Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  “Oh.”

  “Dating you is, like, sweet. I thought it would be something . . . I don’t know. Different.”

  “I get it.”

  We hug. It’s a mature breakup, and we both want the easy swagger of little kids who’ve had a mature breakup.

  I look at myself in the mirror that night and do a five-minute monologue to myself, cataloging every facet of my dullness. You couldn’t keep Genevieve M. interested. Genevieve M. with the horse stickers and literal ribbon in her hair. You’re not just boring. Vanilla is boring but vanilla is still a flavor—a popular flavor. People want their bathrooms to smell like vanilla. You wish you were ice cream, son. You’re the ice around the goddamn container. The sticky condensation that leaves a residue on people’s fingers. Why couldn’t you be Lil’ Bow Wow, Will Smith, or Basquiat? Google becomes your best friend in understanding what you’re supposed to know, like, watch, and listen to. Even if you don’t abide by them, it’s vital to at least know all the standards you’re falling short of.

  Nine

  How to Go through Life without Drowning, Part I

  I’M THIRTEEN and my aunt’s kitchen is huge and bright. My mom’s relationship with her sister is nothing like the dutiful weariness and point keeping of my dad’s relationship with his sister, Aunt Atalante. Mom and her sister will occasionally hug each other out of nowhere and for no reason at all, and you can tell they’re sharing a memory that doesn’t need to be voiced. My aunt, uncle, and three cousins live in a gated community in New Port Richey, Florida. Their house is big, with ceilings you can’t touch even by stepping on a chair. Their children, my cousins—two boys a couple of years older than me and a girl, four years younger—are cool, and I like them as much as I envy them.

  I breathe in the AC not only because it’s hot outside (sweltering, really—God, Florida), but because it’s wealthy, valuable. Something I can internalize and take back home. We go for long drives to giant supermarkets and malls, sampling this American life two tax brackets above ours. My aunt’s a nurse and my uncle works at a store. Somehow, that’s enough, because it’s 2002 and that’s how the economy works.

  I like to rub my hand against their marble kitchen island, like some half weird nephew, half enthralled Gollum for no reason other than that it feels fancy. Our kitchen counter back home, waiting for me in seven weeks when we go back to Canada, is barely a shelf, cluttered with a dish rack, spices, and pots, a laundry basket. No inch is spared. I suspect my uncle thinks I’m wiping my greasy hands off on his marble counter. I’m not. I’m trying to remember it to take some part of the tactile memory home with me.

  Years later, I’ll find out that their home looks exactly like every other in their small gated community: valued at roughly $300,000; and that, while a wonderful house, is not the rap video I remember—but for now, I’m thirteen and I’m enthralled. It’s the American Dream™.

  My cousins are ungrateful, I think without ever saying. When Melissa, nine, rolls her eyes because she doesn’t get the remote, or cries when she sits pretzel-style in the living room in pink shirts, getting her coarse Black-girl hair roughly combed out, I want to grab a wooden spoon, smack her twice, and tell her we’ve decided to ship her ungrateful behind back to Haiti where she’ll clean marmites all day with increasingly coarse hands.

  “Why can’t we move here?” I say without thinking to Mom at night in the guest bedroom we share. I know she secretly thinks the same thing but knows better than to say it aloud. She doesn’t have the luxury to entertain these kinds of thoughts.

  She answers in French or Creole, speaking of the language barrier, the work she doesn’t have, the visas we don’t have. The schooling I would be too behind in. Occasionally, she runs out of arguments and will throw a “What would your dad say?” in there. Right. Him. From the listless Q&A chitchats on the phone, I know that he doesn’t miss us any more than we miss him, but we pretend for each other’s sake that he does.

  When I stare at her, she follows it with a more logical argument, aimed at overturning my adolescent hierarchy of needs.

  “We couldn’t live here. We’d have to find another apartment. One without furniture or TV.”

  “You’re right, Mom,” I eventually say. The lack of TV is the first real flaw in my elegant plan to pack up and move here.

  Still, that won’t stop my hand from rubbing the marble at breakfast and dinner the next day. Once she’s used to having me around, Melissa—ever observant—draws attention to it by saying I’m making love to the marble. Impertinent American child. Respect your elders.

