Whereas you?
Whereas I just carry around baggage, I guess. I mean, you wouldn’t know it, would you? I am the epitome of a black upwardly mobile female blah, blah, blah. But as it turns out I can’t hold a conversation with a white person for more than five minutes on the subject of race. Maybe those two things go together.
Finally the light turns green, and she sprints across, lock-legged, stalking fury and frustration. I follow two steps behind, and not until halfway down to Pratt does she give me a sideways look. Sorry, she says. I’m upset. I’m uncomfortable. It’s no excuse for acting like a baby.
Something has passed between us, I’m just beginning to realize, in that half-block, that fifty yards of uneven and rutted city pavement. Her face, uncomposed, is trying to regain control of itself. In a different age, in a Victorian novel, I would say, my dear lady, and touch her elbow, or offer her a handkerchief. I have the urge to be gallant and rise above it all. But we live in an age allergic to suppositions. The pause we’re in now is the one where she’s expected to say, These cases are really getting to me, I need a vacation, or, I had some bad news before we left the office, or, My allergies are acting up and my sinuses are killing me. She’s not going to offer an explanation; I know that much. We’ve passed beyond social lies. Where we’ve arrived, on the other hand, is an open question.
It seems to me, for a moment, that Martin’s decision — that Martin’s real existence, the real fake black man that he is — has, subtly, indefinably, already seeped into the world around us. That we are living in an ersatz twenty-first century.
You know I spent every weekend down here? I say. Fell’s Point was my stomping grounds. The best record store in Baltimore was two blocks that way. Reptilian Records. I spent every spare dollar I had in that place. Between that and the Salvation Army and the vintage store down on Aliceanna and Charm City Coffee down on Thames — that was the circuit. And Jimmy’s. That was the only place we could afford to eat.
Mom and Dad didn’t give you much of an allowance?
I wasn’t really into capitalism. I used to wear a button that said Property is theft. Which is easy to say, of course, when your basic needs are all paid for. But at least I was consistent. I don’t think I owned a single new piece of clothing until I went to college.
Saved your parents a lot of money.
In theory, but all of it was poured back into music in the end. That was the property I cared about. Drums, cases, cymbals, sticks, gas for when we went on tour. It was a pretty expensive hobby.
What kind of a band were you in?
I’d have to know your point of reference. Ever heard Fugazi?
Fu-what?
Helmet? Jesus Lizard? Jawbox?
I had a roommate at Spelman who was into the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction.
Okay. Well, we were like Jane’s Addiction without the funk, and the falsetto voices, and all that L.A. druggie attitude.
But all Jane’s Addiction was was funk, and falsetto—
I think I’d have to play it for you. We had a lot of dissonance, a lot of noise, but still songs, in the end. We were political and artsy. And for a while we actually had a following. Put out three EPs and one LP. Toured all around the East Coast.
This was all in high school? Any chance of a reunion?
None, I say, keeping my breathing steady, because our singer — his name was Alan — he died of a drug overdose. In 1994.
An overdose?
The nonaccidental kind. He’d already been hospitalized once for depression. A classic late-adolescence bipolar shift.
That must have been devastating. And it was here? No wonder you never wanted to come back.
It was all too convenient, really. Because my parents moved away. With that, and Alan’s death, I fell into this groove of thinking I didn’t belong anywhere. Right around that time I was getting fluent in Chinese, and all my energy was wrapped up in that, and hanging out with kids from Amherst who’d gone to prep school in Switzerland — it was just easy to think I was some kind of cosmopolite, some Salman Rushdie character, on the run, a homeland that doesn’t want me back. I mean, not literally, but—
No, I understand what you mean. Kind of. I read Imaginary Homelands, too, and it kind of sounded awesome. Like the fatwa was the perfect excuse. Everybody wants a fatwa from their parents at a certain age.
Well, my parents had nothing to do with it.
That can’t quite be true.
No, really. Their emotional lives are just barely above room temperature. Some parents of only children are like that. You must know what I’m talking about. I mean, they can get into the act when they have to. When the accident happened, they were there, after a fashion. Because, literally, I had nowhere else to turn. Our friends were wonderful friends, but it takes more than a good friend to help out in that kind of catastrophe. And in the larger sense, I mean, all those years we were in Baltimore, my parents were just so much on the periphery of my experience. And they knew it. They couldn’t control what was happening to me. Baltimore was way too much for them to handle. New Paltz is exactly their speed. My mom practically runs the library — she volunteers nearly every day. The highlight of their week is singing in the Unitarian Church choir. The truth is, they find parenthood exhausting, and I’m just me, not some kind of train wreck. They made it extremely easy for me to feel like an orphan — a cultural orphan.
I hear you.
You do?
Does that surprise you? Do you even know where I’m from?
Here, I thought. Was I wrong?
I was born here, she says. In my grandparents’ house, while they were still alive. But we left when I was two. Then Champaign-Urbana, where my dad went to grad school. He a civil bureaucrat; he did fiscal planning, bond issues, that kind of thing. He got to like small towns. College towns. Places where the voters weren’t too dumb to pay for a first-class sewer system or a new gym floor before the old one wore out. First Gambier, Ohio. That was middle school. Then Bennington. You’re looking at the valedictorian of North Bennington High School, class of 1994.
Bennington. No kidding.
My dad loves sweater vests, Vivaldi, and Wall Street Week. Does that surprise you? He likes to talk about Mom’s ancestors who fought in the Revolution. The American Revolution. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Before I was born, in the Sixties, he lived in New York and drove a cab and played trombone. He was a Manhattan School of Music dropout, a free-jazz cat. Albert Ayler, Noah Howard, Malachi Favors, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders — he was up there with all those guys. Then, so the story goes, he got into an argument outside a club with some black nationalists, not the Panthers but some splinter group, undisciplined, who said the trombone was a bourgeois instrument only fit for Dixie parades. It wound up with one of them grabbing his bone and beating him over the head with it. He woke up in the hospital. Two weeks later he’d moved back in with his parents and enrolled at Morgan State in accounting.
A one-eighty-degree turn.
He’s not the demonstrative type, she says, but when I told him I was going to Spelman he actually broke down and cried. Why, he said, why, why, when you could go anywhere? Why now?
And what did you say?
Because I wanted a vacation, she says. I wanted to see how it felt not to be one of two or three. I mean, I shouldn’t complain. My mother didn’t miss a beat. She did my hair right, every day, made sure we read Hughes and Dunbar and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. She found the nearest church with a decent gospel service and got us there at least once a month. And in the summer we were in Oak Bluffs from the minute school got out. It was her parents’ house, and their money that paid for college, too, so Dad actually didn’t have much say in the matter. Of course, afterward I went to Cornell for med school. But he still doesn’t understand Spelman, and doesn’t understand why I want Sherry and Tamika to go there. To him blackness just isn’t a useful category. He’d rather talk about Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Dignity, that’s what he cares about. I tell him, Marcus Aurelius was George Washington’s favorite writer, and I’ll bet he liked to read him sitting at his desk in Mount Vernon and looking out over the slaves’ backs bent over in the fields.