Into the Go Slow

by Bridgett M. Davis

  “I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell her,” insisted Regina.

  “Neither do I,” Angie echoed.

  Nigel raised his palms to the sky, looked at Angie. “What do you want me to say?”

  Regina narrowed her eyes. “Is this why you made us wait and not go back to Kenya?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “So you could meet up with Angie, here?”

  “You know I can’t go back to Kenya until I get my grades in,” he said. “And I told you, she walked into my office that day out of nowhere. She just appeared.”

  “I know that’s what you told me, but—”

  “It’s true,” said Angie. “I just appeared.”

  Regina looked at Angie as if seeing her for the first time. “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” Now Angie was getting an attitude.

  “And by the way,” said Nigel. “You were thrilled to finally leave Kenya, so don’t act like you were rushing to get back.”

  “No! Get it right.” Regina placed her mug onto the coffee table with a dull thud. “I didn’t have a problem with Kenya per se. I just didn’t like those men you were hanging out with. Especially Harry!”

  “I told you then, I’m telling you now,” said Nigel. “You’re paranoid.”

  She turned to Angie. “It’s like a little club of foreign correspondents, all white men of course, except for Nigel. All from Europe and Australia, all thinking they’re on some kind of native-watching safari.”

  “Regina doesn’t like my friends in the press corps because they’re not all touchy-feely.”

  “I don’t like them because they’re racist beasts.”

  Nigel sighed. “Here we go.”

  “They are so condescending to the Africans.” Regina paused. “Even though they don’t mind sleeping with the local women.”

  “I don’t see those women complaining,” said Nigel.

  She cut her eyes at him. “Are you trying to tell me something, Nigel?”

  “Stop it. Angie does not want to hear this.”

  Actually, she did. Angie felt immense satisfaction in the fact that these two were not blissfully in love.

  Regina was on a course now, hurdling forward, unable to stop. “From the day we hooked up in Kenya, everybody treated us like we were some freak couple,” she said to Angie. “Because we’re both black American,”

  “That’s how you saw it,” he chimed in. “Not me.”

  Regina ignored him. “They basically told Nigel he was crazy not to sleep with the pretty Kenyan and Somalian girls, or better yet, the wild white girls who hang around all the time. You know, the peace corps backpacking types who finally get to have their black-man adventure.”

  “OK Regina, enough.”

  “I’m just telling it like it is, as you love to say.”

  “Then tell it like it really is,” said Nigel. “You don’t like those guys in the press corps because they call it the way they see it.”

  “Funny how everybody ends up seeing the same thing,” said Regina. “And how does that happen?” She counted on her fingers, held aloft. “You hang around each other, you share the same sources, the same drivers. And I’m sure you’re all sharing the same women. I guess you do come to the same conclusions.”

  Nigel glared at her. “That was unnecessary.”

  “Oh come on, Nigel! You think I didn’t know?”

  “Shut up, Regina.”

  “Just admit it!”

  Nigel fell back hard in the chair; it rocked wildly. “You’re just pissed that I refuse to write a goddamn human-interest story about some middle-class black girl who decides she wants to join a Kenyan tribe. I’m covering disease and war and famine in one desperate country after another. I’m covering resistance and mass murder. So I can’t see out of those rose-colored glasses you wear. Shit is foggy as a motherfucker when I put them on.”

  “My profile of that girl was a very good piece!” yelled Regina.

  Angie couldn’t believe she was witnessing this. Was there no escaping folks’ domestic dysfunction in Lagos?

  “Like I said, editors want to hear one story out of Africa.” Nigel smirked. “And that sure as hell ain’t it.”

  Regina plopped back onto the sofa, arms folded. “Well, that’s the story I want to tell.”

  “And thank God you’re traveling on my dime, ‘cause otherwise you wouldn’t be able to survive on those cute little feature articles that you wanna tell.”

  “Is that what you think of them?” Regina’s face crumbled. “They’re cute?” Abruptly, she stood. “If you’ll excuse me.” She stalked toward the bedroom.

