In junior high school, I had started to take sports seriously. Being on a team was like being in a gang—the same level of protection from the streets but with more respect from the wider community. Football was particularly useful, but it didn’t insulate me from all claims on my loyalty. Some of the homies I used to walk with to and from junior high now spent most of their time on those same streets, migrating between petty squabbles with one another and interactions with the police. Whenever I saw them, I had to prove myself in some way. This led eventually to my agreeing to let them into the gym one evening when the school was closed. All first-string ballplayers knew where the key to the storage room was kept. My friends moved in and stole sports equipment. I didn’t take anything but we were all caught and I had to face a disciplinary hearing.
My mother rounded up all the white friends she had from the hospitals where she worked to testify to the school disciplinary board on my behalf. Not only did these women sing my praises, they all also emphasized that I read books, a lot, and how remarkable that was and that I wasn’t really American, I was an immigrant and so easily swayed by natives because I didn’t know much better but would learn because I read books. In the school and eventually in my neighborhood, the fact that I wasn’t expelled was enough evidence that I’d snitched on my friends. Plus, word had gotten out from the disciplinary hearing that I read books, a lot.
My punishment, being cut from the football team, meant I’d lost everything—reputation, protection, the promise of sex. Being branded a snitch meant I was not only ostracized by my friends but also had to keep watch over my shoulder. The only people I could occasionally socialize with were the friendless white kids with weird hair who read science fiction and listened to rock music and loved, yes, David Bowie. With no social group, I found myself in the library during recess and lunch. In a dingy office behind the library, I eventually discovered the college guidance counselor.
But the effects of that discovery would not play out in my life for another couple of years. I needed immediate help. The only person I could turn to was a cousin who’d been sent back to Jamaica himself multiple times though he seemed immune to the punishment. Cousin Brian had arrived in America years before me, long enough ago to have utterly lost his Jamaican accent. That alone made him a hero to many of my cousins. On top of that, he’d become a legend in the neighborhood while a cautionary tale in the family. He had played sports for a time too until he found his greater loyalty. He had by now spent as much time in as out of jail. He’d become a Diamond Dog and his reputation was such that merely mentioning his name in certain areas of the city could save us cousins from a serious beatdown.
Even though his parents had achieved the American middle class in record time, this was Inglewood, which meant street life was still close enough to make gang life attractive to a “pretty boy” like him. Middle-class boys rose quickly up the ranks not only because of their tendency to overcompensate for their privilege through violence but by the fact that their parents could afford lawyers. His mother had been friends with mine from when they were both nursing students in England during the 1950s. His family may have been among the most successful of the families, but if you asked others, those who heard the fights between Cousin Brian and his father that ended with slammed doors or the thud of bone on flesh or bone on bone, he was headed for prison the whole time. He had always displayed open disdain for our families’ habit of cultivating foreignness. When a rumor came up that he had actually been born in the United States, my uncles and aunts allowed it to continue out of resentment toward him for the disdain he showed them. But after he went to prison for the final time, we young cousins kept him in our family by dismissing the rumor as absurd.
Cousin Brian was often blamed for my own propensity for violence. He had taught me that violence was its own method of belonging or at least of finding a space that was yours in a neighborhood that my cousins saw as permanent and my elders insisted was temporary. He introduced me to the idea that the difference between a strong man and weak one wasn’t physical strength or skill but ultimately the will to do violence and that this could be cultivated. It became easy for me to transfer that will to the football field or basketball court, especially since games often ended with actual violence in the parking lots or on the long walks home.
Cousin Brian was old school to the bone even as guns were entering our field of play. Only employ weapons you were born with, he said. They hurt if you use them incorrectly and thereby limited their own use. Ironic, since guns were the weapons of choice that night at the motel on La Brea where the bodies were found and from where he fled until he was either caught or surrendered and went up for double homicide (at that point, all details were suppressed as his mother and father stopped uttering his name and used the intensity of their denial to keep us from talking about it).
It made sense to seek him out now. It was a surprise to see him open the door, boyish face smiling in a way that made me wonder at times if his good looks had something to do with his need to overcompensate with toughness. Nothing was worse in that part of town than being a pretty boy. There was his general refusal to comb his hair even though he—as was still the style—kept an Afro pick in it, the type with a Black Power fist on the end. As much as he adhered to the style codes of his street family, his natural good looks made those styles seem affected. His body had changed since his last prison bid. It was more muscular, at least the torso and arms, almost grotesque in contrast with that face. In a few weeks or months, he would be gone for good, his name then able to confer to us cousins the respect that came from having a relative doing heavy time.
I’d started lifting weights myself at the local YMCA. Not only because of sports but also because I wanted to look capable of the kind of violence I was no longer willing to commit. My mother had paid for the membership on my return from Jamaica, hoping it would keep me out of trouble. Cousin Brian approved the difference in me as he took me into the garage where there was a rickety workout bench with weights and a boom box without a cover and a tape shoved in. The cassette had to be removed when necessary by a butter knife.
