A Particular Kind of Black Man

by Tope Folarin

  The courtyard makes more sense with all the food and chatter and tables. I look at the tombstones again. I wish my grandmother were here, standing next to me. She was supposed to guide me through this, to show me what to do. How to be. Someone begins to cough. We settle again, and Uncle Wale announces that we are here to celebrate my arrival, and the departure of Grandma. Now, as before, his is a disembodied voice—I don’t know where he is. He says it is not a coincidence that I arrived just after my grandmother died. He tells us that she said I would be coming soon and that my arrival is proof of her closeness to God. Around me voices are murmuring in unison, and this is a sound I’ve never heard before—all those voices that I cataloged individually and worked so hard to keep apart are seeping into each other, and though I am afraid that I will never be able to disentangle them, I know their voices sound lovelier this way.

  Now I hear music. It sounds vaguely like the juju I grew up with, but I have never heard this song. Someone begins to laugh and my cousin directs me toward the long table just ahead. It stretches across the courtyard, piled high with more food than I’ve ever seen in one place. But I’ve eaten this food many times—eba and amala and dodo and pepper soup. I stack some jollof rice and moin moin and dodo on my plate and the people who walk past me glance at my food and then at my face and then my food again.

  I walk to a table and sit. Around me are cousins and aunts and uncles. I dip my fork into the mound of moin moin on my plate and take a bite. This Nigerian food doesn’t taste like Nigerian food. I take another bite. Suddenly I realize that I am tasting Nigerian food for the first time, now, and I also realize that the Nigerian food I ate back in the States was somehow inauthentic—each bite a fuzzy hologram that dissolved into familiarity the moment the food touched my tongue. Then I tasted the American food I was accustomed to: the pancake mix, the canned beans and spinach, the corned beef that I’d had for breakfast with eggs and toast. Now I’m eating more slowly, more carefully, because I want to taste every molecule of this food. If I can’t bring anything else back with me to America, if customs seizes all my packages or my bags don’t make it across the Atlantic with me, I can still smuggle my tongue’s memories back home.

  I smile when someone claps my back. A voice exclaims, So he is a Nigerian after all! and I laugh along with them. But now I am wondering: How can I possibly be a Nigerian when every Nigerian experience I have had up to this point was made in America?

  Yet here I am, in Nigeria. And I know it doesn’t make sense, but I do feel as if I have experienced some of these moments before. I have seen these tables assembled in almost perfect rows around me, each with five or six people, the laughter and the food and the sunlight, each leaf bending softly in the breeze. I have felt this sadness, so painful that the only logical response is to act as if I have always felt it. I think of all those times I sat on my bed conjuring faces and places. All those times I created memories of the person I would have been if I’d grown up in Nigeria. I am living in those memories right now. And I’m learning that memory isn’t just a catalog of things past; in times of desperation or loss or exile a memory can be a passageway into the future.

  As I’m finishing my food I look up and realize that everyone is looking at me. Something solemn is in the air. Silence resettles in the courtyard. It’s almost like this courtyard is a giant musical instrument and we are the strings; someone above has been plucking us with abandon for the past few minutes, but this silence is the clearest note.

  A little smile unfurls inside of me. This is the part of my trip I have been preparing for since I got here. I know they all want to ask me about my life in America, about all the wonderful treasures that are stored up there. I am ready for this.

  “Why did it take you so long to come home?” someone asks me. “Where have you been?” says someone else. “Have you not missed us?” says a third. Others lean forward and begin to talk. “Did you not know that we missed you? How long will you be staying? When will we see you again?” More of them lean forward. “Have you ever thought about living here? When will we see you again? How is your brother doing?” Some of them shift, but the rest remain where they are, staring at me. “When will he be coming? How is your father? When will he come back?” Someone lowers the volume of the music. “Does your father plan on living in America for the rest of his life? They look at me with concern, and then sadness. “Can you tell him that we are waiting for him? When will we see you again? What are you going to do with your life? How often do you pray? Do you pray for us? Do you know how often we pray for you?” I look around for my cousin, but I realize that he has joined them. “When will we see you again? Are you dating anybody? Is she special? Is she the one? How long have you been with her? When will you bring her to Nigeria?” I hear some kind of bird calling in the distance. “Have you finished your studies? When will you graduate? When will we see you again? Have you considered working in Nigeria? Why didn’t you tell us you were coming? How do you like Nigeria so far? Is the food to your liking?” Now I hear someone laughing, and her laughter swells into the silence, and suddenly everyone is laughing. “Can you make Nigerian food? Do you have any Nigerian clothes? Why don’t you speak Yoruba well?” Anxiety infects their laughter, extinguishes it. “What did you learn about Nigeria in your school? Do your friends know where you are from? What do you think you will tell them about your time here? Have you drunk that before? What do you think of it? When will we see you again?”

  I don’t know what to say. I am overwhelmed. My words aren’t enough.

  My cousin appears before me. “Come now,” he says. My family watches me depart; I try to discern my destination in their eyes. We enter the building and pass down a dark hallway until we arrive at a door. “Your uncle is there. He wants to speak with you,” he says, and then he walks back down the hallway.

