by Uwem Akpan
Like she knew my thoughts, Ofonime said if I let trifles like this get to me, I would never enjoy this country. “Iyo, I’m not worried,” I lied. “I shall take care of the situation.” She pleaded I should ignore it.
“My dear childhood friend,” Usen said, “you can’t fight everything in America. What have you seen yet? I say: just concentrate on what brought you here: the fight to prove that we exist back home, so that the Yorubas, the Igbos, and the Hausa-Fulanis—the huge ethnic groups—can get off our backs. I say leave American racism to us. We’re okay.”
“Well, I was only worried about Ujai,” I said.
“No, Uncle, I’m fine,” she said, swallowing hard. “Just that I greeted them twice.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh well, it’s difficult to be a Black kid in America,” she said.
Her last words silenced everyone; the parents avoided my face. They tried to look at each other but failed at that, too, as though they could not protect me from the shame of America. The girl herself clung to me till we got to the mailboxes.
Outside, Igwat finally relaxed, giggling and clapping and waving like he was celebrating an escape from some haunted house. And by the time we got to the subway on Fiftieth Street, his sister had recouped her spirits. We were as boisterous in our goodbyes as when they had arrived in my place, and as we hugged and took more selfies, Ujai said we should have taken a selfie with Keith. When she said she had a big secret for me, I thought she was going to ask me to bring Keith along when I visited the Bronx. But Ujai pulled me down and whispered she did not like the three mosquitoes she saw in my apartment.
I promised to kill them that night.
I HURRIED HOME to try the palm wine, in spite of all my guilt of drinking, in spite of knowing Caro would not have found it funny if she knew. I pounded the 110 steps upstairs, ready to mow down anybody bent on belittling me. I drank straight from the bottle. Well, it was nothing like the real thing, but, as our people say, in the absence of an alligator a lizard will do. It was not even that potent; it tasted diluted.
Soon the water for the poundo was boiling on the cooker and the afang soup hummed in the microwave, the whiffs of home spices and flavors finally ripening all over the apartment. By the time I finished making the poundo and stood it was like a small steamy jagged white mountain in a flat plate beside the soup bowl, memories of the stairwell bullshit were almost cleansed from my head. I washed my hands and cut and worked the poundo and soup with my fingers like I had not eaten for years. Though my taste buds immediately concluded this Annang food had been Americanized, I was continually licking my fingers. I could neither resist the spinach used in place of our tropical mmung-mmung ikong nor the bales of succulent atinapa mushrooms nor the generous crumbs of deboned dried bonga fish nor the tenderly baked drumsticks.
It was only when I was almost done that I realized I was chowing down both portions instead of one, like hungry folks who suddenly remember to add salt to a meal at the end. Also discovering I was sweating, I paused to cool myself with more wine. But then one swallow continued to call on another insatiable swallow—till I tilted the soup bowl and cocked my index finger to scoop and lick everything. The bowl was as clean as though I had tongued it. I was very full, as though the balls of poundo had found their way to my toes. Sitting back, I sighed and consoled myself that Thanksgiving would be another chance to enjoy their outstanding cooking. I raised the wine bottle in a silent cheer to the immutable friendship between me and Usen, before shaking it to stir up the dregs and then, throwing back my head, poured everything down my gullet in one long gurgling swig. When the last drop hit my tongue, I smacked my lips, put down the bottle, and, out of habit, placed the empty bowl in the plate, our way of signaling that one was done.
When I washed my hands, I did not use soap. I wanted the heady smell of the fresh Cameroon pepper and palm wine to stay with me.
CHAPTER 4
I loved Starbucks
THAT FOGGY MONDAY MORNING IN LATE AUGUST, MY first day of fellowship, I left early for breakfast at Starbucks. Jet lag had not allowed me to sleep a wink. I was in a brown Nigerian senator dress. After grabbing my laptop bag, I shone my eyes through the peephole and slipped out.
I was happiest away from my block.
