by Teju Cole
Walking back, I stayed in the shadows for as long as I could. It wasn’t far. The boys had melted away into the park, and were probably far away, somewhere deep in Harlem, by now. The lobby was empty, the elevator free. I entered my apartment and stood before the bathroom mirror for a long time. I touched my jaw, traced a finger gently up onto the cheek. It hurt, swollen to a furious purple. I removed my clothes, first the filthy black coat, then the pristine powder-blue shirt rumpled underneath it. The shirt, which I rarely wore, was a gift from Nadège. Clarity returned: I must clean the wounds (a hospital visit did not seem necessary), and I must make a report. My credit cards, too: that was the first call to make, to limit the financial damage. Then the campus police, who would put up a sign by the elevator announcing (as so often before, in all the previous instances when I wasn’t the victim) that someone had recently been attacked in the neighborhood, and that the suspects were male, black, and young, of average height and weight.
I opened the window and looked out. It was total darkness now, and the sky was a charcoal gray, the darkness interrupted closer to ground level by distant halogen lights. The buildings across the street were apartments, mostly occupied by students and faculty of the various institutions of the neighborhood, Teachers College, Union Theological Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia Law School. In one of the apartments, the one almost directly level with mine, a young woman faced a wall. She was wearing a shawl, and bowed her head repeatedly, davening in the yellow light of a standing lamp. A few floors above her, on the flat roof of the building, a large chimney belched out gray smoke in a wide plume. The smoke was like a slowed-down explosion, silent, billowing, being absorbed at its edges into the deeper darkness of the sky. My own apartment was dark. I had made some tea, and I drank it as I watched the woman pray. Others are not like us, I thought to myself, their forms are different from ours. Yet I prayed, too, I would gladly face a wall and daven, if that was what had been given to me. Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones.
It had been only two hours. I trembled from the shock, still gasped inwardly at the suddenness of it; but already, it felt in some way like a school yard scuffle. Had I sailed through a brief moment when, like an old man welcoming death, I had accepted the next blow and the next? No, I hadn’t. I had felt only the fear of pain and the love of being free of pain. But how could I have missed this! I’d thought, lying in the dirt. How could I have been less than completely aware of how good it was to be injury-free?
Now every cliché by which the assault could be minimized hurried to claim space in my head. These things happen, it was only a matter of time, count your blessings, and, yes, it could have been worse—and such bile rose into my throat at these thoughts. Three personal days from work would be enough to restore my equilibrium, I thought, and I would try to be frank about the reasons for my time away, for my staying out of sight. In the meantime, I would have to reach out to my friend for help with some practical things. He, at least, would not make more of the event than was necessary.
I had listened to others’ stories of being mugged. A colleague on the service had had her purse snatched. One of the nurses—a burly, soft-spoken Portuguese-American—had had his jaw broken by a gang, and they had left his wallet, his watch, his gold chain, and taken only his iPod. He’d needed seventeen stitches across his face. Violence for sport was no strange thing in the city; but now: me. I had cleaned the wounds on my shoulders, arms, and legs, mostly numerous small bruises that would heal quickly. My disfigured mouth and my hand troubled me most. As I examined the bruises, a herd of thoughts clattered through me: Why had this same body hale so often hurried past its lovers?
The woman had stopped praying. She ran her fingers through her fair brown hair, and took the tallit from her shoulders, pausing for a moment as though she’d forgotten something. Then she folded it, and switched off the lamp.
THE YOUNG WOMAN WAS UNCERTAIN, THINKING HARD BEFORE she said each word. The man sitting next to her, to whom she had looked for confirmation, shook his head and corrected her. No, that’s World Health Organization. Try it again, do you see? That is World. Trade. Organization. Yes, that’s trade. Do you remember the word for trade?
