The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (20 page)

We had actually moved to Senegal as a family when I was three years old. My dad felt that we needed to learn more discipline and my mother was worried about what the budding Los Angeles gang violence would mean for her three sons, then aged twelve, ten, and a few months. As a toddler, I had no qualms about the move, but for my older brothers, it was the end of the world. Amadou and Malick had friends and reputations they were leaving behind in the only city they knew. They were devastated, which is probably why their
love affair with Senegal is, to this day, a bit tenuous. I had no idea about anything life had to offer, so the adaptation was fairly easy for me. Senegalese food? Bring it on. Wolof and French? Guess I’m trilingual up in here!

Yes, my parents were ready to start a new life in Senegal, leaving the States behind for good. During the time we spent there, we had a great life. We lived in a huge, multilevel house, with a security guard and two maids, in an affluent area called Anne Mariste. I could see my cousins whenever I wanted to and was in a school where my American-ness made me special. Life was great, for two years. Until my father attempted to build a hospital in Senegal and instead got ripped off by the government, losing most of his money in the process. That’s when, to my sadness and my older brothers’ relief, we packed our bags to return to the States.

We wouldn’t come back to visit until I was ten years old and, while that visit served as a brief reminder of what once was, it didn’t trigger any fond nostalgia. In fact, during that particular visit, the one thing I took back with me was “Roachelle,” a cruel nickname given to me by my mother on the plane ride back home. One of my only surface gripes with Senegal, due to several horrible experiences and really, the general grossness of them, is the abundance of cockroaches. If you don’t see them, they’re somewhere. The incident that sparked my new nickname began at the Dakar airport, on our way back home to Potomac, Maryland. I really had to use the restroom and couldn’t wait until we got past the ticketing line to go. I was wearing an all-white
booboo
, with beautiful color-printed accents, and these cute white harem pants. The outfit was a parting gift from a relative that my mother insisted, to demonstrate our appreciation, I put on right away.

My family waited for me in the ticketing area as I pee-pee danced
to the bathroom. As soon as I walked inside, I knew I didn’t want to be in there for very long. It smelled like a urine fairy was floating around the bathroom, blowing his pee-pee breath ever-so-delicately directly up my nostrils. I rushed inside the stall and pulled down my pants, only to look down and see several small roaches scurrying along the floor tiles. I quickly pulled my pants up to my thighs, holding them tightly while keeping balanced enough to squat over the seatless toilet, all the while attempting to keep my eye on every single roach, to ensure my safety. When I got out of the restroom, before I could tell my mother about the nastiness, she rushed us to the gate.

In the middle of the thirteen-hour plane ride back home, I kept feeling a strange brushing sensation on my inner thigh. Being a stupid child, apparently too lazy to investigate unfamiliar sensations, I ignored the tingling the first three times it occurred. Maybe the cloth in my new pants was especially stringy in the crotch area? After the fourth brush-up, I reached down and discovered a hole right in the center of my pants. Intrigued, I stuck my hand near my inner thigh to see what was causing my irritation. I grabbed what I thought was a loose piece of fabric or a tag, held it to my face for closer inspection, and was met with the absolutely disgusting cycling legs of a thick, three-inch-long cockroach. I freaked the entire hell out and instinctively threw it out of my hands, next to me, where my younger brother sat. Horrified, he let out a high-pitched squeal and brushed it off his chest and sent it flying down to the aisle between him and my mother, where it landed on its pedaling feet. My mother, who sat holding a four-year-old Elize, looked at the walking roach and shrieked with alarm. As it made its way to the front of the plane, my mother tapped the man sitting in front of her, who was engaged in reading a newspaper, and asked him with
pleading panicked politeness, “
Monsieur
, could you please kill that roach?”

In response, the man barely turned his eyes to the floor, where the roach leisurely roamed, and calmly told her, “No.” He resumed his newspaper reading as the roach prepared for his new life in New York, and
that’s
the story of how “Roachelle” was almost impregnated by a cockroach.