I readily found a café on Forty-Seventh Street and Ninth Avenue. It was as enchanting as I always thought it would be from the ads I had seen on the internet, magazines, and global TV. Seeing its green mermaid logo and intense colors all over the shop reminded me of the powerfully energetic paintings of my namesake, Ekong Emmanuel Ekefrey, the Ibibio artist. I felt at home with the café’s chirpy morning music, reminiscent of our 1970s Radio Calabar’s Music While We Eat. I stood at a corner, carefully studying what others were getting before ordering a double-smoked bacon, cheddar, and egg sandwich and Salted Caramel Mocha Grande. And, hearing another customer tell the salesperson, “No whipped cream, no foam, please!” on his order, I repeated it. I just wanted to know what salt and caramel together tasted like; only children would combine both in Ikot Ituno-Ekanem.
I sat by one of the big rectangular windows facing the avenue and read home news from my laptop while I ate. I loved my mocha; the salt did not get in the way of the syrup. And this was the perfect calm perch from where to absorb the city, I thought, instead of being sucked into Times Square’s whirlpool right away. I was disgusted by crazy NYC taxis hooting their horns so early like in Ikot Ekpene Motor Park. New York was already overwhelming; each minute, each experience, each location had the power to sink me deeper into the immensity of this city. I took refuge in watching Nigerian hip-hop on YouTube, entertained by all our dance moves.
I loved Starbucks.
I called Caro. She was still saying how jealous she was of my Starbucks’ ambience when I was startled by a gaggle of cartoon characters, Scooby-Doos and Mickey Mouses, on the street. They had zoomed against my window like I was sitting too close to a big TV screen. I fumbled my precious mocha, spilling some on my shirt. In another moment, they were gone. As I quickly dabbed the spill with napkins, the salesgirl came over to sympathize, wipe the table, and compliment my outfit.
I was not angry with the clowns. They brought me nostalgia, because as a child I had always loved them on NTA Channel 6 Aba and NTA Channel 10 Calabar in Usen’s house on the other side of the valley, the only TV of our childhood. But too many of them in one place was a bad idea; they appeared to be competing among themselves for best character rendition—and too rowdily, like they had been woken too early to cheer up all these little groggy NYC kids being dragged to kindergarten by their parents.
When I saw the clowns’ jaywalking had drawn angry hooting from taxis, quickly I excused myself from Caro, packed up my things, and, like folks trailing benevolent ekpo masqueraders, followed to see what morning show they had for the square. But the cartoon characters had not combusted into action like on TV but dawdled around, daily laborers waiting for an employer. Their attempt to be funny toward folks going to work looked like harassment, because this crowd was more serious than the weekend revelers. Everyone was in a hurry.
Not me. I looked up and around like one who had a whole open-air theater to himself, until I was bowled by the urchins in a Newsies commercial for Broadway. As they pirouetted, ghosted, and glided from building to building, I spun like a cone to follow the spectacle. Next, the rascals seemed to sprint at me from all directions as if they would fly off the screens. Then the screens momentarily darkened, burying them mid-flight. Immediately I knew I must visit Broadway soon. Then I went to wave at the King Kong lady. I expected to be picked up since I was, perhaps, the only attentive audience. But she ignored me again and picked up an empty MacDonald’s chair. I sat on a nearby chair; she went for the table. I quickly pinned it down with my butt, yet, like a witch, she had already extracted the image. “Dude, it’s too early for this stupid musical chairs!” growled a mother with a weeping child on a purple leash. “Go fucking get yourself a job or somethin
g, will you?” I was too disgusted with her and wanted to scream at her to carry her child instead. I had never seen a child on a leash before. But I shrugged and ignored the busybody.
AT VANDERBILT and Forty-Seventh Street, I rode an elevator to Andrew & Thompson, my heart swelling with joy. I’m finally here! I told myself several times to calm down. The place was even smaller than I had thought, one big square room partitioned into cubicles and fringed by a few offices and conference rooms. The walls were lined by shelves and art, and the floor had a blue-black carpet. It smelled of new books. Everyone was excited to see me. Molly was at a meeting in her office when I arrived, but the rest had risen to the occasion, like they had been waiting for me for years.
