One cousin, Lloydie, had migrated to England as a child and come to stay in Los Angeles in his twenties. Folks in our neighborhood had a very hard time believing his accent wasn’t affected. Where our Caribbean or West African accents could elicit laughter, his brought threats of violence. At a local restaurant once, the Black American waitress wouldn’t serve us until he started talking in his “real” voice. She had a point to make, stronger than our hunger. We ended up eating somewhere else. A few times we were even threatened by gangbangers on the street who were convinced Cousin Lloydie was talking down to them. Had we not dropped the name of Cousin Brian, we would have been bruised.
There were consolations. Local girls found Lloydie’s accent irresistible. Sadly for me, I could never pull off the full English, only the occasional hint of it. That hint didn’t come from England, though. It came from my mother, who, no matter how far she’d traveled from Jamaica to England to Nigeria to America, always maintained that type of British accent produced in its colonies. This drew Indians to her when they worked together in hospitals because they recognized it too—more English than the English, as the old cliché went. Her accent rendered her less foreign when she arrived in Nigeria in 1963 just after independence. She was no longer a Jamaican woman, something few of them had any knowledge of. She was the much more familiar English woman, easier to position and ultimately to accept.
As a colonial product, she manifested a prejudice typical of her generation: there was to be no Jamaican dialect—patwah—in the house. This put her at odds with aunts and uncles who only needed to hear Byron Lee or Bob Marley or burn their tongue on Jamaican peppers to start trembling the room with what’s now called Jamaican English or just Jamaican. They were from the same class as my mother, but she had grown up on the outskirts of Montego Bay and left before the shift that began in the 1960s to claim the language of the poor as the sound of the nation. She left Jamaica before “the ghetto won,” as Great-Uncle Irving would say, meaning before reggae.
My mother was the least likely to accept the blind generalizing about Black Americans common at the dining table. Because of her time with my father, my godfather, and the inner circle of the Biafran secession, a form of racial consciousness had seeped into her colonial British self. Biafrans, at least their leaders, thought of themselves as ultimately fighting an anticolonial war, a war of African liberation. She may have been skeptical of the generalized romantic ideas of African identity spun in Jamaica after she left the island, but she was also less interested in the what-is-wrong-with-Black-Americans debates here in America.
As a result, she usually chose to employ the abstraction “Black people”—initially as a corrective but eventually as a compromise. What is wrong with Black Americans? became What are the struggles facing Black people? Don’t trust African Americans became Some Black people can’t be trusted. It was a way of using an imagined global community of Blacks to mediate the unpleasant details of personal experience. By the time I began to employ phrases like my mother’s in college as I became radicalized in my race consciousness, I did so fully acknowledging that they were products of desperation. Neither of us could tolerate the alternative.
In contrast to the use of racial abstractions was Great-Uncle Irving. He was an expert on Black Americans, he boasted. Evidence of this was the fact that he exclusively dated light-skinned Black American women, many of whom he would take on cruise ships, which is where he spent much of his retirement. Black Americans were just like Jamaicans, he claimed; they needed white people more than any other people because without them they wouldn’t exist. But when it came to racism, he argued, there was a special intimacy between Black Americans and whites. We should stay clear of it because there was little room for others in that relationship. They couldn’t see or feel anything beyond the wound that had brought them together.
Great-Uncle Irving’s accent was the strangest of any of ours. He claimed it was because Angelenos had spoken differently when he first arrived in the forties. He sounded like a Jamaican countryman straining to talk like a World War II newsreel or like the men in boxy suits and women with hairstyles so angled that they seemed made of plaster who appeared in black-and-white films. Apparently, he was one of my relatives who’d been dead set against my mother marrying an African and moving to Nigeria back in the late 1950s, so all talk of Africa sent him into a rage. He also made no secret of his hatred for his home country: that’s why he’d come to Los Angeles before anyone else had even heard of the place. Everybody else was going to London, some to New York, then to Miami and Toronto. Los Angeles had no snow and was as far away as he could go in America from Jamaicans and damned islands. For a while, it was paradise.
My Aunt Joy brought other ideas about accent, identity, and community to the dining table. She was a Yoruba who lived the furtive life of a second wife in a country where polygamy was illegal and shameful. Her husband never came to these events, living as he did with his senior wife and primary children on one of the best streets in upper-middle-class Baldwin Hills. Aunt Joy found all talk of “Blackness” or “Black people” alternately touching and comical. Sad also, because of how obsessed Caribbean people and Black Americans were with skin color and how far they would go to claim and defend something she thought meaningless and exaggerated. White people, well, it was obvious that they were a certain way, but Black people? What did skin have to do with anything? African Americans were Americans. The “African” part was just denial. And if there was anything that linked Jamaicans to Black Americans, it was that their assertions of pride were so relentless that they could only be masks for shame.
Her English was no different than it would have been had she been in a market in Lagos. She was one of the few people I knew who went back to Nigeria every year and had been doing so since the war ended. Sometimes she spoke pidgin, which embarrassed her son. His accent was the most African Americanized of all of ours, which deeply embarrassed his mother.
