Yes, Chef (5 page)

Hanging with Torsten in his smokehouse was more than a way to spend the afternoon. It was an initiation of sorts, into manhood. Chest puffed up, I stoked the fire, yanked fish off rods, and piled up stones. Torsten talked the whole time, loud and clear, always telling me what
he was doing, asking me if I understood the process, what came next, why we did what we did.

“Low heat, close the door, leave it overnight.”

“I’ve done this before, Uncle Torsten.”

“Come back every other hour,” he ordered. “Check the wood.”

He handed me a pan of cured fish. “Has your father caught any mackerel lately?”

“We brought in twenty-five this morning,” I told him.

Torsten raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said, smiling. “Your father’s been down in Göteborg a long time. No one can hold such a modest number against him.”

My great-aunt Nini, Torsten’s wife, screamed from the back door of the house, “Are we ever going to get any fish? Time for lunch already!”

“Finally, she appears,” Torsten said, as he handed me two smoked mackerel.

In the kitchen, Nini had laid out four open-faced sandwiches: sliced boiled eggs, roe paste, mayonnaise, and a sprinkling of chives on a piece of brown bread. With a knife, she quickly filleted the mackerel, dressed it with black pepper and garlic, and topped each piece of bread with the warm, flavorful fish.

I carried Torsten’s plate over to the table, placing it in front of him. He took a bite, and I could see in his face the pleasure he took in the rich simplicity of the meal: the flaky chunks of fish, the velvety texture of the egg, the saltiness of the roe. Then he closed his eyes. “That’s a good life,” he said.

Torsten and Nini had a louder, more brash style than my parents, and I loved to watch the way they mirrored each other. Their shouts and seemingly exasperated murmurs were the words of two old people who had stood, united, against the harshness of the cold blue sea for sixty years and made a life together. I looked at the two of them and the simple but hugely satisfying meals they shared, and I thought, Torsten is right. That
is
a good life.

A
T 5:00 ON OUR LAST NIGHT IN
S
MÖGEN
, my father and I walked down the hill to visit Ludvig. He had been widowed young and lived by himself on the top floor of a large house that had tenants on the first floor and nothing going on, as far as I could tell, on the floor in between. Stellan had dropped off some mackerel earlier in the day and Ludvig was halfway through cleaning it when we walked in. He’d gutted the fish and cut off their heads; then my father took over, sharpening a thin, curved knife on a block of stone and deftly slicing the flesh off the bone.

“Marcus, if you don’t cook, we don’t eat,” my father joked.

It was a joke, of course, because my father knew I needed no prompting to cook, which is probably why he let me take over the meal. This was my first time cooking on my own, as opposed to helping my grandmother or mother. Just as I had with the boats, I was eager to show I was a big man, that I didn’t need anyone’s help. I quickly washed some potatoes, then boiled them in a pot of salted water with dill, just like
Mormor
did. My father had brought our frying pan from home and I set it on the stove, put the flame on high, then added a large knob of butter, which slowly melted at the center. While I waited for the pan to heat up, and for the butter to bubble and turn golden, I dipped each fillet in a mix of flour, breadcrumbs, salt, and pepper. I waited until the butter was good and hot, and I tested it the way I’d seen Helga do many times, by scraping into the pan a tiny bit of flour that had caked on my finger. When the flour sizzled and popped, I laid in the strips of fish, side-by-side. I knew then, maybe for the first time, that I wasn’t just my grandmother’s little helper. I had absorbed some of her gift for the movements and the timing, but the sense of how to make the meal taste
just
right—more salt, less pepper—came naturally to me, even without
Mormor
there to supervise me.

My father and Uncle Ludvig drank beers and spoke in their dialect while I cooked and they didn’t seem to notice that I had put the dill in with the fish too soon, so it was a crispy black by the time I retrieved it from the pan. The meal was more than the thrown-together ingredients that we’d eaten the entire week; it was a reward
for a week of hard work: quick, delicious food for hungry, hardworking men.

