by Issa Rae
Just weeks earlier, I’d had brunch with Andunett, one of my childhood fellow nomad friends—actually, my only nomad friend. It had been several years since we’d sat down and caught each other up on our respective lives. She was briefly in town from Tennessee, venting that she wanted to return to Los Angeles, but the thought of living with her mom again was enough to keep her hungry and uncomfortable in Tennessee. Her mom is Ethiopian but actually grew up in Senegal with my aunts. We laughed about trying to have honest conversations with our respective African parents about our feelings. In a brief moment of sincerity, I revealed to her that I wish I could get inside my father’s head, that I could talk to him about the divorce, about his choice in women, just to get a sense of where his head was. But I shrugged, noting that my Senegalese father would never be open to such candid conversation and prodding questions from his daughter. Andunett nodded with understanding.
Now, as I sat before my dad, my heartbeat revealed the surprise that my face tried to hide as I feigned nonchalance and tried to keep my tone casually delicate, so as not to lose the rare opportunity for a truth viewing.
“So,” I started. “What happened?”
My dad explained, between long gazes at his food and our respective faces, that after Elize was born, during our last year in Senegal, he wanted to go back to Los Angeles, but my mother had no interest in returning there. They both agreed that he would try to make it work in Los Angeles and she would take us to Maryland.
“But whenever I would visit you all in Potomac, I felt out of place. Your mother had an established way of doing things and I started feeling a sense of detachment.”
By the time we had arrived in Los Angeles to reunite with him, he explained, he didn’t know us as well as our mom did, and whenever he would try to intervene in certain aspects of raising us, our mother would have already established the right way to do it—and that the distance definitely played a huge part in their unraveling. As he explained, he made no excuses, didn’t fault our mother or ever speak ill of her. Hearing him talk about it and acknowledge what happened gave me a sense of closure and comfort in knowing that I could actually talk to him about it. About anything, really.
* * *
My father is now remarried, settling in with his new wife. And though I find myself tip-toeing around her with forced politeness, I don’t find myself as hesitant to get inside his head. When I’m ready to go down that road, I will.
Today, with the Obamacare California deadline looming, my dad calls me to make sure I have health insurance.
“Hey, Dad,” I answer.
“Sign up for the California Care. Google it and tell your sister.”
I’m driving on Edgewood to a meeting in Hollywood.
“Dad, I been had insurance. I’m grown,” I say playfully, laughing because my dad still doesn’t know exactly what it is that I do. He’s just grateful I’m not on his payroll anymore. He laughs heartily. “Oh, you’re grown? How many bills am I paying again?”
Oops. “Oh, just kidding. I was just playing. I’m not grown, Dad!” I relent as I realize he’s still paying my phone bill (I’m on a family plan). And my car insurance (that shit’s expensive). And up until that conversation, which must have served as a reminder for him, my car was still in his name. No less than a week later, he gave me the pink slip of ownership. Now all my tickets go directly to me.
I realize I can get so caught up in my own feelings that I forget how much my dad still does for me, without a single complaint. I neglect to consider how much he will continue to support me, no matter what I need, as long as he can. While I still haven’t heard the words “I love you,” I realize I haven’t said them to him either. We both have some feelings to catch up on and I know I’m not beyond initiating them.
Dating Lessons & Summer Lust
The Diop women—including those who marry into the family—haven’t had a great history with men. I observed this only in the last few years, when one of my favorite Senegalese aunts, whose chill demeanor and laid-back beauty I’ve always admired, married a man who was absolutely hideous in every way. His face looked like God said, “I just . . . I can’t. I’m tired. Let me see what I can do with these leftovers.” I don’t ever call people ugly and if his personality didn’t match his appearance, then his looks wouldn’t be an issue. But after meeting him, it was abundantly clear that she was settling for some kind of security. This was the aunt I was proud to say my high school boyfriend had a crush on. She was the aunt who I hoped to look and be like when I grew up.
Twelve years prior, my aunt married a handsome Senegalese man who lived in the house across the street from our family home. We met him during one of our yearly visits, and he seemed to be well favored among the aunties. My aunt gave birth to her first child while she was staying with us in Los Angeles. She was the most adorable little girl ever, and the first child whose birth I remember, whose diaper (singular, because it happened only once) I remember changing, and who I happily cradled and put to sleep on several occasions. She was the daughter my aunt always wanted.
Soon after the birth, my aunt’s marriage ended. Long-distance relationships are already hard to make work, so a cross-continental relationship was bound for failure. At the time, I attributed the end of their marriage to that alone.
Then I grew up, took a step back, and took stock of my dad and his six siblings. We already know my father’s marital situation (more on that in “African Dad”), and the other situationships on his side of the family didn’t fare much better. Out of his four sisters, none of the marriages lasted, for reasons that varied, from polygamy5 to adultery to fatal freak accident. Where the Diop men are concerned (i.e., my dad’s brothers), the curse is transmitted by name to the women they marry. There may be a loophole in marrying a Diop and not taking on the last name, but I have been unable to find evidence in that just yet. No marriage is without its problems, but I think I can trace the curse back to my grandfather, who, with his infidelities, also extended our family beyond that which he created with my grandmother. Perhaps that’s where the curse began? The Senegalese are no stranger to curses, spells, and jinxes. Perhaps, in being unfaithful to my loyal grandmother, my grandfather unknowingly solidified the fate of his children to a life of cursed romances and marriages. Or maybe the French culture’s casual embrace of flings coupled with Islam’s encouragement of “responsible polygamy” plays into our “curse.” Maybe it’s not that big of a deal, as one of my father’s Senegalese friends once told my mother, “It’s our God-given right to have a mistress.” Oh. Well, then.
