In Jamaica, I learned of and tasted many new foods like breadfruit, ackee, and salt fish. I was also introduced to a tropical climate and encountered for the first time the phenomenon of a flying cockroach. It flew through the air like a mutant ninja beetle. I heard of new names and places like Negril, and I went swimming in Dunge River Falls in Montego Bay. I tasted curry goat for the first time. I bought a large print dashiki and wore it to a family event and a beautiful dark Jamaican man stared at me. On the beach together, Annette and I met a young Jamaican guy who sold us weed and wove it into baskets to hide, unravel, and then smoke when we got home. This young Jamaican guy was also a delight to tourists because he knew how to eat or swallow light bulbs. I’m completely serious. The trip to Jamaica was life changing. The turquoise waters, the tropical air, the warm climate, winds blowing gently, the sun. I came to crave it all of my life; it was the very beginning of my wanderlust and appetite for freedom.
At the hotel in Rio with Michael, I was rereading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which informs an unpublished memoir I wrote called My Soul Went With her. It is titled after Winnie Mandela’s memoir Part of My Soul Went with Him written in the apartheid years when she and her freedom fighter husband Nelson are separated, and he has gone underground to evade capture. Song of Solomon uses the mythology of the African runaways who could fly, but my story is based on a mother who left trying to escape an abusive marriage and me imagining as she takes flight, runs away for freedom, part of my soul goes with her. I imagine for all slaves left behind, forced into separations, part of their souls too went with the runaways, the dead, and the lynched. I imagine a character in Chimamanda Adichie’s, Half of a Yellow Sun set during the Nigerian Biafra war, and a traumatized mother carries her dead son’s head by hiding it in a calabash. Besides the stories of the Africans who could fly, what I remember from Song of Solomon was the character Hagar, who had fallen in love with Milkman, who decides if she couldn’t have his love, she would have his hate. I also remember the character Pilate, Hagar’s mom, who wears a hat and sucks straw through her teeth. She is mostly silent, but when Hagar dies, she breaks her silence, walks into a church, and screams out, “Mercy, I want Mercy.” That scene is resonant today, as so many Black mothers have to bury their children prematurely because of police and state violence. It’s like our collective grief as a people is being expressed. Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland … We are all Pilate and the real life Mamie Till in 1955 looking into the coffin of her murdered fourteen-year-old son, his face battered beyond recognition shouting up to the rafters, “I want MERCY.”
Karim met Michael and me in Rio. Initially we weren’t sure if he’d even show up. He was traveling from his residence in Brasília. While waiting in the hotel, I serenaded Michael with Nina Simone songs. Michael always shook his head appreciatively when I did this. “You’re Nina,” he’d say.
Michael spoke Spanish and it helped us navigate the Brazilian Portuguese as both languages are closely related. In the first few days, Michael and I watched the sunset on a beach in Rio. We were obsessed with caipirinhas and the beach at Ipanema as we’d heard it in the song, “The Girl From Ipanema.” Though Michael was a White Irish Catholic punk-rocker and I, a 6' 2" Black girl who’d grown up in the church, he and I like lovers had begun to resemble each other, had sifted into each other like sand.
There was a funny moment between us when I noticed that all the women on the beach in Rio wore G-strings and bikinis and I wanted one. We went to a bikini shop. I tried on a G-string and stepped out of the dressing room. Michael’s face turned flush red. “My god Pamela,” he said, embarrassed. “You look amazing,” but I noticed he was shy to look.
When we were giving up on Karim and left the hotel for dinner one night, we saw Karim walking toward us. We reunited and spent weeks travelling around Brazil. Karim took to us to his home. It was a city nothing like I’d expected Brazil to be. We spent a few nights there snorting pure cocaine. Instead of making you speedy, it made you numb. Whitney Houston was popular at the time and every five minutes she played on the radio. The announcer yelled excitedly, “And Whitney Houssssson,” omitting the T.
Our trip was successful; months later Karim relocated to be with Michael. He enrolled in film school. During this time, Michael and I eventually outgrew each other, but moments of freedom came again and again, like the summer I spent with a lover, wearing Gucci sunglasses and her driving a Mercedes convertible through North Carolina’s back woods and hidden roads, imagining paths slaves once traveled, pursuing liberty. Top down, wind behind us, her one hand on the steering wheel, other in mine, we felt contented as we listened to hip hop sounds of the reigning soul priestess Mary J. Blige. In a piece I wrote called Motherland and Chitlin Chimichanga, I imagine the intersection of Latin and African American culture, the presence of Black blood all over America. In the past now and forever there is Black blood.
“In North Carolina looking at trees in a forest, you can still taste, smell, and feel remnants of Black blood. Driving past newly rekindled and restored
