I remember the summer day in 1969 when astronauts first landed on the moon. A white high school classmate of mine confessed that in spite of the Vietnam War the moon landing made him proud to be an American. My shock extinguished the glow of his liberalism for the day. That same afternoon, my parents said I had to get a haircut. At the barbershop in the black neighborhood a customer said the moon walk had been faked, that the Man was just trying to distract us. Not everyone agreed that the moon shot was a hoax, but there were mutterings of assent that the money would have been better spent on earth. It was my turn to shut up. My uncle was in the Digital Computation Group of the Apollo project, maybe the only black person involved in the moon landing, my quota-conscious but proud father said.
The barbershop was the only forum of black populist feeling I knew, and I was careful to avoid conversation that might reveal I did not fit in. My double consciousness was not that as expressed by Du Bois, but the elementary dual existence Edmund Gosse remembered in Father and Son (1907). While he kneeled and prayed, a captive of his rigid upbringing, there was another self, unsuspected by anyone in his religious life, who managed to thrive on imaginative scraps. Gosse found a companion and confidant in himself. A secret could belong to him and to the somebody who lived in the same body with him. The two of them, Gosse and the sympathizer in his breast, could talk to each other and offer solace. There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
* * *
Sometimes I think that Anglophilia was the first foreign language I learned. However, I couldn’t pick up a royal history without my parents reminding me that the British were among the most racist people on earth, second only to the Japanese. Elizabeth Tudor commanded that a proclamation be drawn up intended to expel blacks from her kingdom. Everyone except immigration officials at Heathrow knew that more people were trying to leave Britain than were trying to get into it. My parents’ disapproval of my fanciful reading matter bore the traces of their brief careers as dissenters on black campuses back during World War II.
After Ethiopia, Spain, and Roosevelt’s refusal to lift immigration controls, there had been a sort of murky coolness toward the war effort among some black students, a private withholding of support for the anti-fascist rhetoric, because the democracies they were being exhorted to defend were, to them, imperialist powers. Then, too, the U.S. Army was segregated, and, in spite of Joe Louis, my father dodged the troopships for as long as he could.
The journalist Murray Kempton, who served in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II, once told me that for most white boys the war had been their only chance to go someplace and meet people different from themselves. On the other hand, the stories I heard from my father featured white second lieutenants putting at risk the black squads they loathed being in command of—which had an echo during the Vietnam War in rumors of white officers being fragged by their men—and mobs waiting outside dance halls in not-so-small Italian towns to try to punish black soldiers for flirting with local girls.
My father tried to tell me as he slipped condoms into my shaving kit when I packed for my first trip abroad that I would do well not to take Europe too seriously, and certainly not at its own word. The Grand Tour was fine as a sowing of wild oats, but the solutions I sought were not in going away, and the away I was looking for was not in Europe. And yet, in those days, a black kid’s going to study in Europe was spoken of as having achieved something in the white world. A black kid’s going to Africa was whispered about as having elected to do something sacrificial.
I was just going on holiday, and the ambivalence my parents felt was akin to being unsure about having given permission for an unsupervised camping trip. I suppose for blacks of my mother and father’s generation, letting your kids go off to Europe was a kind of doing the right thing, giving them the same advantages white kids had, though their duty and wish to be protective also put them in the position of having to be the bad guys, the ones who warned that Europe wasn’t just old buildings and art, it was also history and people, and racism didn’t disappear at passport control at JFK.
My father’s attitude was typical, I thought, of his generation, as VE Day and as out-of-date as condoms, silk stockings, or telling recalcitrant children at the dinner table to meditate on starving children in Europe. Vietnam and the American Century hadn’t absolved Europe of its past, but compared to the policies of the U.S. government, the villainies of Europe were receding, regardless of the bashing of Pakistanis in Britain. Draft dodgers in Sweden, De Gaulle’s humiliation in ’68—liberal culture appeared to be flourishing in Europe. One day I would realize that the image of Europe that I imbibed as a teenager, nurtured through university, and had recourse to as a young adult was just as old-fashioned, incomplete, and limited, as much a relic of postwar arrangements, the Occupation, and the Marshall Plan as the image of black soldiers distributing chocolate and chewing gum to grimy blond waifs.