Between my family history, its cultural and religious affinity for infidelity, and the American divorce statistics, I’ve held firm to the belief that if I don’t get married, that would be just fine. Marriage will never be a priority for me. Even now, as I hear about relationships ending around me and marriages “failing” (as opposed to “passing,” I suppose), and people deceiving one another, sometimes losing tons of money in the process, I think, What’s the point of getting married? For one thing, marriage seems to have become a bit of a national joke. There are reality shows for gold-diggers while televised Bridezillas and messy infidelities get sky-high ratings. To think that amidst all the infidelity, Americans actually had the nerve to try to get all sanctimonious when the gay marriage debate surfaced. Shut up!
My indifference to marriage doesn’t mean I won’t commit to someone. I’m in a relationship as I write this, one to which I’ve been committed for over seven years, though the path here has been anything but easy.
Trouble started as early as high school, where people thought I was a lesbian because of the way I dressed. It didn’t help that I didn’t know that rainbows were an LGBT symbol and would frequently color all of my name tags with the colors of the rainbow.
In college, things started to get a bit better. In time a few guys asked me out, but negatively influenced by my parents’ divorce, I went through a
chronic cheating phase. For one thing, I didn’t want to feel too attached to any one person, after witnessing my mother’s feelings of betrayal and violation in light of my father’s affair. In my mind, it was cheat or be cheated on, and I felt a sense of satisfaction knowing that I had beat my partner to the punch—whether he knew it or not. This way, if he decided to cheat, then I would be numb to it because I had done it first. It’s a really juvenile way of thinking, an emotional escape route that would allow me to leave with just the clothes on my back when necessary.
By my junior year of college, my prospects, if not my attitude, had started to improve. I came back to college a little bit thinner and with a perfectly white, straight smile, thanks to five years of braces. I noticed the change almost immediately. I started getting more attention from guys and started to seek it in a completely different way than I did during my desperate middle and high school years. I wasn’t interested in a relationship; I just wanted sexual activity. Because I had stopped out of school the year prior, I missed out on the housing draw, and I learned over the summer that I would be in a one-room double with a stranger in the quiet study dorm. NOPE. Wasn’t having that. So I told my dad that I wanted to live off-campus, somehow convincing him that it would be significantly cheaper because he wouldn’t have to pay for a meal plan, my two jobs would allow me to buy groceries, and I would be able to help him with the rent (I didn’t, and he wouldn’t have allowed it anyway). I found an apartment that was a five-minute drive from campus and moved in early, elated. I felt an overwhelming sense of liberation as I held the keys in my hand. I didn’t have any furniture to my name and I didn’t care. After a night on the carpeted floor, I woke up the next morning and headed to IKEA, equipped with my very first credit card—a Discover card with a limit of one thousand dollars, the most I’d ever had in my account at one time.
With my new apartment, my own car, and my very own credit card, I developed a new independence. I could do whatever I wanted. Barring my being enrolled in college, I was a grown-ass woman and I could do grown-ass woman things in the privacy of my grown-ass woman home. The two years I spent in that apartment were two of the best years of my life—in terms of my friendships, my creativity, my relationships, and my sense of identity.
The first boyfriend to set foot in my man-eating apartment was George. We met while I was home during a weekend in Los Angeles. He was super attractive, with a smile with which I fell in lust. We went on a date to the movies and our chemistry was palpable. He was genuinely sweet and adorably shy and spoke with one of those hybrid London-Nigerian accents. When I drove back up to Stanford, we talked every single day. He was going to school to study business and was intent on returning to Nigeria to become the president someday. I was impressed with his ambition. Then one day, he called me with embarrassment and anger.
“I got kicked out of school.”
“What? What happened?”
“I kicked this guy’s ass for talking shit.”
I was silent on the other end. I had never been with a guy who had kicked anyone’s ass before. While I was disappointed that he was expelled, the simple bitch in me was impressed.
“Hello?” he asked.
“You kicked a guy’s—what happened?”
“He was just all in my face, talking shit and asking for it. I lost my temper and now I have to figure out what to do.”
I wasn’t terribly worried about him. There were countless schools in Los Angeles, and surely he could enroll in a community college while he applied to a new school. Only a couple of days later, he called me with some more news.
“I’m going to be a Marine.”
“Like a swimmer?”
“No, like the military. The Marine Corps.”
We had known each other only a month, but he’d managed to leave me speechless twice in one week.
