Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (36 page)

Some weekends, needing a brief respite from course work, dorms, dining halls, campus gossip, and roommates, I’d take the bus to New York City. After so many years of living thousands of miles away from my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and of imagining that there were many impassable worlds between us, I was finally getting to know that branch of the family for myself. Those visits had also, finally, wrested the city itself from my father’s narrow view of it, erased for me his contempt for the sprawling, messy, raucous frenzy of the place. There on my own terms, letting my eyes climb past the trees to scale the high-rise buildings that never fully seemed to surrender to the sky, I’d felt filled with agency, as if the magnitude of what was human—the skyscrapers, clock towers, mammoth bridges, and the wide avenues electric with traffic—had enlarged me. I could see very clearly why a person would
choose
to live in a place like that, why a person might race to fall into step with the river of pedestrians, everyone moving with an aggrandized sense of his or her own going—walking, sprinting, climbing, closing in on something always just a little way off. There was a
privacy to the place that intoxicated me. A quiet at the center of that racket into which a person could disappear, if she wanted to.

Sometimes the quiet of my thoughts, and my ideals—which I took to be thoughts I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to act upon, like the one about being a nationalist—was intruded upon by one of my relatives. Like Nina asking what on earth had happened to me. Or my aunt Ursula wanting to know what kind of job I hoped to get with a head full of dreadlocks.

“I’m not interested in the kind of job that would discriminate against me for wearing my hair in its natural state.”

I can now see how the steely rigidity with which I rattled off my new beliefs might have been disconcerting. My mother was unsettled by my new appearance; she thought I looked unkempt, though she grilled me less about what else my appearance signified. But my aunts were not my mother, and they gave themselves permission not just to worry but also to badger me.

“There’s a little boy at my school,” Aunt Ursula had told me, “whose mother put his hair into dreadlocks. I see him on the playground yanking it out, one lock at a time. He feels stuck. It’s not fair.”

“You can be black without going overboard about it,” another voice had chimed in. “Why stir up trouble trying to make such a big statement?”

They were telling me that blackness wasn’t a costume and it wasn’t a battle but something most people lived inside of quite naturally, not wrestling with it or feeling obliged to wave it around. Like it or not, they also meant to remind me, blackness was also a factor that made some aspects of life harder. Of course I knew what they meant. Of course I knew they were right, but up until that point in my life, I’d mostly kept my understanding of blackness
inside. Couldn’t my aunts see how elated I felt, finally having the permission and the tools to voice my own thinking about race and to unpack such thinking for others (whether or not they wanted to hear it)?

As far as my New York family was concerned, I was late to the party. They’d lived a great portion of their lives in the South, after all. Even my cousins who were raised in New York had had the benefit of regular visits to Alabama, where they, unlike me, had felt at home. They’d been given the language I hadn’t or hadn’t been willing to receive, and it freed them from having to talk their way through what being black meant. Had they been told to always be
twice as good
? Maybe, but they’d also been told it was a flaw of the white world to require such a display.

I made a trip to New York one weekend in order to visit the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library devoted to the African diaspora. I’d read about it and was eager to be in the space, to soak up the feeling of all that black art, all that black thinking. My aunt Carla had driven me there, and on the way home, she’d given me a tour of the Harlem neighborhoods, weaving along the blocks of Striver’s Row and, farther north, pointing out the abandoned buildings that had once been magnificent, too, but that now stood gutted like doll houses on burnt-out blocks. After dark, as we were heading back down Lenox Avenue, I’d pointed to the silhouettes warming themselves around garbage cans whose contents had been set aflame.

“Wow!” was all I could say, spinning around in my seat to take in the sight for as long as I could. There was something about it that delighted me, something real, something that reminded me, perhaps, of the invisibility Ellison’s protagonist described.

“When I graduate, I want to come here. I want to live in Harlem, with all these beautiful black people,” I announced. It felt like
a homecoming. The little sliver of blackness I’d known growing up in California, a sliver that sat inside the walls of our family house, or inside the silence of my mind, leapt now in joy to know that there was an immense realm whose facets gave back occasional glimpses of itself.

“Those men are
homeless
,” Aunt Carla said. I could hear the echo of my father in her voice.

“But there’s something so…so
beautiful
about them.” It was the only word I could access quickly enough to answer her. I didn’t want to be just my old self, the one for whom race was a private meditation and nothing more. And while I surely didn’t want to be one of the homeless warming myself by the heat of a trash can set afire, I didn’t want to be a stranger to that reality forever.

“Your parents did everything they could to make sure you wouldn’t have to suffer. Why would you want to go backward?” Aunt Carla was asking.

It was a question that on one level made sense to me. But on another, it didn’t, and I wasn’t able to answer it—not yet.

On the Greyhound back to Boston, signs everywhere told me how much farther there was to go. Bridgeport. New Haven. Providence. I treasured that feeling of drifting between places. It helped erase some of the anxiety about where, in the real scheme of things, I was supposed to be headed, and it helped take my mind off the loneliness I sometimes felt now that I was no longer in love, no longer anybody’s urgent destination. Moving over ramps and bridges, and back and forth across lanes, I relaxed my grip around the confusion, the sorrow, the independence, the wanting, the shifting allegiances, the insatiable wondering that fueled so much of my life. High above the ground, watching the bus’s shadow skimming north on Interstate 95, I felt vacant, expansive, subjective, far away. Like a cloud pushed along by the wind.