* * *
When I left Indiana, I ended up in New York City and stuck around for a decade or so. The moves—or the not moving, the passivity—were as casual and chaotic as the times could make them. The searing dinner-table battles with those who had kept futile vigil over my development, the classroom analyses, the late-night dormitory vows—all that high-mindedness about life was lost in an unsurprising kind of molting. Not too long ago I asked a friend from those New Wave days, a black woman who had spent some of that time in Paris, what had happened to all those years. “We smoked up quite a few of them,” she said. Because I was from the Midwest, New York had the eroticism of a foreign country. Every dive was crammed with the Flying Dutchmen of internal exile. As Langston Hughes said of the Harlem Renaissance, I had a swell time while it lasted.
What was not casual were the shifts in the city under my feet: the real estate squeeze, the “semantic adventurism” of neoconservatives, the coming of crack cocaine, the terror of AIDS. Once, in 1983, I got off the plane from Berlin and took the subway into Manhattan. I read The Village Voice over the shoulder of another passenger. On the cover was a photo of Klaus Nomi, a downtown rock star whose band I often went to hear. The story wasn’t the interview I’d expected. It was an obituary saying he’d died of AIDS. I sometimes think of a line from Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), about the game the girls in his mother’s village played based on the stations of a woman’s life: “Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead.”
Whenever I could get abroad for a summer holiday—if I had the time, I didn’t have the money; if I had the money, I didn’t have the time—I was testing places, auditioning places, imagining the shape of old habits pursued through endless days in new places. When you are a visitor, you can make the mistake of thinking the life you’re visiting would be the life you’d have if you lived there. I became afraid of getting stuck, of not being able to get out before it was too late, before I was too old for the marginal life, which was the only one I could afford. I was waiting for the fleeting notion that would lead me somewhere, for the fortuitous meeting that would look in retrospect like destiny.
I was jealous of the friend who worked as a nurse but quit her job to open an herbal medicine shop in Jamaica, of the graduate students who packed unfinished dissertations for permanent vacation in Belize, of the musicologist last heard of in the rain forest of the Central African Republic. “The man who loves his homeland is a beginner; he to whom every soil is as his own is strong; but he is perfect for whom the entire world is a foreign country,” Hugh of St. Victor said. For the brave, the possibilities were wide; for the timid, those of us dependent on all-night delis, neon, and telephones, the choices were limited.
I said the point was to make yourself up as you went along, but I was interested in where it was possible to reproduce the way I already lived: side streets where everyone wore black, danced all night, or marched in the mornings in favor of disarmament, and tucked within that bohemian zone of commiseration a room from which I could contemplate the variousness of the world and congratulate myself for doing so. I had the provincial�
��s belief that an interesting life could take place only in a great metropolis. What I needed from a city were enough corners to lose myself in.
Because whole peoples, countries, and cities were not knowable, I considered where I could go with as much gravity as if discussing the merits of clubs: the more popular it was, the less attractive it was. Paris, like the Mudd Club, was overrun, and as a place to fall apart it had long been a cliché for blacks, a dream that had made as many comebacks as Josephine Baker. Amsterdam, like the Michael Todd Room upstairs at the Palladium, had also been done to death. An Irish trumpet player on his way back to Abidjan almost convinced me that it had become the new capital of chill. A Nigerian taxi driver didn’t know how enticing it was to hear, as he drove me along a Manhattan street, that Lagos was the most dangerous city on earth. The hardest thing about Berlin was getting there.
* * *
Your historical moment, the era that forged your consciousness, sets you up, makes you out a chump, a fall guy. On the night of November 9, 1989, when I climbed onto the Berlin Wall, when I walked under the Brandenburg Gate, I realized, watching the drunken scenes of reunion all around me, that the postwar occupation of Berlin had come to an end. Your troops can go home, the tears said. I felt like an American for the first time in my life. That is, I was not entirely pleased to have the arrogance of my passport diminished. And then Berlin became a German town. The hard-edged, international city dissolved.
