process—when Dad insists that I wear a tie to the first day of school as a “point of pride.” His, not mine. The classroom is bright, with colors and cutouts on all the walls. The air smells sweet from the lingering collages the kids did two days prior to my arrival when the spring half of the second grade officially started. The teacher, Miss Germaine, is nice. That’s all I remember. It takes me no time at all to realize that I’m the Black kid, singular, of Saint-Esprit elementary. This makes me the very first Black friend of seventeen white second graders all at once and, to be honest, it’s fucking great.

  “Can I touch your hair?” Kevin asks me at recess, right by the classroom door, brave and bold in a way only very young, very blond children can be. The other boys stand behind him, curious and excited.

  “Sure!”

  After that exchange, Kevin is my best friend. I want to die on a field for him, sword in hand, having served with valor.

  “Can I go next?” Jérémie, a human avatar of freckles, asks. Each head pat gets me a new friend.

  They all live in the neighborhood, have lived in the neighborhood since they were born, and something or someone different is still good at that age. Jérémie’s followed by Eric, and then Simon who lives closest to me and with whom I will walk home from school: a straight path, nine minutes away. I don’t have much to say to Simon. He’s better at sports than me, but we have enough common interests to keep a friendly fire burning. The covenant of the hair touch is nearly unbreakable. Simon waits for me on his doorstep, and we walk to the school together until the middle of fourth grade.

  Girls like me, too, but more slowly. My handwriting is neat and cursive and causes an “Ooooh” when I’m called to the chalkboard. We didn’t learn the stutter step of blocky, lowercase letters in Haiti, and getting three rulers smacked across your hands is an amazing motivator for calligraphy.

  I get a Super Nintendo on my first Canadian birthday, and Haiti becomes a distant memory. The memory of our house and its two gardens—one indoors and one outdoors—is swiftly washed away with the first mushroom Mario the plumber jumps onto. I vaguely wonder if my armless Ninja Turtle action figure of Donatello (the purple one, you layman)—who had lost his left arm and thus deserved a warrior’s burial—is still in the outdoors garden back in Haiti, but don’t wonder about much else.

  The renting of our Haitian house will be the primary and steadiest source of income for years to come. It brings in $12,000 a year, in USD, which is a fortune in Haitian gourdes and below the poverty line of annual income in Canadian dollars. I’m told—because my mother has been told by someone else who also has been told—that this house survived the earthquake that split the country’s soul apart without a single brick falling. Its big red gates now apparently belong to a bank.

  For years, until something close to nostalgia begins to uncover the memory, all I will remember from that country, my motherland, will be the grimly profound and unbearable lack of video games and cartoons.

  I wear T-shirts now, and Kevin and I trade our lunches with each other and no one else.

  He loves the roasted chicken legs and pikliz (Haitian pickled vegetable relish) that my mother diligently makes every night to kill time and make our apartment smell like a home. Even cold, it’s adult food and objectively delicious. We make a game of trading lunches, and he gives me neatly cut sandwiches that are color coded white, pink, orange. Somehow, the cheese, meat, and bread all taste exactly the same. Dominic, a shaggy-haired boy who appreciates Dragon Ball Z at the same religious level that I appreciate Dragon Ball Z, smells the chicken and presents me with a string cheese and microwaveable pasta lunch. I nod my head at him like I’m a nun being lured into the occult.

  I’m in love with Kevin, the way third graders fall in love with their best friends. We’ll move into houses next to one another one day and our kids will play together. Anything that happens until then is just homework and weekends.

  The pack turns. Kids like me until, suddenly, they don’t. (I will update you if this phenomenon stops one day.) I don’t know why. Maybe we’re all just growing into our faces and the outliers are standing out more. Or, maybe we all collectively realize that we’re big kids now. At-risk youths with hoodies and new South Park–obtained curse words in our arsenals. Somewhere someone heard there was a pecking order and came to school excited by the idea, which spread quickly. Who knows? In my case, the first crack appears on a winter afternoon in the fourth grade during a free activity period, as we’re all working together on gluing bits of cotton onto red construction paper to turn it into Santa’s beard.

  A North American education amounts to a lot of gluing, as it turns out.

  Over my shoulder Simon shows Eric something and the two of them snort-laugh when they notice me noticing. They’re each other’s best friends this year.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’
s a ranking,” Eric says. He’s learned to smirk, ahead of the curve. The list amounts to four French words stacked on top of each other with a chasm in between.

  BLANC

  JAUN

  BRUN

  NOIR

  They’re colors but also very clearly not colors. The B in BLANC has what I will one day learn are serifs. It’s been outlined over with a highlighter. NOIR is last. There’s a typo in JAUN(E) (yellow) because Eric is low-key inbred and will tap out in the seventh grade anyway.

  But for now, I am easily upset and can’t control my face yet.

  Eric snorts while Simon snorts apologetically. White people turn pink when they laugh very hard, I notice for the first time. It’s like the shittiest camouflage imaginable.

  “It’s my dad’s,” Eric says, shrugging.

  When I point out that it’s in his handwriting, Eric rolls his eyes. It’s his copy but the real list is his dad’s. I’m being a baby. We’ve grown into racial beings with an ever-expanding and contracting idea of difference and inclusion, who know how to roll our eyes. We’ve seen it on TV enough to replicate.

  “You’re being raciste!” I say. Loud enough for Maxime and Clémence to start paying attention. I don’t know how I know that word, but I do and so do they. They share a worried look. Eric puts the paper away.

  “Don’t tell Mrs. Louise, okay?” Eric asks. Begs. He sounds worried, and I like that.

  I wish this halved my love for them like my dad’s belt did for mine in Haiti, but it doesn’t. I go back to my desk and resume gluing. My Santa is flawless. I perforate pink sheets of construction paper with a hole puncher and collect the circular remains. I place each tiny paper circle around Santa’s skin, made with peach-colored construction paper, and just like that they become freckles. There’s no brown paper in the plastic bin from which we collect our colored sheets.