Dominique’s mum, Cedelka, was a cleaner; she became good friends with Chabella, and her stories about the everyday filthiness of the people she cleaned for racked Mami with guilt. Their conversations always ended with Cedelka assuring Chabella that Chabella worked just as hard as she did, taking care of her family and doing ‘all that language stuff’, and Chabella rhapsodising on Cedelka’s natural wisdom.
Cedelka wore dreadlocks and she was all soulful eyes and beautiful lips. When I played or ate dinner at Dominique’s, or when Cedelka came to collect Dominique from my house, she would reveal an instinct for freezing gracefully, a way of turning her face to the light when she stepped outside.
I always knew when Chabella had been talking to Dominique’s mum because she would start to mutter, ‘I don’t work hard enough, I’m not useful, all this paper and scribbling is making me soft.’ Chabella would take out her sponges and scrubbers and bleach and get on her hands and knees to clean the kitchen and bathroom from corner to corner. Papi didn’t like that. He especially hated it if I helped her, which I did to stop her from crying. ‘I don’t want to see my wife scrubbing away like that,’ he would say. ‘I write textbooks! Chabella, use a mop, or we’ll get a cleaner. And please, my daughter is not your assistant. Maja, go and have a bath and read a book or something.’
‘Get a cleaner! And you just equated this hypothetical cleaning woman with a mop!’ Chabella’s eyes filled with tears.
Papi kissed her, sweat and soap suds and all. ‘I was joking. Forget it.’
He didn’t know that mostly the cleaning was fun once we’d started; it was only the idea of it that made me sigh and drag my feet. We were never very thorough and it was more like play-acting, down on the floor with soapy rags and cleaner rags on our heads as we mimed to The Supremes and The Drifters and Melanie Safka’s ‘Brand New Key’.
Cedelka said to me, half-jokingly, ‘Please don’t try and teach my daughter Spanish! Black people ain’t meant to speak Spanish!’
‘Black people ain’t meant to speak English, neither, then. Or French Creole,’ I said, using exactly the same tone.
Cedelka swatted at my head. ‘You must get that big brain from your big-brain parents.’
I remembered what Cedelka said when I was in Year 9, when the most popular girls in my and Amy Eleni’s form were those with African parents; girls with perfectly straightened hair and mellow gospel voices that changed the sound of the sung school Mass; girls who had (or pretended to have) Igbo, Ewe, Yoruba, Chiga, Ganda, Swahili. They built a kind of slang that was composed of slightly anglicised words borrowed from their pool of languages. The code sounded impossibly cool if you had the right turn of the tongue for it, which I didn’t, although some of the white girls did. Lucy, who started up the slang, was Ugandan; she had a pretty heart-shaped face and a rabidly intent method of marking her netball opponent.
At school a lot of the other girls brought flags out on their countries’ independence days. With permission from the teachers, they tied them around their upper arms or waists and tied their hair up with ribbons in their flags’ colours. On Nigerian Independence Day, one girl did a special assembly on her country and passed around an overwhelming amount of fried Nigerian snacks. Amy Eleni and I were at the back. Amy Eleni put her hand up and said, ‘Can I just ask you what you think of this idea: if your parents taught you to be so proud of Nigeria, how come they’re over here?’
The girl stammered and fiddled with her tie-dyed head wrap. People started hissing disagreement with Amy Eleni. Amy Eleni and I hissed back. Isn’t living in your country the best way to show that you think it worthy of love? You choose to live in a country because there’s something there that makes it better than anywhere else. You set your daily life down regardless of the restrictive conditions. It’s the same sort of thing Clarence talks about in True Romance — he says real love is remaining loyal when it’s easier, even excusable, not to.
The talk about Nigerian independence continued. Amy Eleni sighed and wrote a long note in small letters on her hand. The note was so long that she had to take my hand to write on, too, and we could only read her note to me by placing our biro-splotched palms alongside each other. The note said:
You know what, if you want to talk about your original country, if you want to be serious about it, fine. But you don’t need to pretend that you love the place. People need to stop using love of some country that they don’t live in as an excuse for their inability to shut up about it.
We kept the note on our hands all day, smiling enigmatically and turning our hands palms-down when other girls wheedled, ‘Let me see.’
Dominique was at home sick the day Lucy came up to me at registration, peeped at me through heavy lashes and said, ‘You know, a lot of the others have been saying that out of you and Dominique, we like you better. You’re all right. You’re roots.’
I must have seemed stupid to her. I said, ‘Huh?’ I thought a black girl was a black girl. Why did it come down to a choice between me and Dominique, and not any of the other girls? Then I got it; we were both black without coming from the right place. We were the slave girls from Trinidad and Cuba; not supposed to speak Spanish, not supposed to speak English either. I wanted to curse Lucy Cuban-style, but I was afraid she’d understand; she was predicted an A star for GCSE Spanish.
Tonight I am singing a set at a café whose poetry-night theme is ‘Solitude’. They’ve asked me to start with my three least-favourite songs: ‘In my Solitude’, ‘Black Coffee’ and ‘Misty Blue’. When Michael from the band called to tell me about it last week, he anticipated my response, chanting ‘Oh, whine, whine, whine,’ along with me. ‘Don’t worry about it — next week it’s Ronnie Scott’s, with our own songs. .’
I hastily assemble my things so that they’re in the general vicinity of the full-length bedroom mirror — make-up bag, a selection of black stiletto heels, armfuls of dresses on hangers, hair tongs tangled in their own plug lead, sheer tights that are to the best of my knowledge unladdered. Aaron’s side of our dresser is analytically tidy: a small city of glass-bottled gift colognes and sable-backed hairbrushes, mostly unused, alongside a depleted bundle of the tough, dried-wood chewing sticks he swears by — my teeth ache just looking at them. The only things on his bedside table are a water glass and a photograph of him and his best friend, aged ten. In the picture Geoffrey is cola-dark, with astonishing, vine-like sideburns. Aaron is defiantly pale and chubby-cheeked; his hair is slicked into some attempt at a Jheri curl. They both have carelessly gappy smiles; they stand together in a heaving Accra sidestreet swept with umber dust, against a battered blue backdrop that says ‘PepsiCo’.
I have yet to meet Geoffrey, who still lives in Accra. But the fact that Aaron always refers to him as ‘Geoffrey’, never ‘Geoff’ or ‘G’, makes me think of him as diffident and kind and slightly stuffy. A boy who felt the pressure of being a cabinet minister’s son and tried his best to behave himself, growing up into the kind of man who rolls his English around in his mouth as plummily as he can.
I strip to my underwear and study myself in the mirror; it is a bronzed sorrel woman with a net of curly hair who looks back, and she does not look Jamaican or Ghanaian or Kenyan or Sudanese — the only firm thing that is sure is that she is black. Mami says only Cubans look like Cubans; put three Cuban girls together — white, black Latina, whatever — and you just see it. It is as if you could take away my colouring and I would be a white Cubana — a white Cubana not being, after all, particularly white.