It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  It was right around the time that my badge started working that Nnamdi Watson, PhD, joined the committee. A visiting lecturer in African American history with a five-year appointment that had been renewed once, putting him on year eight. The week prior, Lyle Sanders, the professor of rhetoric and oldest black tenured faculty member, had quit the committee, citing health concerns, which was just as well. He mostly slept through the meetings, his head dropping suddenly and freaking everybody out. Nnamdi was there to keep our number at a respectable two, we both figured. Solid build, neat, shoulder-length locs. Short, but cute. Horn-rimmed glasses, bow ties or tweed vests over crisp, long-sleeved oxfords every day. A Kappa, I could tell before he told me so. Friendly enough. He said he liked my twist-out, called it glossy. I laughed, said thank you. He called me “sista” and I did not roll my eyes. By this time I’d also finally bought a microwave.

  The following informational display has been approved:

  A mounted poster highlighting the furniture and tools in the houses, including one kitchen table, one bed with a quilt similar in style to those sewn by Miss April during her tenure, one washing board, an embroidery hoop and one broom.

  Items currently in the houses but hereafter prohibited from display:

  A hatchet, found hanging near the fireplace of House #1.

  Seventeen handmade dolls that comprised Miss April’s collection (some inherited from her mother), donated to the University by her sons.

  The 6-inch by 12-inch wooden box with a cross carved into its top, found buried behind House #2 in 1983.

  All contents of this box.

  In consideration of the preservation of the approved objects for display, the Committee recommends that access to the interior of the houses be limited to scholars with written permission from the University’s Department of Special Collections, and various special persons as designated by the Board of Trustees. Visitors from the general population should view the interior of the houses from the front and back porches via the double-paned, shatterproof windows.

  A typical committee meeting went like this: We were all given a proposal for an element to be included in the restoration of the houses, then thirty minutes would be devoted to presentations regarding the merit of the proposal, sometimes made by the authors themselves, but more often from third-party experts. Then we’d deliberate for twenty minutes or so (usually less) and issue our recommendation. Patricia Dwyer, the head of the Office of the General Counsel, would then run the recommendation through whatever sort of legal analysis was necessary, and return at the next meeting with the proper wording for us to adopt. Pretty efficient, I thought. The catered lunch varied from sandwiches to Italian to Chinese.

  The Committee acknowledges receipt of a petition presented by community member Shaw Hammers proposing that the site include literature about the transatlantic slave trade, including the amount paid for original inhabitants as listed in University archives.

  Finding: Committee finds such literature to be outside the scope of the goals of the restoration project.

  From the outset, Nnamdi had taken issue with the omission of the word slave and the use of houses over quarters or cabins. I was with him at first. I mean, if you don’t use it, that’s erasure, right? But then Becca Samuels from University Counseling—the woman who swiped me in in the early days—finally stopped speaking in slogans and said something that made a little sense on the day we discussed the petition (it had two hundred signees, but only about eighty from people affiliated with the university, and most of those were classified staff). Becca asked: Would the relatively small population of students of color find comfort in these houses, or would they become fodder for ridicule used against them? She presented research about young people and constant proximity to sites of past trauma. “It can feel like stepping on the same land mine day after day just to get from one class to the next,” she concluded. This was more flourish than reality because the houses, being tucked up in the corner of campus like they were, weren’t on the way to anyone’s class.

  Predictably, Patricia Dwyer rattled off a bunch of legalese that suggested the proposal could one day bankrupt the university. I didn’t care about Dwyer’s point, but Becca’s—it was worth mulling over, her land mine analogy notwithstanding. Who am I to say what causes another person trauma? In the end I decided to show solidarity and vote with Nnamdi. We lost 2–6.

  In accordance with a recommendation from expert linguists, the following language and accompanying illustrations* have been accepted by the Committee:

  “Lenny Roberts used the phrase “lee little” to mean very small. “Lee” is similar to a WOLOF word that means small.”

  “One of the inhabitants of this House was named Esther Malink. MALINKE is the name of an ethnic group, also known as the Mandinka, the Mandinko, the Mandingo or the Manding.”

  “To express amazement, inhabitant Buster Griggs would exclaim, “Great Da!” The FON people (also known as the Fon nu, the Agadja or the Dahomey) worship a god named Da.”

  “Miss April referred to peanuts as “pindas.” Pinda is the KONGO word for peanut. The Kongo people are the largest ethnic group in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  *Illustrations should show a map of West Africa with corresponding geographic regions of each ethnic group highlighted in either of the University’s official colors.

  This linguist (there was only just the one—not plural), Dr. Nichole Valdes-James, made a very compelling argument. Even Nnamdi, who hated us all by now, had to admit it. Gander, the co-chair, looked charmed in spite of himself. Who can argue with enduring language? Who would see a posting like that and not be impressed, intrigued? Apparently Nnamdi had expected plenty of people to be offended. After the meeting he walked me back to the library. “A decade ago you hardly ever heard the word Africa on this campus if not in the pejorative,” he said. I said, “Well, Africa’s pretty trendy up north these days.” He looked at me like I was an idiot, muttered, “This isn’t up north.” But then he invited me to get a drink with him.