“Why,” I asked. “Do you have a death wish?” We were still in a war and, in my mind, he would certainly be deployed to go fight. I had been reading every day about suicide bombings and mass military rapes and women and children being killed mercilessly. Why would anyone who had options want to voluntarily subject himself to that? I didn’t see bravery; I saw stupidity. But George was determined. He wasn’t asking my permission; he was just gauging how I felt about his decision. I hated it, but it didn’t matter.
“Well, I saw a recruiter today and if I’m accepted, I go to boot camp in three weeks.” Why did he even call me?!
“But the good news,” he continued, “is that I can come spend the weekend with you before I go.” My mind and loins raced. He would be the first gentleman visitor in my new place. I tried to play it cool, while still being outraged that he would decide to embark upon this suicide mission without actually taking my feelings into consideration.
“Well, you’d better.”
He made plans to come up by Greyhound bus a few weeks later. Most of my friends had taken trips abroad, and so I had no one to call and get advice from except Suzanne, one of my high school best friends who attended UC Berkeley. She wasn’t that experienced with gentleman callers, so couldn’t offer any advice beyond “Have fun!”
I picked him up from the bus station bumping Rasheeda’s provocative “Georgia Peach,” just in case he needed some subliminal signals as to what was about to go down. In case that wasn’t enough, I had lit “smell-good” candles all around my house to set the mood. I had fleeting thoughts of returning home only to find my apartment engulfed in flames, with Gemma my Fargo-accented landlord “Gee golly”-ing in horror. But when I pulled up to find him waiting at that bus stop, a single duffel bag in hand, smiling with contained excitement to see me, I didn’t give a damn about any fires.
I watched him walk to my window. He leaned his head in and smiled.
“You’re not gonna get out and give me a hug?”
I promptly swung my door open and hopped into his arms. Then we shared our very first kiss.
When we got back in the car, I popped in a 50 Cent CD, his favorite rapper of all time, and we headed back to my place.
George was my first relationship since my high school boyfriend, and now he was leaving me to go become a soldier. I’m pretty positive I cried after he left. We’d known each other for only a couple of months, and while his incessant back-to-back phone calls and “hey” texts would annoy me, I still missed him. A topic we frequently broached, and that George was often too eager to talk about, was Laila, his ex-girlfriend who still lived in London. I’m not the jealous type, but I’m the jealous type. Appearance-wise, I didn’t feel threatened. Feelings-wise, I did. Laila was George’s first love and she dumped him. I’m always wary about guys who’ve been dumped by girls they loved, because it typically means they have unresolved feelings. George didn’t hide the fact that he’d enjoyed the years they spent together, but he frequently insisted that he was completely over her. This didn’t stop him from putting her in his Top 8 on his MySpace page, however. The Top 8 was like a public acknowledgment of one’s clique, a blanket endorsement of the people with whom one associates heavily. Because she lived in London, however, I was willing to excuse this as a simple oversight on his part.
When George graduated from boot camp, I was there. I made the trip to the San Diego base, excited to be reunited with him, fantasizing that he’d pick me up and carry me across the auditorium, as Richard Gere did to Debra Winger in An Officer and a Gentleman. I think I was oblivious to the fact that my friends’ absence had caused me to gain weight—having no one to hang with left lots of time for quality snack time. So when we were finally reunited, George’s first words to me were, “Damn, girl, you’ve been eating good.” I think I can safely pinpoint that as the moment at which my insecurity about our relationship started.
This was also the first time I met George’s mother, his sisters, and his brother. They were all nice enough, but I felt inadequate—partly because Laila had made such a positive impression on
his family before I was in the picture, and mostly because I hadn’t been faithful during George’s thirteen-week stint in boot camp. Over the course of his absence, we exchanged letters, but I found that just wasn’t enough for me. Plus, his enthusiasm to be a Marine and shoot guns and kill people wasn’t exactly compatible with my liberal, nonviolent views. So, when opportunity knocked, I answered, justifying my infidelity by telling myself that he still had feelings for his ex-girlfriend anyway. Still, a part of me felt guilty. Until, that is, I returned home from his graduation, where I was only able to spend a brief couple of hours with him as he stayed behind with his family, who had come all the way from London. Back home, I logged on to MySpace a few days later. It was during a bout of bored curiosity—which is typically the mood in which if you seek, you shall find—that I clicked on his ex’s page, and there for all the world to see was a heartfelt wall message from George, addressing her as “baby.” I was angry, slightly hurt, but mostly livid about what I perceived to be public disrespect. Nobody really knew about our relationship, but how dare he?
I called him and immediately ended our relationship. Over the next couple of weeks, he called me back to back, apologizing, begging for my forgiveness. I grew satisfied as my hurt feelings turned to general irritation. Plus, by that time, I had already moved on with Taz.
Taz, ruggedly handsome and with brash confidence, would probably drive a girl with low self-esteem to suicide. Had I met him during my high school years, I would have either succumbed to his blunt aggression or tucked myself away, deciding that I was out of his league. However, he met me during a time when I felt my confidence rising. I’d started to feel more comfortable in my skin, as many college students tend to; never mind that I knew absolutely nothing about life. I was amused by Taz’s hot temper, which was cutely mismatched with a deep, raspy French accent. When he grew upset with a joke I made at his expense, he sounded like a peeved Pepé Le Pew.