  I breathe. I close my eyes. I knock.

  Someone tells me to come in.

  Inside, the room is swaddled in shadows. I can’t make out the figure sitting before me until my eyes adjust. After a few seconds he is all that I can see—the dimensions of the room remain invisible to me.

  “Sit, sit,” he says, and he points to a chair across from his own.

  He smiles at me. I can tell that his face must extend a great deal of effort to perform even this simple feat, but the result is wonderful—his wrinkles disappear and his face issues a clean, minimal, toothless grin.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  He is wearing a pair of trousers and a shirt. I can’t make out the pattern because of the darkness. A tall cane rests against the wall beside his chair. He is bald, and his left eye has been smogged over by a cataract. He right hand trembles slightly. His feet are pale and unadorned—they look brand-new.

  “Yes, sah.”

  “Who am I?”

  “My uncle, sah.”

  He smiles again. “Good. Welcome to Nigeria. Come closer to me.”

  I look around the room, and now I notice a low table to the left of his chair. I walk slowly across the room and perch on it. My uncle reaches for my hand. We’re holding hands and it feels right.

  “I am so glad to see you. I was afraid I would die without meeting you.”

  “I am glad to see you too.”

  “My mother told me many things about you. But she always told me that you were a good boy. I can see that now.”

  “Thank you, sah.”

  “I know that you loved her. And I know that she loves you. She is here with us, even now.”

  “I know.”

  “You know that now that my mother has died there is no one to look after your mother. Your grandma is the one who used to visit her every day.”

  I did not know this. No one ever told me.

  “Yes, sah.”

  “Your cousin will take you to see her soon. Since you are her oldest child you will have to make some arrangements. When are you visiting your father’s family?”

  “Tomorrow, sah.”

  “That is good.
You can speak with them about it as well. Greet them for me.”

  “I will, sah.”

  He nods and doesn’t speak. But somehow holding his hand is more than enough.

  A few minutes pass.

  “Do you mind if I bless you?”

  “No, sah.”

  “Bend your head.”

  I do as he asks. His hand feels dry and hard on my scalp. I don’t recognize a single word that falls from his lips. But they sound like words of power. When he is done he grasps my hand once more.

  “You will be seeing your mother soon. I know you are scared, but you mustn’t worry.”

  “Yes, sah.”

  I inhale deeply.

  “Uncle, I have something to ask you.”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. What I’m supposed to say to her.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Your mother is your mother. You will know what you need to say when the time comes.”

  “Yes, sah.”

  I’ve never thought of it this way before. I’m still not quite ready to see her. But this is something.

  I look at my uncle and he nods like he agrees with my thoughts.

  He grips my hand like he will never see me again.

  * * *

  My cousin ushers me through the maze that extends from my grandparents’ section of Lagos to my mother’s. Lagos, now familiar to me, seems accessible and cozy as we travel by motorcycle, then taxi, then motorcycle again. We walk down a dark alley, sidestepping open pits, agile four-legged animals, and limbless beggars who stare up at us reverently. We turn left into a small clearing with a crumbling building jousting its way up to a darkening sky. I pause but my cousin continues walking. I follow him inside.

  As we walk down the hallway I can just make out the outlines of other human beings standing on either side of us. The whites of their eyes tracking my slow movement through the dark.

  My cousin stops before a door on our left. He knocks and steps back. I don’t hear a thing behind the door. Someone opens it. She looks at me and I look at her. I do not know her.

  She touches her face. Who are you? She asks like she’s afraid of me. She’s wearing a light-blue wrapper and brown sandals. Her arms look so thin. So, so thin. And her face. I can’t recognize it but I have always known it. I shake my head slowly. I don’t know how to work my voice. She looks, terrified, at my cousin, her eyes pleading for a response.

  “This is your son,” my cousin says. “He has come all the way from America to see you.”

  I see my mother trying to decipher my cousin’s words. I watch her as she relearns the definition of “son.” I can feel myself relearning the pain I thought I had lost somewhere in the past.

  But something else is happening to me. Something else.

  Something twisting my mother’s face. She looks again at my cousin and then at me. She looks harder at me and then her eyes go wide and pure, recognition stripping years away from her face until the woman before me looks like the person she must have been before me, before she became a woman. And then she collapses to the floor and my cousin rushes over to her, laughing, telling her that this is something to be happy about.

  She rises slowly with his help. She stares at me once more. Her hand reaches forward.

  My first impulse is to flinch, but I catch myself and allow her to stroke my cheek. She rubs one spot insistently, just below my eye, and I am suddenly afraid that she is preparing the spot for something I do not want, a landing strip for an unsolicited kiss. I know I will have to step back if she attempts such a gesture, but she stops and stares at me instead. There are tears building up in her eyes, glassy snowballs gaining heft and speed. I glance away, at the small, dark room behind her. The moonlight is shining down on us through a crack in the ceiling. “Let’s go inside,” my cousin says.

  We walk in and sit on thin, scratchy mats on the floor. My cousin is speaking Yoruba to my mother, and she is staring at me. I’m trying to act like I don’t know what he is saying, but of course I do. My mother nods and continues to stare. I look around her room.

