by Ben Philippe
4. I’M FLUENT IN WHITE WOMAN
How fluent? Let’s just say I’ve gotten used to the nails-on-a-chalkboard refrain of a white person telling you how much they love Beyoncé.
I was emotionally raised by the white women of the small cable-ready television in my bedroom as an only child. My inner monologue is Emily Gilmore, my astrological sign is Wisteria Lane in retrograde, and my spirit animal? Cersei Lannister, son.
Much like Tarzan had to meet other humans to realize that it was kind of weird how he could walk on his knuckles and slide across vines, it would be years until I realized that being raised by the WB, CW, and having an idyllic memory of the Gilmore girls was not a conventional experience for anyone, let alone a Black male.
5. YOU WILL OCCASIONALLY BE TESTED
Candidly, I (and many other Black people) secretly think—fear—that my white friends might be a little racist deep down. It’s a thing. After a few false starts, friendships that turned out to be too problematic to endure, you find yourself waiting for that other shoe to drop. There are informal tests along the way; little tests neither of us are aware of until they’ve been failed. For example, the shoulder tap at the bar nodding toward a group of Black women entering the establishment and going, “Lucky night for you, man!” (What the hell was that, Brock? Did you just assume my taste in women?)
One definite test manifests in how I come to meet your other Black acquaintances. Casually, at a birthday party? Awesome! Bumping into you on the street? Great! Getting a DM with a forward of your other Black friend’s funny tweet with no explanation other than “YOU TWO SHOULD HANG”? . . . Not great.
It’s completely fine that your wedding—all 240 Vermonters—only has a handful of nonwhite guests. You can’t control that! But if Jamaal, your only other Black friend from college, your spouse’s coworker Latesha, and I make eye contact the moment we walk into your farm-to-table reception and find ourselves navigating toward the “ethnic” table in the corner, I guarantee we will proceed to abuse the open bar heartily bonding over this crap.
6. SPRITUALLY, I LEAN “COWARD”
In the world of men, there are teeth-showing growlers, and brawlers, and hunters, and gatherers. I have no delusions about my role—my basket of berries is freaking cute, all right? I decorated it with pretty flowers, and you can find me in the nearby creek, humming a song to myself while the village is getting slaughtered across the meadow. I’ll tearfully decorate their graves later.
To give you an idea, I am currently writing this book at the height of the COVID-19 global pandemic. There is a stay-at-home order throughout New York, and NYC currently owns the dubious honor of being the hardest-hit city in the world. Sure, I may get overtaken by a sudden dry cough and fall prey to compromised lungs, but I am not dying in a street fight because someone stepped on my Jordans and I felt disrespected. Nor am I the Black guy who takes it upon himself to die first by flipping his baseball cap backward, grabbing a log, and going to check out the strange noise at minute thirty-seven of a horror movie. Hell, no. I choose life.
I may get my feelings hurt from a comment made at the bar, and in turn mumble something about you (see #2 and #1, in that order) but you won’t find me swinging the first (or second, or third) punch. Nah, dude. Will I duck behind someone with their back turned to the mayhem, hoping you’ll accidentally punch them and that the epicenter of the brawl will happen there instead of on my beautiful cheekbones? Absolutely.
I prefer to think of it as a really specific survival instinct in a deeply unfair world, y’know? Say what you will, but the coward lives.
7. I’VE LIVED A PRETTY BORING AND LINE-TOEING LIFE
On a related note, the amount of hood struggles you’ll find in these pages is minimal. There’s a fair bit of poverty, but it’s the deeply ashamed immigrant kind where your mom bursts into tears when you try on baggy jeans at Walmart and shoves you back into the dressing room, whisper-seething between clenched teeth that “They’ll think we can’t afford belts!”
I’ve never really had “beef” that did not involve Wi-Fi and harshly worded direct messages. I write very long emails, but these fists know no rage.