TESTIMONY

I
n the fall of my senior year of college, I was living in Somerville, in an off-campus apartment with a roommate who was, from what I gathered, about twelve years older than me. I’d just as soon have come out and asked her, but by then, too much time had passed, and I didn’t want her to think I’d been inordinately concerned about the age gap between us. She did once mention that she’d been a regular on a 1970s children’s program that I was too young for but that my older siblings had watched with devotion.

Her name was Dawn, and we’d met on campus during the spring of my junior year. She seemed like a refreshing alternative to my friends from the dorms. My best friend was a first-generation Indian American girl from Sacramento with a penchant for alcohol and theatrics. I loved her, but when I was being very honest with myself, I had to admit that I found her exhausting. And while she was my main confidante—we spent whole days and nights talking to one another about what we did and thought and felt—she had once made it explicitly clear to me that she had limited patience for hearing me talk about my romantic exploits. “You sound almost stupid when you’re talking about your boyfriend,” she’d once said. And ever since, I’d tried very hard to keep most of that kind of business to myself.

Dawn was black, which was one thing that had drawn me to
her. I had plenty of black friends, but not so many that I had ceased feeling excited about cultivating new ones. At first, I thought she was a student, but it turned out that she was on an extended leave from the university, having taken time off during her second or third year. Though older than me, she was sweet and innocent in a way I felt I’d only just left behind myself. As far as I was concerned, I’d grown up a lot in two years, a side effect of heartbreak, and as a result of having, at some point in the preceding years, learned to look at myself through more objective eyes, commanding,
Straighten up
, or
Grow up
, or
Wise up
, at times when the old me might have stood mute in shock or crumpled into despair. This is life, I learned to tell myself. These are the fleeting glories and their accompanying devastations: love and betrayal, unabashed pride and humiliation so poignant it requires you to lift your chin and stride out the door like a goddess.

When I met Dawn, I was dating a slightly older black guy I’d met at the campus film archive, where he worked. He wasn’t a student, but he was a campus personality. I wanted the relationship to succeed, but I suspected that he was being somewhat cavalier with his affections. There seemed to be more than a few young black women with whom he was exceptionally familiar. Dawn didn’t appear to know terribly much about him, and I took that to mean that they’d never dated or that he’d never flirted (successfully) with her and that striking up a friendship with her wouldn’t later open me up to the mortification of discovering we had far too much in common.

In the spring of the previous year, after we had already looked at a few apartments together and my eagerness to leave the dorms had been mightily piqued, Dawn and I went for a coffee in Harvard Square. “Are we sure we should be moving in together?” she had
asked, as if we were contemplating a far more serious commitment. I shot her a confused, half-betrayed look, and she attempted to clarify by saying that she was a Christian and that her values might seem unusual to me.

Her concern hit me like a rebuke from my own conscience.
For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?
Instead of telling her that, like her, I was a Christian, I’d snarked back, “Well, if you’re worried that we won’t be ‘equally yoked,’ you can relax.” Why was I trying to punish her for being transparent in her faith? And what was clouding my ability to be transparent in mine?

“Maybe I’m worried about living with someone who makes cheesy jokes about my religion,” she’d replied, ruffled. But we went ahead with things anyway. It would have been far harder to find affordable one-bedroom apartments on our own. Like it or not, we had come to need one another.

Dawn and I were alike in certain ways. She seemed to come from a fairly sheltered middle-class black family with a handful of kids. But when she was my age, both of her parents were killed in a car crash. That was why she’d taken a leave of absence from school. Again, it was something I’d gathered, pieced together from our many day’s-end conversations. The closest I’d come to asking Dawn to tell me her whole story from start to finish was simply listening to the bits and pieces that came tumbling out when we were relaxing together at home.

After we’d first moved in, we drove a U-Haul out to Roxbury to pick up some of her belongings from her brother’s basement. The two of them had the same wide, spoon-shaped face and exquisite almond eyes. I could imagine the whole family was beautiful, in a gentle, almost surprising way. They’d been quiet together that afternoon, talking but not talking, not bothering with the kind
of cheerful chatter we’d have made in my family: smiling our big smiles, volleying around jokes, and lobbing a slew of questions over to the outsider.

Dawn prayed before meals and woke up for church on Sundays (not Memorial Church but another in Cambridge). Sometimes, she brought people home from her church group, students who were my age mostly, from Harvard and the other nearby campuses. I always wondered if I’d bump into the Bible-study kids I’d met and embarrassed myself in front of that evening during my freshman fall, and for all intents and purposes, I did, over and over: the types were exactly the same, as was the feeling they incited in me, which was equal parts annoyance and shame, as if they were the flock and I the single sheep that succeeded in getting away.

Our apartment was large and sunny, but in winter it felt like a walk-in refrigerator. The number of tenants who had lived there before us seemed to bear a direct relationship to the layers of linoleum curling up from the kitchen and bathroom floors. If you stood on the corner of Dane Street, where we lived, and Washington, which led to campus, you could see the factory chimneys off in the distance. On cold days, their smoke hung motionless in the white sky. A block up, there was the bakery where I bought the (half-priced) day-old scone and cup of black currant tea that together helped take my mind off the wind rifling through the wool of my army surplus jacket (I had warmer coats, but that was the coolest one). As I set out from home each morning for campus, the cadence of my footfalls seemed to invite a new thought to take shape, and the twenty minutes it took for me to reach campus gave that thought the time to really get somewhere. Sometimes, it felt more like dreamtime, and I found that I’d worked my way through an idea or a memory it should have taken far longer to navigate.
The same held true on my treks back home at night, though the dark added an element of mystery and a sense of largeness to things that I never quite noticed when the sun was out.