And there were others, too many to recount, uncles and aunts and cousins and friends—Uncle Tommy from Scotland with his string of white British wives, Jean-Bernard from Haiti with his Senegalese wife who apparently spoke a Parisian sort of French, an uncle from Gabon whose family had sheltered us after we’d left the refugee camps during the war—all coming in waves, going in gusts, some strong enough to have directly shaped my personality and others whose impact was brief but still important. Sometimes it was a fist to the stomach, a crude joke during prayers, a lie I had to bear. Other times it was a story I would claim as my own or fumbled attempts at sex during sleepovers. So many stories and people in this world of the dining table that was in but not of Inglewood and Los Angeles.
When the table grew too small and we too many, the younger cousins would migrate to a satellite. At Aunt Pansy and Uncle Owen’s house, that second table would be a few steps down from the kitchen where the adults sat into what was called the family room, which was ironic since generally no one was allowed in it. It was where Uncle Owen went when he wanted to be alone, which was often. A few times he hosted visiting low-level Jamaican political figures there, sometimes a South African gentleman who owned a dry cleaners on La Brea and became a stand-in for Nelson Mandela or Steve Biko at these family events. When he visited the dining table, we younger ones were allowed to sit at the edges of the room and applaud with the big folks as he talked about the imminent end of apartheid and the final freedom of Africa. This man also spoke at churches or local Black culture festivals. It was almost enough to allow him to forget how he was treated by people in the neighborhood who made a royal mess of his shop and used his parking lot for criminal and ungodly purposes.
When separated from the louder adult conversations, our individual dramas were in free play. In the absence of his mother, Aunt Joy’s son could go on with his “nigger this” and “nigger that,” and hold his crotch in impersonation of the kids in his neighborhood. He regaled us with tales of “bitches” and “whips,” “punks” and “getting money,” and
poured scorn on those of us still in thrall to African or Caribbean identities. He and his mother lived very close to an area of La Brea everyone called the Jungle, which was west of Crenshaw and below Baldwin Hills. It was eventually renamed Baldwin Village due, I think, to the racial slurs inherent in the previous name.
In alternate summers, two of Uncle Owen’s nieces visited from New York. All of us cousins became susceptible to the volatile mix of sex and adolescent emotional turmoil that their visits induced. We called them the Twins. They were not the same age nor did they even vaguely resemble each other (one was tall and string-bean lean, the other rounded like a breadfruit) but they echoed each other when laughing and talked together in a dialect that seemed entirely of their own devising. Though born in Jamaica, they were New York City through and through. They lorded it over all of us by repeating how much they missed America and how they couldn’t wait to get back there and how backward we were in terms of music and clothes and slang. To this day, I don’t know if they were being funny or just had a terrible sense of geography.
If they and Aunt Joy’s son were the least political of the cousins, I was the most, or became so. By the time I graduated to the main table, I began challenging everyone, using Black Americans—I insisted they be called African Americans—as my trump card. Eventually, my only reason for going to these meals was to argue. It was me, angry and alone, defending Black America against all comers and wishing that those I spoke for could witness it and finally bid me welcome.
I often made the mistake of thinking the silence around the table was defeat when, in fact, it was disappointment. Nobody actually read my anger as political, not Uncle Owen, a strict behaviorist (I recall in detail his lectures on B. F. Skinner over dessert); or Great-Uncle Irving, an absurdist in the mode of Ionesco if ever there was one; or any of the others. Not even those who were focused on politics in the Caribbean or Africa since these elders generally thought of race in America as a distraction. For them, my militancy was simply a lack of gratitude. I’d forgotten what we had left behind.
I eventually stopped going to Uncle Owen and Aunt Pansy’s house. I rarely saw my cousins. When my mother hosted meals, I’d either lock myself in my bedroom and listen to music (“Studying,” she told everyone. “Studying well hard.”) or go out somewhere with friends (“School meeting,” she’d say. “The boy is deep in his books.”). Stressing my studiousness was a way of promising that I was going through a phase. That angered me more. My refusal was a protest, and I wanted it recognized. Sunday evenings I would always be sent leftovers to eat alone in silence. It was a cruel reminder that I was still one of them.
But my boycott of the dining table wouldn’t last. Too often I would be reminded that in the real America my emotional affinities and political identifications were a one-way street. Black America didn’t necessarily reciprocate my sentiments, and the fact that white teachers paid attention to me due to my reading abilities and the foreignness they attributed it to rendered many friendships temporary or conditional. The dining table was once again a sanctuary, more than music or books since both required an ease with solitude at odds with my hunger for community. And it was always there, not everyone every time, but always someone, and music, food, and dialect that would remind me that America was not the world and that there were other ways of knowing and being in skin.
This is what carried me through high school and into college, and why I would eventually take classes in Black history and literature—boisterous old uncles in the family room during the World Cup with Red Stripe beer and aunties throughout the house, policing our pleasures and questioning our growth. Black strangers in the family comparing dialects and countries, and everyone lying about how beautiful, how sinless our national origins were. Trips to and from the airport and Western Union, mothball scent and newspaper wrapping.