My new colleagues were all so nice and sweet. They were modest about their publishing house and, in self-deprecating humor, they merely pointed to the water fountain and the restroom in the hallway and the big printer in one of the conference rooms in the name of showing me around. Except for a few remarks about the uniqueness of my accent, I could not have found a warmer reception in my village.
Still, I was a bit more nervous than I needed to be on the first day of work, culture shock or not. Slowly it began to register that it was the first time in my life I had inhabited this kind of white space. While I could hope to avoid my two Hell’s Kitchen neighbors, this feeling of being enclosed in a white bubble high up here in an NYC skyscraper was really out of this world, as it were. It was not the New York I had come to know in the past two days. When I looked out the window, my sight was beaten back by fog, and when I glanced at my body it was as though I myself had become darker.
Moreover, I did not like the fact that I was already blaming myself for my shock. When my eyes kept lashing the hallway where the nearest thing to diversity hung, Henri Matisse’s The Moroccans, I knew I was allowing myself to be distracted by mere skin color, instead of appreciating the warmth of my new friends and environment.
So I exhaled and willed myself to calm down as they showed me my cubicle, which was in the nearest cluster of cubicles by Molly’s office. On the desk was my schedule of rotations through the publishing house’s various departments, starting with editorial.
We were all still gathered around my cubicle chatting about my first impressions of America, Nigerian hip-hop, and the Nollywood movie industry and the great strides of the American national women’s soccer team when Molly emerged from her meeting and gave me a great hug and complimented me on my height. She was a petite white lady with a beautiful face, cropped blond hair, and freckled skin, and great perfume. She was as fiery in person as she was on the phone. I also liked her immediately because her heels rolled her little waist like a former girlfriend of mine’s. And from the reaction of everyone, I knew straightaway she was a good boss.
“Hey, I want to add my voice to the enthusiastic welcome of everyone here!” Molly said before introducing me to those she was meeting with, Angela Stevens and Jack Cane, from the marketing and publicity departments, respectively. In a very short time, I already knew Angela was loquacious and gesticulated a lot when she talked, while Jack was quiet and introspective. Angela was taller than everyone except me. She was in her early sixties, with long brown hair. I also thought I got the measure of her expressive personality when a visitor from another publishing house stared at me like I was out of place; she quickly asked the guy to leave, that they were in the midst of a private reception for me. Jack, who was in his mid-thirties, nodded and gave her a thumbs-up. He had a beard that was redder than his hair. He liked to stroke the beard like it might catch fire, and his sense of humor came through the little he said.
THEN MOLLY LED ME into her office and closed the door. We sat down in a red velvet couch by the wall, while her hobo bag full of manuscripts and a handbag were on her desk. I thanked her again for all she had done to bring me here and mentioned how cool everyone was. Of course, when she asked how New York was treating me, I talked up Starbucks like I lived there. “Oh, New York is splendid, I must admit!” I concluded.
“Marvelous!” she said. “Are you hearing from your folks back home?”
“Yes, yes, even my Bronx folks visited yesterday. The afang soup really made me feel at home.”
“Wow, how nice! By the way, could I offer you some water or something?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”
“Do you like your apartment’s kitchen bath in reality as you did on the phone?”
“Even more, I’d say.”
“Wonderful! Then you’re really settling into the city.”
“Even I surprise myself. Everything is so different here—big, intense!”
“Well, Andrew & Thompson is small, right?”
“And that suits me just fine.”
“Oh, well, I’ve been there, done that at the big publishers, you know,” she said, leaning back and pouring out a résumé that seemed to have taken her through all the powerful publishing houses already.