A month before the Wall went down, on the day when six thousand students marched in Leipzig to demand free speech, two hundred thousand people assembled in Rome to demonstrate against racist attacks, one of which, in southern Italy, had resulted in the death of six Africans. The troubles in France had long been in the news. Sometimes, after German unification, alone at night on the streets, I surprised myself that I hurried. But the overnight seriousness of change exposed as irrelevant my posture of alienated sensibility. I could be vulnerable to assault, but in those days of anti-foreigner violence, I was unmolested, because it was clear to resentful German youth from the way I was dressed that I was American. It had almost been like I was playing make-believe: bad-mouthing the United States, but saved because I was a U.S. citizen. Even as a black American, I had more power than those who looked for foreigners to beat up. I was also not an exile. Though I’d been very solemn with myself about my flight from the policies of successive Republican administrations, I had no right to call myself an exile. I’d learned from people I met—writers from South Africa and Yugoslavia, musicians from Russia, a historian from Chile, a student from Iran, an engineer from Ghana, an actor from Uganda, a farmer from Bangladesh—that it was not a status I should have been in a rush to claim.
Long before anyone thought the Wall would fall so easily, a man from South Africa, an Afrikaner, a member of the African National Congress who had been in prison, looked out at the Berlin streets and said to me, “Forget Europe, brother. Africa’s the place.” I took his advice as an expression of passionate homelessness on his part—and hope: he had information that Mandela was to be released in a few months’ time. But he’d turned the tables on me. That was my line, and he was white. It was okay for me to talk about Herder, but it wasn’t okay for a white to hold forth about Fanon, in a way that my presence in a white environment was merely testing its egalitarianism, but a white person’s presence in a black environment signaled another agent, however hip, of exploitation, because integration seldom worked both ways. I was surprised to hear an Afrikaner, even a radical one, speak as though he really thought of himself as an African. I’d always thought that Africa was mine, even when I wasn’t using it, and didn’t know how to take his offer to share it with me.
The moral intensity of his cause said he wasn’t telling me to go back and help my people, in the way white professors used to tell black students to go back and teach in the cotton fields of the South, as if their black students couldn’t find purpose up North. He was telling me something that he thought would be a benefit to me. It was harder not to feel he had confronted me with one of those challenges of loyalty and identification I sometimes faced back in the States, back when there were the beginnings of that aura of vindication of everything having to do with Africa, which was a form of not taking the subject as seriously as it deserved. I had an inkling of how frustrated Wright must have been when people told him that intellectually there was nothing for him in Europe; how impatient Baldwin became when his critics said he’d gone to Europe to forget he was black. You could still find a sort of prejudice among black people against European expatriatism, as if it were only a rung below passing for white.
Meanwhile, as I sat brooding in a café, trying to identify some old song, Europe changed, or it went back to something it had been before the NATO–Warsaw Pact lid was clamped on. I was appalled to hear a Czech diplomat, one of the early dissidents from Charta 77, insist—this was after the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution had dissipated—that while watching a group of children at play in Prague, she’d noticed that a girl from India, adopted when a baby, behaved differently from the others, and the girl did so because she was answering some cultural siren in her genes. I’d never liked that way of assigning innate behavioral characteristics to whole nations or groups. The work of every serious social scientist militated against it. Now that even the prettiest claims of ethnicity have helped erode belief in the possibility of a secular, nonracial society, I feel I can’t find a place in the world anymore.
* * *
On the night in 1993 when it was announced that Berlin had lost the competition to host the Olympics in the year 2000, I ran into an acquaintance, a black guy from the United States. He was standing under a lit awning, with a beer in his hand. He always seemed to have a magical beer, one that never emptied no matter how long the night, unless you were buying. I asked him what he was up to and went on automatic pilot as his explanation revealed that he was up to what he had been up to when I was first introduced to him five years before. Back then he was three years older than I was. In the meantime, he somehow had become two years my junior.
