The issue of skin began to encroach as my first summer in America came to an end and school approached. I could already see that there were two Americas, one white and one black. I’d still never actually met any Black Americans, no one I knew had. Still, it was emphasized to us children that despite how others might see us we were not like them. What we were was never defined except in terms of what we were not and what we did not think or what we would not do. Despite Tante and Aunt Carmen being equally emphatic about our not being Black Americans, I have no memory of their families, one Caribbean and one African, spending any time together. They were as segregated from one another as we all were from both Americas. In what would become a pattern, my mother shuttled me between Caribbean and African people in hopes that my mixed heritage would forge some notion of community in a country that seemed unable to define us as other than Black American.
Within my first few weeks of Catholic school, something happened that gave Tante the opportunity to make abundantly clear what it was that we were not. A boy my age who came from the real America, the white one, called me nigger. It was an unfamiliar word. It wasn’t yet common in Jamaica or among any Africans. Because it was as alien as those rare and archaic words my mother collected, it had little impact. It was the boy’s expression, the mixture of disdain and anger on his face, that told me that the word had privileged meanings. He’d expected it to have devastating effect. Up until then, the teachers and my schoolmates had seemed charmed by my accent, which seemed to me to be the thing that primarily marked my difference from everyone else. Awareness of skin color was clearly at work in Jamaica, but it hadn’t yet commanded my perception of self or my sense of difference from other people. My teachers and fellow students were impressed by the way I read out loud. Here in my American school, I sought every opportunity to perform this skill, and because of it, I had already been awarded responsibility for the class library, a small bookshelf that I organized and reorganized diligently.
It was out of curiosity that I asked my mother what the word meant. I expected to make mistakes in this country, but I couldn’t figure out what the boy had expected me to do in response to him or what I’d done to earn the expression on his face. Because I was new, I assumed all this was my fault. My mother gasped but said nothing. That too was proof that something unusual had happened. She seemed visibly bent by a sudden weight. She was unable or unwilling to define the word.
I was alone with the word until a few days later at Tante’s house. Tante, midstream in the process of wrapping her head tie, came bursting through the door from a room where my mother had been speaking to her. With the fabric draped around her neck, she put her hands on my shoulders, delivering just enough pain from her fingernails to hold me at attention. Her children responded as if I were about to get a beating, meaning that they sat quietly assessing if they were next.
But Tante wasn’t angry with me.
“Listen to me,” she said. “This is very wrong and we must do something about this immediately. It is not your fault. They have mistaken you for one of the blacks. Do you get? It is because we look the same. When someone says that word to you or calls you that name, say this. Listen. And you must say it very well and clear. Say I am not a slave. My father was not a slave. My grandfather was not a slave. My father’s mother was not a slave. My uncles were not slaves and aunties were not slaves. We are not slaves. We came to this country by choice!”
She turned to my mother, who had entered the room, and said, “This has happened to others of us so it is not his fault. He did nothing wrong, but it’s good you all now know. This is something very important in this America, and you will be in trouble if you do not know these things.” Then she turned back to me. “Now say it back to me.”
I couldn’t so she repeated it.
I am not a slave. My father was not a slave. My grandfather was not a slave. My father’s mother was not a slave. My uncles were not slaves and aunties were not slaves. We are not slaves. We came to this country by choice!
It took at least four times before I could impress it into memory via a familiar rhythm. It helped after she told her children to say it for me. They did so easily. They’d memorized it a long time ago in English and French. Should they ever get into any trouble with white Americans, being able to call upon a French accent would be helpful. It would let them know what you were not.
She turned to my mother.
“You have to keep his accent strong. They must hear him before they see him. The whites have to know who we are so they won’t treat us like them.”
Aunt Carmen had been here much longer than any of the other aunties, and when she learned what had happened, she wasn’t overly offended. To be mistaken for a Black American was the price of arrival, especially for children whose accents were much more vulnerable to assimilation than their parents’. Her children were older than the others so she no longer had the confidence of complete control and increasingly faced the impact of both Americas in her home. In her view, being mistaken for a Black American had its benefits. There were times when it would be good to hide within the skin, as it were. It could be safe there, and you could be left to live and prosper in this country quietly. There was no shame in invisibility as long as you knew it was not the same as disappearance.
I was too young to wonder what my mother must have thought of Tante’s words. She was no longer the mythic being described in Jamaica or the hero described by Africans but a wearer of wigs. At first, I thought it was the word “nigger” that was responsible for her diminishment, but it had to have something to do with another word—“Biafra.” Everything led back to that even if she wouldn’t talk about it. Maybe it was because this country was also depleted, recovering from long marches, burning cities, and violence. There had been a war here too, said Aunt Carmen, whenever any of us encountered inexplicable bitterness on the busses or at school or in the streets. We’d arrived before they’d healed their wounds. It was rude to expect them to attend to ours. What I remember is that my mother told me to respond as Tante had instructed and had me practice the words in our apartment until they were like a song that came easily.