We ate the potatoes and the fish and I was proud to have not only helped my father do his work but to have prepared the workingman’s simple meal. The next day, as I helped my father give the boats a light sanding and a final coat of paint, I thought of what Uncle Torsten had said about our mackerel lunch and how much he might have enjoyed the supper I had prepared. Although I was still a kid and years away from any thought of becoming a chef, I was learning the beauty of food within a context: how important it is to let the dishes be reflective of your surroundings. Hot smoked-mackerel sandwiches on dark brown bread in the smokehouse with Torsten. Panfried fish and potatoes with my father at the end of a long, hard day. If the ingredients are fresh and prepared with love, they are bound to be satisfying.

“Marcus,” my father called out after me when the last boat was done.
“Val gjort, lille yrkesfiskare.”
Well done, little fisherman.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
I
’D STARTED GRADE SCHOOL THAT THE QUESTION OF
race became real for me and my sister Linda, in large part because Anna had integrated the Samuelsson household years before we’d arrived. For Anna, biracial and fair-skinned with an Afro that could have rivaled Angela Davis’s, the arrival of two dark-skinned siblings was a revelation. At nine years of age, she had never known children who were browner than she was. In those first few days, she would stroke my cheek and run her hands through my woolly hair, curiosity overriding her Swedish reserve. We may have been a novelty to my oldest sister, but because of Anna, Linda and I were never the “black kids” in the family. We were two
more
black kids in the family. All the
skin touching and hair pulling and curious questions came to Anna first and by the time we arrived, it went without saying that this was a mixed-race family. As a black girl in Sweden, Anna always stood out. But she handled it all in her own elegant way, in part because my mother and her parents never made race an issue. We were Samuelssons now and that was all they felt they, or anybody else, needed to know.

Once we got to school, there were comments, at first more curious than cruel. And as I got older, as a boy, there were more than my fair share of taunts and playground fights. Still, it’s important that you know that growing up black in Sweden is different than growing up black in America. I have no big race wounds. And I owe that to Anne Marie Samuelsson.

We had arrived in the early 1970s, in what was then a small, working-class Scandinavian city, but my mother wanted to do more than make us Samuelssons: She wanted to embrace black culture however she could. Because Anna’s birth father had been Jamaican, my mother spent what little pocket money she had on Bob Marley records. I can still picture her singing along to Bob as she stirred her spaghetti and peas. When Linda and I showed up, Anne Marie added Miriam Makeba to the mix. Makeba was not exactly Ethiopian—not Ethiopian at all—but African and beautiful all the same. Even now, I can’t hear a song like “Three Little Birds” without thinking of my mother blasting her music, like she blasted her love, out loud.

I might have looked on my childhood differently if I hadn’t met Mats Carestam. He’s my oldest friend. We met when I was five years old and I realized there was only one kid in the neighborhood who was as good as me at soccer. That was Mats, and I knew, even then, that we were going to either hate each other or become the best of friends.

We became the best of friends.

From the beginning, my battles were his battles. Which was great because Mats was a guy who took no shit. It’s not so much that he had a quick temper. It’s more that he was always this big kid who was never afraid to get down in it. No matter how nicely his mother had
dressed him before he left the house, within minutes the knees of his pants would be muddy and grass-stained, and he’d be a mess. His shins were always a collage of bruises. Whenever I think of Mats, even today, I picture him wiping the back of his hand across his face and all over his clothes like a kid in a laundry detergent commercial.

I ate at Mats’s house as often as I ate at my own, and I lived for his mother’s creamy macaroni and cheese. A dish like that was way too modern for my mother. Mats’s mother served store-bought meatballs, which my mother would
never
do. My mother didn’t love to cook, but certain things she would never cut corners on. There was also a generational gap between our families. Mats’s parents were much younger, more on the go, much more contemporary.

Everything Mats ate, he covered in ketchup. Which was fine with his parents, but always left me slightly bewildered. How could you taste the cheese or the meat or the potatoes when they were drowning in cold red tomato sauce? And Mats would eat fast. He’d make himself a giant plate of mac and cheese, meatballs, pickles, lingonberries, cover the whole thing with ketchup, and wash it down with a pint of milk in about two minutes. Mats didn’t care what you put in front of him as long as there was plenty of it. He was a big kid and he ate not out of greed but because his body was this
machine
that demanded it.

