“I already have an identity, I didn’t think I needed to get one in a new color.” Tal hands me her food, she’s only eaten half of it. I put it in the refrigerator, a machine so old it has a latch handle.
“Look, you’re black. I know it comes as a bit of a shock, but trust me, it’s pretty damn amazing. You’ve inherited a rich cultural tradition — think of it that way. But you’re not white anymore. You never were. Sorry.”
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ for that.” Tal’s already down the hall. “It’s not like I was great at being white either.”
Tal, my daughter, who I keep telling myself is my daughter, takes my tent. I was going to offer it anyway. I gather what appears to be a clean towel and washcloth from one of my father’s empty storage bins, and leave them on the floor outside the tent because the door is zippered. I can hear her moving around in there and I can see the light of her cell phone glowing. And I know she hears me, because the warped wooden floors in this place complain with every footfall.
I check all the doors one more time, make sure they’re not just locked, but properly locked, look out each distorted window for a sign of the ghouls showing back up. But there’s nothing. When I come creaking back to the tent, I expect Tal to say something, to ask a question, to make another comment. Nothing comes. Just the glow. The sounds of clicking digital machinations. I lie down on the wooden floor, another towel for my pillow.
“This is our first night together!” I say after ten minutes, with all the cheer I can muster. Tal doesn’t respond. After a minute, after I’ve given up and closed my eyes, she finally says something back.
“It’s like you think there’s a race war, and you want me to choose sides.”
“Not a war. Maybe…a cold war. And yes, there are sides,” I tell her, because I’m tired. Because I think, just say the blunt thing now, and walk it back from there. “There’s Team White, and there’s Team Black, okay? You probably didn’t even know you were on Team White before, most of Team White’s members never do. They just think they’re ‘normal.’ But if you’re black, and you go with Team White, that makes you a sellout. A traitor. And plus, you’ll never be accepted as a full member if they know the truth about you. It’s all good though. Because there’s Team Black where, okay, you may have to work sometimes to be accepted if you look like us, but you’re membership is clearly stated. In the bylaws.”
“Oh great. Well as long as I have a choice.” I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic because I can’t see her and don’t really know her that well anyway.
5
“WHAT DOES UMOJA even mean? Wasn’t that, like, an R&B group or something?” When Tal first says this, I kick her under the table. This is the universal sign to “shut up,” but she looks over at me surprised and hurt like I just kicked her and I realize: she’s not kidding. She really thinks the school might have been named after an R&B group.
“ ‘Umoja’ is Swahili, a Bantu language from East Africa. It means ‘For there to be an I, there must be a We.’ Or, unity. You can learn about many of the African principles if you’re in attendance here,” Principal Kamau says, and there is no annoyance in his manner. We are lucky to have this meeting so quickly. Tosha called in a favor, and here we are, and if Tal screws this up I have no other options.
“They have a vegan salad bar in their lunchroom,” I tell her, or remind her, because I mentioned it at least twice before we rode over. I want to add, That means your food will come pre-divided, but don’t think she’ll see the humor.
“I thought all the American blacks came from slaves on the west side,” Tal says to him. But then she’s looking at me. Because I’m the one now squeezing her hand under the table to tell her to shut the hell up. I bulge my eyes at her, smile wider.
“You were saying there’s a tour my daughter could go on while we discuss specifics?” I ask the principal, and mercifully he calls in a student to take Tal out of the room before she can open her mouth again. The kid’s Tal’s age, tall, almost as light as she is, but the first thing I notice is the muscular arms poking out of his sleeveless dashiki. He smiles at me and nods with both hands clasped in front of him, as if I’m his sparring partner in a dojo. His locks are long and perfectly pulled to the back of his head, his neckline open, cowrie shells lining his leather choker chain. Clearly bright, confident, he looks to me like a young black warrior, a shining example of what the Umoja Charter School can accomplish. Tal must see something positive about him as well because almost immediately she jumps up with, “Okay, Dad, I’m out of here. Bye!” I catch myself reaching for her, scared of what will come from her mouth unbridled.
“I’m sure she will be fine. At Umoja, we teach our young men to be gentlemen, the future leaders of tomorrow.”
“Sir, I’m sorry. I don’t know what Tosha told you about Tal. This is all, y’know, new to her. To me. It’s an odd circumstance. And Tal’s only really known about her identity, her blackness, for a few—”
“Not uncommon at all, brother. Not. At. All. We get a lot of parents through here, they got these kids today, they’re disconnected. Disconnected from the soul. All they know about being black is what they see in music videos. That’s part of why we’re here. To teach. To repair.”
I like what I am hearing. There is a weight, so quickly laid upon me, that I feel magically lifting now. I imagine a life as he keeps talking. I see Tal and I rising together every morning, her donning her dashiki, me cooking her organic free-range eggs as she prepares for school. I see me giving her a ride to the door of this building, a converted Victorian mansion itself, and then returning to my father’s to draw more pages to pay the bills before the great fire and the resulting windfall. At the end of the year, she will graduate and I will burn the house to the ground, using the insurance money for her college tuition. And then maybe I will follow her to whatever city she escapes to, far away from the charred ruins. Maybe to London. Forget Team Black, Team White, just join Team Not From Here again. She’ll bring her friends over to our flat and I’ll be the cheery but slightly aloof cool dad.
“We teach them African history — the real history, not the lies in most history books. In language we offer both Swahili and Igbo.” His head is mahogany, round, shiny. While other people comb their hair, he must spend that same time rubbing his scalp with Muslim oils. “African philosophy, African mathematics, African food. The point is, we remove the toxins of Western decadence and replace it with purity. We make them whole.”
This sounds basically fine. Why not? I’ve had a lot of European toxins in my life — weed vacations to Amsterdam, drunken club-hopping in Ibiza — and it hasn’t worked out that well, has it? I would like to be whole, too. And I am currently trying to remove the European toxin of Becks, so I can sympathize. There is paperwork to do. There are transcripts to be sent over, but from the way Kamau is talking, it sounds like we have a completed agreement. I shake his hand, follow it through all its brotherman finger gyrations, and even though a part of me thinks he just gripped me like that to see if I was truly black, I don’t care. A victory has been won. An education will be received. Blackness will be restored.
When I finally get out, Tal’s not in the waiting room. I hear a rhythm beating, and I go to a window that overlooks the courtyard below. There’s a drum circle, with adults at the center banging away hard enough to make the glass shake under my hands. The students have formed a ring around them and now take turns dancing the circumference one at a time before taking their place again.
I see my daughter instantly amid the class, her skin a blanched beacon, the lightest among them. There is an elegance in the movements of each kid’s cakewalk, evidence that they have done this before, that this is a school ritual. I watch them dance in their uniform of dashikis and khaki pants, and then quickly excuse myself and head for the stairs to pull her out of there. I do this before Tal can mess this up. Before she can dance like a white girl and make a fool of herself on her first day of school.