Being Black was nothing if it was everything.
Maybe that was Aunt Joy or Aunt Pansy. Or maybe Uncle Tommy, who always claimed he was the happiest to be who he was when there were no others like him around. For him, Black Pride was an individual thing and had nothing to do with other Black people.
Songs we heard in the afternoon playing again in the dark. Graying heads over empty dishes, fighting to stay awake to forestall the inevitable return to that America outside. The young ones contemplating marijuana in the backyard, Cousin Brian lifting weights in the garage listening to Prince, Uncle Owen turning up the volume on Byron Lee and the Dragonaires. All of us around the dining table navigating Africa like planets orbiting the bright light of a long-dead sun.
* * *
Even now I don’t know the details of Cousin Brian’s crime or sentence. Even now I don’t want to ask. Some say he was an accomplice, others say he pulled the trigger, and some say he wasn’t even there. Others used to say more dramatic things: the more garish the crime, the more powerful his name would be when needed. I certainly couldn’t ask his parents for details. They were in jail themselves, the house defined now by silence. Those few times they attempted to revive the dining table, the mood was sour, the arguments as unpalatable as the food now seemed. The guilt I felt was due to my part in those exaggerations of Cousin Brian’s criminal prowess. In college, it was clear to me as an aspiring black scholar and writer how valuable it might be to have a relative in prison.
The phone call came in Aunt Pansy and Uncle Owen’s house. We were at the dining table. My time spent at that house with them had become rare, which is why this event is easy to recall. My cousin had called from prison or maybe they had called him. I was unaware that such communication happened, and I realized that I might be the only one who wasn’t talking to him regularly despite being the one who most often traded on his reputation. Even more surprising than the call itself was the fact that he asked to talk to me, the college boy who had already begun to learn what higher education meant for many black men—guilt and distance.
He asked how I was doing, if I was keeping my head up, if I was staying strong. He spoke faster than usual, as if our time was being measured, which, of course, it was. Maybe he spoke rapidly to prevent me from asking questions he couldn’t or didn’t want to answer. He’d heard that I was at university and congratulated me. I was embarrassed in the way I could be when admitting that I was in college to people in the neighborhood, especially those with impeccable street credentials. He was warm, sincere, and I wondered if prison had hardened his babyish face.
I was surprised when he said he wanted something from me.
Of course, I said, anything. Anything at all.
He wanted the newspaper published by the Black Student Association. He’d started reading in prison and had become radicalized. His focus was now on racism and oppression, and he’d heard much about the militancy of the Black Student Association and its newspaper. They’d had something to do with bringing the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, Minister Louis Farrakhan, to campus and that had made news. I told him that I’d actually been at that talk and he was impressed.
Not only was I to get copies of the paper to him, I was to get the BSA to communicate directly and educate him on the issues facing oppressed black people in the white man’s America. In fact, he wanted all the information I could send him, not only about America but on the whole diaspora.
I think he assumed I’d become king of my university.
Getting copies of the paper wasn’t the problem. It was likely that all this would have done wonders for my reputation with the BSA, which, in fact, was the problem. Since arriving on campus, I’d been struggling to be a part of both the BSA and the African Student Association (the ASA). I was grateful there was as yet no Caribbean Student Association on campus.
As was the fashion on college campuses, the BSA had become Afrocentric. Radical students were no longer black but African, and the spelling wavered between the conventional spelling with a c or a more militant k. Yet this interest in Africa occurred alongside an open and casual prejudice toward Africans, including those in
the ASA. There were BSA gatherings and meetings where Africans were described as dirty or having strong and unwelcome smells. They were described as being too dark and their lips and noses too big. The term “African booty scratcher” from my early days in America was revived.
Because some of the members of the BSA thought me Jamaican, not African, they spoke freely. When others caught themselves, they would then say things like “You’re really one of us” or “We should be in solidarity against white oppression” as a way to escape responsibility for the insult. Africans were regularly seen as “not Black enough.” This meant they were either not angry enough about racism or didn’t understand it at all. But worse even than ideological or cultural differences was something more potent for a young man navigating this terrain: Africans were simply undateable.
The breaking point came when the newly radicalized BSA changed its name to the ASA, the Afrikan Student Association. They did it without conversation or concern. Blackness was theirs, after all. This posed a significant problem for the ASA, or what some took to calling the African African Student Association. The group was livid but essentially powerless. They were culturally and socially outgunned.
Unable to convey these details in a conversation both brief and likely monitored by the state, I told him yes. I would get him a copy of the paper. I would get him a full subscription. I would put him in touch with the editors and their prison outreach program if they had one, which if they didn’t, they most surely should, and perhaps I should start one because so many brothers in prison were there due to the system of oppression that spread all the way from Africa through the Middle Passage and to the New World.
In other words, I did what I had become so good at. I lied.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 11