At Penn Station in New York, a dark-haired young woman got on and sat next to me. She was a few years older than I was, dressed in jeans and an old squirrel coat; there was, however, something stately and controlled about the way she moved her shoulders and head that made her clothes seem elegant. She was carrying a paperback book, but she kept glancing at me in a lively, eager way that made me realize that I was fated, that day, to have people approach me. When we started to talk, I was struck by the contrast between the vibrant expression on her face and the strange, deliberately muted way in which she spoke. After a few minutes she told me that she was an opera student and had just won a prize in a competition in Manhattan.
“The prize I won is a scholarship to study at the Salzburg Conservatory,” she said in her muted voice, regarding me with a warm, almost caressing look in her small brown eyes, as if she felt that I was partly responsible for her good fortune. “I’m walking on air, but I’m also scared out of my mind. I’ve been studying for years, but I never thought anything like this would happen—I mean, I was teaching nursery school. And my family’s ecstatic—they’re throwing me a big party at my aunt’s house in Cranston.”
Now that I knew she was a singer, I studied her strong, rather swarthy neck that rose imperiously from her red sweater; it seemed to be pulsing with life and health.
“You’ll be famous,” I said, feeling a little jealous.
“That part doesn’t even count to me,” she said, though her expression made me suspect that it did. “What matters is that something—at last—has happened to me!”
She got off at New Haven, first giving me her name—Lucy Consalves—and I settled back to stare out at the wintry beaches passing by the train windows as we continued through Connecticut. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon. The sky over the water was a striated gray, and the sea was a deeper gray, with the foam of the waves a startling, recurring flicker of yellowish white that seemed like a repetitious signal of nearly human expression—the wink of an eye or the waving of a handkerchief. A kid of about seventeen or eighteen was jogging on the sand; he was black, and I wondered briefly what on earth he was doing on a Connecticut beach. The lowering light gave the broad expanse of sea and marsh and sky around him a curiously contained, interior feeling. A few gulls skimmed the waves, and I thought of the New African Baptist Church, where the stuffed white dove representing the Holy Spirit still hung on a string over the baptismal pool, and where the people had stood crowded as close as marsh grass to witness my father’s last appearance.
The train moved past the seascape and the jogger, on toward Rhode Island, and I closed my eyes. Exhausted as I was, I had a brief new impression: that the world was a place full of kids in transit, people like the jogger and Lucy Consalves and that punk from Linvilla, PA, all of them, inexplicably, bound on excursions that might end up being glorious or stupid or violent, but that certainly moved in a direction away from anything they had ever known. I was one of them, and although I didn’t know what direction I was heading in, and had only a faint idea yet of what I was leaving behind, the sense of being in motion was a thrill that made up for a lot. I sat and squeezed my eyes tighter and hoped that it would turn out to be enough for me.
More from the Author
Interesting Women
Lost Hearts in Italy
Red Island House
The Packet War
I am a big house seen from afar
Not even a whole crowd can take it apart
but if they do, it takes revenge.
And when those from across the sea catch sight of me
I add them to my servants.
—“Ibonia,” traditional epic of Madagascar, translated by Lee Haring
There are houses you don’t want, that, nevertheless, enter your life and bring with them other lives, whole other worlds. There are countries you visit that lay hold of you and don’t let go, even if you diligently attempt to remain a tourist. These thoughts have been incubating in the mind of Shay Senna ever since she—a Black American woman with scant interest in the continent of Africa except as a near-mythical motherland—unexpectedly and unwillingly became mistress of the Red House, a sprawling household in northwestern Madagascar.
It is because of the big house and its bad fortune that she is at present in a dreamlike situation, hurrying under the calescent subequatorial sun through the back lanes of a fishermen’s shantytown on the island of Naratrany, in pursuit of a tiny Sakalava girl in a white satin gown.
In the light-soaked stillness of the hottest noontime hour, when mongrel dogs lie flat as puddles in patches of shade, the barefoot child, who looks like an eerie carnival figure in that glaring dress with its flounces and ribbons, skips in and out of sight through a maze of tottering bamboo huts. Occasionally she turns her little braided head and makes a cheeky, beckoning motion with a spindly brown arm as she guides Shay and Shay’s head housekeeper, Bertine la Grande, to the home of the man referred to, usually in whispers, as the Neighbor.
The tall, stately Bertine, also barefoot, also Sakalava, leads the way. Dressed in a sweeping print lamba, her geometrically knotted hair hidden by a big, sun-faded newsboy hat that gives her a curiously regal air, she chuckles softly each time the small white apparition flashes into sight, then treads on casually as if engaged