I’ve never smoked a single cigarette my entire life. Part of that comes from being born of that generation that saw their first cancer commercial before being offered their first smoke. By the time someone extended their dad’s cigarette my way, I had the defense mechanism of mocking their peer pressure, lifted from a commercial about how to resist peer pressure. You’re dealing with a very good boy here.
8. WHAT DO YOU DO, ANYWAY?
These days I’m a college professor and a working writer. Occasionally books, occasionally TV writers rooms. Writers are sensitive creatures. They’re opinionated, have an unearned sense of superiority, and have already thought out their answers to their inevitable future New Yorker interview. I’m absolutely no exception in this, save that I’m actually awesome. I am a peacock of glory, the embodiment of a Kanye West song given lungs, and as a result have very thin skin when it comes to criticism. Very thin.
So, don’t criticize me. But also, don’t praise me in a way that I might misread as condescending, either. You should understand that I can handle the worst of your criticism but find no need to issue any of it, ever. (If you’re a writer yourself, that sentence makes complete sense to you.)
9. YOUR 420 TEXT WILL BE IGNORED
The presumption of weed is something that Black acquaintances have had to deal with from the fourth grade on. People aged ten to twenty-eight will assume you to have access to a never-ending supply of weed they can hit you up for. You’ll get “’Sup, dude!” and leaf emoji texts from numbers you don’t recognize on April 20. A smooth-faced guy in a plaid shirt will break from his pack of TODOGs (Tims or Dans or Grants) at the back of an Austin bar after psyching himself up with a few Natty Lights and feel completely justified in hitting you up for weed. “Do you have any? You holding?” he’ll whisper. You’ll consider rushing to a nearby 7-Eleven and buying all the oregano you can and making him empty his bank account at the ATM for the privilege. But that would take effort. “No, sorry, dude,” you’ll simply say before returning to your Tinder date.
While I’ve smoked in my lifetime, I’ve never owned much weed or cocaine or any of the harder stimulants that Law & Order reruns told you that my pockets are layered with at all times. My weed consumption is not a lifestyle. It’s an occasionally offered distraction, and often an attempt to fit in: part of the cost of having so many white artist types in my life.
I am not holding, okay? I do not know how to roll a blunt. I don’t have anything “on deck.” What is a fun thing for you (or occasionally a full-blown persona to make up for a glaring lack of personality) is an expectation of folks who look like me. Considering that weed is now on its way to being no more provocative than a stick of cinnamon-flavored gum, maybe you can go ahead and break that association in your mind? Thanks.
So, please do not text me a marijuana leaf emoji at midnight. I was the high schooler Googling “where to find weed?” in an incognito tab after being invited to a party strictly for my presumed weed-summoning abilities as a Black kid. For me, 4/20 is not a holiday. More often than not, it’s a weekday, and at 4:19 p.m. I’m trying to wrap up work while browsing a food delivery service with the passion of a husband scrolling through porn while his wife is in the bathroom. Your dreaded white friend definitely has a better weed connection than me. Go bother them.
10. I’M NOT SPIRITUAL, SUPERSTITIOUS, OR RELIGIOUS
What can I say? Lent isn’t my thing. Neither is Kwanzaa, mind you. I’m a Christmas boy, sure, though not for religious reasons. It’s strictly an eggnog and “Ooh, pretty lights” situation. Now, this does not particularly matter to me, but I’ve found that it matters to some other people. I once dated someone who felt “misled and bamboozled” by my Daisy Buchanan level of carelessness toward a higher power. I like to step on those sidewalk cracks and used to sign the cross in reverse order at Sunday school to see what e
xactly would happen and who it might summon. I liked the stories and parables—I just never believed any of them were true. I might give them a breezy edit, y’know? Find the best plot twist to understanding those footsteps in the sand.
Now, if you’re wondering what this possibly has to do with our new interracial friendship here, well, you’ve clearly never attempted to voice any of these thoughts to any of my aunts in their Sunday best shaking their heads at me in abject horror. To quote my aunt Colette, whose hat feather was trembling with holy concern as she shook her head at my eight-year-old self after broaching the topic: “This isn’t right . . . The devil lives in your boy, Belzie!”
