he takes her head in his huge hand, “grasping it like a fruit” to “fling her to the ground by it.”
He is an animal, this man with a vaguely African-sounding mother. He is an animal, this man in Louisiana where the “high medicine” made him, and not a mortal father. I can’t understand why this man is shown to be an animal in these opening pages.
The white woman he’s come for doesn’t see yet that he’s here to kill her. She thinks he’s looking for something else. “She lifted her nightdress up to her thighs and said, ‘Gonna get me some poison ivy like as not, but it’s goin’ to be worth it, ain’t it, you?’” and I have to close down a memory that threatens to rise up—a story about a woman my father had sex with in the woods one night, how she became covered in a rash from poison ivy afterwards, how he wasn’t allergic to it—and I give my head a shake, remind myself why I’m here. Look back at the book.
He knelt, took her neck in one powerful hand and began to choke the amazed, half naked, throbbing woman. Her eyes swelled in her head, a strange small sound left her throat and when he stood up, still holding her by the neck, she was dragged up with him. Her nightdress fell, covering her body again. She shook violently for a moment and then died, a foot off the ground, held in the powerful grip of the infuriated slave.
AT FIRST I sit dumbstruck and wonder what my tidy WASP of a grandmother thought when she read her son-in-law’s words. How Joan McKenzie from Albany, New York, felt about writing her name in that book after all.
Then I wonder what it takes to dream up that violence. What parts of a person have to be accessible for him to reach in and find that. How the plot the author puts down on the page is informed by the contents of his heart.
I think about my family sleeping above me and put the book down. I climb the stairs and creep into first one kid’s room and then the other’s. I linger as long as I can, press my lips onto warm foreheads until their bodies shift and resettle. Stand in the hallway and listen to them breathe. Worry about what I have done, opening this door. About what I will tell them when they ask where they come from, who their grandfather was.
Then I climb into the bed I share with my husband and lie as still as possible. I don’t want to wake him, I don’t want to ask him to hold this truth with me, I don’t want to burden him with these fears. I lie as still as possible in the bed I share with my husband and wonder how my father’s imagination could have been so filled with racial stereotypes about couplings like my own. I lie as still as possible and think about how much I want to crawl out of my skin. Out of my marriage from the guilt I feel, because if this is who my father was, who am I?
2
THE FIRST TIME I saw Ngoni, I was eating lunch in the Bard College cafeteria. I looked up from my soup and there he was across the room, a point of stillness in the surrounding mêlée. Framed by the cafeteria’s wide-open doorway, he didn’t move while people pushed their way by and around him. His face was filled with uncertainty and confusion and confidence despite being out of place. He wore a round, flat-topped felt hat that didn’t cover his ears and a tan cotton jacket with a pattern that, from a distance, looked like a map of the world. His lavender pants didn’t reach his ankles, and I worried what was protecting him from the upstate New York winter that raged out the window behind me.
Looking at him made me shy, embarrassed, so I turned back to my soup. As I did, I thought I felt an invitation in the crinkling near his temples. A light behind the trim wire-rim glasses on his face. Picking up my spoon, I chided myself. He didn’t smile at me. He can’t see anyone particular in this sea of white faces.
The next day I rushed into the cafeteria for a quick lunch between classes. A South African student I hardly knew ushered me to a table and introduced me to the man I would marry. He told me his name but I couldn’t hear it, he named his country but I couldn’t place it. He made a joke but I couldn’t follow it. I just looked into his soft brown eyes and smiled. When I walked away, my whole body vibrated.
In my bed that night, I turned off the light and closed my eyes and saw his profile as if in silhouette—the curve of his chin and lips, the round of his nose, the tall forehead and the spot where it met his hairline. I followed that line in my memory, tracing it to the tidy crush of curls on the top of his head. I still didn’t know his name.
I opened my eyes some hours later into a darkness I couldn’t change. I was too surprised by the contents of my dream to find the light switch. This dream had recurred throughout my childhood, but I hadn’t had it in years. Its premise was always the same—my father is really alive—but the circumstances changed every time. In this one, we were speaking on the phone. He said he was living in New York, writing under a pseudonym. When he named it, I recognized the author—a literary hero I’d been reading for class—my God! That’s really you?
But eyes open in the dark, the name was smoke.
SATURDAY NIGHT, THE first party of the semester over. Ngoni accepted an invitation to the local diner. Liz—my closest companion since our first day on campus—drove us over the bridge and across the Hudson, started interviewing him from our side of the booth. I sat across from him, really seeing him now that I could be still and watch. His eyes were set wide apart in a face shaped like an owl’s. His nose was broad and—I noticed when he removed his glasses and wiped his hands across his eyes—marked on either side by dark spots where those trim wirerims rested. He didn’t smile much, and when he did I couldn’t tell if it was because he thought something was funny or because he was tired of the talk, thinking of ways to escape.
“Do you have any siblings?” Liz asked.
“A sister.”
“Older or younger?”
“Younger.”
“What do your parents do?”
“My father passed when I was sixteen.”
“I’m so sorry,” I interjected. Our eyes met for a moment. My dad is dead, too, I wanted to say. I wanted to take his hand.
Liz again, though not unkindly, “And your mother?”
A pause. “My mother’s not around.”
Too personal too fast. I changed the subject, asked for the bill, got us out of there. Back on campus, we left Liz at her room, found our own spot in the lounge down the hall.
I asked only the safest questions.
“What will you do after this year?” was one.
“I want to attend graduate school to study colonialism,” he said, as though this were perfectly obvious. I had to stop myself from asking why a young black intellectual from Africa would want to study the first thirteen colonies of the United States, my only definition of colonialism.
“The best programs are in the U.K. and the States,” he said.
It was a physical jolt, my relief that he might return.
At some point I took his hand, led him back to my room. We talked late into the night. We started, then, to draw the lines of similarity, the lost fathers, the ties that would bind. The bright fluorescent hallway lights were sharp in my eyes when he opened the door to leave. I leaned in and kissed his cheek. He says now that’s when he knew.
When he was gone, I slipped into the bathroom that separated my room from Liz’s and took down the small laminated U.S. map she’d tacked up on the wall, flipped it over to see the other side, on which was drawn the world. I put my finger on Africa and quickly found Zaire—I’d written a report about it in sixth grade, and its familiar shape marked the only country I recognized on that continent. I searched all around and then drew my finger south before landing on a country shaped like the head of a rhinoceros. Zimbabwe. Landlocked, with a river following its northwestern border, Botswana and South Africa along the southern one, Mozambique curled around it to the east. I hung the map back on the wall, leaving the world side showing, and held my finger on Zimbabwe awhile, tracing the rhinoceros horn and thinking about Ngoni’s place on the planet—a place I knew nothing about.
WITHIN