“I don’t want to explain, I want to observe,” she said.
“Remember people are not reading you as entertainment, they’re reading you as cultural commentary. That’s a real responsibility. There are kids writing college essays about your blog,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to be academic or boring. Keep your style but add more depth.”
“It has enough depth,” she said, irritated, but with the niggling thought that he was right.
“You’re being lazy, Ifem.”
He used that word, “lazy,” often, for his students who did not hand in work on time, black celebrities who were not politically active, ideas that did not match his own. Sometimes she felt like his apprentice; when they wandered through museums, he would linger at abstract paintings, which bored her, and she would drift to the bold sculptures or the naturalistic paintings, and sense in his tight smile his disappointment that she had not yet learned enough from him. When he played selections from his complete John Coltrane, he would watch her as she listened, waiting for a rapture he was sure would glaze over her, and then at the end, when she remained untransported, he would quickly avert his eyes. She blogged about two novels she loved, by Ann Petry and Gayl Jones, and Blaine said, “They don’t push the boundaries.” He spoke gently, as though he did not want to upset her, but it still had to be said. His positions were firm, so thought-through and fully realized in his own mind that he sometimes seemed surprised that she, too, had not arrived at them herself. She felt a step removed from the things he believed, and the things he knew, and she was eager to play catch-up, fascinated by his sense of rightness. Once, as they walked down Elm Street, on their way to get a sandwich, they saw the plump black woman who was a fixture on campus: always standing near the coffee shop, a woolen hat squashed on her head, offering single plastic red roses to passersby and asking “You got any change?” Two students were talking to her, and then one of them gave her a cappuccino in a tall paper cup. The woman looked thrilled; she threw her head back and drank from the cup.
“That’s so disgusting,” Blaine said, as they walked past.
“I know,” Ifemelu said, although she did not quite understand why he felt so strongly about the homeless woman and her cappuccino gift. Weeks before, an older white woman standing in line behind them at the grocery store had said, “Your hair is so beautiful, can I touch it?” and Ifemelu said yes. The woman sank her fingers into her Afro. She sensed Blaine tense, saw the pulsing at his temples. “How could you let her do that?” he asked afterwards. “Why not? How else will she know what hair like mine feels like? She probably doesn’t know any black people.”
“And so you have to be her guinea pig?” Blaine asked. He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with “sort of,” and “the ways in which”; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief.
SHE TOLD her parents about Blaine, that she was leaving Baltimore and moving to New Haven to live with him. She could have lied, invented a new job, or simply said she wanted to move. “His name is Blaine,” she said. “He’s an American.”
She heard the symbolism in her own words, traveling thousands of miles to Nigeria, and she knew what her parents would understand. She and Blaine had not talked about marriage, but the ground beneath her feet felt firm. She wanted her parents to know of him, and of how good he was. She used that word in describing him: “good.”
“An American Negro?” her father asked, sounding baffled.
Ifemelu burst out laughing. “Daddy, nobody says Negro anymore.”
“But why a Negro? Is there a substantive scarcity of Nigerians there?”
She ignored him, still laughing, and asked him to give her mother the phone. Ignoring him, even telling him that she was moving in with a man to whom she was not married, was something she could do only because she lived in America. Rules had shifted, fallen into the cracks of distance and foreignness.
Her mother asked, “Is he a Christian?”
“No. He is a devil-worshipper.”
“Blood of Jesus!” her mother shrieked.
“Mummy, yes, he is a Christian,” she said.
“Then no problem,” her mother said. “When will he come to introduce himself? You can plan it so that we do everything at the same time—door-knocking, bride price, and wine-carrying—it will cut costs and that way he does not have to keep coming and going. America is far …”
“Mummy, please, we are taking things slowly for now.”
After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.
Job Vacancy in America—National Arbiter in Chief of “Who Is Racist”
In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folk who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn’t. Or maybe it’s time to just scrap the word “racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.
CHAPTER 35
Ifemelu woke up one night to go to the bathroom, and heard Blaine in the living room, talking on the phone, his tone gentle and solacing. “I’m sorry, did I wake you? That was my sister, Shan,” he said when he came back to bed. “She’s back in New York, from France. Her first book is about to be published and she’s having a small meltdown about it.” He paused. “Another small meltdown. Shan has lots of melt-downs. Will you go down to the city this weekend with me to see her?”
“Sure. What does she do again?”
“What doesn’t Shan do? She used to work at a hedge fund. Then she left and traveled all over the world and did a bit of journalism. She met this Haitian guy and moved to Paris to live with him. Then he got sick and died. It happened very quickly. She stayed for a while, and even after she decided to move back to the States, she kept the flat in Paris. She’s been with this new guy, Ovidio, for about a year now. He’s the first real relationship she’s had since Jerry died. Pretty decent cat. He’s away this week, on assignment in California, so Shan’s alone. She likes to have these gatherings, she calls them salons. She has an amazing group of friends, mostly artists and writers, and they get together at her place and have really good conversations.” He paused. “She’s a really special person.”
WHEN SHAN WALKED into a room, all the air disappeared. She did not breathe deeply; she did not need to: the air simply floated towards her, drawn by her natural authority, until there was nothing left for others. Ifemelu imagined Blaine’s airless childhood, running after Shan to impress her, to remind her of his existence. Even now, as an adult, he was still the little brother full of desperate love, trying to win an approval that he feared he never would. They arrived at Shan’s apartment early in the afternoon, and Blaine stopped to chat with the doorman, as he had chatted with their taxi driver from Penn Station, in that unforced manner that he had, forming alliances with janitors, with cleaning staff, with bus drivers. He knew how much they made and how many hours they worked; he knew they didn’t have health insurance.
“Hey, Jorge, how’s it going?” Blaine pronounced it the Spanish way: Hor-hay.
“Pretty good. How are your students over at Yale?” the doorman asked, looking pleased to see him and pleased that he taught at Yale.
“Driving me crazy as usual,” Blaine said. Then he pointed at the woman standing by the elevator with her back to them, cradling a pink yoga mat. “Oh, there’s Shan.” Shan was tiny and beautiful, with an oval face and high cheekbones, an imperious face.
“Hey!” she said, and hugged Blaine. She did not look once at Ifemelu. “I’m so glad I went to my Pilates class. It leaves you if you leave it. Did you go running today?”
“Yep.”
“I just talked to David again. He says he’ll send me alternative covers this evening. Finally they seem to be hearing me.” She rolled her eyes. The elevator’s doors slid open and she led the way in, still talking to Blaine, who now seemed uncomfortable, as though he was waiting for a moment to make introductions, a moment that Shan was not willing to give.