Before they left, her mother asked her quietly, “Do you have a friend?” She said “friend” in English; the tame word parents used because they could not desecrate their tongues with “boyfriend,” even though it was exactly what they meant: somebody romantic, a marriage prospect.
“No,” Ifemelu said. “I have been very busy with work.”
“Work is good, Ifem. But you should also keep your eyes open. Remember that a woman is like a flower. Our time passes quickly.”
Before, she might have laughed dismissively, and told her mother that she did not at all feel like a flower, but now she was too tired, it felt too much of an effort. On the day they left for Nigeria, she collapsed onto her bed, crying uncontrollably, and thinking: What is wrong with me? She was relieved that her parents had gone, and she felt guilty for feeling relief. After work, she wandered around the center of Baltimore, aimlessly, interested in nothing. Was this what the novelists meant by ennui? On a slow Wednesday afternoon, she handed in her resignation. She had not planned to resign, but it suddenly seemed to be what she had to do, and so she typed the letter on her computer and took it to her manager’s office.
“You were making such progress. Is there anything we can do to make you change your mind?” her manager asked, very surprised.
“It’s personal, family reasons,” Ifemelu said vaguely. “I really appreciate all the opportunities you’ve given me.”
So What’s the Deal?
They tell us race is an invention, that there is more genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroids. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what’s the deal, doctors in the house? Is race an invention or not?
CHAPTER 33
The blog had unveiled itself and shed its milk teeth; by turns, it surprised her, pleased her, left her behind. Its readers increased, by the thousands from all over the world, so quickly that she resisted checking the stats, reluctant to know how many new people had clicked to read her that day, because it frightened her. And it exhilarated her. When she saw her posts reposted on another site, she flushed with accomplishment, and yet she had not imagined any of this, had never nursed any firm ambition. E-mails came from readers who wanted to support the blog. Support. That word made the blog even more apart from her, a separate thing that could thrive or not, sometimes without her and sometimes with her. So she put up a link to her PayPal account. Credits appeared, many small and one so large that when she saw it, she let out an unfamiliar sound, a blend of a gasp and a scream. It began to appear every month, anonymously, as regular as a paycheck, and each time it did, she felt abashed, as though she had picked up something valuable on the street and kept it for herself. She wondered if it was from Curt, just as she wondered if he followed the blog, and what he thought of being referred to as The Hot White Ex. It was a halfhearted wondering; she missed what could have been, but she no longer missed him.
She checked her blog e-mail too often, like a child eagerly tearing open a present she is not sure she wants, and read from people asking for a drink, telling her she was a racist, giving her ideas to blog about. A fellow blogger who made hair butters first suggested advertising and, for a token fee, Ifemelu put up the image of a bounteous-haired woman on the top right side of the blog page; clicking on it led to the hair butter website. Another reader offered more money for a blinking graphic that showed, first, a long-necked model in a tight dress, then the same model in a floppy hat. Clicking on the image led to an online boutique. Soon there were e-mails about advertising Pantene shampoos and Covergirl makeup. Then an e-mail from the director of multicultural life at a prep school in Connecticut, so formal she imagined it typed on hand-cut paper with a silver crest, asking if she would speak to the students on diversity. Another e-mail came from a corporation in Pennsylvania, less formally written, telling her a local professor had identified her as a provocative race blogger and asking if she would lead their annual diversity workshop. An editor from Baltimore Living e-mailed to say that they wanted to include her in a Ten People to Watch feature; she was photographed next to her laptop, her face doused in shadow, under the caption “The Blogger.” Her readers tripled. More invitations came. To receive phone calls, she wore her most serious pair of trousers, her most muted shade of lipstick, and she spoke sitting upright at her desk, legs crossed, her voice measured and sure. Yet a part of her always stiffened with apprehension, expecting the person on the other end to realize that she was play-acting this professional, this negotiator of terms, to see that she was, in fact, an unemployed person who wore a rumpled nightshirt all day, to call her “Fraud!” and hang up. But more invitations came. Hotel and travel were covered and the fees varied. Once she said, on an impulse, that she wanted twice what she had been offered the previous week, and was shocked when the man calling from Delaware said, “Yeah, we could do that.”
