9
Young Americans
My new job tutoring students for the college’s affirmative action program was much better than scrubbing pots and serving food in a graduate dorm, which was how I’d contributed to my tuition payments up until then. It was also better than working for Great-Uncle Irving in his carpentry shop. Our relationship became more difficult for us both to tolerate the deeper I got into college. He may not have had a high school or college education, but he was smart enough to be certain that the ideas he heard me talking about were an absolute waste of time—and money, because I’m sure he occasionally helped my mother supplement my tuition. Most of the students I tutored were African American so the job delivered escape not only from Great-Uncle but also a way to render my political stance so clear that it wouldn’t seem as if I were hiding from either of the two African student organizations, which I was.
The new job proved controversial at home. Great-Uncle Irving and other members of my family considered affirmative action a sign of intellectual laziness and a dependence on charity. We didn’t need such things. People would assume me unworthy of my place at the university and assume we were scroungers.
Beyond this political push and pull, the affirmative action program shaped my political consciousness in a more intimate way: it was where I met the first person who would break my heart. She was African American, which was immensely significant. So was the fact that she was studying African history. I assumed her field of study was why she’d been open to dating me. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, so I was happy to exchange whatever Africanness I could still conjure for the relentlessly imagined pleasures that consumed me when I thought of her.
Tonight those pleasures would be realized. My mother was working very late or taking a night class as she often did. I’d cleared the living room and the bedroom so I wouldn’t have to explain why the house had so much stuff everywhere. I’d installed cheap scented candles from a liquor store. But by the time we turned off the 10 freeway onto Crenshaw and the neighborhood took on its distinct shape and feel, my young lady’s arms were crossed. I assumed she was nervous; many people who exited the freeway here got nervous. To make her feel comfortable, I pointed out places that mattered to me, where family members or friends lived or where you could get your hair braided for cheap or hear music on the weekends. I indicated a row of houses where Black fraternities lived and showed her the Jamaican restaurant that bore my mother’s maiden name.
After a moody, withdrawn silence, she said, “I didn’t realize you lived in the ghetto.”
It took time to register what she was saying.
“I mean, this is the ghetto. You grew up in the ghetto!”
Maybe this was a simple mistake, I thought. One had to live here to understand the differences in streets, topography, and culture. The ghetto was, of course, over there, on the other side of Crenshaw Boulevard. It was south of Century or on the other side of Inglewood Park Cemetery. From the top of Slauson where we lived, you could see it spread out flat and wide with long swaying palm trees that reminded us all of the Caribbean and me of Cousin Cecil, who could shimmy up them in a flash. It was definitely up near Normandie and Vermont, and if you got so far as Hoover, then even God couldn’t help you.
No, we didn’t live in the ghetto. We were near it, moved through it, and had learned to respect it as one learns to respect an angry sea. We lived just close enough to breathe with its ebb and flow, hear its roar, and feel its spume.
After passing Great-Uncle Irving’s church, which I showed her in hopes of getting us back on track, she said, “You’re not really African at all. At least not really.”
At first it seemed a compliment to my assimilation. I was eager to find something positive in her words. We were here for a reason, after all, and what I was—or what she thought I was—was crucial to its fulfillment.
When we were alone in my mother’s house and the candles were lit, I made my first move, drawing her shea butter smell into my lungs. She recoiled. She said she felt that she’d been duped. She’d accepted my affection for nonblack things like the science fiction books I read and the music I listened to but that was because she assumed I didn’t know the codes of Black America. That I so adored David Bowie had required much of her, but she figured I couldn’t have known better since I was a foreigner. But for me to have grown up in what she—and admittedly most people in Los Angeles—called the ghetto meant that I should have known the rules. My way of speaking or presenting myself had to have been pretention. I’d hidden or perhaps rejected my true ghetto identity.
This difficult knot came when I was far from receptive to complex ideas, given my hopes for the evening and her smell deep in my lungs and my fingers aching for touch. But I knew I’d failed. Needless to say, we didn’t have sex that evening—or ever.
Her rejection would have much to do with my now-changed relationship to the city I’d grown up in and something to do with my increased focus on more racially charged topics as I soon passed from undergraduate to graduate studies at the same school. That need to intellectually overcompensate for a failed racial identity or a general cultural alienation would be shared with many of the graduate students I began to know. So many of them were either immigrants themselves or rejects from cultures and communities that had bruised and still haunted them. A new community began to shape itself, one where our radicalisms were largely products of individual betrayals and personal failures. It became a home of sorts but then eventually, for many of us, careers.
