Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  Mrs. Ivette nearly passes out when she sees it. No, seriously: in my memory, the woman needs to lean against a chair at the sight of my Santa. It’s put in the middle of the Christmas array of Santas with “RUBEINTZ,” my full name, under it. It’s the first one you see displayed by the door. Simon’s and Eric’s blend into the background, and although I could mock their sad artistry, it’s good enough that theirs weren’t good enough for center stage on the door. Marie-Audrée compliments me on it, which only sweetens my artistic triumph. Her sweaters are always fuzzy because she has two cats and brought them to school last year in two crates for show-and-tell. I brazenly tell her that her hair is pretty today while Eric walks by, and he hears her giggle. She caught him eating a booger once and he cried. I secretly—and pettily, perhaps—rejoiced in his humiliation.

  I walk home alone and wonder if this is the future Dad was talking about; if I’m living it right now and if I’m being ungrateful for briefly considering what shade Eric might turn if his dad belted him . . . or if a hole puncher hit him across the head. Having now Googled all these people, decades later and with a fair bit of nostalgia, I can confirm that Eric now looks shockingly like a penis. As if a wizard granted a penis a wish to become a real boy but used a new wand he wasn’t quite familiar with, leaving the new forsaken creature bald with a tilted forehead and a wrinkle that looks like a slit at the top.

  Six

  Sure, I’ll Be Your Anchor Baby

  My mom hails from the north of Haiti. It’s a weirdly shaped country already, half of an island that looks like a hook. Looking at a map, it was always hard to pinpoint the “north” of its flat top. But it shaped her in a specific way. Her first response to trauma is to boil water because whatever happens, people will need to drink water and, to this day, water from the tap is not to be trusted. Even when food was sparse and the fridge was well spaced out, with plenty of space between each item, we also always had a carton of matches and a box of candles at the ready. The trauma she is prepared for, that she trained for as a nurse, is the obvious kind. It’s wounds and diseases. It’s lights going off unexpectedly, a sudden fever in the night; the sort of misery that requires you to stay up all night. She’s not ready for the quiet, private misery of Sherbrooke, two hours from Montreal and her only friends in this country.

  I instantly have Kevin and seventeen new stories in the form of new white friends, while she will suffer a string of private humiliations while smiling for me at night. It’s clear which one of us was lied to about this bright new future.

  Because of the differences in certification requirements—bureaucratic minutiae—her nursing degree isn’t worth much in Sherbrooke. She can’t find a job. In Montreal, she would be able to attend programs catering to immigrants like her. She would have a cohort.

  She has to go back to CEGEP—the two-year Quebec equivalent of a twelfth and thirteenth grade, before university. Just for a few credits. To a seven-year-old, anyone who is not a child is an adult. The CEGEP kids drive and have purses, and Mom has purses.

  It’s Dad’s car, and sometimes he gives us rides. Anything that conflicts with his schedule or willingness to drive requires us to get quickly acclimated to the bus system. The number 6 stops a block away from our home. Mom and I take to cutting through a parking lot to get to the stop until one day an old lady comes out and tells us with a smile that the parking lot isn’t for pedestrian crossing. Mom could charm her. She’s charm incarnate. Instead, she walks past the woman with her chin high and coat bundled. I mimic and follow her. Bitch, I think in my head.

  Whatever social gene I inherited from her was first spliced with my dad’s ruthless self-sufficiency and privacy, all solidified by a lifetime as an only child. I’ve had years of alone and nothing to compare it to. As a result, I didn’t find myself dying on a vine when moved to Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. For a woman like my mother, used to being the life of the party, to conversation filling the house, to telling the same stories over and over with small deviations that gave them new life each time, it was more or less a death sentence.

  Cab drivers lock the door when we get in, and Mom squeezes my knee without saying anything as we ride in silence. She leaves a fair $2 tip on the $8 fare.

  Her outfits dull as the days pass. Her stylish vests and silk blouses are ironed and then placed back into the closet. Her gold accessories stay in their boxes and the boxes in their drawers. Some days, she’ll put them all on for a Saturday trip that amounts to church basements and other garage sales. Her hair begins to thin. She spends all day looking at the photo album she brought with her. She’s allergic to this future.

