Terrified by the possibilities of response to this obscene item, my cousins offered no resistance to my claiming primary ownership of the record along with sole responsibility should it ever be found. I was, after all, not quite one of them. I was from Africa, so salvation was always a question. My agreeing to keep it was also an acknowledgment that it would be hidden so well that there would be no evidence of it should any of these boys decide to use it against me. Hiding this object was an act of greater value than the crude act of listening to it. Centuries in the future, this object would be the final evidence that the island or its language or its people ever existed. But I’d make sure no one found it even then.
* * *
• One of my father’s medals. It was a Biafra Air Force pin caked with dirt but not chipped or broken, the clasp miraculously still working. I found it while walking one evening through the long hallway that connected the front of the house to the central kitchen and then opened out to the maze of rooms in the back where Hortense and the other house girls slept. Beyond that was the washing room and then the yard, which spilled over into as many other yards as spilled into it.
I’d noticed the medal’s muted glimmer in a pile of dirt left behind by someone who was sweeping just as Sabbath fell and knew to leave the job unfinished so as to not incur the wrath of Big Auntie for whom the moment of sunset was absolute. Strangely enough, I knew immediately what it was. It had been kept in a storage room that my mother had left in Big Auntie’s care. How long had it been mingled with the dirt and refuse of this house?
* * *
• A small American flag wrapped tightly around itself and shoved inside a long, thin enamel pipe, the kind that Uncle Daddy used or sold for building or plumbing. It was mounted on a black pencil-thin pole with its once gold spear-shaped head chipped and dulled. The flag was safe inside the pipe because it was buried beneath many other pipes on the side of the house that was too dense with brush and zinc panels to permit trespass.
The flag had been given to me by one of a set of twin cousins from America who visited one summer, my first Black Americans though they were originally from Jamaica. They were from a previous generation of children, having migrated to America years before any of us had arrived in the house and before Cousin Cecil had been adopted. Upon arriving, they displaced Cousin Cecil and me from our bed except for late nights when one of them would bring either Cousin Cecil or me into bed while his brother slept or read comic books by candlelight. There he gave us sweets and chocolates that we couldn’t get in Jamaica while feverishly rubbing his hands between our legs and his stiffened groin against ours until in a shudder he pushed us back on the floor. Whoever had been in bed with him would share the sweets and chocolates with the others, even smaller cousins who thought it unfair that they were not allowed to earn them on their own.
Big Auntie nicknamed the cousins Dilly and Dally. We worshipped them as if they were stars from television or heroes from movies we heard about but could not watch. They arrived complete with the accent, clothes, and an impatience that seemed cultivated and therefore easily imitable. Cousin Cecil and I traveled with them to visit their grandparents up in the countryside near Reading. They refused to use the outhouses, and as far as we could see, they never did.
One afternoon the cousins sent me, Cousin Cecil, and a herd of local country boys to catch as many bush rats as we could find. The two cousins walked behind us wearing actual blue jeans and tennis shoes. They carried a small wooden cage they had made. We eventually caught two fat mangy things with teeth as long as the nails on their feet and a smell that made even the country boys turn up their noses. The cousins had us put them in the cage before leading us back toward the house. We put the cage on a tree stump and delighted in watching the two beasts crawl over and around each other, pushing their filthy snouts in between the crooked wooden bars.
The cousins insisted we gather as much brush and dried grass as possible, which was easy since it was high summer. The grass and leaves felt like strips of paper or Grandma’s white hair. Then they banished the local boys, pushing and slapping them violently away. One of the cousins went to make sure there were no adults around their grandparents’ yard and sent Cousin Cecil and me to check the kitchen and the front garden. We felt a sudden and overwhelming excitement, much like the feeling we got when someone was arriving at the airport or when the one American cousin was deciding which of us would briefly share his bed.