  There is no electricity here, just a small candle situated on a box in the middle of the room—a thin wedge of light shivers in the dark. I don’t glance beyond its grim boundaries; out there lies shame, my mother’s and my own. But here, with the shadows roaming our faces, I feel like there’s a possibility I might learn something about her.

  My cousin is narrating a tale about how we’ve been planning this surprise for many weeks, how glad I am to see her. She doesn’t say a thing. Whenever I glance at her she holds my eyes for just a moment before looking down. When I look away I feel her heavy gaze on my face.

  I wonder if she is OK. I wonder if she understands any of this. I wonder if, to her, I’m merely an oddity from the past, or a figment of her addled imagination that has somehow gained life. If I am just another hallucination. When I was younger I often woke up to my mother’s screams in the middle of the night, and then my father’s soft whispers. Sometimes this went on for only a few minutes, but usually these conversations lasted the whole night, and then my father would smile in the morning while handing me a lunch bag for school. Behind him the door to their bedroom would be closed. I often wondered if my mother was still asleep, or if my father had somehow managed to cure her, if only for the day. It occurs to me now, as I sit here, that I have finally entered my parents’ bedroom, and I only had to travel across the span of sixteen years and six thousand miles to get here. And that she is the same person I would have seen back then—a silent figure who does not recognize me.

  My cousin has been talking. “What do you think?” he says. His face implores me to say yes, so I do, though I don’t know what he asked me. He hurries outside and I hear him whispering some Yoruba into his cell phone. My mother remains where she is. Looking at me like she isn’t looking at me. I want to get the hell out of here.

  My cousin rushes back in. “She’s coming!” he yells. Now I wonder if I’ve joined my mother in her serene hallucination. I ask who and my cousin winces. “My mother! Your auntie!” he says. My aunt. Yet another stranger I’m supposed to greet with familiarity and love.

  My aunt bounds in a few minutes later, panting. She is thicker than my mother, her face much rounder. At first I don’t think she and my mother look anything alike, but when she reaches down to hug my mother I see the resemblance—same round nose, same full lips, same small chin. Now I see that they could actually be twins; the only real difference between them is that my aunt’s face seems more vibrant. Comparing her face to my mother’s, I can see what happiness does to a face, how it sharpens it, and how sadness can flatten the softer parts of a face, and how anger, too, remolds a face in its image, leaving an imprint of its presence even as a face expresses something else. Looking at them together, it occurs to me that our faces are meant to provide an ongoing transcription of every emotion we have ever felt. And that’s why my mother’s face is so vacant—for too long hers has been a vessel of loss.

  My aunt walks across the darkness and I rise to hug her.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to meet you at my father’s house,” she says. “I had to work late today.”

  She stares at me and smiles.

  “Do you remember me?” she asks, full of confidence.

  “No,” I say.

  “Well, you were a little boy when I traveled to Utah. How could you?”

  My aunt looks at my mother. “You cannot imagine how happy your mother is now. This is the day that she has been waiting for her entire life. I can tell you that she has never been happier.”

  My mother looks the same.

  “There were times when I would invite her over to my house, and she would be playing with my children and then she would just go to the corner and cry. Sometimes I would try to comfort her but she would always brush me away. And we have both been devastated since your grandmother died. And now, imagine, she is seeing her first son after so many years! L
ook how happy she is!”

  Now my mother searches for something on her wrapper. She finds it, glances at it, and flips it away.

  My aunt continues, undeterred. I look at my cousin. He shrugs. I squat back down to the floor, and something loud and juicy rips free of my body. Suddenly I feel light. Relieved. And then a smell; something reeks of rotten eggs. I can’t help but grimace, and I look around to see who the hell would pass gas at a time like this, and my mother and cousin and aunt are looking at me the same way.

  We are all silent. The smell blooms.

  My mother begins to laugh. The sound is so startling at first that I think she’s in pain. But no—her entire body is quaking with glee.

  She rises and crosses the room. My cousin moves without a word, and my mother sits next to me. She leans her head on my shoulder, her laughter winding its way out of her. The rest of us are shocked, and we look at each other with expressions of concern and curiosity. My mother keeps laughing at my shoulder. She’s moving so vigorously that I catch a whiff of her hair. I’m relieved that it smells normal, that it smells like hair, despite its disheveled appearance, the thinning strands of it pointing in every direction, her hair illustrating—in my mind, anyway—the random trajectories of her harried thoughts.

  My mother reaches a hand behind me and begins to rub my back. I look at my cousin and ask him with my eyes what I should do. He shrugs again. My aunt is staring at my mother with her mouth wide open. My mother, still laughing, rises and pulls me up after her. She walks out the door, into the night, and I follow her.

  The air is brisk, and the stars above are shining with the same ferocity that they do everywhere else I’ve been. As my mother pulls me insistently along, dragging me to a fate I cannot even anticipate, I derive some solace from the idea that there is nothing my mother can do to me—no harm or good deed—that these stars, wrapped in their robes of impenetrable darkness, have not seen before.