Armed with this catechism—it was a Catholic school after all—I went eager to encounter that word, that boy, even that expression again. I had no greater understanding of the word itself but felt confident that even though I’d been armed by women this would be a manly act.
It took some days for me to find myself face-to-face with the boy in the hallway. He was preoccupied and pretended not to notice me. He required inciting. I remember being surprised by how short and small he was. In the days since he’d used that word and in the wake of my aunties’ responses, he’d become taller and threatening enough in my mind to make this confrontation seem worthy of the courage I now felt. He remained reluctant until I pushed him with my shoulder, causing him to stumble against the wall. On the cusp of tears, he called me nigger again and I was elated.
Knowing my words would carry, I spoke as much to him as for the audience I saw gathering. It was like being on stage, a feeling that befit my being the voice of the people.
I am not a slave. My father was not a slave. My grandfather was not a slave. My father’s mother was not a slave. My uncles were not slaves and aunties were not slaves. We are not slaves. We came to this country by choice!
And then I said the words again, this time emphasizing my Jamaican accent.
The boy looked up at me quizzically and began to cry. I’d said the last word “choice!” particularly loudly and wondered if that was what made him run through the hallway until he found an adult. That adult turned to see me in the hallway with the other children shrinking away from me. He marched toward me, grabbed my shoulder, and whisked me away to the main office. I felt nausea, calenture, but due to shaking on dry land, not open sea.
I was sure I would be deported, but to which country God only knew. Instead, I lost charge of the class library and was no longer given opportunities to read aloud. This w
asn’t so bad since my accent was no longer charming or exotic and no longer protected me from the fact of my skin. This was the punishment that turned out to be enduring: a new awareness of that skin. I’d previously thought of myself as either the only Jamaican or only African or only immigrant child in school. I now noticed that there was a handful of other black children, African Americans. If they were otherwise, they would likely have been from families my aunts would have known. I wondered if they had noticed me or thought me as invisible as they had been to me. I began to notice these things everywhere now, who was what and who looked like what and who came from where. The sounds of voices became more pressing to my ear, who had an accent and who didn’t. The country began to feel smaller.
Some weeks or months later, I thought I was being given a chance at redemption. The school was celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, and we students were each tasked with writing a poem or essay about him. I hadn’t heard of Dr. King before this celebration, but regardless of how little money we had, my mother had recently purchased a more or less current set of The Encyclopedia Britannica, where I learned enough about him to write a poem.
I remember the first lines vividly: “Bells do ring for Dr. Martin Luther King, he made the world free for you and me.”
Not only did I get to read it out loud to all the students in my grade, and thereby brandish my accent after a long silence, but my poem and performance also won a coupon for McDonald’s. It was my first experience of literary notice (and I had never been to McDonald’s). The following week I was asked to read my poem again in front of a larger group of students and teachers from several grades. After the reading, one of the teachers came to the front of the class. She was the only black teacher at the school I can recall, and she was livid. After glaring at me, she turned to my audience and declared that Dr. Martin Luther King was great but that he didn’t die for me. He died for her people, not mine. It was wrong for me to win. Africans were backward and spent all their time killing one another, like in Uganda and Biafra, and were an embarrassment to real black people. She grabbed the poem from my hands, crumpling it.
It is hard not to tell this story alongside the one about my introduction to the word “nigger” and the sudden awareness it brought to skin and accent. I was too young to know that the teacher’s view of Africans might not have been shared by other blacks and also too new to the country to acknowledge her own conflicts with this great land to which my mother and I had fled. But the fact that the conflict occurred in front of an audience of whites looking on in amusement and perhaps pity did not leave me.
The country shrunk again, smaller than Biafra and even Jamaica. At least I still had the coupon.
* * *
But, as they said in this country, timing is everything. I thought they said it because things here still happened for a reason even if God was indifferent or optional. Here everything was preordained, destined. Randomness was for countries where bodies clogged rivers and roads, and mothers left children behind.
It was in the thick of these shifting perceptions of race and accent and America that I finally found the song that had haunted me. The song about Major Tom and Ground Control, about floating in space, refusing to land. I’d hear it occasionally late at night with my transistor radio fuzzing me to sleep but never in full and never with the singer’s name or song title. The night I found the song, my mother was working and I’d been left at Aunt Carmen’s apartment with Karina and Jacob. Aunt Carmen was asleep in her bedroom and had allowed us to eat, play, sleep, and watch television together in the living room. The lights were out except for the television that was crowned with an antenna made of a wire clothes hanger. We lay on the floor covered with a blanket, fast-food wrappers and containers scattered around. Soda cans and cups had been shaped into a castle around us, but somehow its walls separated Karina and me from her younger brother. Jacob had recently sprained his wrist and had fallen asleep with his arm curled on his chest like an insect.