  The Committee recommends the following permanent information placards be added to the façade of the Miss April Houses wherever the restorers find aesthetically pleasing:

  A display highlighting the restoration efforts of University researchers, with attending photographs of the process of transporting the cabins to their current location.

  A display with the names of members of this Committee.

  I left Brooklyn because I was at the point where just walking to the post office made me want to reach out for the nearest stranger’s neck and squeeze it, and I’m not a particularly violent person. All of these forever-children in wrinkled clothes with make-believe jobs and very real bank accounts looking down their noses at me, as if the sight of me made the neighborhood bad? I know, I know. But just because it’s happening all over the place doesn’t make it any easier to stomach. Plus, I was single again. Plus, all my friends were having kids and moving away, or just moving away because things had gotten so unbearable in Brooklyn. I was sitting at my desk at my branch library one day, with a stack of books to weed, and thought: “You know what? They can have this place.” I went online, applied for this job, and got it, even though I don’t have any university experience. The air is much, much cleaner down here.

  The Committee acknowledges receipt of a petition presented by community member Shaw Hammers, submitted on behalf of Dr. Nnamdi Watson, Visiting Lecturer in African-American Studies (and member of this same Committee, hereby recused from this vote), proposing an informational placard featuring scholarship speculating on how and against what odds particular words and phrases might have lasted in the inhabitants’ lexicon over the generations.

  Finding: Committee finds that such a placard would be outside the scope of the goals of the restoration project.

  It was stupid of the committee to accept proposals on a rolling basis. This was a policy established before I arrived. Of course Nnamdi would try to take the one thing everyone was enthusia
stic about and flip it on them. I told him the night before to just leave it alone, be happy they don’t just bulldoze the houses altogether, but he said, “It’s the principle of the matter.” And I said, “That’s usually what someone says before they do something dumb,” and he shook his head and threatened to leave my apartment. But he didn’t. He didn’t leave the committee either. He came twice a week, ate heartily and smiled too much at everyone there.

  The following permanent placard must be affixed within twenty feet of the entrance of both Miss April Houses:

  A display thanking the individual and corporate donors that made the restoration project possible. Language on this display is up to the donor’s discretion, granted such language meets the guidelines outlined above.

  The semester was nearly over by the time we worked our way through all of the proposals. No, I didn’t let them put my name on the official committee placard; I was new and maybe I didn’t quite understand the stakes, but I knew better than to put my name on either one of those houses. They didn’t even ask me to explain why I abstained. No, I did not join Nnamdi, Shaw Hammers and the seven others who staged a sit-in for three days on the porch of House #1. That doesn’t mean I didn’t care.

  If you focus on what we did accomplish as a committee, versus what was left out, we communicated two important truths: the past inhabitants made do with what they had—a few pieces of furniture, a humble kitchen—and they found ingenious, albeit small ways to make their language endure. That’s not nothing. That’s huge, I think.

  And maybe a later committee can add more information.

  ANGELA FLOURNOY is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. The novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and an NAACP Image Award. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree for 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, and she has written for the New York Times, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Flournoy was the 2016–17 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and the New School. She is currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Princeton University.

  ELIZABETH FRANK

  * * *

  Fires

  From the Journal of Ben Swift

  Kranevo. The Black Sea. 1:15 a.m. May—what is today, anyway?—1999. Left L.A. 5/17 arr. Sofia 5/18, start road trip 5/19? So it’s the 21st?

  After a long lazy afternoon on the beach here, dinner tonight at an outdoor café. Kroum (pronounced “Kroom,” name of some ancient Bulgarian khan) orders grape rakia, fills my shot glass. “Thanks, Kroum,” I say, “but I don’t drink.”

  “How is it possible? How can a man not drink?”

  “Maybe I’m not a ‘man.’ ”

  “You must be kidding.” (Picked up from American kids at that school in Switzerland where he and Eva met a thousand years ago?)

  Reaction shot: Eva, wary, listens.

  “I mean it. Bad stuff happens when I drink. And you don’t want to see it.”

  “On the contrary, I do!”

  “Look, I drank in order not to be there. I wasn’t really present in the lives of my wife and kids.” (American psychobabble, must sound like Martian to him.)

  “Smart guy,” he says. “Why would you want to give that up?!”

  “Because my drinking became a sickness.”

  “We have a saying here: all diseases are the result of irregular drinking!”

  “Until regular drinking turns into a disease.”

  He doesn’t insist, but goes right ahead and gets absolutely wasted. We’re eating spicy meat patties and fries and salads, and Kroum digs right in along with us, but having started with rakia, he moves on to the first of three enormous pitchers of beer. Mug follows mug follows mug until his speech slurs to gibberish. The guy is fucking hammered.