It helped that my best friend was built like a tank when we started junior high school. I’d long healed from the tuberculosis and the distended belly of poverty was gone, but I was still built like an Ethiopian runner—lean and wiry. In my mind, I was as cool and powerful as any of the American black men we saw on TV, but in the land of Vikings, I stood out as a scrawny little kid.

O
NE DAY AFTER SCHOOL
, Mats and I were headed to his house for an afternoon of listening to music, reading soccer magazines, and chowing down on the kind of packaged pastries and soda my mother never had in our house. We’d made it halfway across the school playground when a basketball hit me in the back so hard that I stumbled forward.

“Hey, Marcus, why don’t you teach us how to play
negerboll
,” a kid named Boje called out.

It was always a little hard to tell if Boje was honestly mean-spirited or if he’d been drafted to play the part because he was a big, muscular kid, even in the sixth grade, like a nightclub bouncer. In either case, he was the closest we had to a bully at our school and I’d been lucky enough to escape his attention. Until now.

Negerboll
. The word hung in the air as the boys around us, all kids in our class, froze. There couldn’t have been more than twenty boys in the group, but I felt like there were a hundred eyes on me. Boje had thrown the ball hard, but the word hit me harder. Mats picked the ball up and stood protectively in front of me, but the words kept bouncing up and down against the pavement:

Neger

Boll
.

Neger

Boll
.

Neger

Boll
.

Although it sounded like
nigger
and Boje spewed it with that level of venom,
neger
was the Swedish word for
Negro
. There was even a Swedish cookie called
negerboll
or, in English,
Negro ball
: It was made from cocoa powder, sugar, and oats. But Boje was not calling me a cookie. And he had thrown a basketball at me, which I took as its own kind of loaded symbol. It was the early 1980s, the dawn of the Michael Jordan era, and most Swedes associated that orange ball with dark-skinned men.

Boje wasn’t done with me yet. “What, does the
neger
not know how to play
negerboll
?”

Mats looked like he might shove the basketball down the tall, blond boy’s throat.

“Leave him alone,” Mats growled.

Later, back at Mats’s house, all my clever, cutting retorts would come at me in a kind of beautiful wave, like the way genius mathematicians
scrawl numbers and letters on chalkboards in movies. But in the moment, the very first time in my life someone called me out as
neger
, I had said nothing. I had spent years growing in the quiet confidence of being Anne Marie and Lennart’s son. I knew that they did not look like me and that I had come from a faraway place called Africa, but it was no more mysterious for me than it was for kids who still believed they had arrived on their parents’ doorstep by stork. When Boje called me a
neger
, when he threw an American basketball at me and tried to hurt me, physically and emotionally, I had to ask myself for the very first time—
was
I different? How was I different? And in the same way that five-year-old Linda had kept vigilant for months on end, the question occurred to me for the very first time—where was home? Was this place it?

In his
Letters to a Young Poet
, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that the young poet should “live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” I was an eleven-year-old kid in Göteborg and not particularly bookish. I’d never read Rilke at that point, but somehow I came to the same conclusion that I would have to live the questions.

That night, when I described the incident to my family at the dinner table, my father seemed concerned, but my mother jumped right in with what she thought was a viable solution:
“Kalla honom vit kaka,”
she said. Call him a white cookie.

I moaned and tried to explain that it would not have the same effect. But my mother, like the mother of bullied children everywhere, could not understand that in middle school there was no such thing as a fair fight.

For the next three years, Boje hardly let up. Anything spherical could be lobbed at me and turned into a taunt. A little Sambo had long been used to advertise
negerboll
cookies in Sweden and I felt a sense of dread anytime I saw a boy open a package of them at lunch because I knew that the wrapper would soon be coming my way. Mats never hesitated to stand up for me. He wasn’t just defending me as a friend, he was standing up for what was right.