One imagines calenture in line with nostalgia, also once thought to be an illness, from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). It was affiliated with paranoia and melancholia, other illnesses as hard to identify as they were to treat, given how patients seemed to luxuriate in the symptoms.
The symptoms, however, are far more meaningful than the condition’s almost forgotten history. Calenture brought a specific kind of delirium. It was not unusual for one so afflicted to suddenly see the ocean as a vast, rolling green field, rich with flowers, brush, and familiar grass. At sea for months at a time, parched for the sight of land, sailors flung themselves into this expanse knowing that home was just beyond the next rise, sure-footing themselves to death.
As we know, many enslaved Africans chose to drown rather than remain captive. Some folktales tell us they tried to fly back to Africa, having sprouted wings from the transformative power of their longing. But in cases of calenture, this leap wasn’t an act of suicide or evidence of madness. It was a final grasp at certainty, knowing that they could make their home in permanent flight.
5
Absolute Beginners (Part I)
After spending so much time rummaging through the boxes in our apartment and looking at pictures of my father and godfather in military uniforms—the latter with his notable beard on the cover of international magazines—my desire to know more about these men grew stronger. This was especially the case because actual men were still scarce in my world. My father in particular became more and more a source of fascination. I had been with my mother long enough now to know that asking direct questions about him wouldn’t be easy. We had yet to develop any ease with each other that could lead to the sharing of difficult information. I still held my guard against her.
There were many images of my father in infantry school in England, where I knew my parents first met and where their story, which had become mythical in Jamaica, started. In these pictures, he was running and climbing and marching with white men. In some—I noticed now that skin had become more significant to me—he was commanding them. He and my godfather were always at the center of every picture. And the white men were always at the edges of the photos. But I could find no information in the apartment about my father’s death.
I occasionally left some pictures of my father on the kitchen table or on our foldaway bed hoping to prepare my mother for an imminent conversation. She needed to know that I was curious, amassing facts. Whenever she saw the pictures or saw me looking at them, her face grew stern enough that I could tell it wasn’t time to ask my questions. She was always too tired from working or always preparing to take another shift or always getting ready to take me to stay with one of my aunties and cousins or upstairs to stay with Aunt Ngozi. I looked for an opening, an opportunity. Her discomfort, anger, or pain wouldn’t deter me. These would only be evidence of wounds I still wanted to inflame.
The opportunity came when I found a leather-bound photo album clasped with a small lock. It was in an area I’d never dared look before—the space in the closet where she kept her underwear, handbags, and other personal items, the one place free of files or boxes or items branded with drug logos or the names of medical supply companies. Because the album was worn and battered, the clasp lifted right off the cover. The album opened even though the lock was intact. I saw photographs of a funeral. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it had to be my father’s funeral. The casket was closed, but most of the pictures featured my mother dressed in black, a veil over her face, weeping and surrounded by various people. She wore dark glasses under the veil, adding to the glamour all of those old black-and-white pictures conveyed. My godfather was in full uniform, surrounded by a military guard. I could only assume that the various women and men not in military uniform were members of my family that I could not have remembered.
Showing my mother the album had the desired effect. She slowed, then froze, sitting down heavily. It was clear she hadn’t seen it for ages or, for all I could tell, had never actually looked in it since she turned each page as if it were the first time. Each new image drew a gasp or a whisper. I wondered if I’d presented the book too aggressively. Her silence suggested a hurt that even at my age and despite my resentment of her I dared not exploit.
“Who was he?” I eventually asked.
“This was your father,” she said. “It was his funeral.”
“I know but who was he?”
Her lips were open, poised on the precipice of speech, but she remained silent without even breath.
“I want to know about him, what he was like.”
Something about her silence that looked like imminent speech triggered me.
“I’ve seen all of the pictures and read all of this stuff in the house, and I remember people saying all kinds of things in Jamaica. Was he a king or a prince or a hero? What happened to him? It was in the war, I know, but how was he killed?”
It all came from me in a great burst, a rush of questions that began softly and sincerely but quickly evolved into a series of demands. I was owed this information. I was the first son of the first son for God’s sake. Mine was a legacy of fame and she merely its conduit.
“Was my father famous just because of the war? And my godfather, he was a hero too. Where is he now? Will he come see us? Is the war really over? Why didn’t we win if we were all heroes?”
She sat there in a cocoon of silence as if she hadn’t heard me. Her lips had closed, and it seemed to me she’d retreated from whatever she may have seemed ready to share. I’d expected some anger from her and hoped for some pain, but this utter lack of emotion was an unexpected move on her part.
“Why didn’t we go back to Nigeria after the war? Why did we have to go to Jamaica at all?”
And with her silence now seeming aggressive, even retaliatory, I asked what suddenly seemed more important than everything else I’d purportedly wanted to know.
“Why did you leave me in that house?”
At that, she raised her head. She closed the photo album and looked at me with a warmth that wilted me in ways her silence didn’t. This, I now knew, was the violence of women, even more reason for me to find men and escape from this city. This was the wrong America. She knew enough to not reach out to me, but her eyes were so soft that it took every bit of strength I had not to go to her.