She said she had started off at Little, Brown and Company. Then she moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, or FSG, which she said was a branch of Macmillan, the popular one in Africa. She was enjoying her best stint there surrounded by a brilliant group of editors, but then Alfred Knopf tempted her away with higher pay. But she did not like her new bosses and ended up with Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins, where she was fired within months. Next, Penguin hired her, but then it became Penguin Random House and someone who engineered her firing at Harper Wave became her boss and squeezed her ass till she lost her thrill for making books. She said then she became depressed because nobody would speak up for her, and when word got back to her nemesis that she was scouting for a new job, things only got worse. Then she got fired. “Oh well, there are worse tales out there,” Molly said, shrugging and laughing.
She freelanced for six months before moving to Andrew & Thompson three years ago, where she said she was happy to have more editorial freedom, though they did not have the kind of money those other empires paid to their prized authors or put into publicizing their books. “So, yep, we’ll get there someday,” she concluded, giggling. “No stress, the most important thing is we’re publishing really cool books and turning heads and winning prizes. Maybe financial rewards will follow, who knows?”
When she saw how surprised I was at her odyssey, she said American publishing was like that, cutthroat and insular, and that our Nigerian version would be this way once we had serious competition. “Everyone gets fired or poached, except the owners!” she joked. “Look, people move so much it’s safe to say you have no permanent enemies. My only big regret was always leaving the authors I signed up. You work so hard to land the newest talent and establish a bond. And then, boom, you’re gone. How do they know their next editor will share your enthusiasm? But I think it’s worse when you’re fired. You cry twice!”
“That’s so sad,” I said, squirming.
“Well, relationships are everything. The life of an editor is such that you’ll have to run into everyone in the endless meet-and-greets, prize ceremonies, readings, festivals, end-of-year parties, and so on. If you don’t recover quickly, or if you bitch too loudly, you’re done.” That infectious laugh I used to hear over the phone now filled the room. “By the way, you’ll attend our editorial meetings, which are every two weeks. So, apart from editing your big anthology, you’ll read some of our manuscripts for a second or third opinion.”
“Oh, I really look forward to that! It will also give me a break from our crazy war stories and minority woes. You know, I must say I’m a bit nervous about the anthology.”
“Who wouldn’t be? But you’ll be okay. I believe you have plenty of motivation to edit these stories. I like the table of contents you emailed to me. It’s great.
“By the way, I forgot to tell you on Saturday where I got the war details to fight off the JFK folks and their stupid questions about your anthology …!” She brought out a copy of Chinua Achebe’s recent Biafran War memoir There Was a Country and brandished
it before me.
“Oh, you’ve read it?” I said, pulling up in surprise. “Some of the stories I’m editing are a direct reaction to the book!”
“This also helped me write your appeal letter to the congressman.”
Molly said There Was a Country was one of the books the Columbia University professor who wrote one of the Annangs-exist attestation letters had recommended to her. She said it was an easy choice for her because ever since she read Things Fall Apart in high school, she had always loved Achebe’s beautiful and spare style. I totally agreed with her, though I did not like how the weight of the war had already blighted our first meeting.
She praised the book for its capture of the trauma of the Achebes and their fellow Igbos from the 1966 genocide to the war to the evil postwar atmosphere of distrust. I said, yes, our murderous Nigerian government wanted to wipe out his family and had bombed his wartime publishing house, so he had to move his young family often to stay alive.
“Someday,” Molly said, “you’ll tell me whether you agree with how, as a Biafran War ambassador or propagandist, Achebe presented Biafra. It seems a different place altogether from the brutally divided Biafra of your project.”
“You’re totally right,” I said. “But now I’m not in the mood to dig into Achebe’s Biafra—this Igbo thing. They said it was about self-determination, independence, freedom of worship, freedom from genocide, all those noble things, but to us it seems just a grab for power and oil money. My country hasn’t recovered from the war yet. Or my family! Don’t ask me to talk about what happened to my father.”
“Your father …?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, then your project is more personal than I’d imagined! I’m sorry to hear that.”