She never did send any of these items back to Jamaica or Nigeria, but she continued planning to do so. That was her primary psychological setting. It was a way of not fully accepting our arrival. I assumed it was a trait of women because my aunties were always trying to convince themselves that they could and would leave this country anytime they wanted. It was as if it was necessary to remind themselves that they’d chosen to come here and that they could take it or leave it. The country had no power over them.
I came to realize that she did understand the point of America, so well that she had been rebelling against it long before I’d arrived. She’d landed in a place where things seemed to evaporate or were too easily replaced. These mundane and banal items, stacked as they were, layered and dense with accretion, represented a stand against loss.
* * *
Upstairs from us lived a nun who had known us during the war. Aunt Ngozi had been my nanny at some point in Gabon and smelled like mothballs. This made sense after I discovered that she kept her clothes in a travel trunk despite having lived in the same apartment for years before my mother’s arrival. I have no recollection of her ever being outside the building. She never used the elevator and always arrived at our door sweating, her sheen emphasizing the pristine darkness of her skin.
Aunt Ngozi was the second person to call me the first son of the first son. For the first few weeks, she visited our cramped and tiny apartment simply to stare at me, rocking back and forth on the edge of a couch that at nightfall miraculously transformed into the bed that my mother and I shared. Aunt Ngozi was never able to look at me, talk to me, or touch me without reminding me that my father was a hero to the Igbo people and that she’d cried forever when she heard that he had been killed and thought that we had been killed also only to learn that we were only for a time lost somewhere in the bush where the children were swollen with kwashiorkor and rivers overflowed with chopped and bloated bodies.
Fortunately, she only spoke in outbursts. Her creaky voice exploded in all directions but only for concentrated moments of time. With spit froth speckling her lips, words left tracks across her chin. Then she would retreat, arms folded, head bowed, eyes staring so intently that I could feel them on my skin like ants.
She took it upon herself to begin teaching me Igbo.
“Nno,” she said whenever she saw me, which meant “welcome.” “Nno,” with her mothball scented hands holding my face. “Nno.”
“Say d’aalu,” said my mother. “D’aalu.”
But this was America. I thought there were more important things to learn.
Eventually, I was allowed to leave the apartment on my own and walk upstairs to stay with Aunt Ngozi whenever my mother was going to be home later than usual or on rare nights when she had an overnight shift. Aunt Ngozi didn’t have a television or even a radio and her apartment was smaller than ours. To not have a television in a country where broadcasting was permanent and channels were multiple was unforgivable. I never brought my transistor radio because Aunt Ngozi didn’t understand my ongoing search for that song about Major Tom, and the one time I brought it, the static rattled her. She wasn’t able to speak until the radio was off and then rubbed her skin as if the white noise was creeping across her body.
Her windows were always closed, covered with dark curtains, and the heat sweltering. The apartment smelled of old, wet paper, and I imagined dark corners mossy green and fetid with life. Though largely empty of furniture, the apartment also had one of those miraculous extending couches and a small table in the kitchen covered with photographs and letters. While my mother kept multiple items, Aunt Ngozi kept only paper. Beneath the table was a box of passport photos of dozens of African priests and nuns and missionaries, most of them dressed in white. I don’t remember there being anything on her walls, no crosses, no pictures of a crucified Christ or the Virgin Mary, and no images of the countryside churches or frolicking sheep typical in Jamaica. She had no bookshelves, which made sense because she hadn’t any books at all.
Sometimes I awoke to find her rooting through the box of passport photos or the photo albums. I would catch her making the sign of the cross on her chest and shaking her hands as if to rid them of something sticking to them. And sometimes when airplanes passed too loudly by, she ducked against the corner of the windows.
Without a television, a radio, or books, I spent my time with her looking at photographs or listening to her stories about the war, about the bombs that razed villages and the hordes of Igbo people scattering east and south knowing that to go west toward Lagos was to face indifference and to go north was to face death, and in its wake, your body would be defiled. It was in the North that the violence had started, as the Muslim Hausa people turned on the Christian Igbos who had lived among them for so long. There had been a coup in the South, or perhaps two of them, led by Igbo soldiers, which triggered the paranoia of the Muslims. The Hausas responded by attempting to cleanse the newly formed nation of Igbos, who then began retreating to their ancestral lands in the East, which is where the nation of Biafra was soon declared in response. It didn’t help that Biafra sat on one of the largest oil deposits discovered on the African continent. According to my mother, this was something that my godfather—who made the declaration—thought a source of power.
Aunt Ngozi had seen many people burned alive as they fled to the East, left smoldering in dirt roads as warnings to other road-weary refugees. The violence a message of a power so great that it could reduce human life to mere signs. That is how she knew God had chosen the Igbos to suffer for the sins of the entire continent and that he had intended for that suffering to be public.