  “Regina,” he said to her back. “It’s not personal.”

  She looked back at him over her shoulder. “Fuck you.”

  She closed the door gently behind her. Nigel rubbed his hand down his face.

  “Nothing like a rich and trusting relationship,” said Angie.

  He looked at her through his fingers. “I don’t remember you as sarcastic.”

  “And I don’t remember you as so deceptive.”

  “It’s not how it looks.”

  He glanced at the closed door, rose slowly, like a reluctant escort. “I’ll be back.”

  He entered. She could hear their muffled voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying. She got up, turned down Steely Dan, tip-toed closer, put her ear to the door. She heard a sob. Soon enough, she couldn’t hear anything, so she moved over to the window and waited. The lagoon front had thinned out and she imagined clusters of Nigerian students gathered in the campus cafeteria, shoving jollof rice into their mouths, all talking at once, carefree. She waited for the door to open, her anxiousness growing as she pictured Nigel and Regina in each other’s arms, turned on by the thrill of make-up sex with her just outside. She thought of her childhood playroom and its closed door, of turned-over furniture, smudges of chocolate on the walls, that smell.

  She left.

  FIFTEEN

  Nigel found her several minutes later. Along the shore, a tree trunk had defiantly climbed out of the earth, reaching for escape, its branches dangling so low bottom leaves tickled the lagoon’s surface. The day had peeled back to dusk.

  He sat beside her on the water’s edge. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  “That must have been some pick-up line,” she said. “’You look like a girl who could use a fellowship and baby, I got one for you.’”

  “It wasn’t like that. She came before the fellowship. And she really is deserving. Despite her cutesy articles.”

  “Save it,” snapped Angie.

  From an open window somewhere came Whitney’s faint vocals. Didn’t we almost have it all? When love was all we had worth giving.

  “I take it she’s not going to Fela’s club tonight.”

  “No, she is not. But I’m still going with you.”

  “Do you love her?” asked Angie.

  Nigel shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I think so, yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Why do you love her?” she repeated.

  He pulled out the pack of cigarettes from his shirt’s breast pocket. “She’s loyal. I like that.”

  “Are you loyal?”

  “I’m trying to be.”

  “Do you love her more than you loved Ella?”

  He thumped the bottom of the pack. “There’s no comparison.”

  Angie needed to hear this right now. “Go on.”

  “You were there.” He pulled out a cigarette, worried it between his fingers. “You saw us.”

  In fact, the last time Angie had seen them together was at Ella’s one-year anniversary party. She thought about her sister’s giddiness that day, how Nigel kept leaning over, whisp
ering in her ear. How everyone watched them while pretending not to. She told Nigel about her memory. “What was it like to see her again, after all that time?”

  “Amazing.” Nigel pulled out his lighter. “She looked good, you know? I hadn’t seen her in four years! I was so happy that she’d gotten herself together. I couldn’t wait for the party to be over so we could jump in my car, be alone.”

  “I remember that.” She also remembered her mother’s concern.

  Nigel cupped his hand around the fledging flame as he lit his cigarette. He took a puff, blew out. “We were hungry for each other. I never felt so much desire in my life. We did it right there in the car.”

  He pulled on the cigarette again, as if extracting memories from it. “We just rode around, ended up in Greektown, sat at one of those all-night diners and started reminiscing about the Lagos trip, how extraordinary it was, how much fun we had, how we both missed that, that energy of the continent. She told me she’d stayed in touch with this couple we met at FESTAC—Brenda and Chris. How they’d gotten married after graduation, and moved back to Nigeria. She said Brenda told her about all the new opportunities there, what with a civilian president and all. She said black Americans were moving there, taking advantage of opportunities they didn’t have in the US. It sounded exciting.” He took another puff, made a little whistle sound as he exhaled through pursed lips. “It sounded like back in the day, you know? When all these black folks moved to Ghana in droves, nation-building with Nkrumah, kicking it with Du Bois and shit. I always wished I could’ve been part of something like that. This felt like my chance. And it sure as hell sounded better than staying in Detroit. Detroit was dead.”

