by Tope Folarin
“Well, Mrs. Turner said that you were born in Utah. Cool! My family went skiing there when I was little, to Snowbird. I bet you went there all the time! I bet you guys basically lived there!”
He was smiling widely. I didn’t know what to say. We’d never been skiing because my father had always claimed that traveling down a snowy mountain on metal sticks was a stupid, suicidal idea. I’d always suspected that the real reason we’d never been skiing was because my parents were too broke to afford all the equipment. Sam was staring at me, his eyes gleaming with expectation. I knew what he was waiting for.
“Oh, yeah, we went there a couple times,” I said. “It was no biggie.”
Sam’s eyes grew larger. “Wow! You guys were really lucky. So why’d you guys move to Dallas?”
Sam and I continued talking and walking down the hall. I couldn’t help but smile.
My next two classes went much better than I expected. Both teachers treated me well, and I was secretly delighted that a few of my classmates seemed genuinely curious about me. Sam was waiting outside my classroom after third period, and I strolled to the cafeteria with him and his friend John. There were no doors to the cafeteria, just a large space that opened off the main corridor. I stopped walking when we reached the threshold.
The place looked crazy as hell. I saw colors clashing, I heard sounds clashing, I even saw bodies clashing as people casually bumped into one other without saying so much as a word. The kids were burly, and they forked massive portions of steaming food into their big watery mouths.
There were black kids everywhere. More than I had ever seen in one place.
As I stood there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was pounding me, rhythmically, and although I felt no pain my head was like a broken windshield, each beat inscribing another crack onto my forehead. I looked to the far end of the cafeteria and saw two large speakers hanging from the ceiling on either side, and I realized with a rush of relief and unbelief that the pounding was actually music, that I was meant to be enjoying it in some way.
Sam and John were staring back at me, waving me forward, and I followed them to our apparent destination—a long line that ended a few feet ahead. When I made it to the front I noticed that the lunch ladies—three of them, dressed in white aprons spattered with gobs of tomato paste and hamburger meat—all appeared to be angry for some reason. They dismissively slapped their spoons and spatulas on the trays that were presented to them; they were grunting in a harsh, synchronized beat.
“Hi,” I said, trying to sound smooth. “How are you?”
“What do you want?” the lady before me asked, looking haggard and sour, seemingly irritated by my interruption of her slap and scowl rhythm.
“Thanks for asking, and I love your—”
“Look, hurry up! Too many people behind you! Just tell you what ya need!”
“Hamburger.”
“There you go.”
I sat down to eat, and I was dumping a second handful of surprisingly delicious French fries into my mouth when I felt a hand on my shoulder, near my neck. I glanced at my shoulder and saw a cocoa-colored hand with clean fingernails. I traced the line of cocoa upward—I saw a muscular arm, developed shoulders, a laughing, grimacing face. He had the kind of smile that didn’t turn up fully; the far edges of his lips seemed uncertain somehow, forever on the verge of a frown.
“Hey, man, stand up right quick,” he said. His voice had dropped, was deep. Mine hadn’t, wasn’t.
“Why?” I asked, with my newly deepened voice.
“I just wanna see something, man. Stand up for me right quick.”
I looked at my new friends for guidance, but they avoided me. They looked everywhere else. I glanced down. That’s when I saw him, smiling up at me.
I realized that I’d somehow forgotten about Michael.
I’d caught Tayo staring doubtfully at me as I pulled on my favorite MJ shirt that morning. He shook his head. “I don’t think that’ll work here,” he said. “Don’t do it.” As he spoke I stared at his beautiful fade. He was wearing his favorite shirt. It was black and it had the words FIGHT THE POWER emblazoned in red on the front. I barely recognized him.
He left the room, and I thought about changing my shirt for a sec, but then I decided against it. I knew what I was doing. It was a dope shirt.
“I would like to eat my food if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s cool, man, I just want you to stand right quick. I wanna see something.”
I noticed that a few people were listening to our conversation. I took a deep breath and stood slowly.
“What the fuck are you wearing?” he said.
He was taller than me, and he was wearing a red Bulls basketball jersey with a white 23 stamped on front, a white shirt underneath, and a pair of jeans. His language shocked me, but I knew I had to stand firm.
“What are you talking about?”
“You heard me, man. The fuck you wearing?”
“A shirt.”
He leaned his head back and laughed like he was running out of air. A few black kids rose from the surrounding tables to join him.
“You funny, man, you know that? You a funny dude.”
“Thanks.”
He laughed again, and his friends joined in. I felt like a cinematic attraction. I looked down at MJ. He was still smiling.
“Where’d you get that shirt from, man?”
“My dad bought it for me.”
More laughter. Above it I could hear a new song booming from the speakers. Something with a bizarre looping piano riff. It sounded somewhat familiar.
“So your dad dresses you?”
“No, it was a gift.”
“And you accepted it?”
His crew howled. All eyes were on me. Cocoa leaned forward suddenly and grabbed my shoulder. “Hey, fool, it’s all good; I’m just playing with you.”
