A Particular Kind of Black Man

by Tope Folarin

  We stayed on the road past sundown, and by the time we pulled onto our street Femi was sleeping on the bed in the back, and I’d already exchanged places with Tayo at least twice. When I opened the freezer I noticed that it was half-empty, and our makeshift cash register at the front of the truck was filled with one-dollar bills. Dad rubbed his eyes after parking, and he cleared his throat the way he always did when he had an announcement.

  “We did okay today, guys. We’ll do better tomorrow.”

  Then he stepped out of the van, pulled on some gloves, and packed more dry ice into the freezer.

  * * *

  By the end of our first week on the road we had developed a system. Dad insisted that I accompany him each day while Tayo and Femi rotated during weekdays (someone had to stay home and look after Ade). Mom would rise before us each day to prepare our meals for the road, which she placed in used Styrofoam packaging that had formerly held Chinese food or hamburgers. At midday Dad would stop at a parking lot somewhere and we would swallow our cold fufu or jollof rice or fried plantain, and then we’d start out again.

  We did better as it got hotter. By the middle of the summer, as word spread about our ice cream truck, we’d drive onto certain streets where hungry crowds had already gathered. Tayo, Femi, or I would hustle at the freezer while the kids and adults called out their orders. Some days we woke up well before dawn to buy more ice cream from the wholesalers downtown.

  Occasionally on the road Dad would tell us stories about Nigeria. He made the place sound like a wonderful party that was always happening. He told us stories about each of his brothers—he has dozens; my grandfather married six women—and he wistfully spoke of the time he’d spent traveling from city to city as a semiprofessional soccer player. He also told us stories about the mistakes he’d made as a younger man; the women he’d chased just because he could, the jobs he hadn’t taken seriously enough. Each story he told ended abruptly, or at least it seemed so to me. I was always waiting to hear about the day his apartment had been stormed by corrupt policemen, the time he’d been incarcerated for something he hadn’t done. I was waiting to hear that he was a refugee—back then I thought this was the only legitimate reason for leaving a place you called home. I knew nothing about ambition then, how it wakes you up and won’t let you sleep at night, how it’ll fling you across an ocean or three if you let it. I would learn soon enough.

  As I look back on those days now I often think of all the fun that Tayo, Femi, and I had in the back of the truck, the way we would pull out a deck of cards whenever Dad was occupied with a sale and toss the cards under a pillow the moment he was done; and also our fights, our screaming and clawing and shoving and snarling; the way Dad would shout at us; all of us angry with him at the same time; the secrets we shared with one another; the stories we made up about our favorite customers; the many silent hours of reading and contemplation; the deep, sunny stillness of those late afternoons when the sun was drifting toward the western horizon and all of us were drunk on happiness and light.

  The only unpleasant aspect of all those mornings, afternoons, and late evenings on the road was the fact that Dad didn’t allow us to eat as much ice cream as we would have liked. Initially, of course, we’d been excited about Dad’s ice cream business because we’d envisioned a future in which we did nothing but gorge ourselves on sumptuous cream-filled treats. Dad thought differently. He rarely allowed us to eat more than one ice cream bar a day, and he was hesitant to allow us to eat any ice cream that was in perfect condition.

  After we’d been on the road for a week or so, Dad drafted an “ice cream consumption hierarchy chart” and pasted it to the wall just behind the freezer. On the bottom of the paper he’d written, in all caps, BAD ICE CREAM. By this he meant ice cream that was ill-formed or otherwise imperfect because of some manufacturing defect; sometimes an errant stick, sometimes a crumbled cone. Above, he’d written MELTED ICE CREAM. This was the ice cream that had melted during transport and had refrozen in odd, unsellable shapes. And then there was the CHEAP ICE CREAM—the Fudgsicles and Creamsicles for example. Above the cheap ice cream was the OK ICE CREAM—ice cream sandwiches and premium ice pops—and shining above everything else was the SUPREME ICE CREAM (he drew a circle of stars around the word “supreme”); the aforementioned Choco Taco, the large ice cream sandwiches, the super-deluxe ice cream cones. Dad expected us to start at the bottom of the chart when we were selecting our ice cream for the day, and so on most days the best we could hope for was an “OK” ice cream; usually, though, my brothers and I would chomp on our bad or melted ice cream bars with frowns on our faces to emphasize to Dad how unhappy we were. He never seemed to notice.

  Dad tried very hard to sell each of the supreme ice cream bars, even the bad and melted ones. He’d brandish them about after completing a large sale—“Are you sure you guys don’t want any more? I am selling these at half price!”—and he usually ended up selling most of them. If, at the end, a few of these melted masterpieces went unsold, he would grudgingly allow us to eat them, but only if there were enough for each of us. Otherwise we’d take them home, and he and Mom would divvy up the bounty.

  My brothers and I came up with a few tricks to increase our chances of eating those supreme ice cream bars. Sometimes we’d forget to place the dry ice on the parts of the freezer that held the most expensive ice cream, and they would melt as a result. We’d present the spoiled goods to my father with sad eyes and sad tales to match:

  “I don’t know what’s wrong, Daddy. The ice doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe we need to get something that’s stronger?”