She never answered any of those questions, and I wouldn’t ask them again for years. But it was clear to me now that my mother had failed me. My aunts too. Men would have taught me the correct response to “nigger,” there was no question about that. Men would have explained the various meanings of skin that were suddenly thrust on me in school after such a short time in this country.
It was sometime soon after that that I started hearing her speaking to my aunts about our leaving Washington, DC. She never told me directly why, but I overheard that we were going to Los Angeles, a city far on the other side of this endless country. There was an uncle there, a blood relative. I was excited, not about the move or the city but because he was an uncle. Maybe Los Angeles would be my city of men.
6
All the Young Dudes
The rumor was that the Bloods were planning to open fire on our school playground sometime today. That street gang controlled the area from downtown Inglewood all the way back to the Crenshaw District of South Los Angeles, just beyond where my mother and I now lived. When we’d arrived from Washington, DC, I couldn’t yet recognize the hand signs, icons, colors, and other differences between the gangs that were everywhere, the Bloods, the Eight Tray Gangster Crips, or the Blood Stone Pirus. I called them all Diamond Dogs in my head in homage to the David Bowie album of the same name. His vision of a postapocalyptic world of feral teenagers roaming the streets seemed just right. Learning to distinguish between gangs and territories was as crucial to my survival as dodging the police, who seemed unable to differentiate between gangbangers and any random cluster of black boys in the area.
Our junior high school was
flanked by the concrete buildings of the Inglewood Courthouse to the north and another set of gray structures to the west. The school’s location gave rise to many jokes about how convenient the site made it for students to ping-pong from building to building. Those jokes weren’t completely untrue because it wasn’t unusual to see friends or brothers of friends on their way to court in recently purchased suits. Just behind the school was the Inglewood Public Library, also concrete. Behind the library was the local high school, which had a reputation in line with its location in the heart of Inglewood. The stories of gang violence and mayhem at times may have been exaggerated but were eagerly embraced by us middle-school boys because they enhanced our own street credibility.
Which is why the rumor of snipers firing on our playground quickly became fact in our minds when the principal announced over the loudspeaker that we weren’t allowed out of our classrooms during recess or lunch. All the boys clustered by the windows, eager to witness or claim participation in whatever was about to happen. I joined them, thrilled finally to be in a world of men.
When it came time for gym class, we filed out from the locker rooms into the gymnasium. The exercise of the day, Coach announced, was square dancing. As strange as this was, we dared not complain because Coach terrified us. She was white and a woman, and was rumored to be able to dunk a basketball. More than a few of us mumbled that square dancing was a white people thing, but Coach ignored this. She was clearly looking for a way to keep us off the playground. The dance would force the boys and the girls to engage one another. We were at the age when being coerced into dancing allowed us to maintain that feigned indifference to one another we were attempting to master. We grabbed our partners and do-si-doed and laughed at the white people’s music that Coach played from a record player. I laughed louder than most because I couldn’t let anyone know that country music was wildly popular in Jamaica and more familiar to me at the time than the music my American peers listened to.
After class, Coach led us through the school and outside the building as if we were having a fire drill. She set us free in front of the courthouse, where there were always police cars and officers moving in, out, and around the gray buildings that today seemed to protect rather than intimidate. My friends were waiting near the police cars with rumors about why what we’d expected did not happen. Some said the gang chose a different school. Some said they got caught or the date was wrong.
No one our age walked these streets alone. Even if we quarreled or fought, it was always understood that the walks to and from school were never forfeited. Whether we chose to go straight down La Brea or to cut through Centinela Park, it was always best to be in a group. No one wanted to be alone in case of a run-in with the Diamond Dogs; or any wannabes looking to make a name for themselves; or the police, whose intentions were always opaque; or other groups of boys or girls as afraid as we were and equally eager to prove themselves fearless.
Just as my friends and I were about to cross Prairie Avenue to the park, I realized I’d left something behind in the locker room, something no different to me than an internal organ and just as vulnerable. In a panic, hoping I was wrong, I rummaged through my bag. My friends wondered what was going on. Was it money, my house key, homework, some girl’s phone number? Terrified and not daring to tell what I’d lost, I bolted back toward the school. That I would do so alone must have conveyed to the others how serious this was.
When I got back to the school, the police cars were gone, the doors closed, and the gates chained. One of the school counselors escorted me in once he saw the urgency on my face and after I told him that I had left something important in the locker room. My stomach went queasy and my eyes wet, and I was so scared that it didn’t matter if anyone saw me crying. The terror came from imagining one of the older boys, or one of my friends, or one of those boys who constantly had beef with me for one reason or another in possession of what I’d lost. What I did find was the empty folder that had held what would make me more vulnerable in this community than my accent, my familiarity with country and western music, or my adoration of David Bowie. It was, or had been, my first attempt at a novel.