Throughout my life, my mother’s faith was important to her, so as a result I grew up respecting it without ever believing it or participating in it with any real conviction. My atheism, if we have to name it, is strictly passive. I do not preach it, and I am happy to accept your pamphlet with a nod before recycling it. Don’t convert me to your setting, and I won’t try to convert you to my neutral. Cool? Cool. Oh! While we’re here . . .
Astrology is also not my journey.
Honestly, can we all calm down a bit with this? While I have a deep respect for theistic belief systems, I would like to erase myself from the narrative of your narcissistic sky tic-tac-toe. If a student can ask me for a paper deadline extension because Mercury is in retrograde, I get to give you a full 180-degree eye roll. At some point this past decade, astrology + hiking became a personality, and I want no part of it. Look, be your best narcissistic self, please. Heck, I get along with narcissists (surprising, right?), but Miss Cleo gibberish is profoundly boring to me. I have no idea what it says about me that I am a Sagittarius except that it has led to a lot of condescending smirks and “Ah, that explains it.” Honestly, just call me an asshole and be done with it.
All right! That should be plenty. By now you should have a pretty good idea of who I am. See? It’s really not that deep. So, how did I get here? What’s my Black story? Well, like many Black people before me, my beautiful Black story begins with two Black people making love on a beautiful island of the Greater Antilles archipelago.
Although, probably not on an actual beach? It was near a beach from the photos, though . . . Look, we don’t know each other well enough for you to ask where my father inseminated my mother yet! Rude.
Three
The First Gift
A familiar thing happens every May. Without warning and with far more ferocity than the usual hashtags, social media is suddenly flooded with photos of young, thriving women for twenty-four straight hours. Some of these photos pre-date digital photography altogether: they bear the grainy marks of 35mm, the soft tones of black and white, the faded sepia of the past scanned into the twenty-first century. Tangible photos that must still live on mantels and in ornate frames somewhere. One glance at the calendar and you know: Mother’s Day is upon us.
You will scroll through your phone and travel all over the world through these young women in bygone-era shorts riding bikes, wearing sunglasses and throwing up peace signs, or in some cases just giving a defiant finger to the camera. A lip ring and black lipstick at a concert here, a knitted sweater with hands pulled into the sleeve on an old couch there. These women are the larval stages of future mothers.
Sons and daughters, especially those in their twenties, revel in bragging about the women their mothers used to be. Those friends who whine about having to go home for the holidays or the panic attacks experienced at LaGuardia, pantomiming the political fights they’ll have with their outdated, regressive parents, atone for their filial sins with flower emojis and soliloquies. There are 364 days of ingratitude—or worse, indifference—to make up for.
It’s not that these dynamic girls are gone. They’ve just been folded into the maternal figure whose day is being celebrated. They were precursors to the “mom” their children will come to know. The one who worries and Facebooks as a verb. The one whose voice audibly dips in voicemails because you not picking up when she called was already a dismissal: another indignity, like the carelessly strewn socks you left her to pick up or uncleaned plate left at the table when you were a teenager. It’s okay, though. She’ll keep giving because that’s just what mothers do.
I’m no better than the other ungrateful children of the web. My social media features carefully curated photos of my mother, reveling in how awesome she is. In my case, however, it’s because I know she was never meant to be my mother. No matter how easily giving and understanding and folding and cleaning and hugging and calling and worrying all come to her, I suspect Belzie would have thrived without a child and the blessing—and inconvenience—of loving me. At the end of the day, that’s all my dad had on her.
How do you write about a single Black mother, without reducing her to a series of stacked tropes and demographic woes? How do you write about a philandering Black father biding his time before the next wedding without making him a stereotypical deadbeat? Like most parents, if you grant them a second look, I’m aware that both of these people are so much more than the broad sum of their demographics. People are complicated creatures, more so when they are our parents, occupying Venn diagrams where idolatry, disappointment, anger, regret, and, yes, affection meet and help to complicate ourselves.