In general, my mother and father have always been very good about keeping some aspect of Senegal in our lives, whether they intended to or not. One incident particularly endeared me to that culture. Alioune was one of my aunt Mame Bineta’s friends and one of the many Senegalese visitors over the years who had extended his stay in our home. My mother quickly learned that when she said “I do” to my father, she said “I do” to his culture, which states that any visitor is welcome to stay at your house, eat your food, and cause you inconvenience, indefinitely—family or not. Many relatives took advantage of my dad’s generosity and general politeness. In addition to sponsoring the visits of over fifty relatives and close family friends, my father has repeatedly housed at least half of them.

Alioune had been in our Los Angeles home for only a couple of days when, during a balcony smoke break, he saw what appeared to be a black baby doll floating on top of our backyard pool. Upon closer inspection, he realized it was my unconscious body and promptly ran down to jump in the pool and retrieve me. At only one and a half years old, I had wandered outside alone and fallen into the gateless pool. My mother called the paramedics in a frenzy as my brothers rushed outside to watch while Alioune administered CPR
to me. Had it not been for a random Senegalese stranger staying at our house, I would certainly be dead.

This is a fact I’m sure my mother never forgot, and that must have remained in her mind as she tolerated more and more stays from visitors over the years, even after she and my father divorced.

One of our visitors, Cherif, my father’s elderly “uncle” who resembled an African Redd Foxx, had decided to grace us with his presence for several weeks. I was fourteen at the time, and my parents and siblings were gone for some inexplicable reason. Maybe I had stayed home from school. Who knows? All I know is that I found myself alone with this man, who had to be in his seventies, but was still in good enough form to do some jumping jacks if he needed to. His French was broken and often unintelligible, and so was my Wolof, so our language barrier was pretty prominent. When he called me from my snack searching in the kitchen to where he lay stretched out on the couch, lazy and entitled, like the Senegalese version of Jabba the Hutt, I knew I’d be in for a struggle.

The request started out simple enough. He indicated his hands and asked me in a French-Wolof hybrid, “
Ana coupé
?
Coupé
?” (Literally: “Where’s cut? Cut?”)

It took me a minute, but all I had to do was look at his nails to understand his request.

“
Ahh, les couples d
’ongles
?
Je vais les chercher
.” I pointed behind me and pronounced it again, louder, as if my volume would magically make him understand, “
CHERCHER
!”

So I went to find the nail clippers, which I knew my mother kept in some cluttered drawer of her bathroom. As I thoroughly searched each drawer, I crossed my fingers that we had all been responsible and considerate enough to have put them back where we found them. I shuffled through tampons and cotton balls and nail polish
and . . .
Eureka!
I jogged back to the family room and handed them to him. He nodded with mild appreciation as he took them from me. I went back to my dad’s office to internet surf.

Ten minutes later, my surfing was interrupted.

“Isseu!” Had I heard my name? I waited. Maybe he was coughing.

“Isseu!” Nope. Not a cough. I scooted away from my leisurely act of nothingness and made my way back to the family room. Cherif handed me the clippers and as I nodded, readying to put them back, he stopped me.

“
Xadda, xadda
 . . .” I turned back to see him pointing, this time . . . at his feet. I looked down at the long-nailed toes he wiggled as he continued to say something in Wolof that I didn’t
want
to understand. I tried to hand the nail clippers back to him and was met instead with a closed fist and single finger pointing in my direction.
Me?

I played dumb. “
Quest-ce que tu veux
?”

More Wolof from him, then the word, “
coupe
,” as he made room for me on the couch, flexing his feet and pointing his toes.

I couldn’t believe this mess. I didn’t know what to do. I knew what I
didn
’t
want to do, but if I refused, would that be a grave sign of disrespect? Would I cause some family drama between him and my father? Or a confrontation of some sort? On the other hand, if I
did
do it, wouldn’t I be disrespecting myself? Why did I have to be the only one home today? Why did this jerk feel so comfortable asking me to perform this task? At fourteen, did I look like someone who did man feet? Why couldn’t I have been one of those roughneck Latina girls I went to high school with, who constantly disrespected authority figures without any remorse? (“I ain’t doin’
dick
! F!@# yo’ toes!”)