  No one knows where she’s picked up those two words “making love,” but my uncle hates it. My English is still bad, and my cousins amuse themselves by teaching me “bitch” and “pussy,” so I certainly can’t be blamed. When Tuxedo Mask kisses Sailor Moon on a fade-out of a Toonami block of cartoons on Cartoon Network, I tell her they’re off to make love with his penis and her vagina, and luckily, Melissa is not a narc yet.

  We spent a lot of time in that kitchen, distributing takeout for this temporarily seven-person household of my aunt, uncle, three cousins, myself, and Mom. The adults sit, the children stand up. Or, maybe it was the other way around. Either way, chair-to-ass parity was never achieved that summer.

  It’s in that high-ceiling kitchen of the gods, with pizza and Crazy Bread being passed around, that I heard about Julie Smith—my cousin Ricky’s classmate who died while on vacation. The news of her drowning was currently making the rounds of the eighth graders and had landed in Ricky’s MySpace. We took the news as somberly as we could considering Julie Smith and I had never met. Julie Smith was young, and we, their children, were young, and that was enough for Mom and my aunt to be devastated.

  “So young,” Mom said, eyes on me.

  “Can you imagine?” Aunt Louisa said, eyes on Melissa, nine.

  “How did she die?”

  “She drowned,” Ricky explained.

  “In a pool?”

  “No,” Ricky said, done with his Crazy Bread and ripping Melissa’s in half, always a good older brother. “At a lake with her family.”

  It was almost imperceptible, but the next series of looks Mom and Aunt Louisa shared—pursed lips, tilted chins, and raised eyebrows—carried within it an entire conversation that in my mind went a little something like this:

  What was that child doing in a lake?

  “Vacation.”

  White Nonsense.

  White Nonsense.

  I don’t like you at lakes, my mom says without saying. I’d fall apart if you drowned.

  I commit then and there to never drown, thinking of excuses to use in the event of lake invitations in an imagined other life.

  You’d fall apart if I drowned.

  Mind you, this all happened in my head, while fully fondling some marble, so perhaps that look never actually took place.

  Despite it being penciled in on all of our calendars, we didn’t go back to Florida the following summer. Two plane tickets amount to $1,000. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that. Still, my relationship with swimming was problematic from that day forward. It will remain that way through college and into adulthood when I finally remedy the situation. We’ll get there.

  Ten

  Sure, I Guess I’ll Be Your Classic Name-Brand Cookie

  Located on the South Shore, the Collège Français was a barely private secondary school. Despite being nestled in the suburbs of Montreal, the midsize school managed to be as diverse as any future New York City subway. For roughly $2,000 a year—perhaps even a bit less, it’s hard to remember—the illusion of a high-end education was something most working families of immigrants on a budget could afford for their children. They imagined us, their kids, learning to speak a perfect idealized French, free of accent, in white and forest-green polos with dark blue slacks and black shoes.

  We were the at-risk offspring of immigrant men. The truth was, we were all misshapen and greasy, finding our way around each other, too afraid to em
brace any real delinquency and content to curse a lot. Boys were too shy to shower together, and after gym, our classroom smelled downright spicy. Our jocks played soccer: the varsity suburban Quebecois kind. Each day, I ride the bus to school and listen to my iPod. It’s during that stretch of time that I discover what an Oreo is.

  My middle school’s Black kids tended to come in three common subcategories: (1) the Thugs, (2) the Oreos, and (3) the Immigrants, which referred to the international kids from our student body; those Black kids who came from faraway countries where the rest of their families resided. Foreign Black. Different-language Black. Dashiki Black.

  If you didn’t fall squarely into one of the three, you would be designated according to your nearest classification. In the tenth grade, for instance, Leo was our African. He was tall, dark-skinned, and stoic with a heavy African accent. People liked him well enough from afar without having much to say to or about him. His name was solely omitted in the class-wide Attractiveness Ranking of the boys the girls did one day. Leo belonged to the “Immigrants,” and while I was an immigrant myself—born and raised in Haiti until the second grade—I did not want to fall into the same bin as Leo.

  People only paired up with him for team assignments when they had to. “You’re not friends with Leo,” Maxime, a kid from our grade, once complained. “You’re an ambassador to him.” I took it as an unspoken compliment. I wasn’t like Leo; I could be befriended by the Maximes of the school on equal footing.

  I stayed away from Leo. Two well-behaved Black kids with good grades start talking and pretty soon, they’re declared best friends and teachers put their desks together. They’re on the second page of the school pamphlet together with their thumbs up and the word Diversity! floating over their heads. Hell no. I would not be a Leo. I would make that horny attractiveness list, goddammit.