He asked a question, one he’d asked me when I had first arrived in LA. Was I the king of my school? I’d had no idea what he was talking about back when I was new to this city. I’d heard older boys on the basketball court debating who was or wasn’t king of the school but never paid this much mind. The king of a school, I eventually understood, was the boy who could whoop everybody’s ass or—and I learned this later, not from Cousin Brian but from what happened when I became a contender in this game—people thought you could. The distinction was significant.
I said no to his question in the garage. That guns had moved from lore to reality made his type of manhood less appealing to me. I wanted to tell him that I’d come to realize something that he’d never pointed out, that each fight could now lead to death and that I now knew people who had died. Also, my head had been broken open in Jamaica. It was filled with awful images and feelings of such weakness that I couldn’t conjure up that wild breath in my chest that he’d taught me to enjoy before swinging my fists or while taking a blow. When I’d first arrived in Los Angeles, I’d said no to his question as well and his mentoring began in earnest. Those first few tutorials consisted of his beating me until I no longer feared being beaten, the lesson being that nobody at my school could hit this hard so no one was worthy of fear.
On this visit, I tried to speak to Cousin Brian about my time in the hospital in Jamaica, what I’d seen and what had led me there, but also my return and the new confusion about who I was and was supposed to be. I tried to speak to him for the first time about my alienation from my family and my friends, about the Jamaican accent that still flickered even as I struggled to keep it hidden. How had he so completely lost his and what was it like to have crossed over and become one of them? We’d never had this kind of conversation before, but high school without the protection of football was no joke and I was terrified. He was
the “Black American” in our family, and I needed some insight about how he had become one, how he had assimilated and become a man.
I took in every word, every shrug and gesture, and even every moment when he punctuated his points by moving the Afro pick around and patting his hair back into shape. If what he taught me could be reduced to words, it would be something like this. Gang life was his America, a small enough piece of it anyway for him not only to manage but also control. He’d met other black immigrant kids in that world, Belizean, Eritrean, Caribbean. Like them, he’d assimilated head on without the parry and thrust or denial and blame that the rest of us depended on. Our vacillation was the problem. Inbetweenness was weakness, pussy. There could never be doubt about where he stood, where he belonged, what side he was on. He aimed to be certainty itself, reality personified. You’d think this would enable stillness, a quiet coming from absolute self-knowledge. It was the opposite. It required a relentless generating of fear in others to keep them on edge and render a man’s history and authenticity beyond reproach.
“Accent doesn’t matter, racism doesn’t matter, white people don’t matter. Nigerian, African, Caribbean don’t matter either,” he said. “We—our people—are stupid to hold on to those types of things. That’s why people hate us.”
In his view, only one black identity mattered in America and there was no point in fighting it or asking it to recognize ours because we would always be secondary to it. This was their country, their game. But as if he wanted to make sure I wasn’t utterly disconsolate at his revelations, he said there was, however, a way to win.
“Become king” was what he said, over a cassette gone squeaky at the end of the tape’s run. It might have been the Gap Band or Zapp featuring Roger. Maybe it was Egyptian Lover. Maybe it was Prince. I remember thinking how cool it was for someone with such masculine street cred to blast Prince, who was mocked by everyone in those days as effeminate and wannabe white.
Being king required that you so master their rules that you would disappear, all traces of foreignness gone. But then you could use your mastery to rise above those who’d established the rules in the first place. This advice would stay with me throughout high school and into college, as would the fact that it came from a man on the verge of doing serious time in prison.
* * *
Despite Cousin Brian’s disdain for our foreignness, his family was at the center of our Black immigrant world. His parents were my aunt Pansy and uncle Owen, and we all gathered around their dining table, usually after church when the spiritual demands of the sermon generated a hunger for a community of people untroubled by the smells that stayed on our clothes or by the ratio of spice to food. These gatherings were even larger on native holidays—Jamaican or Nigerian Independence, Carnival, Crop Over, or Boxing Day.
I began to pay more and more attention to these people who gathered around the dining table now that high school and the road between home and school had become less and less hospitable. In addition to our ever-extending family, the table was where any black immigrant who turned up in Inglewood or South Central for educational, professional, or questionable purposes would find themselves welcome. This was also when my reading began to switch from science fiction to so-called serious literature due to all the time I was spending in libraries. It was around then that I first discovered the word “diaspora.”
Diaspora was one of those words from my mother’s “word of the month” or “word of the week” subscriptions. What made it stick out was that I heard it repeated around the table. The word meant the scattering of a people across different lands and countries and languages. To me, this meaning seemed immediate, oppressively intimate. It wasn’t just about the Middle Passage and slavery in the New World. It wasn’t even about our more specific migration from Africa to Jamaica to America. It was accents and curses, uncles and aunties, cousins and endless trips to Western Union, and obligations of all kinds. Diaspora was mapped across the plates of ackee and saltfish, fried dumplings, escoveitch fish, and curry goat.