* * *
When my mother and I arrived in Los Angeles, we stayed with my great-uncle Irving. He was, I learned, our only blood relative in the United States. But he turned out to have been alone for so long that having family around wasn’t easy for him. He was a carpenter who’d come to California after World War II and made himself wealthy building kitchens for the black middle class he’d arrived in time to see emerge. His house where we stayed for our first few months was just a block off Crenshaw Boulevard, a street that would be immortalized in gangsta hip-hop and a series of “hood” films that presaged and followed the 1992 riots, which spilled over into this very neighborhood. The house was a fortress surrounded by walls and bars. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were the same. They reminded me of Montego Bay, front porches like birdcages and yards like compounds.
Great-Uncle Irving’s carpentry business was nearby on Slauson Avenue. He drove a scarred and wounded pickup truck, but on Sundays and occasional Saturdays he brought out his Mercedes Benz and made the rounds. Most important for me was the fact that in his storefront shop was a collection of pornography more varied than what my friends and I found in liquor stores. Without those magazines, puberty might have been more difficult.
Close to his house was a Jamaican grocery store on Crenshaw that sold meat patties, cocoa bread, and, if you arrived early enough on weekends, the Jamaican national dish, ackee and saltfish. This would be gone before noon, and to get it, people often resorted to behavior Great-Uncle described as “truly Jamaican,” hence his refusal to eat there and his only grudgingly shopping in the store. The owners ran a proper sit-down restaurant even closer to his house. He didn’t eat there either even though we could smell the wonderful odor of jerk chicken when they made it in the parking lot.
The owners of the grocery store and the restaurant had the same last name as my mother’s maiden name. Rumor was that we were related, but the connection would remain unverified. Due to some feud that had started back on the island before Britain and Biafra, we didn’t socialize with the owners or expect anything beyond basic business. At one point, after an acrimonious divorce, a restaurant of the same name popped up on the other side of Slauson Avenue. Two Jamaican restaurants with the same name, the same food, and many of the same people working and loitering at each split the Jamaican community. Some sided with the wife and others with the husband. Because of that ancient family feud, we were treated with the same indifference in each one and had the benefit of both. Yet the feud confirmed a stronger sense of community for me. What provides a greater sense of belonging than shared family drama, especially the kind that travels nations and continents?
Eventually, my mother and I moved to a house deeper in gang territory than Great-Uncle’s house was. There was a bus that ran by my school, but to take it would leave me vulnerable to the older kids who rode it to the local high school behind the library. And I wanted to test the freedom that came with walking the route free from adult supervision.
When I first started walking to school with the boys in my neighborhood, I refused to carry a backpack or gym bag because I wanted my books to be seen. This public display was to me a signifier of arrival. It may have led to my being singled out by gangbangers for beatings but that didn’t trouble me much. In the wake of the relentless mockery of my friends, though, I took notice. All this reading meant, apparently, that I was “acting white.” Bowie’s music and also the reggae and calypso my family played a little too loudly on weekends drew the same accusations. Anything that was alien to my friends and neighbors was branded white even if it came from Jamaica or Nigeria. This accusation was already a strong cliché in that suburb of Black America even among those who rejected it as a racist myth. It didn’t seem a reasonable insult to me because there were barely any white people to mimic. And why would I want to imitate white people? Ev
en the ones on TV didn’t read.
I remember no more than four white kids in a school of hundreds of black and Mexican kids. The few white families still in our neighborhood never interacted with their neighbors, and their children were not seen on the street. Those kids appeared only in class where they were judged as weak, to be pitied, not imitated. They may have been ensconced in “advanced” or “mentally gifted” courses, but we all knew it was because they were unable to survive on their own. White kids rarely appeared on the playground, and the girls wore their hair in rigid buns for fear that some other student would light their hair on fire. The only other whites were teachers, head coaches, librarians, and police officers, none of whom lived in the neighborhood.
Acting white, then, had nothing to do with white people or their skin. Learning this was a true revelation. Acting white had to do with how those who read spoke and how they began to react to the people and world around them. It defined a curiosity seen as dangerous because it meant you were testing this community’s definitions and limits. This curiosity had to be policed, it seemed to me, because it threatened those definitions and limits by suggesting they could be transformed.
What seemed especially strange, given what I knew from being born on the African continent and having spent years on a majority-black island, was that Blackness had nothing to do with where we came from. At least not in this neighborhood. We immigrants certainly weren’t Black—we were told so regularly by our neighbors and friends who were, apparently, really Black. If whiteness wasn’t really about skin, neither was Blackness.
My accent and obsession with books also marked me as foreign, making the only manhood I could imagine—a Black one—seem out of reach. That’s likely why I soon stopped reading entirely. My mother was too busy with work to notice, at least until she began hearing from the vice principal that I was getting into regular fights. One in particular featured my using a bicycle chain to strip some flesh from one boy outside the school’s main gate after having driven a sharpened pencil deep into the thigh of his second in command. The police had been called. Had it not been for the fact that the boy was armed with a broken broomstick and had bloodied me, I likely would have been the only one suspended.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 7