We piled the brush and grass around the cage, and put a heavy piece of wood on the top. Despite our preparation, we were surprised when the cousins lit the brush and leaves. Cousin Cecil and I stared at each other briefly, suddenly unable to communicate even silently as we usually could. It was much easier than we thought to watch the cage quickly envelop in flames. First the bush rats squirmed around and under each other, then pushed harder against the bars. Then they too went up in a flash, and their natural stink and the added stink of burning fur and flesh blended with the smoke.
Faster than I would have imagined, the rats stopped pushing and squirming, and just sat quietly. Their eyes trained past us at the local boys who had slowly begun returning from the bushes, fences, and corners. The cousins from America didn’t shoo them away this time, transfixed as they were by the eyes of the rats that began to grow and expand until there was no doubt that they could see all of us. The rats watched us watching them, and we watched until those eyes burst with a sound like an echoed rhythm, bubble gum popping, or Ping-Pong balls suspended by skillful players.
The cousins slapped each other’s palms and did that intricate handshake that we’d learned from Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy’s oldest daughter. Then they smiled with great satisfaction and let out deep breaths.
* * *
• The few remaining plastic soldiers from a set I’d liberated from the top of Big Auntie’s dresser where she kept some of the toys and books sent by my mother. I didn’t share them with any of the others even after many of the soldiers became unrecognizable from being chewed by the house dogs into mere lumps of green plastic. With them, I restaged that war that had been the cause of our arrival on the island. I rebuilt a country, though, without women since there weren’t any in the set. There was no need for refugees or immigrants in this country because our side always won. With these toys, we could be heroes in a world made exclusively of fathers.
3
Life on Mars
My mother thought that when I kicked her during the night it was because I was still wrestling with my cousins back in Montego Bay. Sometimes it did begin that way as I moved away from her grasping fingers or heard her dream-talking about bombed-out villages, hollowed-out bodies, and children shaped like spiders. But ultimately it had nothing to do with Cousins Cecil or Danny or Mark. On this small bed that magically folded into a couch in the daytime, I was punishing her for leaving me on that island.
It started at the airport immediately after landing and my having been escorted out of the plane by the flight attendants. My mother approached while I was scanning the ceilings and high corners for the source of the robot voices announcing arrivals and departures. She was thinner than I remembered and visibly shaken in the bleaching lights. My grandmother’s flaring nose was the first thing I recognized on her face. I turned toward her, imagining the purple mask of the Phantom on my face, and raised myself to full height. My mother retaliated by falling to her knees. We were face-to-face. She’d achieved the same sweatless scent that tourists and missionaries had. Like babies, the house girls said, Americans smelled like babies. They took too many baths and drank too much milk. I looked at the passengers crisscrossing the tiles, embarrassed that they might think me a newcomer when my mother was the real foreigner.
The group of women who came with her encircled us as she held my arms up above my head and turned me around to read my skin. She felt my neck, ribs, belly, and shoulders, and lifted my shirt. She traced her fingers down the middle of my back, and when she pushed too hard at a scar, I shivere
d at the sweetness of her discovery. She made a sharp intake of breath as she discovered each scar and bruise. She prodded and touched, and I winced and gasped. We would communicate this way for days.
My disappointment grew when I saw the women with her. I’d expected men in America. I’d earned them. Instead, there were just more aunties, Cousin Danny’s mother and the mothers of both Cousins June. There were others, but their names were unimportant. Aunties were the same everywhere and were apparently everywhere. They were waiting for me to look up at them. They wanted forgiveness or some temporary form of it that could last until their own child arrived. On behalf of my peers left back on the island, I denied them even as they collapsed around me competing for an inch of unbruised skin.
My mother wasn’t wearing dark glasses as she did in every photograph I could recall. The ones I remembered best were where she looked like a film star, the “Jackie O of Biafra,” I’d heard say, though it would be years before I knew who Jackie O was. Here in the airport, she seemed too simple to be what the stories and the photos said of her. Was she wearing a wig? That was enough to make me doubt everything, even the story of my birth and maybe also the war.