Most of the people who attended her first diversity talk, at a small company in Ohio, wore sneakers. They were all white. Her presentation was titled “How to Talk About Race with Colleagues of Other Races,” but who, she wondered, would they be talking to, since they were all white? Perhaps the janitor was black.
“I’m no expert so don’t quote me,” she started, and they laughed, warm encouraging laughter, and she told herself that this would go well, she need not have worried about talking to a roomful of strangers in the middle of Ohio. (She had read, with mild worry, that openly sundown towns still existed here.) “The first step to honest communication about race is to realize that you cannot equate all racisms,” she said, and then launched into her carefully prepared speech. When, at the end, she said, “Thank you,” pleased with the fluidness of her delivery, the faces around her were frozen. The leaden clapping deflated her. Afterwards, she was left only with the director of human resources, drinking oversweet iced tea in the conference room, and talking about soccer, which he knew Nigeria played well, as though keen to discuss anything but the talk she had just given. That evening she received an e-mail: YOUR TALK WAS BALONEY. YOU ARE A RACIST. YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL WE LET YOU INTO THIS COUNTRY.
That e-mail, written in all capital letters, was a revelation. The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence. They had not read her blog but they had heard that she was a “leading blogger” about race. And so, in the following weeks, as she gave more talks at companies and schools, she began to say what they wanted to hear, none of which she would ever write on her blog, because she knew that the people who read her blog were not the same people who attended her diversity workshops. During her talks, she said: “America has made great progress for which we should be very proud.” In her blog she wrote: Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it. Still more invitations came. She hired a student intern, a Haitian American, her hair worn in elegant twists, who was nimble on the Internet, looking up whatever information Ifemelu needed, and deleting inappropriate comments almost as soon as they were posted.
Ifemelu bought a small condominium. She had been startled, when she first saw the listing in the real estate section of the paper, to realize she could afford the down payment in cash. Signing her name above the word “homeowner” had left her with a frightening sense of being grown-up, and also with a small astonishment, that this was possible because of her blog. She converted one of the two bedrooms into a study and wrote there, standing often by the window to look down at her new Roland Park neighborhood, the restored row homes shielded by old trees. It surprised her, which blog posts got attention and which were hardly clicked on. Her post about trying to date online, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” continued to draw comments, like something sticky, after many months.
So, still a bit sad about the breakup with The Hot White Ex, not into the bar scene, and so I signed up for online dating. And I looked at lots of profiles. So here’s the thing. In that category where you choose the ethnicity you are interested in? White men tick white women, and the braver ones tick Asian and Hispanic. Hispanic men tick white and Hispanic. Black men are the only men likely to tick “all,” but some don’t even tick Black. They tick White, Asian, Hispanic. I wasn’t feeling the love. But what’s love got to do with all that ticking, anyway? You could walk into a grocery store and bump into someone and fall in love and that someone would not be the race you tick online. So after browsing, I cancelled my membership, thankfully still on trial, got a refund, and will be walking around blindly in the grocery store instead.
Comments came from people with similar stories and people saying she was wrong, from men asking her to put up a photo of herself, from black women sharing success stories of online dating, from people angry and from people thrilled. Some comments amused her, because they were wildly unconnected to the subject of the post. Oh fuck off, one wrote. Black people get everything easy. You can’t get anything in this country unless you’re black. Black women are even allowed to weigh more. Her recurring post “Mish Mash Friday,” a jumble of thoughts, drew the most clicks and comments each week. Sometimes she wrote some posts expecting ugly responses, her stomach tight with dread and excitement, but they would draw only tepid comments. Now that she was asked to speak at roundtables and panels, on public radio and community radio, always identified simply as The Blogger, she felt subsumed by her blog. She had become her blog. There were times, lying awake at night, when her growing discomforts crawled out from the crevices, and the blog’s many readers became, in her mind, a judgmental angry mob waiting for her, biding their time until they could attack her, unmask her.