“I am not a fool,” I said, with all the haughtiness I could muster.
Cocoa paused and frowned at me.
“What did you say?”
“I am not a fool.”
“Why do you talk like that?”
“Like what?”
“What’s your name anyway?”
“It’s Tune-Day,” I said. I was almost whispering.
“What the fuck is a TUNE-DAY?” he said. His crew howled again.
“It’s my name.”
“Where the hell is that from? That sounds like some African shit.”
“Yeah, like that Swahili shit that my moms be talkin’ during Kwanzaa.” This was one of his friends.
Cocoa brightened. “Yeah, all y’all African niggas speak Swahili, right?”
“No.”
I wanted to crawl under a rock, under my house, under my life. I caught Cocoa’s eyes and we stared at each other for a few seconds. Then his face softened. At least I thought so.
He shrugged. I smiled. Then I thrust my hand in his direction—a peace offering. He looked at it and then he just stared at me. I put my hand away.
“Something’s wrong with you,” he said, “but I can’t figure out what.” He shook his head. Then he pushed me. I fell and my head bounced against the floor. I felt nauseous and dizzy. I blinked. I looked up and saw that everyone around me was cheering and clapping and laughing. There was a tall guy standing next to me. He was nodding with a smile on his face. Someone was playing a piano somewhere, and it felt good in my bones.
I closed my eyes and imagined they were not laughing at me, but with me. I imagined they saw me for who I am, who I wanted to be, and not how I looked or spoke. I imagined that I was not sad and embarrassed, but that I was expanding with happiness, growing larger and larger by the second. I imagined that I had been accepted, that I had become part of something greater than myself.
I imagined that I no longer had to imagine these things.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2001
1:12 AM
What do I remember about the rest of high school?
&nbs
p; Well, I remember that we moved all the time. At least once a year. Because Dad was so broke and he was always chasing some shitty job. Dad, Tayo, and I moved south from Dallas to Merton, Texas, right after my stepmother and stepbrothers left, and when Dad told us that we’d be moving again at the end of the school year Tayo said that he wasn’t going anywhere because he had a girl and he was doing well on the basketball team. He said that he’d already found a family that was willing to care for him in our absence, and that he’d rather die than move again. Surprisingly, incredibly, astoundingly, Dad didn’t argue with him. He just said fine and told me to pack my stuff, and I was stunned because Tayo had so easily done something I was unsure I’d ever be able to do: he had defied my father and started down a path of his own making.
I remember that I was far too shy to talk to any girls. I never went on a date, never kissed a girl, maybe I only hugged a girl once or twice.
I remember that I was incredibly lonely. We moved too often for me to make any new friends, and I fell out of touch with all of my friends from Utah. And then Dad stopped paying for long distance, so I stopped talking to Grandma. That was pretty horrible. I missed her so much that I began to make up conversations with her in my head. I spoke to her for hours at a time, and sometimes I convinced myself that we were actually speaking. That we were somehow close to each another despite the fact that she was so far away.
I remember that I spent most of my time missing people. I missed my stepmother and stepbrothers after they left. I missed Tayo after we moved away from Merton. I missed my mom every single moment of every single day.
I remember that we met a few Nigerians here and there, but I never received those lessons about my heritage that my father promised me before we moved to Texas.
I remember my father’s anger, how it infected and corroded everything.
I remember that I read constantly, everything, that what I read seemed more important than what was happening in my life.
I remember that I spent countless hours in front of the mirror, trying out different ways of speaking, different personalities. I remember that by the time I became a senior I had somehow learned how to project a version of myself into the world that seemed to delight and impress others (all that time studying Hakeem and Sidney and Bryant helped). I remember admiring and then becoming jealous of this fake version of myself.
I remember writing, always writing, sometimes about my life, but mostly science fiction stories in which my heroes traveled as far away from Earth as they could.
I remember my father’s sadness—so dense and intricate and expansive it should have had its own zipcode.
I remember that The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill dropped when I was a junior, that I listened to it nonstop until I graduated.
I remember that I applied to a bunch of schools, and that I eventually winnowed my list down to two: Morehouse College and Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. I considered Bates because Mrs. Ross, my favorite librarian, had gone there, she even wrote a letter of recommendation for me, but I felt that Morehouse was where I was supposed to be, and so I ended up here.
I remember lots of things, but I have reached a point where I can no longer trust my memories.
A few days ago I was thinking about high school and it occurred to me that I had never asked Tayo how he felt when we moved away from Merton. We talked on the phone many times in the weeks and months after Dad and I left, and I saw him whenever he was in town for a basketball game, or just to visit, but for some reason that particular topic never came up. So yesterday I decided to call him up and ask him. He laughed and asked if I was kidding. I said no. He asked again, and then he told me that he’d wanted to stay in Merton, but Dad raised so much hell that he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. “Don’t you remember?” he said.