The headless man made some sense now, like a symbol or fragment of speech.
“This is why it is true for everybody to be calling Igbo people the Jews of Africa. Do you know about these things? Has your mother told you about these things? Do you even know that she had to kidnap you from your own people to save you?”
My mother wouldn’t start telling me anything until I was impervious to her discomfort. Aunt Ngozi insisted on telling me despite its being against my will. The telling was harsh, her spittle and her penchant for emphasizing brutality too much even though I was at the age when I was consistently testing my ability to sustain unpleasant things. Many of these stories ended in my being clutched to Aunt Ngozi’s musky bosom as she prayed and slept. In those weeks before I could go down to the lobby by myself and before I started school, she turned the two apartments into something akin to that refugee camp in Gabon where she said we’d been reunited with her and then other friends.
“Governments would not help us then, only charities and churches, and many of those people died as well, shot down in planes or just killed.”
There were photographs of airlifts and bomb casings and bullets littering the ground like peanut shells.
“Those boys,” she said, pointing at half-naked youths bent over in the dust against the wide-leaved greenery of Eastern Nigeria. “Their job was to find bullets and take them from dead men and give them to the living ones. They were there also making weapons. Your father’s greatness came from being the commander of the Biafra Air Force with no planes at first and no pilots, just Igbo people learning how to do these things and some madmen from Europe called mercenaries and some who believed in your godfather even though they were white men. He was a hero to white men too.”
She remembered the shock that ran through the camp in Gabon when it was discovered that a foreign woman had arrived on an airlift with a baby boy strapped to her back like a native woman. This woman wasn’t Igbo or even African.
“No matter what they tell you when you go back there,” she once said before sleeping, “your mother was a hero to take you from that family after your father was killed by that shrapnel that was everywhere in those times.”
There were no details about my father’s death in my mother’s boxes, drawers, and bags and piles of paper.
“No matter how much they blame her and call
her kidnapper, your mother is a hero. Should she have stayed behind? And left you in that place? No, no, God, no. Your mother was a better African than them because she wanted to be one whereas they could only be what they were. Only a hero can become someone else. And that baby boy was you, the first son of the first son. God can do great things. There are times when he shows you that he can. But then sometimes he will show you that he won’t.”
Aunt Ngozi’s faith had stretched enough to suit my own nascent thinking about the universe. During the worst of the war, she’d begun to wonder if the suffering of the Igbos and the mad-eyed violence of the Northerners were proof that there was no God. She’d always assumed their gods were ultimately the same but for the difference in name and mode of worship. For Allah to sanction or require this violence only fed the suspicion that there could be no God at all, Muslim or Christian. But the war had confirmed that God did exist, just not in the way she had taken for granted. Kwashiorkor and the violence had taught her that perhaps he was just not a god to be worshipped. Instead, he was to be feared for an indifference that in the face of all this chaos and suffering made him divine. After all, only a god could ignore what she saw. Only God could allow it.
She added, “The Yoruba believe creation came from a drunk god. We don’t have the benefit of such explanation.”
There were pictures among my mother’s papers of children who had been hungry for so long that they no longer knew how to eat. They seemed as if they were actually posing for the camera, with food from American aid tins clotting their faces. Even the flies seemed picturesque, posed. These children looked like stranded outer space travelers. To see them as belonging to this world made it harder to look at them.
Aunt Ngozi’s particular vision of God was the first to take hold of me in the wake of my time in Jamaica, those years of Seventh-day Adventist fire and brimstone. I’d thought that there were two options, God or godlessness. But this notion of an indifferent God was as powerful an idea as any I’d heard or read about. It might have come from Aunt Ngozi, but I cherished it as my first great American notion.
This was a god of indifference but also of forgetting. Better yet a machine, one too complex to acknowledge its smaller parts or recall its processes and effects. This machine would have to be all-knowing and therefore know its own limits so it could choose to erase portions of its memory. That will to erase was an act of love because it came from a desire to find us again but as if new and strange and therefore redeemable.
4
Suffragette City
Still, the absence of men troubled me. Weeks and months in America and this remained a city, a country perhaps, of women. Aunties upon aunties. I began to wonder if only women and children were immigrants. And were the only men here white? That’s all I saw in and around the gleaming glass-and-metal spaceship that was our building. And what happened when boys became men? Did they remain immigrants?
I came here expecting not only to become an American but specifically a Black American. But there were no Black Americans anywhere, at least none I can remember, until my mother began taking me through the city. Even then it was clear that there was a barrier between us and them despite the similarity of skin. It was never discussed, but it was rigidly maintained and wouldn’t be explained until I started school.
Some aunties visited the apartment in those first weeks and months, but it was some time before I began to see them and their children regularly. Even after earning my right to stray from the path between our apartment and Aunt Ngozi’s, I spent almost all of my time in the apartment complex. There were days I’d meet my mother downstairs as she came home and ride the elevator up with her. The joy of this freedom would translate into moments of warmth she was happy to receive.
