Makeda (23 page)
So whenever off-campus parochial old Richmond kinds of black people asked me what my plans were for the summer, I’d tell them and brace for the Aunt Clarice response. Indeed, a lot of blacks I told were supportive, even envious. But, if I am remembering things correctly, the only one over fifty who thought I was on the verge of something wonderful and life-altering was my grandmother.
She seemed as excited about my plans as I was, and I don’t believe for a minute that her enthusiasm stemmed from her Dogon dream alone, because owing to me, it was that dream that had plunged our family into its current state of confusion.
My grandmother had always had this way about her, and all she would say to me was that the “life of the spirit” was thousands of years long and things that were lost in one stage of that life could be recovered in another. When I asked her to explain this she’d demurred, saying only that I’d find out for myself soon enough. She had said one thing further that I thought may have been important, and that was that I’d be doing little more than traveling around in Africa “lookin’ at stuff” unless I found a way, after “all that had happened,” to open the eyes of my spirit. I troubled over what she had meant by this right up until the time I left Baltimore for Bamako.
By
all that had happened.
The evening was warm and redolent with the renovating scent of spring. The sliding glass balcony door at Jeanne’s was fixed full open. The fragrant night air circulated through the apartment. The rustle of embryonic tree leaves made themselves heard in the clean night space. Jeanne looked casual and summery in a cotton tangerine tank top and faded denim jeans.
She embraced me and drew back, looking at me somewhat diffidently and less directly than usual. The small smile was marked by some new material question that I’d seen no evidence of before. She was armed with a finely tuned intuitive sensitivity with which she detected symptoms in me of a well-varnished ambivalence, symptoms, however, that she had diagnosed, I would later learn, wrongly. It wasn’t that I lacked a passionate affection for her, as she might well have concluded, but that, unbeknownst to her, my soul bore some retrograde infection that stunted the expression of that affection.
“I brought all the materials that I picked up from the embassy.”
I left a silence for her to fill but she only watched me under lightly knitted brows and said nothing.
I took the materials from my briefcase and spread them on the little coffee table. Her silence continued and extended well past the time it took me to make diversionary use of my hands. She simply watched me, not unpleasantly, but as if I were a dense puzzle, perhaps not worth the trouble required for solving.
“I’ve taken care of the tickets so we’re all set.”
“I didn’t expect you to pay for my ticket. Let me do that.”
“No. Absolutely not. In any case, it’s done.”
She lengthened her silence and looked down at her fingers which lay laced together on her lap. I stopped talking but could not hold the position. The widening spaces of quiet unsettled me, made me nervous.
I started again. “The man at the embassy was very nice. He said—” I stopped talking abruptly and looked at her watching her motionless hands. “Is something wrong, Jeanne? What is it?” She remained quiet. “What is it, Jeanne? Tell me, please?”
She continued to examine her hands then spoke strangely, in a flat voice, as if she were talking to herself.
“Why is it, Gray, that I have not been allowed to see all the places of your life?”
“I told you my place was a mess. I didn’t want you to see it that way.” My voice sounded querulous—whiny— and had risen an octave. Always with me a sign of anxiety.
“I was not talking about your apartment, Gray.” She said this softly, sympathetically, as if to indicate her loyalty and that she would be on my side were she but informed well enough to locate it.
“When have you last spoken to your mother, Gray?”
I don’t know why it is that my thinking processes addle when I am made the subject of even the mildest personal invasion.
“Not long ago. Maybe a week or so.”
“When did you last see her?”
I did not answer. She looked at me and saw the change in my eyes.
“Gray?”
I was staring past her, over her shoulder, blankly into the black night.
“Gray?”
I did not shift my eyes but turned my head slightly, moving, with it, my eyes onto hers.
“Yes?” My voice alloyed resentment with grief.
“I love you.”
She said this as a parent would say such to a small son who’d fallen on gravel and bloodied his knee. I wanted to cry and I hardly ever cried. Only twice had I cried since I was a little boy. I had not cried even when Luckbox, a schoolmate, drowned in Turner Lake the day I turned thirteen. But now, I would sigh upon Jeanne in sweet relief and feel curiously better, much better, and for no apparent reason at all.
“I know.” I had trouble with my eyes and glanced down to hide them from her.
“We have never been alone together.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Some presence seems to always be with us, suspended somewhere between us. And you always talk to me as if it could hear us, and you don’t want it to hear us, and so you don’t talk much, except in conversation with yourself, even when I’m sitting in front of you, looking at you. It’s like that now, right now. It’s here, whatever it is, and you know this is so.”
“That’s …” I hadn’t energy to invest a disclaimer with any real conviction. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t sell it. So I remained quiet.
“When did you last see or speak to your father?”
“I saw him and spoke to him when I went to see my grandmother.” Of course this was only technically so, and my face must have told her as much.
The thoughts, the pictures on the screen of my mind took leave of her and the room, wafting off, transforming themselves, helter-skelter, into short-reel snapshots of momentless nonevents in my past. The eight-year-old ruining his brand-new white Easter Sunday suit with axle grease from the underside of an old abandoned Mack truck. The twelve-year-old ripping his gray flannel trousers at recess while scaling the anchor fence at Booker T. Washington Junior High School. Gordon and I walking that night along Brookland Park Boulevard harmonizing,
In the still of the night
.
Shoo dooby dooby do. Shoo dooby dooby do …
“Gray?”
“Yes?” I said softly.
“You told me that you had no brothers or sisters.”
“Yes.”
“Did you once have a brother or a sister?”
“Yes.”
“Which, Gray?”
“A brother.”
“Tell me about him. Tell me how he died.”