I was shocked. And distressed. Why would he claim that he’d moved with us when he didn’t? I asked him if he’d lived with Dad and me in the various places we traveled to after Merton, like Carrollton and Irving. He said of course. I asked him specific questions about each place and he answered them easily. I was panicking by this point, so I asked him if he was sure that he’d actually lived with us during those years, or if maybe he was just remembering the times that he’d visited us. He chuckled, but not like he was amused. Like he was uncomfortable. With me, with our conversation, with everything, probably. Then he asked me where I thought he was living now, and suddenly it occurred to me that I had called Dad’s apartment to reach him. Now I was at a complete loss. Maybe he was just visiting Dad. Or maybe he moved in after I left, and no one ever told me. I was so confused that I just laughed, I played it off like I’d been kidding all along, and I ended the call as quickly as I could.
I spent the next few hours trying to remember what Tayo had just told me. I tried everything I could to nudge some hidden or long-forgotten memory loose, something that would enable me to recall the past he had described with so much confidence, but all I can remember is being angry with him. Angry that he would willingly separate himself from us. Angry that he had discovered something he cared for more than Dad and me.
And of course I’m questioning everything now. Yesterday I decided to read this entire document for the first time in a long time, and as I read I realized that I’d forgotten much of what I’d written. And though some of it rings true (I never thought I’d be relieved that I remember—in vivid, frightening detail—the moment when my mom became sick) many details seem off-kilter. For example, I remember a different version of my stepmother and stepbrothers’ arrival in America. And a different version of their departure from our place in Dallas. And there are other things that I simply can’t recall. Like my stepmother giving me a CD player. Or the Hartville City Fair. When I close my eyes and think back to that period I remember that we called city hall countless times that summer, that Dad even enlisted a few of his customers to call on our behalf, but that the city ultimately refused to grant him a vendor’s license. What I remember is that Dad was livid for many months afterward, and that we eventually moved to Texas because Dad was convinced that, as he put it, he would never be anything more than a nigger in Utah.
I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be a story about my life, where I’ve been and what I’ve done, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the fact that so much of it is unrecognizable.
Then there’s the fact that my present-day double memories have only become worse. By “worse” I mean that I’m having them more frequently, many times a day now, about all kinds of things. I’m always meeting people I could not have met, visiting places I’ve never been, and all of it seems real to me, as real as anything I’ve ever experienced.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Here’s the truth, the real truth, something I’ve always known but have never admitted to myself: with every fiber of my being I feel like I don’t belong here. In this room. At this college. In this country. And it’s true that my time at Morehouse isn’t going the way that I’d hoped, that I’m just as much of an outsider here as I’ve always been, that all I really do is go to class and then come back to my room and stare at the wall or write, but I mean more than that. When I was younger I used to tell my father and Tayo that I felt like I didn’t fit in my skin, and for years I’ve tried to rationalize this feeling—I’ve told myself that I’m just not black enough, or American enough, or Nigerian enough. Shortly after I arrived at Morehouse I decided that the problem was that I’d spent my entire life trying to fit into one box or another; I decided I just needed some time to figure myself out. And all these things are probably true, but they aren’t quite right. It’s hard to explain, but I’ve always felt like I’m supposed to be somewhere else. I have no idea where that somewhere else is, or how I’d even get there, if it’s some other place or time, but I know it’s not here.
I’ve never admitted these things to myself because I always hoped that I’d figure something out, because what’s the alternative? The alternative is the way I feel now: l
ost, bewildered, terrified.
Because how am I supposed to discover who I am if I can’t tell the difference between what happened to me and what didn’t? If my memories and my actual life experiences are diverging?
Where do I fit?
I need to get some help. I’m not sure from whom, or how, but I need to do find some way to process what is happening to me.
And I need to stop writing. I don’t think this is helping anything. I’m getting lost in all of this.
No. I need to write. When I write I have control. If not over my life, then the lives of the people I’m writing about. What I need to do is to stop acting as if I am writing about myself. Since I can’t write with any confidence about what happened to me in high school, or even yesterday, I have to abandon the idea that I can write about my life in any meaningful way.
I have to let Tunde go. I have to let him find his own path.
I actually think this is the best thing I can do for myself. Because when I step back and think about this rationally, it makes perfect sense that my memories are going all haywire. I’ve been focusing my crazy-ass overactive imagination on myself, on my life, so of course I’m remembering all kinds of random things that never happened to me. If I focus on something else, something external like a story about someone who isn’t me, I have no doubt that things will return to normal.
In no time at all I will find my way back to the truth of who I am.
The flight ends abruptly—at least it seems so to him. He exits the plane and while everyone else rushes forward to act out their scenes of love and reunification at the arrival gates he heads to a row of chairs near the SuperShuttle kiosk. He sits and pulls his giant earphones over his ears. He’s taking a chartered van from Boston to Maine, but the van won’t arrive until seven in the morning, thirteen hours away.
He tries again and again to tuck himself into a comfortable position so he can fall asleep, but nothing works. The chair is dreadful—hard and unyielding. He moves to the neighboring chair and it’s the same. So he listens to his music as the sun goes down, and he turns up the volume on his CD player when the maintenance men come out of hiding with their brooms and vacuums and large humming machines.