The women shook their heads and made sounds of disbelief and surprise. It was as if they had just left Saturday service but were still clustered near the church entrance. The fact that they had no shame embarrassed me deeply. I was grateful I couldn’t see beyond them to the citizens and passengers no doubt frowning at this spectacle.
“Look how him so hungry,” one said, the hands of another on my shoulder tightening the grip of yet another on my arm. “Look how him so slight and skinny and soon turn close to nothing.”
“Jesus Lord, how them treat we pickney them so?”
“Him look sick like African baby for true, like him have kwashi—”
My mother shot a look at this auntie that silenced her and the others shook their heads. After a beat, they began again.
“At least him come, at least him arrive safe and fine in him new shoes and clothes, God bless.”
“Yes, Lord . . . God bless.”
A collective moan, an ululating sigh, then the hydra-headed beast reached its multiple arms towards the ceiling. My mother closed her eyes as if she was praying. She was praying. They all were. I thought about Cousin Violet’s baptism and wondered where she had hidden that bottle.
Anyway, I was in America.
* * *
Soon that was yesterday, then the day before. Then it was a week ago and last month. Sometimes, mercifully, it never was, especially when the weather started to go colder than I’d ever known. The boy with the bruises on his back had proven an entire island wrong. He was now in a place where electricity never faltered, water ran hot and cold, and television never ended. He had a new transistor radio, his very own pillow, and a mother who blamed herself for his bruises. A child couldn’t ask for more.
Because I had arrived at my mother’s apartment in Washington, DC, at night and she went to work every evening and most days, those first weeks were like an extended twilight. The room was kept dark, shades drawn. I remember the intense vertigo that came from looking out of them. I don’t recall what floor we were on, but we were higher than any building I’d ever seen on the island. I wasn’t to open the shades or answer the phone unless it rang once then stopped, rang twice then stopped, and then I would know it was her. I remember only sleeping and waking and keeping myself awake. To fall asleep was to risk returning to Grandma’s room in the bed I shared with my cousins, and to the breathing of the dogs and the smell of Grandma’s bedpan. I still anticipated the call to morning worship.
The apartment was so filled that it felt much smaller than it was. There were unpacked boxes, suitcases, and paper and plastic bags stuffed with paper and plastic bags. In corners were boxes filled with plastic bottles and bottle tops, pencils and pens, empty pill containers, and unopened goods marked with the names of the various hospitals in this city where my mother had worked. Most of our bowls, cups, and saucers were from those hospitals, labeled as such or with the names of drugs being promoted. Bags of clothes choked the bedroom closet and shoeboxes were stacked against the walls. Inside those shoeboxes were rarely shoes, but medical supplies and first aid kits, syringes, cotton, and gauze. There were books too—first aid manuals, Bibles, and those for learning English. Colorful African fabrics made the floor of the closet inches higher than it should have been. Western clothes hung from wall hooks, many still with price tags and wrapping. New brooms and mops were tied in tight bundles leaning against doorjambs. Under the main apartment window like a safety barrier were more books, magazines, and stacks of blank paper wrapped in tight plastic.
There were no proper plates in the kitchen. The ones we used were made of paper. There were no true knives and forks either. We used plastic. These were not thrown away after being used. My mother washed, saved, and collected them until the drawers were so filled that they sometimes couldn’t be closed completely. Even the paper plates were wiped clean unless they were too damp from the food. Realizing how easy it was for them to be ruined, she made sure we stacked two or three together when we used them.
There were boxes of pictures and letters, some obviously unsent since they were written by my mother and addressed to people whose names I also saw on the backs of photographs. Some of the photographs were from Nigeria and Gabon and a great many from Biafra—the kwashiorkor children, mostly, heads and bellies swollen from malnutrition. Later I learned that the British-backed Nigerian government had blockaded our small country during that four-year war. Just as food and medicine were kept out, communication—and evidence of genocide—was kept in. Falling from the boxes too were fragments of letters, notes, and bits of paper scribbled with dates and cryptic phrases like The British didn’t stop it because it was all for oil! Or This is not our country or People can only really hurt what they see or handwritten lines of poetry. One was “I was the sole witness to my own homecoming,” written by a poet named Chris Okigbo.
