It didn’t help: by the end of the week, he was forced to give up playing the piano in Miss Isabel’s dance class. I don’t know what happened to him after that, whether he carried on living in the neighborhood, or moved away, or died, or was simply broken by the rumors. I thought of my mother’s intuition—“Something serious happened to that girl!”—and I felt now that she was right as usual, and that if we had only asked Tracey the proper questions at the right moment and in a more delicate way we might have got the truth. Instead our timing was bad, we backed her and her mother into a corner, to which they both reacted predictably, with wildfire, tearing through whatever was in its path — in this case poor old Mr. Booth. And so we got something like the truth, quite like it, but not exactly.
PART SIX: Day and Night
That autumn, after clearing, I got into my second-choice university, to study media, half a mile from the flat gray English Channel, a scene I remembered from childhood holidays. The sea was fringed by a pebble beach of many sad brown stones, every now and then a large, pale blue one, pieces of white shell, knuckles of coral, bright shards easy to mistake for something precious that turned out to be only glass or broken crockery. My parochial city attitude I took with me, along with a pot plant and several pairs of trainers, sure that every soul on the street would be astounded to see the likes of me. But the likes of me were not so uncommon. From London and Manchester, from Liverpool and Bristol, in our big jeans and bomber jackets, with our little twists or shaved heads or tight-pulled buns slick with Dax, with our proud collection of caps. Those first weeks we gravitated toward each other, walking in a defensive gang together along the seafront, readied for insults, but the locals were never as interested in us as we were in ourselves. The salty air cracked our lips, there was never anywhere to get your hair done, but “You up at the college?” was a genuine polite inquiry, not an attack on our right to be there. And there were other, unexpected advantages. Here I had a “maintenance grant,” covering food and rent, and weekends were cheap — there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. We spent our spare time together, in each other’s rooms, asking after each other’s pasts, with a delicacy that felt right to people whose family trees could be traced back only a branch or two before being sunk in obscurity. There was one exception, a boy, a Ghanaian: he came from a long line of doctors and lawyers and was daily agonized not to find himself at Oxford. But for the rest of us, who were only ever one remove, or occasionally two, distant from father machinists and mother cleaners, from grandmother orderlies and grandfather bus drivers, we still felt we had done the miraculous thing, that we were the “first in our line to go,” and this in itself was enough. If the institution was almost as fresh as we were, that, too, came to feel like an advantage. There was no grand academic past here, we didn’t have to doff our caps to anyone. Our subjects were relatively new — Media Studies, Gender Studies — and so were our rooms, and the young faculty. It was our place to invent. I thought of Tracey escaping early into that community of dancers, of how jealous I’d been, but now on the contrary I felt a little sorry for her, her world seemed childish to me, just a way of playing with the body, whereas I could walk down the hall and attend a lecture called something like “Thinking the Black Body: A Dialectic,” or dance happily in my new friends’ rooms, late into the night, and not to the old show tunes but to the new music, to Gang Starr or Nas. When I danced now I didn’t have to obey any ancient rules of position or style: I moved as I pleased, as the beats themselves compelled me to move. Poor Tracey: the early-morning starts, anxiety on the scales, her aching insteps, the offering up of her young body to the judgment of other people! I was very free compared to her. Here we stayed up late, ate as we pleased, smoked weed. We listened to the golden age of hip-hop, unaware at the time that we were living through a golden age. I got schooled on lyrics by those who knew more than me and took these informal lessons as seriously as anything I heard in the lecture halls. It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos. In our little circle to be “conscious” was the thing, and after years of forcing my hair straight with the hot-comb I now let it frizz and curl, and took to wearing a small map of Africa around my neck, the larger countries made out in a patchwork leather of black and red, green and gold. I wrote long, emotional essays on the phenomenon of the “Uncle Tom.”
When my mother came down to stay for three nights, near the end of that first term, I thought she’d be very impressed by all this. But I’d forgotten that I was not quite like the others, not really the “first in our line to go.” In this steeplechase my mother was one leap ahead of me and I’d forgotten that what was enough for others was never enough for her. Walking along the beach together on that final morning of her stay, she started a sentence which I could see myself somehow escaped her, going far beyond whatever she had intended, but still she said it, she compared her just-completed degree to the one I was starting, called my college a “trumped-up hotel,” not a university at all, nothing but a student-loan trap for kids who didn’t know any better, whose parents were uneducated themselves, and I became infuriated, we argued horribly. I told her not to bother visiting again, and she didn’t.
I expected to feel desolate — as if I had cut through the only cord that connected me to the world — but this feeling didn’t arrive. I had, for the first time in my life, a lover, and was so completely occupied with him that I found I could bear the loss of anything and everything else. He was a conscious young man called Rakim — he had renamed himself after the rapper — and his face, long like mine, was of a deeper honey-brown shade, with two very fierce, very dark eyes dropped into it, a prominent nose, and a gently feminine, unexpected overbite, like Huey P. Newton himself. He wore skinny dreadlocks to his shoulders, Converse All Stars in all weather, little round Lennon glasses. I thought he was the most beautiful man in the world. He thought so, too. He considered himself a “Five Percenter,” that is, a God in himself — as all the male sons of Africa were Gods — and when he first explained this concept to me my initial thought was how nice it must be to think of yourself as a living God, how relaxing! But no, as it turned out, it was a heavy duty: it was not easy to be burdened with truth while so many people lived in ignorance, eighty-five percent of people, to be exact. But worse than the ignorant were the malicious, the ten percent who knew all that Rakim claimed to know but who worked to actively disguise and subvert the truth, the better to keep the eighty-five in ignorance and wield advantage over them. (In this group of perverse deceivers Rakim included all the churches, the Nation of Islam itself, the media, the “establishment.”) He had a cool vintage Panthers poster on his wall, in which the big cat looked about to leap out at you, and he spoke often of the violent life of the big American cities, of the sufferings of our people in New York and Chicago, in Baltimore and LA, places I had never visited and could barely imagine. Sometimes I had the impression that this ghetto life — though it was three thousand miles away — was more real to him than the quiet, pleasant seascape in which we actually lived.