  Dad soon caught on, so we tried other tricks. We’d slam the expensive boxes of ice cream on the hard floor of the freezer while we were packing the truck, in hopes that a few of the precious bars would break. We’d bang the ice cream against the side of the freezer during an especially hectic sale and present it to Dad. He’d return the bars to us—“This one is broken”—and we’d smilingly place the ice cream in the empty box near the back of the freezer that we reserved for spoiled ice cream.

  Dad caught on to these tricks as well, but he never became upset. Usually our plans failed because we were rarely able to produce the four spoiled ice cream bars that we needed in order to be successful. As the summer passed, Dad’s stomach became bigger for our failures.

  * * *

  Sometime during the middle of summer, maybe late July or early August, one of our regular customers—he lived three streets down from us, quite near my elementary school—suggested that we park our truck on Main Street during the annual Hartville City Fair.

  “You’ll make a killing!” the man said, smiling as ice cream dripped from his buckteeth. “There’s never any ice cream around—you should jump on it before someone else gets the same idea!”

  Dad asked for more information and the man told him everything—that the fair took place on the Friday and Saturday of Labor Day weekend, just before school started; how the fairgrounds extended all the way down Main Street, right through the middle of town; how there were kiosks for everything: cotton candy, caramel apples, and popcorn; how there were games and a few rides; how there were even a few people who sold snow cones from small coolers, but no ice cream trucks. We’d never heard of the fair even though we’d been living in Hartville for over a year by then, and as the man described one spectacle after another I wondered how something so wonderful had escaped our attention for so long. We were partly to blame, I knew—we mostly stayed to ourselves. We hadn’t really traveled much around the city, and my parents didn’t have any friends. Our house was a miniature Nigeria, with its own customs and culture, and I didn’t know much about the world outside. I interpreted our ignorance of the Hartville City Fair as just another sign that we would never truly fit in Utah, that the various mysteries of the place would forever remain closed to us, because we weren’t Mormon, because we were black.

  Dad suddenly became infatuated with the fair, and for the rest of the day he spoke of
nothing else. He talked himself into the idea that the Hartville City Fair was the reason he’d started selling ice cream in the first place, that God’s will had been revealed to him through the words of one of his favorite customers. By the time we returned home that evening the Hartville City Fair had become something we’d been waiting for all our lives. Dad went to City Hall first thing the following morning and applied for a vendor’s license. He returned disappointed; he told us that they’d asked him to fill out a few forms, that they’d said they would contact him in a few days. We didn’t hear anything from them in the following weeks, though, despite the fact that Dad pestered them continually. He even drafted Tayo and me to the cause of calling the city council to plead our case. “These people always respond better to an American accent,” he said. So he called, and we called, we even assumed bland American names and bland American accents on the phone, but we garnered no response.

  Meanwhile, our ice cream business was going so well that Dad decided to purchase another US Postal Service truck. He left with Mom early one morning in August for Salt Lake City and they both returned driving trucks, Dad behind the wheel of our ice cream truck, and Mom driving a retired mail truck. We quickly converted the mail truck into an ice cream truck; we scrubbed the inside and outside, removed the various shelves and boxes that had once held countless letters, removed the red and blue stripes from the exterior, and we placed stickers featuring perfect versions of the imperfect ice cream that we sold each day on both sides of the truck. After we finished Dad told us to help him pull the dead freezer out of our first truck and into the garage, and then he drove off again. He beeped loudly when he returned, and we saw a U-Haul trailer attached to the truck. We opened the trailer to a new freezer, and as we laughed Dad said, “And this one works!” He opened the back of the truck to reveal another new freezer.

  We helped Dad carry the new freezer out of the trailer and into the new truck, and then we went inside to rest. Dad came into the living room shortly afterward and asked us what we were doing. He’d already changed into his customary ice cream selling outfit—a loose-fitting dark-blue short-sleeve dress shirt and dark-blue slacks. Femi and I ran outside and hopped into our first truck as Dad was starting it, and we went off for a half day of selling.

  * * *

  Dad spent a week trying to find someone to drive the second truck. He placed an ad in the paper and a few people stopped by our house quite early in the morning, before we started our day, and a few came late at night, after we’d come back. He finally settled on a twenty-four-year-old named Jerry whom he liked because Jerry had referred to him as “sir.” Jerry claimed he was trying to save enough money to return to college, and Dad liked that story, too. Tayo and I didn’t tell Dad about the time we caught Jerry smoking in the backyard while he was waiting for Dad to return from the wholesale ice cream warehouse with ice cream for his truck.

  To this day I don’t know what kind of arrangement my father worked out with Jerry regarding the sharing of revenue, but after only a week of working together Jerry simply stopped showing up. When Tayo asked Dad at dinner what had happened, he told us not to worry. “I will find someone better,” he said.

  Dad eventually found someone else to drive the second ice cream truck, and then someone else when that person quit, and then someone after that. They all eventually left because Dad drove them too hard and because he demanded a quota of ice cream sold each day.

