Between the World and Me (11 page)

I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of “race”—“race” itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same “race.” But a great number of “black” people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead “races” (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights.

If my life ended today, I would tell you it was a happy life—that I drew great joy from the study, from the struggle toward which I now urge you. You have seen in this conversation that the struggle has ruptured and remade me
several times over—in Baltimore, at The Mecca, in fatherhood, in New York. The changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the Dream. But even more, the changes have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

But oh, my eyes. When I was a boy, no portion of my body suffered more than my eyes. If I have done well by the measures of childhood, it must be added that those measures themselves are hampered by how little a boy of my captive class had seen. The Dream seemed to be the pinnacle, then—to grow rich and live in one of those disconnected houses out in the country, in one of those small communities, one of those cul-de-sacs with its gently curving ways, where they staged teen movies and children built treehouses, and in that last lost year before college, teenagers made love in cars parked at the lake. The Dream seemed to be the end of the world for me, the height of American ambition. What more could possibly exist beyond the dispatches, beyond the suburbs?

Your mother knew. Perhaps it was because she was raised within the physical borders of such a place, because she lived in proximity with the Dreamers. Perhaps it was because the people who thought they were white told her she was smart and followed this up by telling her she was not really black, meaning it as a compliment. Perhaps it
was the boys out there, who were in fact black, telling her she was “pretty for a dark-skin girl.” Your mother never felt quite at home, and this made the possibility of some other place essential to her, propelling her to The Mecca, propelling her to New York and then beyond. On her thirtieth birthday she took a trip to Paris. I am not sure you remember. You were only six. We spent that week eating fried fish for breakfast and cake for dinner, leaving underwear on the counter, and blasting Ghostface Killah. It had never occurred to me to leave America—not even temporarily. My eyes. My friend Jelani, who came up the same as me, once said that he used to think of traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit. And I felt much the same, then. I was bemused at your mother’s dreams of Paris. I could not understand them—and I did not think I needed to. Some part of me was still back in that seventh-grade French class, thinking only of the immediate security of my body, regarding France as one might regard Jupiter.

But now your mother had gone and done it, and when she returned her eyes were dancing with all the possibilities out there, not just for her but for you and for me. It is quite ridiculous how the feeling spread. It was like falling in love—the things that get you are so small, the things that keep you up at night are so particular to you that when you try to explain, the only reward anyone can give you is a dumb polite nod. Your mother had taken many pictures, all through Paris, of doors, giant doors—deep
blue, ebony, orange, turquoise, and burning red doors. I examined the pictures of these giant doors in our small Harlem apartment. I had never seen anything like them. It had never even occurred to me that such giant doors could exist, could be so common in one part of the world and totally absent in another. And it occurred to me, listening to your mother, that France was not a thought experiment but an actual place filled with actual people whose traditions were different, whose lives really were different, whose sense of beauty was different.

When I look back, I know that I was then getting the message from all over. By that time my friends included a great number of people with ties to different worlds. “Make the race proud,” the elders used to say. But by then I knew that I wasn’t so much bound to a biological “race” as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream. Not long ago I was standing in an airport retrieving a bag from a conveyor belt. I bumped into a young black man and said, “My bad.” Without even looking up he said, “You straight.” And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only
exist between two particular strangers of this tribe that we call black. In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds—the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then. And my eyes—my beautiful, precious eyes—were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after. In that single exchange with that young man, I was speaking the personal language of my people. It was the briefest intimacy, but it captured much of the beauty of my black world—the ease between your mother and me, the miracle at The Mecca, the way I feel myself disappear on the streets of Harlem. To call that feeling racial is to hand over all those diamonds, fashioned by our ancestors, to the plunderer. We made that feeling, though it was forged in the shadow of the murdered, the raped, the disembodied, we made it all the same. This is the beautiful thing that I have seen with my own eyes, and
I think I needed this vantage point before I could journey out. I think I needed to know that I was from somewhere, that my home was as beautiful as any other.

Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to some other blue world. I wanted to see that world myself, to see the doors and everything behind them. The day of my departure, I sat in a restaurant with your mother, who’d shown me so much. I told her, “I am afraid.” I didn’t really speak the language. I did not know the customs. I would be alone. She just listened and held my hand. And that night, I boarded a starship. The starship punched out into the dark, punched through the sky, punched out past West Baltimore, punched out past The Mecca, past New York, past any language and every spectrum known to me.

My ticket took me to Geneva first. Everything happened very fast. I had to change money. I needed to find a train from the airport into the city and after that find another train to Paris. Some months earlier, I had begun a halting study of the French language. Now I was in a storm of French, drenched really, and only equipped to catch drops of the language—“who,” “euros,” “you,” “to the right.” I was still very afraid.

I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that
I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It happened right then. The realization of being far gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it—the horror, the wonder, the joy—fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I’d gotten watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that I’d felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive—even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating.

I arrived in Paris. I checked in to a hotel in the 6th arrondissement. I had no understanding of the local history at all. I did not think much about Baldwin or Wright. I had not read Sartre nor Camus, and if I walked past Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots I did not, then, take any particular note. None of that mattered. It was Friday, and what mattered were the streets thronged with people in amazing configurations. Teenagers together in cafés. Schoolchildren kicking a soccer ball on the street, backpacks to the side. Older couples in long coats, billowing scarves, and blazers. Twentysomethings leaning out of any number of
establishments looking beautiful and cool. It recalled New York, but without the low-grade, ever-present fear. The people wore no armor, or none that I recognized. Side streets and alleys were bursting with bars, restaurants, and cafés. Everyone was walking. Those who were not walking were embracing. I was feeling myself beyond any natural right. My Caesar was geometric. My lineup was sharp as a sword. I walked outside and melted into the city, like butter in the stew. In my mind, I heard Big Boi sing:

I’m just a playa like that, my jeans was sharply creased
.

I got a fresh white T-shirt and my cap is slightly pointed east
.

I had dinner with a friend. The restaurant was the size of two large living rooms. The tables were jammed together, and to be seated, the waitress employed a kind of magic, pulling one table out and then wedging you in, like a child in a high chair. You had to summon her to use the toilet. When it was time to order, I flailed at her with my catastrophic French. She nodded and did not laugh. She gave no false manners. We had an incredible bottle of wine. I had steak. I had a baguette with bone marrow. I had liver. I had an espresso and a dessert that I can’t even name. Using all the French I could muster, I tried to tell the waitress the meal was magnificent. She cut me off in English, “The best you’ve ever had, right?” I rose to walk, and despite having inhaled half the menu I felt easy as a featherweight.
The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musée Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I’d want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly.

It occurred to me that I really was in someone else’s country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished. I was the one the police stopped on Twenty-third Street in the middle of a workday. I was the one driven to The Mecca. I was not just a father but the father of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the husband of a black woman, a freighted symbol of black love. But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor—landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before—that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished
I had known it sooner. I remember, that night, watching the teenagers gathering along the pathway near the Seine to do all their teenage things. And I remember thinking how much I would have loved for that to have been my life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear. I did not have that past in hand or memory. But I had you.