But then, amid a swirl of new cousins, aunties, and the familiar ache of absent men, life in America began to resemble life in Jamaica. The aunties were most often nurses like my mother. Along with an entire generation of Caribbean people, they’d gone after World War II to rebuild the “Mother Country”—they still called it that without irony. Regardless of how they’d been treated upon arrival in England, they felt they had rescued an empire they still felt a part of. It was England that had needed them, reached out for them. In saving it, they were superior to it and therefore to the racism they encountered. Due to their skills, some eventually made their way to the United States and Canada even if it meant leaving their children in Jamaica.
Many of the women she knew from nursing school in England. This world of immigrant nurses and their families would lead to a strange mix of loneliness and community that characterized my childhood—endless aunties and a relentless flow of new cousins. We quickly assembled networks of family, but our time together was often short. This may have made us value those quick intimacies, but it made us also quick to detach since we were already prepared for connection to end.
One of my new aunts in DC, whom I remember only as Tante, was from Gabon. She and her children became my new family along with an aunt from the Caribbean named Carmen and her children. Aunt Carmen had known my mother in London and had lost track of her after she’d been swept off her feet by my father and hurried to Nigeria. Aunt Carmen remembered that time well because she, like many of the others, had thought my mother was making a terrible mistake. She’d thought her dead when she heard about the Nigerian Civil War—what would a Jamaican woman do in that madness?
Tante had four children. Her oldest son’s French name was Hans. He was older than I by a year or two. There were two girls, one whose French name was Geneviève and who was exactly my age. The other was younger, but I don’t remember her name. The only one not born in Gabon was a baby always swaddled in native cloths. The family had a house girl who spoke only their native language and a few words in French. A house girl was something none of us had anymore, so this seemed both an incredible extravagance and a sign of what we had all lost. In Africa house girls and house boys were such an intrinsic part of life that to arrive in a country where they were available only to the wealthy was a shock even children could feel. Tante’s family also had a house, which placed them at the very top of our small social world.
Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy’s daughters had claimed that when my mother and I landed in Jamaica my first words to them were in French. “Bonbon,” I supposedly had said, which to their ears sounded like the Jamaican profanity bumbo. They’d initially assumed them native African words, which no doubt confirmed whatever ideas they’d had about Africa. They disbelieved my mother who angrily told them that the words were French and that Africans spoke English, French, and other “civilized” languages. France had been one of the few countries to support Biafra, albeit secretly, with weapons, mercenaries, food, and medicine.
But Tante was not as sympathetic to the French people as my mother was. She thought them no different from the British. They had colonized Gabon, after all, and were also after the oil discovered in Igboland before the war. In her view the British hoped to get it by supporting the federal government, the French hoped to have privileged access if they sided with Biafra. It was Tante’s family we’d stayed with once we left the refugee camps—or were rescued from them, said Aunt Ngozi, eyes wide and glazed as we relived each and every moment in the grotto of her apartment. I was thankful to be seeing less and less of that room as I began to spend time with the new aunties and cousins.
Tante’s husband was a diplomat who had traveled between Gabon, Paris, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast. They spoke of him often and displayed photos of him in every room of their spacious home. He’d been placed under house arrest in Gabon. But then all word from or about him stopped. Uncle had been gone so long that his presence was felt largely through a pause in the family’s language, a linguistic instability as they struggled to determine which tense to use when speaking of him. I remember Tante saying to my mother that for us it was easy. At least we knew that my father was actually dead.
Aunt Carmen’s children were named Karina and Jacob. They we
re emotionally closer to me than Tante’s children because Hans and Geneviève went to a school taught in French, whereas these two went to an American school as I now did too. They took it upon themselves to teach me all the things that school and aunties could not. I’d sometimes stay at their house after school until my mother finished work and occasionally would stay over for church on Sunday. They weren’t Seventh-day Adventists. Once she’d reached America, my mother stopped caring about denominations. But I remember that I was never to tell our Seventh-day Adventist aunties that I’d gone to church with “Sunday worshippers.”
I never knew if Aunt Carmen had been widowed, divorced, never married, or if her man had simply stayed in place while she floated around the world for school and work like the other women. She came from Nevis, and everyone joked about how the island was so small that if you rolled over in your sleep you’d fall into the ocean. So small that every front lawn was on the beach and also every backyard. So small that you had to go to other islands to make sure you didn’t marry a relative. Aunt Carmen laughed at the jokes, relishing the fact that anyone had heard of her island at all.
These two aunts would not be in my life for long, but they remain associated with two early, indelible experiences of this country. First, my encounter with America’s unique relationship to skin and, second, the discovery of the song that had haunted me since the refugee camp.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 5