Everyone was there, or I should say everywhere was there. Though still in Inglewood, the dining table was a few blocks, a hill, and an entire tax bracket away from where my mother and I lived. It was Jamaicans mostly, but there were also folks from other islands, like Aunt Viola who came from Nevis. She was somehow related to Aunt Carmen in Washington, DC, and her island of birth inspired the same jokes I’d heard in Washington—Nevis being so small that you slept in your swimming clothes because if you turned over at night you might drown or the ones about sand always being in your food or having to leave the island to avoid incest. Like Aunt Carmen, Aunt Viola laughed louder than anyone at these jokes no matter how often they were repeated. Little island/big island humor was a part of the Caribbean sensibility, and because she had married an African American, she treasured anything that confirmed her status within that sensibility. Maybe her husband didn’t care for foreign blacks. He never came to the table, and when we visited Aunt Viola’s house, he descended into the basement. Because of this, we never had to call him uncle. But because his children were always at the table—for a time anyway, before the older ones lost their accents and the younger ones grew confident enough to mock ours—they were still cousins.
Due to my mother’s efforts, there were always Nigerians at our gatherings, particularly people she’d known from Biafra or had gotten to know after arriving in America. Our last name and my father’s reputation drew many to her. Even a few Hausa people, the ethnic group responsible for the attempted genocide that brought us here in the first place, broke bread with us. In these cases, the war was never really discussed. If ever it was, it wasn’t described as a national or personal or ethnic tragedy but an African or a colonial one. That way blame could be evaded and the experience shared.
Much of what our elders discussed at these gatherings was about what had triggered their migration in the first place—colonialism and revolution and independence. I paid more attention to these conversations than most of my cousins because it was likely that my godfather would be mentioned, or my father, and then the adults would all look in my direction with solemn expectation. I was still the first son of the first son, though that seemed a far less portentous state of being than when I first arrived in Jamaica.
At times, it seemed to me that these people at the dining table, as mundane as they may have appeared to most Americans, were heroes too. They had played a part in some great world-building drama that seemed epic by virtue of the fact that so much of it had failed. These elders at the table had experienced things I was beginning to read about. Revolutions, coups, exile, refugees, betrayal, starvation, genocide. Loss—what should have been and almost was—was always the tone of the conversation.
What they had failed at was freedom. That failure brought them to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and turned them into semi-inebriated uncles and embittered aunts struggling to keep control of their children. I can guarantee they’d all expected to end up in London. My mother used to say that we’d turned left over the Atlantic Ocean when we should have turned right.
Eventually, South Africans began to appear at the table. It was the anti-apartheid moment, Africa’s last chance, Uncle Owen often said. We accepted these people, extending the borders of community farther and farther. This wasn’t due to any romantic notion regarding common Africanness but because of what those people were not—American—and, of course, their ease with that ratio of spice to food. Not only South Africans, but Ghanaians too and a few Liberians would stop by. It was a diaspora mapped by the sound of accents—West African and Caribbean but also British, Canadian, American, and the cadences of us younger ones ranging all over the map. There would always be someone with an even more authentic tongue than those who corrected and attacked us for sounding too Yankee (to the Caribbeans) or oyinbo (to the Nigerians). If the outside world was where my Jamaican accent was still enough to merit comment and require masquerade, these events were where I was encouraged to keep it alive
. That was how we were sure not to disappear into the vortex of American racial meanings and cultural expectations. This was, of course, counter to what Cousin Brian and some of my other cousins thought we should do, but we held our tongues until we were old enough.
What gave our diaspora shape wasn’t so much racism, slavery, or the contrastive presence of white Americans. It was the more pressing reality of Black Americans. American Blacks inevitably became the topic and the source of most arguments. If Black Americans often seemed fixated on white America, black immigrants seemed fixated on Black America, as if it were the wall between them and the promises of this country. Sometimes the conversation began by someone fresh to the country discussing problems they were having with a coworker, or a schoolmate, or an unruly neighbor. Before questions were asked, the seasoned veterans would share a smirk of recognition, knowing that the person being complained about was not white. It was time to school the newcomer on what really went on in this America and that there were two Americas, two distinct regimes of pain and promise.
Things would usually begin with the newcomer asking a familiar but always loaded question, What is wrong with Black Americans? Occasionally, one of us young cousins would attempt to defend or explain those Black Americans to our elders since we were the ones who knew them best and spent most of our time in the crucible of assimilation. These attempts were inappropriate for interrelated reasons. First, we were not to speak back to our elders, a sure sign that we were assimilating in the wrong direction. Second, in speaking on behalf of African Americans, we inevitably slipped into their dialect, which was enough to invalidate our opinions and earn a cuff to the head.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 10