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For my sons, Kwesi and Kip, with many thanks for all they have taught me
Table of Contents
IN THE WEEK BEFORE Daniel and his girlfriend’s wedding his life changed forever. The problem wasn’t marriage because he and Louise had lived together for three years since leaving college. Getting married would not change much.
The big change was instead due to something which Daniel simply could not have foreseen: a sudden shock. Before this he thought of himself as just a normal person, living a normal life. And if anyone had asked him what ‘normal’ meant the answer would have been simple. To Daniel ‘normal’ was his own way of life.
On the other hand, this was only half the answer. From his first day in school Daniel had known that he was different which was why, his mother had said, the bullies picked on him. Daniel agreed. There was only one way to keep out of trouble, he thought, and that was to pretend to be just like the rest of them. Normal.
He was twenty-six, the same age as his girlfriend, Louise, and taught at a comprehensive school in North London. Louise was also a teacher, and they lived together in a ground-floor flat. At the weekends, they normally went out to the cinema, or for dinner with friends. During the summer they sometimes drove down to Devon to stay with her parents.
By this time doing the same things as most of his friends seemed like second nature to Daniel. Sometimes he did feel that he was living under a sort of disguise but also he couldn’t really work out how to change things. He couldn’t even guess what he wanted them to change to. On the surface, his life was happy but deep inside he still felt angry and confused. He shared most of his thoughts with Louise, but this problem he found impossible to explain to her. Going out with Daniel was the only thing that had marked her out from her family and friends. Apart from that, Daniel realised that they lived in much the same way as her sister and cousins. She called it a normal life, where living with Daniel was a stage, after which getting married was the right thing to do. And Daniel agreed it was what a normal couple would do.
But there were still some people who regarded Daniel and Louise as an odd couple. Louise looked a lot like Daniel’s mother in that she was tall, blonde and pretty, with pink skin which flushed easily. Daniel, meanwhile, was just the opposite, with a light brown skin and curly black hair.
He often wondered about his father. Perhaps he looked like him, but there was no way of telling as Daniel had never even seen a photograph of him. He only knew that his father had come from Nigeria, and had died before he was born.
After they decided to marry, he tried to tell Louise about how this made him feel. ‘I wish my father was here,’ he said.
‘Why? Do you miss him?’
‘No. I never knew him, so I can’t miss him. He was struggling to find the right words. ‘But there is something missing.’
He knew a lot about what he was missing. Part of it was a feeling of safety. In primary school, he had stood his own ground against the bullies in the playground. Mostly, not having two parents did not matter. It was different, though, when other kids’ dads turned up to watch them playing sports or to take them home. When that happened, he sometimes had felt a rush of longing so strong that he could hardly control the tears springing behind his eyes. And when other kids teased him the way they were always doing to each other, he had the same crazy thought: You wouldn’t do that if my dad was here.
As he got older, he stopped thinking like that. Instead his absent father gave him a new problem. Many of the people he met seemed to think that the colour of his skin gave him some kind of special access to what they called ‘black culture’. Mostly it didn’t matter. He got tired of explaining that he had been born and brought up nearby, and that he knew nothing about African drums or voodoo or the blues. It got really boring when he had to say that to kids he had known for most of his life, but most of his friends weren’t that stupid. It was the teachers who kept on about ‘his culture’ who annoyed him.
The teacher who got on his nerves most was said to be an expert on black culture. When he talked to the black kids he always seemed to be talking about the Carnival and rap music. Daniel was known as a quiet boy who studied hard, and he became one of the teacher’s targets. After a while, though, Daniel began to get the idea that the man seemed to know about his absent father, and saw him as some kind of social problem. Sometimes he came home seething with rage after one of the teacher’s talks. ‘He thinks,’ he told his mother, ‘that if you’re black you have to be some kind of rebel. And as far as he’s concerned, being a rebel means wearing a hood and rapping. And if you’re really cool you can go to jail or walk the street, without a job.’
At school Daniel hid his anger. He knew by now what kind of future he wanted. He knew also it would count against him if he was seen to reject the man’s attempts to teach him about ‘your own culture’. The issue