  “What do you mean ‘dead?’” asked Angie. What had she been too young to notice? What had she missed?

  “I mean nothing was happening there except for Reaganomics and racist talk about welfare queens; plus crack thrown up in our neighborhoods, and with it a shit-load of gang violence. Meanwhile, black folks who had something going on? Seemed like all they wanted to do was become motherfuckin’ black yuppies. Buppies. Depressing shit.”

  The Black Power movement, Nigel said, which had limped along in the seventies, was nonexistent. All the big brothers and sisters they’d admired? In the ground, locked up, or fucked up. Huey Newton was a drug addict, Eldridge Cleaver was a Republican. Bobby Seale was denouncing guns and wearing three-piece suits. And Assata Shakur was still hiding out in Cuba. Killer cops were on a rampage in the city’s ghettos. And with Reagan in office, white supremacist groups flourished. Life for black folks in America was hazardous, pure and simple.

  “We were sitting in that diner eating our Greek salads, and Ella said, ‘I cannot stay here and stay clean. I have to leave. I’m going back to Nigeria.’ I was like, ‘How you gonna do that?’ She said she had this insurance money from your father and suddenly it was a real possibility. I sure as hell didn’t have nothing going on. I was working at WJLB, doing programming, not really digging it.” He took another drag. “I looked at Ella across that table and she looked, I don’t know, beautiful. I wanted to be with her again, so badly. I told her, ‘I’ll come with you.’”

  He looked over at Angie. “She said she wanted to go to your high school graduation; after that we could split. But not before she saw her baby sister graduate.”

  A flutter of emotion flew around her chest like a little bird trapped inside a closet. After the ceremony, Ella had scrawled a note in Angie’s yearbook. “The world will be hearing great things from you one day soon.”

  “We left on June 21,” continued Nigel. “She liked that date, said it always felt like New Year’s Day to her, because it was the first day of summer, the longest day of the year. Solstice. And we both decided it meant something symbolic, this day of new beginnings.” He paused, shook his head. “When I think back, it sounds crazy. We didn’t really know anybody in Lagos and we didn’t really know each other that well, not after all those years apart. But we had once shared something special and we wanted it back. We wanted to be part of something magical again.”

  When he fell quiet, Angie gently prodded him. “Go on,” she whispered.

  He nodded. “Within a couple weeks, we were staying with Chris and Brenda.” He flicked his cigarette into the lagoon. “They’d just moved into this nice big house, so they had plenty of room. Chris was working for a bank by day and for The Lagos Voice by night, and on weekends. You could see The Voice was different—new and radical. We both got involved with it, and that placed us in this whole scene of progressive folks—writers and artists and journalists, cool expats. Here was a genuine Pan-African movement.” Nigel smiled. “And we were up in it! Ella was really proud of that, that we’d found our tribe so to speak. That we’d gotten it right.”

  “It meant a lot to her, getting things right,” Angie said, as she thought of those endless hours Ella spent on top of racehorses, practicing over and over, their father pushing her to do even better.

  “Yeah, she said her dad inspired her to be that way,” Nigel noted, as if reading Angie’s thoughts. “She was so determined to do what he’d done. To find this thing to do with her life that she loved the way he loved training horses. She said to me once, ‘While all those other black men in Detroit were busy putting left doors on Chryslers? My father was out on the track, making winners.’ That’s what she wanted to do, be distinctive, leave her mark, be a dynamic force in the world.”

  Angie wondered again what that meant for her, what it was she could make.

  “The paper was just a few months old when we got here,” continued Nigel. “And scrappy. They had this little office in Surulere, these manual Portuguese typewriters, one telephone line. But ah, man! They’d already caused a stir, ‘cause for the first time here was a truly independent press, produced by all these well-educated Nigerians, with Western models of what a newspaper could be. Folks who’d been reading the Guardian and the New York Times. Plus it looked good. Completely distinguished itself from those other Lagos dailies with their crooked, hysterical typeface and giant tabloid headlines and typos galore. The Voice had clean lines, Helvetica type, a sophisticated blue banner.”