  Dad began to push himself harder as well. He woke up at four in the morning every day so he could peer at the big map of Hartville he’d purchased a couple weeks into summer. Sometimes he’d wake me up as well, and I would try to keep my eyes open as he traced new paths of ice cream dominance in red ink on the map. He’d bite the tip of his pen while concentrating on a particular quadrant of the map, mumbling incoherently to himself, scribbling red lines next to other red lines, crossing out some routes completely, like he was planning his takeover of the city. When he was done he’d leave the map on the table for one of us to fold up, and he’d walk whistling out the door, his new route inscribed in his brain. We drove for longer hours each day, and Dad became adept at ingratiating himself with every person he met on the road. I’d never known him to be such a flirt, such a politician. If he saw an old woman crossing the street he’d lower the music and speak coolly to her, his voice like a blast of cold air from an oscillating fan:

  “Madame! You look so lovely! How are you this afternoon? Can I interest you in a Creamsicle to help ease you on your way?’

  And even if she rejected his advances, even if she ignored him completely, Dad would continue smiling.

  “Well, God bless you! And I expect you to buy something the next time I see you!”

  At night, after I put on my pajamas and before I fell asleep, Dad would ask me to sit next to him at the kitchen table, and together we would read passages from my favorite books. I would read a few paragraphs and then Dad would repeat them, mimicking my tone, my accent, the way my lips wrapped themselves around each word. As I fell asleep each night I’d hear my father’s voice in my head narrating passages from books by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Over time, he began to sound like me.

  * * *

  August suddenly became September. We were stopped more often as we drove down the streets of Hartville, and the crowds that gathered to meet us at our high-traffic areas grew larger. But the entire time I couldn’t stop thinking about the fair. I wondered if we’d be able to sell ice cream there. I wondered how our lives would change if they allowed us to participate; if, at the end, I would finally understand what it meant to be a part of a community.

  We finally heard from the city council a few days before the fair, and it was good news. Dad immediately went to the ice cream wholesalers and placed his largest order of the summer.

  “Business must be going well,” the man said as he handed over box after box of ice cream.

  “You have no idea,” Dad said as he handed the boxes to me. “I might be putting you out of business soon.”

  They both laughed too loudly.

  * * *

  On the first day of the fair we all woke up at 4 AM and began to make preparations. Mom brewed two big pots of stew and pulled the moin moin she’d prepared the night before from the fridge. While she fried up some plantains the rest of us packed each freezer as full of ice cream as we could, and Dad and Freddy—Dad had hired him the day before; he looked just like Jerry, maybe shorter, maybe younger, but basically the same—left with both trucks to buy dry ice. When they returned we stashed the food in the back of the trucks and stepped in so Dad and Freddy could drive us to Main Street. Mom and Ade followed in our Chevy.

  When we arrived we saw other vendors preparing for the day and policemen going from stand to stand, asking to see vendor passes. The policemen came to our trucks and Dad proudly showed them ours. They nodded and continued on. Dad asked us to gather in a circle and hold hands. We prayed together under the rising sun.

  “God, we thank you for your blessings. We thank you that we are the first ice cream vendors who have been allowed to participate in this festival, O Lord. We didn’t know about this festival before now, but we thank you that we learned in time, and that we were blessed with an opportunity to be here. God, please bless us today, so that the line of people who ask us for ice cream will not stop. We want them to continue to come and ask for ice cream as if they have never tasted ice cream in their lives. God, you have finally given us an opportunity to make it in this country. This is our chance. Help us to make the most of it.”

  We said a loud “amen” together, and my father became a different person. He peeled off his smile.

  He pointed at Freddy. “Go and park where I told you to park last night. Stay there. Tayo will go with you. If anything happens, send him down to this truck with a message. Do not mess around today. I am not playing with you. This is the day that can make the rest of our lives.”

  Freddy slinked away, scow
ling, and Tayo and Ade followed him. Dad turned to the rest of us.

  “I chose this part of the street for a reason. According to my sources in city hall, the busiest part of the festival will be here. That means we’ll be working nonstop. Mom already knows that she’ll have to go back home if we need more food, or if we need more ice cream. Tunde, Femi, I need everything you have today. You cannot let up. Keep moving forward, no matter what.”

  We both nodded.

  We sat in the truck and waited as the sun continued its upward path. The chaos around our truck began slowly. Outside, jugglers threw bright balls into the air, and loud music began pumping from large speakers on either side of us. The music was so loud that I could almost see the musical notes curling up out of the speakers. A man came walking by with a card deck and he flashed a few cards at Femi and me as we peered out of the driver’s side window. Our eyes flashed in response, but we felt Dad’s hard gaze knocking on our backs, so we turned away from him.

  People of all kinds began to walk around, and a few of them stopped by our truck. I stood ready at the freezer and passed Dad the ice cream they were asking for before their tongues had formed the second syllable, so practiced was I. As the day grew hotter more people stopped by, and soon a line snaked around our truck and down the length of the street for many feet. Femi and I worked together, huffing and puffing into the freezer, developing a rhythm of delivery while Dad worked complex figures in his head and passed the ice cream to our customers. By eleven we were on the verge of running out of a few items, and Dad sent me to the other truck to see if we could get any more supplies from them.