He pointed, and trilled a pair of fingers on the page. She mulled it over awhile, then gave another answer in Chinese, which sounded similar to the first. This one pleased him more, and he asked her if she would like to review the list from the beginning. I was at a small table, alone, drinking coffee, picking out their conversation from the fugue of voices in the diner. They were at the bar across from me, drinking Cokes. The student was Asian. Her inky black bangs cut straight across her face, and she moved a stack of flash cards from one hand to the other, restless. Her teacher, not much older than she was, was a blond man in a tracksuit.
I pretended to look out at the street. The shadows were long, the light yellow, and, on the sidewalk, two women with high heels and large shopping bags embraced. The negotiation between the blond teacher and his student was that of a new relationship, with the roles set already but a certain formality still prevailing. She laughed every now and again, and he corrected her pronunciation. She seemed to be struggling to draw what little she knew of the language to the surface. Her eyes searched, oblivious of being seen. His manner seemed more self-conscious. He was aware of the incongruity between his features and his task, aware of carrying out that task in a public space. He seemed to be presenting his credentials, addressing not her alone, but anyone within earshot who might pause for a moment at the sight of a white man teaching Chinese to an Asian woman. He sounded a little pleased with himself. He repeated the phrases again, and in a quick upward glance, caught my eye in the storefront glass of the diner.
The diner was on Broadway, between Duane Street and Reade Street, and close to the Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall subway station, opening into a park that, by the standards of lower Manhattan, was tranquil. That morning it was busy with office workers, park workers, and the odd tourist, but the volume hardly rose above a hum. People came up the stairs out of the station and made their way to work; those on the early shift were already out in the park, taking their first coffee break of the day. An unlit neon sign that said COMIDA LATINA swung outside the café, and inside the restaurant workers cleaned out steam-heated chargers. These would shortly be filled up with yellow rice, fried plantains, chow mein, barbecued spare ribs, and the various Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese dishes that places like these set out for the lunch-hour rush. It wasn’t a big place, but it was easy to tell that it did good business, no doubt because of its proximity to the massive buildings all around, and the countless civil servants who daily streamed in and out of them.
It had been two weeks, and everything else had healed. As it turned out, I hadn’t needed to go to the hospital for my mouth. But my left hand troubled me. What had felt like a minor bruise now seemed to have been a bruise of the bone, and turning a doorknob, or lifting a full cup of coffee, hurt. Mostly, I kept the hand in the pocket of my coat. Across the street, in front of the largest of the federal buildings, there had formed a snaking queue. No one lined up in front of a federal building early on a weekday morning unless they had to. When I came out of the diner, I saw that the crowd seemed to be an immigration crowd, as opposed to a jury-duty crowd, which was the other possibility at such a building. The air was of nervous anticipation, a palpable effort to project readiness for the interrogations ahead.
I walked across the street so that I would pass directly along the line. A group of Bangladeshis—the tiny silver-haired matriarch in salwar kameez, the young man dressed in wool coat and brown slacks, the young woman in a calf-length skirt, the young children bundled up—all seemed to be fumbling with their papers. There appeared to be an unusual number of in
terracial couples standing in line. One pair, I guessed, was African-American and Vietnamese. The security officers were, their uniforms revealed, also from Wackenhut, the same private firm contracted to control the immigrants in the detention facility in Queens. As each expectant family reached the front of the line, they were instructed to remove jewelry, shoes, belts, coins, and keys, so that the official fear of terrorism played along, like a bass figure, to the private fear of being found wanting by an immigration officer once they got upstairs.
From where I stood, I could see, behind the diner, the massive AT&T Long Lines building on Church Street. It was a windowless tower, a giant concrete slab rising into the sky, with little more than a few ventilation openings, which resembled periscopes, to indicate that this was a building rather than a dense brick fabricated by a gargantuan machine. Each floor was at least double the height of that found in a normal office building, so that the whole tower, intimidating though it was, came to only twenty-nine stories. The military aspect of the Long Lines building was intensified by the thickened corners, elongated shafts with which the building mimicked the form of a castle’s keep flanked by gatehouse towers, and which concealed the elevators, ductwork, and plumbing. Those few workers who used the building, I imagined, must after a few years become moles, their circadian rhythms completely distorted, their skin de-pigmented to the point of transparency. Long Lines, which I continued to stare at, as though it had drawn me into a trance, seemed like nothing so much as a monument or a stele.