I was far too polite and I hated that about myself. I didn’t even know where to start. So, without touching his feet, I slowly started with the big toe. His feet weren’t completely ugly, which I appreciated, but neither were they nice-looking enough to change my perspective on the matter.

Clip.

I looked at Cherif, who checked his toe. I guess that was good enough for him. He lay back and allowed me to continue. On to the next.

C-lip. C-lip.
I felt my dignity and pride chip away with each nail that dropped to the towel he’d set below his feet. By the time I got to the fourth toe, which was kind of small, I tried to position the nail clipper just over the nail without putting his skin in the danger zone, and again without putting my hands on his feet. I could feel Cherif tense up, which made my hands shake out of nervousness and insecurity, which was enough for him to hold his hand up and say, “
Ça va. Ça va.
” We both exhaled as I gave him the clippers, and he finished the rest of the job himself. I didn’t know what was worse, being asked to cut his toenails in the first place or being stopped because I wasn’t doing a good enough job.

Fortunately, all of our other houseguests were far more considerate. Sure, we’d be relegated to sleeping in the living room as our beds were given away, but that inconvenience was mostly left to Lamine, who had his own room (Elize and I shared a room). Many of our guests would cook us delicious Senegalese food, give us rides to places we needed to go (including school), and do the chores we didn’t want to do:
dishes
.

Up until my high school trip back to Dakar, practicing French with our guests by way of pleasant conversation and eating
Thiebou dien
and
Yassa
was enough to make me feel like I was still in touch
with my culture. But, within the first day of my visit, I realized how wrong I was and how much I’d been missing out on, first and foremost, camaraderie with family.

One thing that had remained constant since we lived there when I was very young was the family house, the structure of which was unlike any other house I had ever seen, much less lived in. It resembled a single-story motel, in that there was a courtyard terrace with rooms surrounding it. The pathway at the entrance of the house led to an outdoor center terrace, off of which was a kitchen on the right, and then a family room. Most of our quality time was spent in one of two rooms, the family/living room (which held the youthful portraits of my grandparents) and my Tantie Ndeye Fatou’s room, which held one of the bigger televisions in the house and a VCR.

We came with suitcases bearing many gifts, piled on by some of our aunts back in Los Angeles for their children, and medicine for my grandfather, but I’d say the most coveted item we held was the compilation of music videos I had recorded over the course of a week before we arrived. Before international internet, American music hits didn’t come to Senegal until six months to a year later. What I held in my hand was pop culture currency, and the opportunity for my cousins to be ahead of the curve in their social circles. We must have watched those music videos every other day that summer, emulating the dances of Nelly and the St. Lunatics, learning all the lyrics to Ray J and Lil’ Kim’s “Wait A Minute” and rewatching the same Freestyle Friday
battle on AJ and Free’s
106 & Park
. Later, I’d find out that none of the songs I had recorded would be huge hits in the United States (so much for my A&R career), but they were mega hits around the house.

It was, perhaps, during one of these bored bouts of rewatch
ing music videos that I expressed a desire to go out and do something fun.

“Do you want to go to the club?” my cousin, Pape Amadou,
7
asked.

The club?
Did they know I was only fifteen?

“I’m only fifteen,” I suggested.

P’Amadou, who was seventeen, shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. You can get into the clubs at sixteen here—they don’t care.”

I had yet another brief moment of panic as I considered my inability to dance, but then I realized I was among family. Plus, the club would probably be playing mostly Senegalese music anyway, and I wasn’t expected to know how to do those moves.

“Niani plays really good rap and R&B,” he added.

Oh.
Well, still . . . I was among family, and why not?

“Let’s go!” I exclaimed.

We took two cabs to Niani. P’Amadou rode with some of his neighborhood guy friends in one cab, and I rode with Skinny Ndeye Awa and my older cousin Khady in another cab. I had “dressed up” in my Nike Prestos (shoes that were the envy of all my guy cousins), blue jeans that I had rolled up to the ankle, a red tank top, and a red bandanna that blew in the wind as I sat in the backseat, by the window. I looked like I was auditioning to be a Jet in
West Side Story
, but I thought I was cute.