Under the couch were boxes so packed that one had only to reach in and scoop photos of her and other nurses in uniform, of my grandmother in the small town where we lived before Montego Bay, of train stations and brick hospitals in England, and of her life in Nigeria before and during the war. The photographs were all mixed up, 1940s Jamaica, early 1950s London, Nigeria in the 1960s, Gabon and Jamaica in the 1970s—the only thing that held them all together were the images of starving children, layers of newspaper clippings about the war, documents marked from the state of Biafra, faded letterhead with official signatures, bank notes, and stamps. As the country became more isolated, the formalities of statecraft seemed to have increased. This was the archive of a country too hastily erected and too quickly destroyed to have established an official history. Its golden age was measured in moments.
In lieu of science fiction, fantasy, or history, this was all I had to feed my voracious appetite for reading. These boxes were where my new education began.
There were magazine articles about how Americans and Europeans had responded to the war. The Operation Airlift Biafra Benefit in New York featured rock stars such as Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez. These names meant nothing to me then. Apparently, John Lennon of the Beatles—one of my father’s favorite groups—had refused an award from the Queen partly due to England’s support for the Nigerian Federal Government. There was news about a white woman in Paris who burned herself to death in front of the Nigerian embassy in protest against the violence against the Igbo people. A young American student at Columbia University also immolated himself with a sign on his body that read STOP GENOCIDE, SAVE NINE MILLION BIAFRANS. The most notorious reaction to Biafra’s international impact was US President Lyndon Johnson’s demanding his State Department “get those damned nigger babies off my TV set!”
One image in particular comes to mind. With it, Biafra ceased to be family myth or folktale. It may have been a single scene, but there were at least three photos of it—a cleanly deca
pitated man wearing only trousers and sprawled on a table, his head nowhere to be seen. One photo was a close-up of the severed neck. The others focused on separate cuts all over his body but never strayed too far from that primary absence.
There were random words written on bits of paper or the backs of envelopes. My mother had the habit of subscribing to “word of the month” clubs and bought calendars that featured vocabulary. There were Igbo words, Yoruba, French, but also pidgin. Some were obviously new to her as she moved from country to country. Some were archaic. I remember one in particular, calentura,which was written on the back of a picture of a large ship of the sort she must have taken to England in the 1950s. Not knowing its meaning made the image of the ship more memorable, and I began imagining that the word suggested what it must be like to feel the rolling of water beneath one’s feet.
Gaining some sense of her history from this archive, however, didn’t weaken my resolve to punish her. I was barely ten years old and my Jamaican scars still too fresh. If not to signal some softening of my feelings but perhaps to make myself useful, I attempted to throw things away. Maybe an emptier room would make it easier to keep one’s distance. I tossed away empty bottles and jars, unused drinking straws and stacks of paper napkins and broken pens that poured from under the bathroom sink if the doors opened too quickly. Maybe all this stuff made sense in Africa or Jamaica where all objects were valuable, but in my view, she’d completely missed the point of America.
I didn’t think she’d be able to track what remained and what was gone, but she seemed wounded by the absence of each and every thing no matter how small. There were moments of panic, one particularly acute when she began looking for a small wooden egg, notched and scarred. I thought it was simply a child’s toy, perhaps mine. I was shocked at the depth of her hurt over the idea that I might have tossed out the egg and by her attachment to, essentially, rubbish. She told me she was saving everything in the apartment to send to Jamaica and Nigeria when she could afford to and that we should never waste things because you never know when anything could save your life. She’d lost everything too many times to lose anything again. Even an embittered ten-year-old could understand that.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 4