I was drawn out of my thoughts by the voice of a security officer: You can’t stand here, move along, sir. I moved, and came down to the side street. The line had extended that far, to the distant edge of the building. Nearby, another man, who seemed to be a janitor, was helping a Hispanic family group, a mother and two children, who seemed to be lost. Trying to understand what they were asking for, he repeated the mother’s pronunciation of passport as passiport. The older of her boys was just beginning to sprout his first unruly facial hairs. He looked bored, or perhaps embarrassed. Near the front of the line, a young woman raced out of the glass doors, and threw herself at a waiting group, hugging them and weeping. A young man, perhaps her husband, had come out with her, and the people they met outside beamed, embraced each other, and exchanged high fives. An older woman in the group began to weep, and the young woman said, loud enough for all to hear: Now you see who I get it from, from my mama. The other people in line, wishing the same good luck for themselves, possibly made even more tense by someone else’s demonstration of relief, perhaps discomfited by the emotionalism, watched and looked away, and watched again. The janitor near me smiled, shook his head, and explained to the Hispanic family how to get to the passport office.
There was a small security island in the middle of the side street, and just across from it, surrounded by the huge office buildings, was a patch of grass. It wouldn’t have drawn my attention at all, if I hadn’t seen a curious shape—sculpture or architecture, I couldn’t tell right away—set into the middle of it. An inscription on the monument, for that is what it turned out to be, identified it as a memorial for the site of an African burial ground. The tiny plot was what had been set aside now to indicate the spot, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the site had been large, some six acres, as far north as present-day Duane Street, and as far south as City Hall Park. Along Chambers Street and in the park itself, human remains were still routinely uncovered. But most of the burial ground was now under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies, all the endless hum of quotidian commerce and government.
Into this earth had been interred the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand blacks, most of them slaves, but then the land had been built over and the people of the city had forgotten that it was a burial ground. It had passed into private and civic ownership. The monument I saw was designed by a Haitian artist, but I was unable to take a closer look, because it was closed to public access, for renovation, as a sign informed me, in preparation for the summer tourism season. In the green grass and bright sun, in the shadow of government and the marketplace, standing a few yards from the cordoned-off monument, I had no purchase on who these people were whose corpses, between the 1690s and 1795, had been laid to rest beneath my feet. It was here, on the outskirts of the city at the time, north of Wall Street and so outside civilization as it was then defined, that blacks were allowed to bury their dead. Then the dead returned when, in 1991, construction of a building on Broadway and Duane brought human remains to the surface. They had been buried in white shrouds. The coffins that were discovered, some four hundred of them, were almost all found to have been oriented toward the east.
The squabble about the construction of the monument did not interest me. There was certainly no chance that six acres of prime real estate in lower Manhattan would be razed and rededicated as holy ground. What I was steeped in, on that warm morning, was the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York. At the Negro Burial Ground, as it was then known, and others like it on the eastern seaboard, excavated bodies bore traces of suffering: blunt trauma, grievous bodily harm. Many of the skeletons had broken bones, evidence of the suffering they’d endured in life. Disease was common, too: syphilis, rickets, arthritis. In some of the palls were found shells, beads, and polished stones, and in these scholars had seen hints of African religions, rites perhaps retained from the Congo, or from along the West African coast, from which so many people had been captured and sold into slavery. One body had been found buried in a British marine officer’s uniform. Some others had been found with coins over their eyes.