Whatever story she had written for herself changed with me: wet and viscous, squeezing her thumb in some corner of Canapé Vert hospital where she was a beloved nurse, after a routine C-section. Not that she would have it any other way, if you ask her even today, three decades later. She has made a full performance of telling the story of my birth.
“I told my doctor,” she will say over neatly served tea at our kitchen table, smirking slightly and moving her arms as she tells the story the same way she tells every guest I’ve ever brought home. “He was a friend, so I pulled him aside and I said: ‘Listen, doc: no pushing! I can’t do it. Give me the drugs and pull the baby out.’ ”
Time of birth: 3:46 p.m. That was it; the woman was screwed.
Four
Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Canadian
It’s 1994 and I’M FIVE years old. I’m standing in my dad’s office in Haiti, facing his desk, hoping he doesn’t notice the dirt I’ve tracked onto the giant room’s faded Persian rug. I rub it in deep with my foot, trying to keep my back straight.
Dad has summoned me, meaning one of our two maids hunted me down in the backyard and away from the ninja battlefield I was assembling, high on the Power Rangers reruns that come on once a week. I am hastily dragged by the arm to the door of the sunny room filled with plants, books, furniture that looks too heavy to ever move. There are maps on every wall, and the radio is always playing loud Haitian men proselytizing about the state of the world. Political evangelists long before YouTube will add their faces to their voices. The messaging is simple: The world is unfair. Please subscribe to my worldview and send money if you can.
Dad normally only calls me in here when he has to discipline me, mostly, I think, because he likes the echo, but today is different. I think today he has news. He’s giddy and excited.
We do not particularly look alike but share the same birthmark on our left butt cheek. His skin is lighter than mine—as is my mom’s—and he does not have a mustache. Nearly every ethnic father in every story of lost homelands I’ve read is defined by their mustache, beard, or prominent sideburns, but my dad’s face is bare, populated only by a light-gray neck fuzz that disappears as soon as it sprouts. He has piercing eyes behind thick rectangular lenses housed in a thin golden frame.
“There’s no future in Haiti,” he declares after motioning for me to sit down across from him. Before working in the ministry of education, he was a teacher and a principal, too, I think. I can’t be sure, to be honest. His story isn’t mine.
Right behind his head, I notice a new map of America with the folds across the Atlantic still creased. My dad enjoys maps the way the adult version of me will one day enjoy framed stills of movies around my home and office.
We’re both compulsively trying to fill the blank walls with stories.
At school, he likes when I befriend white foreign children. They are the wealthy ones, well-to-do ones. And we are joining their hub, I’m told. Somewhere where the foreign white kids roam around freely.
“We’re going to a place where you have a future,” he continues. “Canada. I used to live there before.” I’m not told before what. Presumably, just me. Mom is at the Canapé Vert hospital, looking after her wealthy patients, but I assume she’s been looped in.
“It’s very cold there,” he says. “You’ll hate that part. There’s snow everywhere for half the year.”
I don’t have to ask about my dog, Bouli; I already know he’s not coming. My follow-up questions annoy him, evidenced by his answers becoming more brusque with each of my inquiries:
“. . . It’s, I don’t know, frozen rain. Go check the freezer. That’s snow.”
“. . . We’re leaving after Christmas. You still have a few months.”
“. . . Yes! Of course there’s TV, but you’re not moving there for the TV!”
The last is the wrong follow-up question, and I’m told to memorize one of Aesop’s fables to recite for him the next day. He has big new plans, global plans, and they don’t involve my watching TV all day. He settles on “Le Corbeau et le Renard” (“The Fox and the Crow”) and doesn’t notice the brown hue of dirt on his patterned carpet. I can still recite that fable to this day, but it’s a party trick that only dazzles from the mouth of a five-year-old.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA
YEAR: 1995