  “Why do you write the names behind the pictures?” I ask, finding her at the kitchen table again, looking at photos again.

  “Because one day you’ll forget them. And when you do, looking at them will make you sad. You need to do the work to preserve the memory.”

  No, I want to say. You need to forget and move on, you silly woman. This is the future. It’s already started and you’re wasting it.

  Mom’s candles finally come in handy exactly once: during the vicious North American ice storm when, four years into the great Canadian adventure my father had immigrated us into, the power went out and the whole of the province of Quebec was covered by a sheet of ice, causing power lines to collapse, cars to crash, and roads to be blocked off. For five nights in the dead of a –22 degrees Fahrenheit winter, our apartment looked like the candlelit setup to a The Bachelorette proposal.

  There’s no TV to watch and fill the dead air. Dad doesn’t talk, he reads, seethes. There’s no such thing as a comfortable Haitian silence. Haitian silence is loud and unnatural. An aberration. The chitchat and ongoing life commentary are suddenly on mute, leaving the day-to-day motions strange and off-putting. Five days is a very long time to live without electricity in this new modern world.

  There’s resentment between them, but I won’t know that word for years to come, so she and I sit at our kitchenette table and I take her through my Pokémon cards. The concept of an Eevee confuses her.

  She frowns at Jolteon, Flareon, and Vaporeon—my prized trifecta—displeased at this bit of mythos I just laid out, but suddenly interested. She tilts the Eevee card to face her. In my mind, she likes that he’s brown.

  “Does he eat the stone?”

  “I think you just touch them with it.”

  “How does a stone have thunder inside of it?”

  That one stumps me.

  “Maybe the stone is from a spot that got struck by lightning and—”

  “—and who says he has to change?” She keeps her eyes on the phone, waiting for her sisters to ring.

  “You get stronger, you survive.” I’m not a baby, and in my multiplication table–adjacent mind, Pokémon die when they lose. It’s a rough Poké-world out there.

  “If you want to survive,” she says, eyes on the side of my father’s face. “You have to draw a tight circle around yourself and don’t believe people who tell you that you can just reinvent yourself.”

  She’s not talking to me anymore, and Dad’s not reading anymore. It was never a big mystery as to which one of them I get my dramatic streak from. He’s in the other room but also less than thirty feet away, because $365 rent will only grant you so much privacy in the new world.

  “They’re deluded,” she says, switching from French to Creole. “Because it will probably be worse and cold and poor. Stay as you are for as long as you can, Beintz. Stay an . . . an . . .”

  She taps the card twice, prompting me.

  “An Eevee.”

  “Yes. Stay an Eevee as long as you can. Don’t trust someone who promises you empty stones.”

  Dad’s book hits the back window. In Haiti, she might have been threatened with being hit by now, but here, in Canada, she might not be. I collect my cards and go into my room with them as Dad bursts into the kitchen, snatching up his book. My favorite Pokémon is Blastoise from that day forward.

  I didn’t know rese
ntment, but I somehow knew “cabin fever.” They both had it—Dad for the apartment and the small life it contained, and Mom for the whole of Canada, too big, too massive, and entirely useless without friends or cousins. They needed to let out the tension and step into the arena loudly screaming at each other in that way that makes white people wish the loud foreign Blacks didn’t move next door. I imagine they wish they had polite white neighbors.

  The electricity comes back, of course. Spring thaws the ice. The storm was an anomaly, but the atmospheric disturbance has set in. Something’s broken in Mom. She wants to go back to the island.

  Dad’s style of fighting is random acts of violence. In Haiti, he had belted me twice—though my butt only bled once. In a modern country, he has to mind himself. People keep an eye on rowdy immigrant men. “Domestic abuse” comes up on the nightly news once, and I want to believe it’s my first Canadian smirk, right at Dad. He notices. I want him to know that I know new words now.