There had been, in the 1780s, a petition by free blacks in defense of their dead. Black corpses were frequently singled out by cadaver thieves, who passed them on to surgeons and anatomists. The petition, in palpably pained language, laments those who under cover of night “dig up the bodies of the deceased, friends and relatives of the petitioners, carry them away without respect to age or sex, mangle their flesh out of wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds.” The civil powers recognized the justness of the cause and, in 1789, the New York Anatomy Act was passed. From that time forward, as was done in Europe, the needs of surgical anatomy were to be met by the cadavers of executed murderers, arsonists, and burglars. The Act added, to the sentence of death for criminals, the further retribution of the medical profession; and it left the buried bodies of innocent blacks in peace and neglect. How difficult it was, from the point of view of the twenty-first century, to fully believe that these people, with the difficult lives they were forced to live, were truly people, complex in all their dimensions as we are, fond of pleasures, shy of suffering, attached to their families. How many times, in the course of each of these lives, would death have invaded, carrying off a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a child, a cousin, a lover? And yet, the Negro Burial Ground was no mass grave: each body had been buried singly, according to whichever rite it was that, outside the city walls, the blacks had been at liberty to practice.
The security island near the monument was unmanned. I stepped across the cordon, and into the grassy plot. Bending down, I lifted a stone from the grass and, as I did so, a pain shot through the back of my left hand.
NINETEEN
I needed clothes for the ceremonies of my father’s burial in May 1989. As these things, and many other simple tasks, confused my mother in those days, most of the rites and the practical matters were taken care of by my father’s sister, my aunt Tinu. A few weeks before the burial, she took me to a tailor’s shop in Ajegunle, a sprawling slum of rusted roofs and open sewers, where the children were all poor and some of them were visibly malnourished. These children stared when my aunt and I emerged from her car because, from their point of view, we would have represented unimaginable wealth and privilege, an impression strengthened by my “whiteness.” The shop itself had an efficient air; its interior, lit only by natural light, was clean, and redolent of blue chalk. There were swatches of Dutch wax prints on the floor, s
emimatte squares of loud color that interrupted the gray shine of the concrete, and the tailor flattered me as he took measurements with his swiftly unfurled tape measure, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to congratulate someone on the length of his inseam or the breadth of his shoulders. He was perhaps trying to comfort me, having had a quiet word beforehand with my aunt, who had told him the purpose of our visit. He called out mysterious numbers to his assistant, numbers that would later be transmuted into clothing, a white shirt and dark suit for the burial, a buba and sokoto in indigo-dyed, hand-spun cloth for the funeral after-party.
The sensation of being in the tailor’s shop was, even in those circumstances, pleasant. I liked the smell of new cloth and, for me, the intimate wonder of getting measured for clothes was like that of getting your hair cut, or feeling the warm back of the doctor’s hand nestled against your throat as he checked your temperature. These were the rare cases in which you gave permission to a stranger to enter your personal space. You trusted the expertise proffered, and enjoyed the promise that the opaque maneuvers of this stranger’s hands would yield a result. The tailor, simply by doing his job that day, comforted me.
The funeral took place on a sunny day, in the afternoon, not on a rainy morning, not in wretched weather, as I suppose I expected funerals to be, as I still expect them to be. I recall now that Mahler, buried in Grinzing in 1911, was given the kind of quiet, private funeral he wanted, no speeches by the graveside, no religious readings, no florid poetry on the gravestone, just the name, Gustav Mahler. And, fittingly, it rained all through it until, as Bruno Walter tells it, the body was interred and the sun came out.
My father was buried on a particularly hot day, an unfunereal day. My new clothes, which were dark blue, not black, chafed, at the neck especially, and standing outside in the heat made me especially aware of the discomfort. The crowd jostling at Atan Cemetery was large, a somber crowd but, on account of its size, not without a touch of festivity. Many of the people present seemed to be friends and business associates of my grandfather, who was active in politics. Many of them had traveled from Ijebu-Ile and other towns in Ogun State to show their respects for my grandfather, who, though he held no formal political office at that time, had been a state commissioner in the seventies, and was still widely viewed as a kingmaker and power broker.