* * *
I remember a T-shirt I’d see at reggae concerts, spoken-word events, hip-hop shows, or African culture festivals in the park near Great-Uncle Irving’s house. It read MARCUS (as in Garvey), MALCOLM (as in X), MARTIN (as in Luther King), and ended with ME. They were sold all along Crenshaw Boulevard along with other clothes emblazoned with the colors, slogans, and images of Black radical politics. The message on the T-shirt suited the obsession with racial leadership that seemed necessary for social or professional advancement on campus. For example, these T-shirts had also become popular among members of the newly renamed Afrikan Student Association and other Black activist groups. Students wore these clothes, often with leather medallions embossed with images of Africa, and there were now drum circles in the quad and homemade incense burning everywhere. It was like when my mother and I had first arrived in Jamaica. Africa—or at least a version of it—was everywhere.
Students I knew who’d been prejudiced against African students and central to the usurping of the name African Student Association were suddenly transformed into oracles of the race, complete with dreadlocks and African names. But I now understood. These acts and performances were necessary given the pervasive doubt cast over our very presence on campus. We were assumed to owe our places there due to affirmative action. The more our qualifications were questioned, the more radical we Black students became. I convinced myself that whites did not discriminate between and among us, so racism was more important a problem than whatever internal wounds we caused one another, even heartbreak. Whatever traces of resentment I felt toward my fellow students I could chalk up to my cynicism and frustrated desire. And graduate school was like having your heart broken every week.
I cleared my shelves of science fiction and threw out Bowie and Prince and all the music they had led me to. I bought a few of those T-shirts from Crenshaw Boulevard, bales of incense from Black Muslim brothers on the corner, and took to traveling through the streets of the city attempting to put myself back together. With help from marijuana from the reggae shop next to the restaurant that bore my mother’s maiden name and cheap alcohol from corner liquor stores, Los Angeles became the canvas for my reinvention, along with my classes, meetings with activist groups focused on everything from protesting racism to organizing rent parties and poetry readings, to the occasional drum circle. There was much to understand but even more to prove.
Still, no amount of Afrocentric or gangsta rap could hide
the fact that in the weeks and months following the breakup I heard Bowie’s “Young Americans” in my head whenever I thought about my young lady. And I thought about her often. That song had been a hit the year my mother and I had arrived in LA. Its lyrics referred to leaving Washington and the notion of the ghetto, but for obvious reasons, the chorus made me wince most of all: “She wants the young American, all night!”
When longing turned to anger, I recalled that my young lady didn’t even live in the neighborhood. Being African American gave her the authority to determine who was in or out of the racial community. Despite what she’d called the neighborhood, almost nobody who lived there or nearby used the word “ghetto” to describe it. Hip-hop, at least for our generation, was to blame for a new geographic elasticity around the word, which had become fashionable among many of the black students on campus. The location of “ghetto” expanded until it became larger than any map could hold yet so small that only they, the arbiters, could tell where its borders were.
I should have told my young lady that my family knew and understood poverty very, very well. In their eyes, what they were surrounded by in that part of Los Angeles was not that. In their countries, “ghetto” meant something else. It didn’t mean hot and cold running water, a television in every or any room, fast food on every corner, free education, and regular electricity. As immigrants, they were also held hostage by an optimism fueled by those they’d left behind. Folks back home wanted only good news about America. Tales of racial suffering or economic disparity were seen as a case of those with wings to fly complaining about the thin air above.
I didn’t tell her these things because they were too difficult to think or say at the time. The anger that gave rise to such thoughts now quickly turned back to longing, and I had started using the word “ghetto” like everybody else to emphasize the racism that I now agreed shaped and maintained the community.
My family was incensed to hear me refer to our neighborhood that way; they had long since tired of my tendency to explain everything by way of racism. For them, “ghetto” described a way of life, or rather the acceptance of that way of life. It was a synonym for choice, therefore it could be judged. There was nothing racial about it. Speaking perhaps for them all, Great-Uncle Irving once said to me over the dining table, “Boy, this racism is better than your daddy’s genocide so shut up and keep breathing.”
He stopped speaking to me for at least two years after that, which I welcomed. What I didn’t welcome was Aunt Pansy’s greeting me with the sadness of a funeral, especially when I began twisting my hair into dreadlocks. This was the price to pay for becoming Black, I thought. But because what I was becoming was actually American, I began to blame my parents and family for everything, especially for not understanding who or what I had become. They were immigrants after all, still fighting battles they had already lost back in their old countries.
I may have alienated my family, but I thrived on campus and in the broader neighborhood around Crenshaw and South Central, becoming a significant figure after participating in more protests and events than I could count. I published a Black student literary journal with funding from the English department and local Black businesses. People looked to me knowing that I had a gift for identifying racism in any situation or context and that I was always ready to speak out in classes and the neighborhoods. The universe was indeed black and white. I’d discovered the formula and was achieving my middle name, Voice of the People.
I joined the ASA (the Black one) even if it meant that the now-nameless African student group looked at me with suspicion. That didn’t trouble me, since they all thought of me as Jamaican now, with my twisted-up hair and the accent they could never quite place. When the ASA gave me an award for my campus and community activism, it was my young lady who presented it to me. And when she hugged me on stage and her shea butter scent went immediately into my lungs, the clarity I’d found began to dissipate into what seemed like smoke rising from a near horizon.