I looked vacantly at the brochures spread on the coffee table and then at Jeanne. Without uttering a word I got up and walked out of the apartment.
I
have a bewildering penchant for absenting myself from situations I seem unable to understand or control. Life had acted upon me unsympathetically and complicated affairs I had much wanted to keep simple. Everything that mattered to me seemed broken, even to some extent my anchoring relationship with my grandmother. And now the tiff with Jeanne. Well, not even a tiff really. Presented with her first real disposition of intimacy, I had closed off from her like a frightened clam. The very thing my grandmother warned me against. As a result, I was going to Mali alone. I had given in to my worst traits. Without a moment of conscious consideration, I had within the space of an instant withdrawn to the painful comfort of an old and familiar despair. I had known the moment that I did this that I had made a serious mistake, a mistake I was temperamentally inclined to solemnize as virtue before preemptively imposing upon it a measure of sensible remedy.
I had never been on an airplane before, and such, when the big Air France Boeing 707 roared down the long concrete runway at Dulles, I discovered only then how little credence my nervous system placed in the physics of manmade flight. As the big aircraft lifted from the ground, the long wing, over which I sat, sagged disconcertingly under the great dangling weight of its two screaming engines. Not two weeks earlier, the port outboard engine had fallen off a 707 on takeoff from San Francisco, carrying half a wing with it, and causing the deaths of everyone on board. I kept my eyes trained through my window on the rightside wing’s bobbing engines until long after the plane had reached its cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. On the ground I could construct an illusion of control. Six miles up, I had little choice but to accept that control over my life rested
ex
post facto
in the hands of distractable assembly plant workers, component manufacturers, maintenance mechanics, and, for the present moment, the unseen hands of the three-person French-speaking crew up front.
Fear eclipsed wonderment. I did not like flying.
I was the only black person on the plane. The cabin had been darkened for sleeping. The night over the North Atlantic fell inky and featureless. The senses listened reluctantly to the shadowy stillness of the plane’s dim hermetic space. All that reminded of human survival was the rise and fall of sleeping breasts against the ugly drone of the big Rolls-Royce jet engines.
I had begun to question the wisdom of the enterprise I was embarking upon. Jeanne had not come to the airport to see me off. I had not spoken to her since abruptly walking out of her apartment a month ago. I realized now that I all too often behaved as a stubborn and stupid man who acted against his very most essential interests for reasons broadly unknown to me and, I suspect, to the general male population of the species as well. It is as if I were captive of some primordial behavioral kink that evolution had omitted to remedy. Still, I believed the despondency resulting from my impetuous mistake with Jeanne would have been manageable were it not layered onto my lengthening estrangement from my parents. While I continued to love them, they and I seemed to have grown increasingly incompatible.
Now here I was, alone in every conceivable fashion, hurtling through a black abyss toward the unfamiliar, and doing so only because of an ill-conceived inertial idea fueled by an ambitious young would-be writer’s curiosity.
I took a blanket and pillow down from the overhead luggage bin. I draped the blanket over my knees before doubling over the pillow and wedging it between my head and the plane’s starboard window wall. I looked out at the inky blackness and soon drifted off to sleep.
The main concourse of the airport was dense with foot traffic. For the first time in my life, I heard only the sound of a language that was not English. The hall was full with the musical riffs of light bell chimes that called attention to flight announcements made in French for destinations like Lucerne, Dakar, Malta, and Moscow. If not racially more heterogeneous, the milling cosmopolitan herd of people was clearly more culturally diverse than any assemblage of people I had seen anywhere before in the United States. They were mostly French, of course, but amongst them could be heard a medley of other languages, none of which I recognized. It came as something of a comfort to me to see a number of very dark blacks, the men dressed in floor-length robes and fez-like hats, the women in brilliant primary colors that accentuated the richness of their complexions.
All that I saw seemed different from that which I had seen my whole life in America—the signage on restroom doors, the spare-line design of the lights and benches and floor coverings. The virtual
everything
was indeed somehow different, a measure less cushiony than America’s lowercase architecturals, more sensible, serviceable, more industrial even, to a new eye accustomed to America’s boastful surplusage.
T
he crowded lobby of the small French airport hotel was charged with the alienating energy of transiting strangers, strangers speaking too loudly, straining to make themselves understood above the clashing of dissonant and mutually incomprehensible tongues. With the exception of a small few, the travelers jostling for space and advantage were Europeans going assertively about their business in a manner of insouciant detachment.
There were the French, of course, but there were also high-pitched gatherings of Czechs, Swedes, Russians, Croatians, Pakistanis, Germans, Japanese, and five or more Francophone Africans. The unrelated languages spoken in unison formed into a cacophonous noise that made the small lobby smaller still.
“Ça va?”
“Ça va.”
The voices, textured and husky with color, carried robustly forward from directly behind me as I waited in line to check in. Air France had vouchered payments for a lunch, a dinner, and the small dayroom I was to use during the twelve-hour duration of my layover.
I looked behind me and saw two black men, one tall and rangy, the other quite short and corpulent. They wore festively embroidered robes. The tall man’s robe was white. The round man’s robe was an eye-catching periwinkle. They did not so much shake as clasp hands in an oddly gentle but nonetheless masculine way, with their left hands holding the right wrists of the hands with which they greeted each other. They seemed to know each other and to have bumped into one another quite by chance. I recognized that they were speaking French although I had no inkling of what they were saying. I had a fleeting impulse to say something to them in English, to ask, for instance, if they were going on, in the evening, to Bamako on the flight that I was booked for. They smiled and laughed together companionably. My courage began to ebb. I remained silent and turned back around to present the Air France voucher to the harried reception desk clerk.