  “I could see that from the clippings she sent me,” said Angie. She wanted to be part of the story.

  “It was the journalism that really distinguished it though,” Nigel pointed out. “No silly stories about standing fans being stolen from some government office, no Page Six girls in bikinis. Here were brave folks doing serious, risky stories, willing to call out corrupt leaders. I started doing what we called diaspora stories, pieces that really linked the struggle across different African countries. And Ella? She’d never even thought about journalism before, but she found she had a knack for it. Interviews were her specialty. She could get Nigerian women to open up, really talk to her. “ He glanced at Angie. “Do you know about her baby-formula exposé?”

  “Yes. But tell me more.”

  “Well, that story caused a serious little brouhaha. She’d been talking to all these different Nigerian mothers about their lives, and noticed that every one of them was feeding their babies Similac. OK, that was strange. In Africa? She just happened to pick up one of the cans, started reading it. Shit was expired. That led her to all the kiosks in the markets around town, and damned if all of them weren’t expired. She faxed a letter to UNESCO, found out the shit was banned in Europe and the US. From there, she wrote a killer investigative piece.”

  Nigel moved his hand across the air. “Jide ran it on the front page.” Angie could see the headline. “And that itself was revolutionary, to put a woman’s issue on the front of a Nigerian newspaper? And a scandalous one? Showing government culpability? Jide was like ‘You’ll be our women’s issues reporter’ and Ella was like, ‘You know what? Let’s take this to a new level: Give me an entire page.’ And he did.”

  “Woman to Woman,” said Angie, proud of that knowledge.

  Nigel’s
eyes flashed with remembrance. “Yep! Holy shit, she was off and running then. She took it so seriously, like every article she wrote was gonna prepare Nigerian women for nation-building. She’d spend hours in that damn newsroom. I’d try to pull her out to go eat or whatever, but she wouldn’t come. She’d sleep in there some nights, curled up on a lumpy sofa in the back.” He smiled. “But she loved it. She was so into it, I swear she glowed.”

  Angie hugged her knees to her chest. “The way you describe her, that’s just how I imagined her life here.”

  “Oh, she was totally in her element,” he said. “The wild thing is, you really couldn’t’ tell Ella wasn’t Nigerian either, especially after she got her hair braided. She liked to wear tops and skirts made out of native fabric, right? So she looked more authentic than a lot of the educated Nigerian women, like Lola, who did the whole Western thing. Somebody was always asking her whether she was Igbo or Yoruba. She loved that.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?” Angie ached for an image. “Did you take any?”

  “Funny thing, we didn’t really stop to do that. We were so busy! We arrived just weeks before the country’s first free elections. The first time Shagari had gotten into office, the whole thing had been handled by the military and they used some convoluted vote-counting system that no one could figure out. Court ended up deciding who won the election. Can you imagine that shit happening in the US? Judges deciding who gets to be president? Anyway, this time it was gonna be through a truly democratic process. “

  “Oh.” She couldn’t understand how no one stopped to snap one picture.

  Nigel kept talking. “There was this electricity in the air! It’s hard to explain what it felt like to be part of something big, where so much was genuinely at stake. Not like the presidential elections in the States, where one privileged white man replaces another. Same ol’, same ol’. We were totally caught up in the excitement of it! To me and Ella, it felt like this rare and precious gift, seeing a black man elected president. We were part of a whole milieu of folks, part of this—” He paused for a moment, searching for the right word. “This intelligencia, helping a fledgling African country develop into greatness.” He grinned. “And since Nigerians know how to party, we did a lot of that! Mostly highlife parties, where they had multicolored lights strewn across back roads, giant speakers blaring, food and liquor galore. We danced our butts off! Everybody accepted us, and that’s what Ella loved. She said to me, ‘Here, I’m not just some big, tall, dark, black girl too smart for her own good. Here, I’m just me.’ She couldn’t get enough of the whole scene. That’s when we became regulars at Fela’s club too, hanging out there until three, four in the morning.”