I carried the award home and stared at it for hours, ignored it for days, then stared at it again for an entire weekend. It looked like glass but wasn’t, and my name and achievements were stuck to it with plastic film. Eventually, I accepted that I deserved the award. Not for my achievements but for the depth and scale of my failures.
I welcomed the riots when they came. I wanted the entire country, or the parts of it that I’d struggled so much to fit into, to burn. As the violence spread, I made my way back to my mother’s house from campus, staring down grim white faces in the opposing traffic. I spent the nights of smoke and fire and sirens drunk on cheap brandy and even cheaper marijuana. I walked the length of Crenshaw and sat in the park. The last time I saw my young lady was there, at an African pride festival, her pregnant belly festooned with cowrie shells, her hair wrapped in West African fabric, her feet stamping to rhythms churned out by Rastafarian drummers. On the streets during the riots, everyone was listening to rap on boom boxes and in cars, shouting out the lyrics and screaming, “Fuck the police!”
In my headphones was David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.
This ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide.
I wished I had the courage to burn something without losing anything. And in the darkest hours, I wished I had nothing to lose.
After the riots, the petty grievances of campus life became harder to justify with inflated talk of the “struggle” or the “people.” I was exhausted, hollowed out, reduced to ash. I wanted more than anything to be an immigrant again or at least go back to the beginning of the story that had brought me to this country, hopeful and naïve. I wanted to be African again.
10
Absolute Beginners (Part II)
Almost everyone in our family immediately blamed my mother’s illness on her recent trip to Nigeria, the one that would be her last. This was especially true of Great-Uncle Irving, who hadn’t wanted her to go at all. I suspect her refusal to blame Nigeria explained her reluctance to see a doctor until she was beyond the power of stubbornness. Of course, Nigeria had nothing to do with her cancer, but that didn’t stop Great-Uncle Irving from believing she was being punished for her foolishness in returning to Africa.
After her diagnosis, conversations about the past became routine between my mother and me, urgent even. It wasn’t just mortality that made her voluble, it had something to do with her discovery of gin and tonic late in life, especially with a drop of sweetened lime juice. I’d assumed her reluctance to share her history with me had something to do with shame or certainly trauma. But no, it was because she had assumed it would be easier for me to think of Africa in abstractions like most of my Black American friends and peers did. She chose not to upset my precarious new sense of belonging with confounding details of personal history.
Even more surprising than her desire to now talk about the past was that she encouraged me to write down what she was saying and at a certain point to even use a tape recorder. She spoke primarily about my father, godfather, Biafra, and sometimes, with prodding, England. Only after some time and after my perfecting the right combination of sweetened lime juice to gin and tonic did she become disoriented enough to accept herself as protagonist.
“I want to hear about 1963, when you arrived in Nigeria. That was when the country was still ‘brimming,’ as you used to say. Three years after independence, right, four years before the civil war. But first you should tell me how you met him.”
“I told you this before. You should record it. Where is that small-small machine?”
“It’s just not the same as writing down what you’ve said. I don’t like writing what I hear back on it if that makes any sense.”
It clearly didn’t because she looked down and away, looking for her cat. I’d come to interpret this gesture as a polite way of indicating loss of interest. Then she’d wrinkle her brow as if trying to recall something important and fall asleep. Sometimes her eyes remained open and her mouth carried the suggestion of a smile, and sometimes her expr
ession told me that the direction of our conversation was taking a great toll. Because she was taking so much medication, I never took those gestures personally.
“Each time you tell me something, it makes a different impression. I want to gather up all the different things that come up each time.”
She must have wondered if my focus on creativity was in some way a refusal to properly engage the material spread throughout her home, stacked up against and covering surfaces, so when I did encounter the actual color of the walls, it came as some surprise. Also, she saw many of my questions as trivial, since only Biafra was of historical significance. That event eclipsed all that had come before it, including the story of Caribbean immigrants migrating to postwar England, the now-famous Windrush generation, named after the first ship that had brought them to the “Mother Country” in 1948. She hadn’t been on that boat but on one of the subsequent ones in 1952.
“How we met. I must have written it down somewhere in one of the letters or notes or something. As you always complain, I saved everything.”
“Actually, I found his military diary the other day,” I said.
The fabric that covered her head tilted to reveal her almost hairless scalp.
“His diary from Sandhurst?”
“Not from Sandhurst. It said FEDERATION OF NIGERIA, DIARY 1963, so it was before Biafra. His rank was captain then.”
She made a weak smile and leaned back against the mountain of cushions she needed in order to sit up even for short periods of time.
“The very first thing I saw when I opened the diary at random was February 16, 1963, a Saturday.”
I paused and watched to see if there would be a response. It was only visible to a mother’s child.
“He wrote that he got engaged to you at Pat—”
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 12