little bit of tension was rising in the room dissipated. We went to the couch and listened to records and you let me kiss your neck a little bit. “I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m happy here in America. I know there are problems. There’s always going to be problems. I know we were kept down, and we’re rising up too slowly. But I also know other things. Do you hear what we’re hearing? Is there another place you can listen to Marvin Gaye and then the Beatles and then Chuck Berry and then Mary Wells and feel like you really know what they all mean? I love being here in this place and I love being here in this place with you.”
“It is nice,” you said, nuzzling into my shoulder.
“I would recognize this country even from the back,” I said. “You think I need to investigate my identity? This is my identity.” Then I headed off to work and proved my point, played “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Thirty Days” and “Your Old Standby,” all as messages to you.
That was twelve days ago. I didn’t even fold up the paper with the news about Malawi. I left it open on the couch, and that night, when I got home from work, I rolled you into it when we were getting down to business. Then a week passed, and it was five days ago, and it was so hot that we went out for ice cream and ended up talking to some of the kids we knew in the neighborhood. Ken Louis was there, who told everyone he was related to Joe Louis, and his best friend Paul Ordis, who liked to tease Ken by saying he was related to Joe Ordis, and James Powell, who was the worst of the bunch but still a good kid. They all had girls they were sweet on, and they wanted you to give them advice on how to act. “Don’t act like this one,” you said, pointing at me, and all three of them bagged up. Paul Ordis said he hoped one day he’d have a girl as pretty as you, and he meant it so sweetly that you told him you were sure one day he would. Then I told him stories about me and Larry and how we both got it together in time for adulthood. “You can call him Larry, CPA,” I said. On our way back we saw two white cops sitting in a car at the corner. One made a gun with his finger and pointed it out the window. He was laughing.
That night we were closer in bed, though we couldn’t have been any closer, and not for any major reasons. It was as a result of a host of little reasons: seeing the teenagers on the stoop near the ice cream shop and remembering when we were that age, knowing how pretty you were and how smart you were and how clearly you saw the world and wondering if I could do the right things to keep you. There was a slight metallic uneasiness in my head, and I assume there was in yours, too, and that’s why you let me make love to you the way I did. “You know what I mean,” I said afterward. “Competently.” You threw your arms around me and laughed.
We both knew enough to be uneasy about the kids and the cops, but we never thought the two stories would come together the way they did. The following week it was even hotter, and all the kids in the neighborhood were out in the street, acting foolish. A group of about five of them, including Paul Ordis and James Powell, were play- fighting, mostly to make fun of Ken Louis, though they continued even after he left to go home. The play fight got louder and louder, and finally one of the neighbors called the cops, just as another neighbor came out of his door to stop the boys. James Powell was in bold character now, and he stood up tall to the man who came to stop the fight. “What do you want?” he said. “What the hell do you want, man?” The neighbor sprayed James and Paul with a hose, and James pretended to go wild and ran full-speed after him, shouting that he was going to kill him when he got hold of him. That was when one of the cops who had showed up on the scene emptied his service revolver into James’s back. I wasn’t there, and neither were you, but you were one of the first people Paul Ordis saw when he ran crying home. “Miss Angie,” he said. He couldn’t say any more and he buried his face in your shoulder.
I was at work, spinning records and making jokes, when the calls started to come in about the shooting. I did what I swore I would never do, and that was to feel ashamed that my job wasn’t serious enough for the world around it. I took the records off the turntable and let people know what was happening, how the CORE meeting later that day was now going to be a protest, how demonstrations were being planned for the next day and the day after that in Harlem and Brooklyn. Already the violence was starting, a few kernels of corn popping. I didn’t come home until late, and when I did, you greeted me at the door like a wife, silently embracing me and whispering into my ear that you were proud of me. “How can you be proud of anyone today?” I said. That night you didn’t stay up late studying. You went to bed when I did, and we were distant from one another, each in our own head, though we couldn’t have been any closer.
We ate breakfast silently the next morning. The newspaper was unopened on the table next to me. You were looking at the window as if no one would ever be able to see through it again.
“Angie,” I said.
“Why not Tail?” you said. “You should call me what you want, and I know you want it.” It was a burlesque only. I could no more have touched you that way than I could have killed you. I kissed you chastely and went off to work, hoping for the best. I didn’t get the best. I didn’t get anywhere near the best. The demonstrations started peaceful but didn’t stay that way for long, and before you knew it there were cars burning and bricks crashing into windows. What would Lee Johnson have said about any of it? I was at work again, imagining I had a new job, which involved keeping the people calm. I was at work again, failing. The calls were pouring in about how the neighborhood had already slipped out of civilization and the city was soon to follow. In the afternoon I took a call from an older white man. “I’ve been listening to your show, and I have a solution,” he said.
“Sir?” I said.
“You should go back to Africa.”
I had heard it before, of course. We all had, and much worse. But this time it sounded different. The man wasn’t angry. He had the appearance, at least on the phone, of a rational being. “Sir?” I said again.
“You heard me,” he said. “Go back. We don’t need you here.”
His comment went through my head, brick-through-window-style, and with it went many other things: affronts, confusions, challenges I had to his remark, ways I could respond. I reversed the process, pulled the brick out until the window was intact again, and in the reflection I saw a clear picture in which I had the man down on the ground, my hands around his throat. I was squeezing hard, yet it was eliciting only laughter, flushing his face a healthy pink from his cheeks to the roots of his hair. I tried to kill the pink and instead I intensified it; his face went red, then purple, then darkened until it was like mine, then darkened further until it was like yours. I put the phone to my ear and heard only the dial tone.
I left work, crisscrossed streets where I shouldn’t have felt safe but did. A store that sold fish tanks was burning. Pause. Get it? I directed myself to believe that fire was a refining force, just as I had once believed that humans are capable of kindness, or that jokes offer an adequate defense against cruelty. You weren’t at the apartment. I went to the library, then I went to a liquor store—both intoxicants, neither lasting—and then I went home and called a travel agent and asked how much it would cost to fly from Kennedy Airport to Blantyre.
“Blantyre?” the girl on the line said. She wasn’t being rude, just curious.
“The one in Malawi,” I said, “not in Scotland. Though I can see how my accent may have confused you.” It was possibly the last joke I had in me, and not one I was particularly proud of.
“Yes, sir,” said the girl, flustered, and got right on it.
When she told me the arrangements were made, I asked her if I really wanted to do this.
“Sir?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I looked through the book I had taken from the library. The city of Blantyre, named for the birthplace of the explorer Livingstone, was in the highlands, which may have strengthened the resemblance. It was surrounded by four mountains whose names I committed to memory—Soche, Ndirande, Chiradzulu, Michiru—and which I imagined as a vocal quartet performing on a street corner: first tenor, second tenor, baritone, bass. There was a joke there, but I didn’t reach for it. The book had some pictures, including one of a woman standing out in front of a small bank, facing away from the camera. She looked just like you. I shut the book and put it away so that you wouldn’t see it, and then I did what I had been waiting days to do: I took a nap. I dreamed of you when you were a little girl. You had your pigtails on and you were telling other girls jokes that were labored and earnest. You were trying to be better. You always were. Ten years from now I want to be holding you in my arms and kissing you while we listen to our children playing in the next room, and to do that I have to be newly born so that I am no longer so young. Isn’t it strange that a man can be newborn after he’s been around a while? I hope you don’t misunderstand what I’m doing with this trip. On the plane I will say prayers because I don’t like flying and also because I am trying to find the divinity in many things. On the plane I will cry because I have doubts, and then I will take the