  Mom’s style is talky. Ranty. Even as an adult son, I’ll still be susceptible to it. She’ll move from room to room, muttering to herself, loudly doing the dishes, waiting for Dad to ask what’s wrong, tempting him. When it finally happens, her yelling will turn into conversation and then back to yelling again. It will default to the silent treatment, and then flare up again. It’s not a fuse being lit; it’s gas filling a room until there’s no air.

  To protect me from it all, I get cable in my room via a splitter installed at the back of the living room outlet that goes throughout the kitchen and under my door. It’s a random and unspoken gift from my father that is set up for me one day after school. It makes for a shockingly effective distraction. My world defaults to an audience laugh track.

  I start picking up bits of English from the sitcom reruns of FOX 34, adding it to the French and Creole. That ’70s Show. The Drew Carey Show. Seinfeld. The Simpsons. It’s a two-hour block, back-to-back, a survey of American popular culture, a second education for me.

  It’s at that point, I imagine, that my mother realized that American television had anchored me. There was just no going back to Haiti once you’d given a kid an N64, a classroom with computers, and McDonald’s twice a week. Electricity without a generator was a given.

  “Don’t you miss your school?” she tries one day. She’s talking of Haiti. Of the private school where mediocre men with rulers send me to the corner when I roll my eyes at their mediocrity and the kid whose parents give the most money ends up with the highest grade. The smell of the latrines could stun a small horse.

  Mom is ready to be a divorcée at the airport, with a polite son at her arm. There’s still life in her. She’s from “the north.” Haitian Winterfell blood. She’s used to fighting, and she’ll fight her way back to Haiti and her old life or some semblance of it. I know she will, and I can’t let that happen.

  She tells me of her plans one night, putting me to bed. She wants us to conspire together like we do for everything. Like when I see a manga at the store I really want and that she’ll buy for me the next time she’s there and leave under my bed. (A wasted expense according to him.) Now, it’s my turn to conspire to make her happy. But I’m my father’s child, too. Ambitious, stubborn, and greedy.

  “This is my school,” I say.

  “Your school in Haiti,” she clarifies, annoyed that she has to.

  “I’m Canadian now.” The card says so.

  “Beinbeintz, please.”

  “No! No! You can’t do this!” I say. I don’t care if he hears. I know she won’t belt me. She’ll be the one who gets in trouble; not me. “You can’t keep yo-yoing me all over the world like this! It’s not fair!”

  I heard yo-yoing as a verb on a TV show and it must have stuck. My fighting style is emotional blackmail. I’M SEVEN, or eight, and selfish for the first time in my life. Unfortunately, it’s aimed at the wrong person.

  “Okay, okay!” she says, crying now, too, feeling terrible. The next act she’d briefly started to plan is now a nonstarter. I feel bad, too, yes, but less than she does. It would be a lie to say that I’m completely unaware of what I’m doing. Using my words and other people’s feelings to get exactly what you want . . . Puberty is still a ways away, and I wonder how much of my dad I’ve already soaked up.

  “We’re staying, Beintz. We can stay.”

  Haiti or Canada, nothing has really changed. She gives and she gives and Philippe men take and they take. What a nuisance it is to love me.

  Seven

  Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Son

  If I was apprehensive of writing about my father here, it’s not because of the emotional trauma. To this day, mine is mostly a strange indifference to him. The epilogue comes early on this one: we never quite gelled, he and I. I feel worse about the indifference than I do about the man. He might say the same about me. I’m sure that first finger squeeze in the maternity ward left both of us cold. I don’t hate him. I’m grateful for what he gave me . . . I’ve honestly just never warmed up to him? Now, this may all sound very dark and harsh to you, who came here hoping for stories of pickup games and fried chicken from your new homie, but keep in mind that:

  My life will grow to include a lot of male writers, often white. Fiction writers, screenwriters, both established and aspiring. So, needless to say: #daddyissues abound. So, to be clear, fellas: y’all definitely have them, too. These are often unfairly given to women in media narratives, but in my experience, daddy issues are the currency of literary bros, these former sensitive indoor kids now rocking man-buns and copies of The Road by Cormac McCarthy on their shelves. Through beers, short stories, text exchanges, and chatty dashes across the highway to reach a movie theater, I’ve heard plenty of these moments that live right under the stories of fishing together or teaching you how to drive in the empty parking lot of a mall. That time he was too quiet on the drive to or from your soccer game. The fact that he sent you a link to a nearby law school—along with his monthly $3,000 check—and how this clearly means that he doesn’t support your life goal of becoming the next king of stand-up comedy. His agreeable divorce from your mother when you were twenty-six years old, which turns you back into a teenager. I’ve heard it all. So, it’s my turn. Emotional reparations, baby.

  I am positive the man never loved me either. I was Robert’s seventh chronological offspring. His first marriage had birthed five. There would be four more. There are a total of nine of us, last I checked. High five for potent semen there, Pops. DISCLAIMER: If you are imagining my father right now, you’re probably picturing the prototypical deadbeat Black father that so much of the media has offered us. A tank top, gold chains, lack of work ethic, getting high, and overly reliant on a societal net, dark faded tattoo ink against darker skin, with a bushel of unclaimed offspring and baby mamas in his wake.

  Very incorrect.

  I mean, okay, fine: maybe the bushel of baby mamas part. The man was a whore, what can I say there? I’m not a whore, but to borrow a folksy bit of kitchen-table wisdom from Aunt Atalante, after learning of the twenty-four-year-old woman her brother had gotten pregnant after parting ways with myself and my mother:

  Some people will hunt with any dogs that’ll run with them.

  I never quite knew if she was referring to Dad as the dog or the hunter. Regardless, my father is not the stereotype you might be imagining.

  The “deadbeat Black dad” stereotype is one of the most pervasive Black stereotypes out there. It’s understandably harmful to paint all lacking Black fathers with such a broad stroke, and while his belt whipping once drew my blood in a country far away, that is not the man I’m writing about here.

  For one thing, the man was viciously, annoyingly smart.

  Smarter than me, by a good mile, which is the only distance in intelligence that I suspect he could tolerate in a child of his: either a genius, a mile ahead of him, who could lead him to a better life, or a mile behind whom he could constantly impress and who would, like so many in his life, exist in constant awe of him. Saf
e to say I was neither.

  His is that smartness that breeds arrogance. The type of smartness that thrives in academia; where grants, fellowships, and offices reward your intelligence and deem you an exceptional Negro, especially at the University of Haiti, and later, Canada. At some point, Germany, too. I believe there was also a stint in the Netherlands as well. How can everyone in your life not be transitory when you were so gifted and singular that your native commune of the Gonaïves started a foundation in the sixties to send you off to study in Port-Au-Prince, knowing you were too good for them? That you were smart enough not to have to go hungry with your siblings but be put in the back of a crowded bus filled with livestock and sent off to a better life? It’s a true story, too. I remember the newspaper clipping in his office. That’s some Lin-Manuel Hamilton crap right there.

  There are moments of fondness. I saw myself in him when he would compulsively buy boxes of books at garage sales, bring them home, and unpack them with a hint of reverence, going on at length about the authors or topics he recognized and staying quiet, but curious, about those he wasn’t familiar with. He’d read those first. I learned to admire a stacked shelf of acquired knowledge through him.

  1998

  Have you ever heard a Black Haitian man speak fluent German? It’s very cool. It would happen occasionally around our tiny apartment. He’d be reading another dusty tome. (Unlike chess, Go, or reciting Aesop’s fables, he had never expressed or insisted on teaching me. Languages were his thing.)

  I half thought he was making it up for a long time; affecting the staccato of the German language and speaking gibberish for the proud smirk in my mom, and taking pleasure in my eye rolls, until, at age eleven or twelve, we bumped into a German family who had just immigrated to Canada, and, like us, found themselves at the Carrefour de l’Estrie mall, of Sherbrooke, Quebec. I don’t remember how the conversation started, but at some point, Dad and this strange and very tall man with thinning blond hair and blond chest hair that peeked through his man-cleave began to converse in German.