In the halcyon days when the Berlin Wall made the city a cushioned cradle for some, one of the things American artists said about other American artists was that they’d come to West Berlin to have the careers they’d been unable to make back in the States. Everyone accused everyone else of running a con. But that night, with much gloating being indulged in by members of several anti-Olympics groups, looking at the black American sipping his bottomless beer and tugging at his X cap that hid his hairline, I wondered if the con wasn’t actually a self-deception.
Youth is already a very extended period for middle-class Americans, and going abroad was a way of keeping this trouble-free phase going a bit longer. When young, you are in a state of becoming, always on the verge. Knocking a few years off his age was, for my fellow countryman, a way of reassuring himself that what he would become—even his having to become something—was still comfortably in the distance, somewhere around the corner. He had postponed that moment when you wake up and face the fact that the life to come is no longer in the misty future, when you sit up and have to tell yourself that you have indeed made a life, that you are in it, that it is what it is. Nothing is more infantile-making of a man than his organizing his life around the avoidance of suffering, because, of course, that is the one thing you cannot avoid.
We got on, the old youngster and I, because we were both African-American, and there was between us something of what Baldwin said about a black not spoiling another black’s hustle in front of whites. A big part of the old youngster’s act had been to remind the Germans how German they were, and so when we reviewed the latest report of a fight between neo-Nazis and refugees, he repeated with a shrug, “They’re German.” I was sure that the bored expressions in East Berlin techno clubs were also visible in London, Marseilles, in Bensonhurst, New York. I started to say that I didn’t understand this new generation—and sounded like every adult who’d ever thought every kid was
the same. More of my sentences began, “In my day…” It was like the faint tolling of a bell.
Some Pakistanis satisfied with life in New Jersey told Salman Rushdie that they knew there was racism in the United States, but they weren’t the objects of it. This had ceased to be a contract between black Americans and Europe ages ago. Black Americans could trust the evidence of their own eyes: that these countries weren’t exclusively white anyway. This is the defining aspect of postwar Europe, however slow or melancholy the recognition has been for some. A black German friend—her mother was born in Berlin, her father in Liberia—told me that white Germans didn’t like it when she returned their compliments and said they also spoke excellent German.
The door had been blown off the deep freeze for many, leaving them exposed. Being away from the United States has changed—if your “away” is Western Europe and not, say, a prawn farm in the Philippines. Telephones, fax machines, CNN, film, the prevalence of English as a tool, and international newspaper distribution have made being cut off a conscious choice. These days being away, in Europe, requires determined immersion, an illusionist’s trick, one accomplished by dropping out twice: leaving the United States and then burying yourself in your someplace else when you land.
Being away has also changed in the universality of shopping mall, boutique, and McDonald’s culture, though, as has been noted often, modernization is no longer synonymous with Americanization. American culture doesn’t have the influence in Europe it once had, though I heard two German girls from Leipzig rap in the most extraordinary fashion, and there is always the appetite for American film. Not nothing. But Americans no longer carry the authority of coming from where they do. The decline in U.S. prestige was accelerated by the dollar’s slide after 1985. Exchanging dollars used to be like collecting Lotto winnings. Virgil Thomson concluded a preface to a volume of his memoirs about his charmed circle by reminding his readers that he was talking about a time when their pennies were like dollars. Read it and weep, he said. The age of young Americans going to Europe to live cheaply and to fill their heads with things that have no utilitarian value may be fading. The new generation of American expatriates seems very entrepreneurial. They are driving up prices in Prague, jogging in Ho Chi Minh City, publishing collegiate-bright English-language newspapers in Moscow, and making deals to import butter in the lobbies of hard-currency St. Petersburg hotels. Concurrently, the places to get away to have seemingly multiplied. I listened to a young man describe the job he’d accepted at an economics institute in Kazakhstan and felt like an old man rocking on a porch.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 28