  Later, Eva and I lock our arms under his and tow him back to the hotel through the Kranevo crowds while he belts out some hundred-year-old song about a hero named Popyordanov, who, Eva explains, was a guerrilla in VMRO, i.e., the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Wounded he’s lying, O woe he’s dying, his old mother’s grieving, etc. Eva says: when people get together in Bulgaria they sit around the table and eat and sing sad old songs about heroes who died fighting against the “Turkish Yoke.” (Memo: Yesterday’s visit to Shipka Pass. Site of huge battle 1877–1878, Russians and Bulgarians, who, when out of ammunition, heave gigantic boulders down the mountain onto stealthily climbing bayonet-and-scimitar-wielding Turks; would make a terrific scene in a movie.)

  The Kranevo crowd here is mostly college-age—easily ten years younger than Harry would have been by now—and nobody pays the slightest attention to our sloshed Kroum, whose doleful ballad is in any case drowned out by relentless disco music throbbing from every café, restaurant and bar. This morning, over coffee, when I remark that this nonstop disco roar is almost all American, Kroum says, with a tight smile, “Of course. We are a shitty little unimportant outpost of your empire. And if we refuse to take orders you will bomb us the way you’re bombing Serbia.” Again, he’s surprised when I don’t disagree. Even though he knows I’m a communist he keeps expecting me to be a knee-jerk pro-American asshole.

  Back in their room, we put him to bed. He’s so sunburned from the day on the beach he looks boiled.

  “What’s with him?” I ask Eva at the door.

  “Bitter disappointment.”

  “Didn’t he vote for the ‘Democratic Changes’?”

  “He did. But democracy here has turned out to be a big fat lie.”

  “And that’s a reason to get drunk?”

  “One reason out of a thousand.”

  Now I’m in my room, next to theirs. Have walked and fed Kroum’s sweet old German shepherd, Romy Schneider. I keep waiting for the jet lag to lift but it’s too soon. I’m still goofy and loopy. The disco stuff could wake the dead.

  If only.

  4:20 a.m. Restless, wakeful (jet lag, of course) after sleeping a couple of hours. Wondering: what the hell am I doing here? My pixilated cousin Eva, after thirty years and more of absolutely no contact whatsoever with her ninth-grade Bulgarian beau at that fancy school they went to in Geneva (her father an infectious disease expert with the WHO, his father with the UN), gets back with him about three years ago after they reconnect through the school’s alumni email list. Lo and behold they’re both divorced and passion rekindles. So she starts coming here every summer, where they play house for three months and she paints and then in late August she goes home and starts teaching again. Eva and I have been pals forever and she knows me, and so we’re on the phone five or six months ago and she says, knowing I’m stuck (that’s putting it mildly), come stay with us for three months. You can visit all the old commie monuments and Kroum has a project you can help him with.

  So why have I come? To get the hell out of an America I hate more and more every day, and to find out if, maybe, the “actually existing socialism” they supposedly had here between 1944 and 1989 in fact actually existed.

  Still, now that I’m here, I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know what wanting is anymore. I want to want—but what? I don’t know who the hell I am and by that I don’t mean some cornball middle-aged identity crisis crap.

  Harry’s father? It feels like that’s the only definite thing I am. Or was. That’s not something I can run away from or even want to run away from, unbearable as it is. But what am I running away to?

  The dog’s ears twitch as I write and she opens her eyes and looks at me. I can almost hear her saying, Go back to sleep, you dope. It isn’t morning yet. If I can sleep through the disco cacophony, so can you.

&n
bsp; Dimitrovgrad, May 23?, 1999, 1:20 a.m.

  From Kroum’s car radio: yesterday NATO bombs accidentally killed dozens of Albanians in Kosare. Fucking idiots, even though I can’t stand the KLA thugs. When I say this or “Humanitarian intervention my ass,” Kroum looks at me in utter amazement. He just can’t get it into his head that I’m a Yank and against this war.

  Up at 6 a.m. yesterday. Over coffee I tease Kroum: He looks like the Platonic form of Hangover. Bloodshot lizard eyes, hair one big cowlick, face puffy. But he’s an old hangover pro and orders shkembe chorba—a milky soup with chunks of chewy tripe, sprinkled with vinegar and paprika. Not bad at all and by God it seemed to revive him.

  Driving south along the coast, the sea a deep blue (it’s called the Black Sea because of fierce winter storms), we pass Golden Sands, where Kroum spent a priapic teenage summer working as a waiter and “chasing Swedish blondes,” Eva remarks sotto voce. In one of our long phone conversations after she got back with him she told me he’s always been successful with women but also that he really does “fall in love”—for me always a foreign language and complete disaster. (Thoughts of Jeanie. Boy, I really fucked that one up. So what if I already had two kids? Would it have been so hard to give her what she wanted and have a couple more? Selfish bastard.)

  Then through Varna: faded pastel apartment buildings, wrought-iron balconies, the traces of tsarist-era refinement. During Communism Varna was called Stalin, not Stalingrad. Name changed back to Varna 1956, soon after the Khrushchev speech (boy, they didn’t waste any time, did they). Funny thing here about changing names: when Bulgaria was an ally of the Nazis, one boulevard in Sofia was changed to Adolf Hitler, then during communism to Klement Gottwald, and now it’s named for some Bulgarian philanthropist. “No one,” Kroum says, “is fooled by these changes except the people who order them. They think they can just erase the history.” (Memo: Bulgarian uses definite articles where we don’t.)