Though I’d avoided this many times before, I didn’t move my hand now while Karina rubbed it between her thighs. She held me tightly enough to cause the bones in my hand to rub painfully against one another. Because this wasn’t my first time rubbing like this, I was able to keep focused on the television even with its images appearing in between bursts of static. My attempts to get up and move the antenna to clear the screen were greeted with even more pressure from her thighs. I stayed in place. Some of the older girls back in Jamaica had done this with Cousin Danny and me when they needed help sleeping or after the reggae concerts in the stadium behind the house after the older boys had gone home. Once I’d even been brought into bed with a group of them and their school friends who were staying past Sabbath. Just when it was announced that Sabbath had ended, they pushed me into one of the rooms on their side of the house. As if I were a patient on a surgical table, they touched and poked and prodded me and had me touch, poke, and prod them. If I pushed too hard, I was hit across the face or one of the larger girls would hold me down on the bed and straddle me, reaching down between my legs to pull and twist, gauging how much pressure and pain a boy could take and laughing equally at my pleasures and failures.
Karina was gentler than the girls in Jamaica. She demanded nothing but my hand and its steady motion. The harder I pushed my hand, the faster she rubbed against it and the tighter she closed her eyes. She’d gone wet by then and my fingers slid easily inside her, first one then two. If I could make her sleep sooner rather than later, I’d have the television to myself. Karina had either forgotten or stopped caring that Jacob was lying next to her and that his fragile arm was close enough to touch when she arched and shook. The soda cans rattled but did not fall. Her breathing was loud but not enough to wake her mother. After less than a minute of short and sharp breaths, she was asleep next to her brother and I was able slowly to remove my hand, trailing moisture like a snail along her thighs.
After a rudimentary shift of the wire hanger, the blur of television static shaped into a smattering of applause. The camera moved back from the host to someone who stood with arms spread out as if crucified, his body draped in what I remember as glittering gauze. His eyes were hollow and his cheekbones sharply angled, giving him the emaciated look of an unfinished machine. His skin was too pale to call white. It was ghostly; you could almost see his inner workings. He had a woman’s face painted vividly like a girl’s doll, and when his mouth opened, it was the song, my song, about the astronaut floating in a most peculiar way with no desire whatsoever to land. My eyes welled up with tears. It had been so long and the song was still so familiar. I’d heard snippets of other songs that were likely from the same singer, but they had only proved that it was just a matter of time before this moment. Timing, again, was everything. Even an indifferent God allowed serendipity.
“Ground control to Major Tom . . . Commencing countdown, engines on.”
Even my mother remembered those words. She had sung them to me before she left Jamaica for America. The song was guaranteed to put me to sleep, she said, as it had back in Gabon, where the noise at night was due to the children crying except for the ones who sat peacefully, eyes wide open, and died. The fact that extreme hunger made one unable and unwilling to eat was a lesson she always emphasized, though I never understood what she meant me to learn from it. The flies made noise, she said, like the static of a transistor radio or the buzz of distant planes on their way to what was Biafra.
At the end of the performance, the applause was a full roar. Yet the singer didn’t smile, didn’t laugh or thank the audience or even bow. That impressed me. He wasn’t performing for them at all. He stood defiantly in the light as if he were looking down at the audience from above that line in the sky where blue turned to black. He disappeared long before the applause stopped.
I didn’t realize I had moved so close to the screen. It covered my entire field of vision. The sound was loud enough to have brought Aunt Carmen running into the room with a belt ready to swing at me, bu
t she didn’t. The house remained silent. I felt like turning around and bowing, as if I had been the one singing and raising my arms up like a messiah in front of that rapturous audience. But it wasn’t my job to sing. My job was to listen and interpret.
I left the television on until the broadcasting day ended and distortion and buzz warmed the room in restless light, then turned it off so I wouldn’t get distracted and forget the name of the singer or allow the feeling to fade too quickly. I wrote it down on the nearest scrap of paper. In the sudden silence, I saw Jacob still asleep and also Karina, her fingers between her thighs and the moisture now coated white on her skin. There was that imperceptible change in atmosphere, that sudden crispness that said morning was coming. For the first few minutes after the singer had gone, I’d been annoyed that my cousins could sleep through something so momentous. But this was obviously not a communal revelation. Even though they were immigrants, Aunt Carmen always reminded them that they had a home on the island of their birth and could always return. I had no such luxury. But I could claim this peculiar floating, a curse I would have to shape into my own kind of blessing.
* * *
Calentura: “calenture” in older English sources.
Cuban fever or, in colloquial terms, sexual arousal.
In the nineteenth century, the word named a species of tropical fever commonly identified among sailors, convicts, and slaves. Victims found themselves beset by a longing so powerful that it caused doctors and philosophers to make declarations about the impact of climate on culture and temperature on race. It’s not surprising that such diagnoses rendered peoples from the tropics less prone to the cold balance of reason and more subject to the torpid violence of passions. This has now become merely a promise made to tourists.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 6