  For my part, I liked anime and manga, was completely uninterested in sports, and my favorite music was “basement white boy” punk rock (your Weezer, your Sum 41, your Panic-punctuation At The Disco) so naturally, I fell into category #2: Oreo.

  My Blackness was not “fake” in my mind but secondary; an aside to the equation. I didn’t quite know what to do with it, and to the eyes of many, my interests did not align with it. It was easily disregarded by friends who did not necessarily have the highest regard for cultural Blackness.

  And I, in turn, would smile through the parts of myself that were cringing, because all a kid wants is some friends. (People in search of an easy label to place on you love to guess an accent, by the way. After four identical conversations in a row, you kind of just want to yell, “Haitian Canadian—eff off.”)

  In the ninth grade, our history teacher, Mr. Mirault, is a large, once-redheaded man whose hair has turned completely white and who freckles easily. I almost wish we still had gluing hours so I could replicate him in construction paper, bringing him to life as I did Santa Claus.

  Mr. Mirault loves Black students. He loves all ethnic students, but Black ones in particular. We have a special place in his bypassed heart. He pats my shoulder when we file into class with him. The man had a history of humanitarian work that lived in framed photos of himself surrounded by Black children in front of brightly painted buildings with patted dirt as floors. I suspect he saw us, his Black students, as Dickensian street urchins, nebbish and impossibly earnest, pulling at his dress shirt for White Man Wisdom.

  On movie afternoons, his go-to choices are American History X, Malcolm X, and Hotel Rwanda. We end up seeing that last one twice. To him, a teaching career was the continuation of a lifetime of good work to make us rowdy immigrant children aware of racism. The man has a particular glistening hard-on for Black-on-Black genocides, subcategory Tutsis and Hutus. Every documentary on the Rwandan genocide is screened for us while other sections, away from his well-meaning supervision, get to watch The Matrix.

  “Racism is a poison,” he says, making benevolent eye contact with the only Black kids in the room of twenty-six bored preteens in the throes of puberty, me and a girl named Sora whom I do not like. The two of us share awkward looks when the movies turn gruesome and Mirault loudly moans his disapproval, stopping short of winking at us.

  As a modern boy with a Playstation 2 back home, I resent being reminded of this type of Blackness out in the world once a week for ninety minutes at a time. My classmates’ occasional yawns and glimpses at the gruesome footage of a movie like Hotel Rwanda feel personal. I don’t want them to imagine this as being my past. My house had two gardens. We had maids.

  I hate being associated with the Blackness Mirault traffics in. I don’t understand how this amounted to a history class, so I skip five or six classes in a row. I sit in a bus stop around the corner from the school building and read the mangas I’ve stuffed into my backpack until my mom finally gets a call.

  “School is not optional, ever,” my mom rages at me that night, angrier than she’s ever been. I slam the door to my room like a properly misunderstood teenager and she rants while ironing my uniform and then we don’t talk for two days. We’re a household of two, which feels right even in moments like this. Linkin Park gets it, and everyone else is a poser.

  I never again miss a single class with Mirault. I practice zoning out and nodding along to his rants while he makes meaningful eye contact with me, clearly wishing my insides were chocolate-stuffed instead of the regular standard Nabisco white filling.

  It’s not always hatred or disdain that makes your skin crawl. In fact, sometimes, it’s the exact opposite: Some people will easily love your Blackness. They will respond to it, gravitate toward it, see it before they even see the rest of you. And once they see it and classify it into their preferred category, they won’t bother to look any further. The rest of you is just a skeleton holding up that beautiful Black skin.

  Eleven

  How to Go through Life without Drowning, Part II

  As it turns out—and without taking away from the tragedy of those who’ve lost loved ones to drowning—it’s fairly easy for me not to drown.

  Occasionally, it takes renewed commitment.

  When I sat in front of The Shallows, a 2016 survival horror movie in which Blake Lively plays a surfer stalked by an unreasonably persistent great white, my sympathies were with the shark. The apex predator belonged in that water: Blake Lively did not. I could not buy into the fiction of this seven-foot-tall blond woman desperately trying to survive through the night. You could have been home, Blake. You’re playing a beautiful young woman, full of life . . . Go get some takeout and go home: Why are you in the ocean by yourself? Why didn’t your mama say no? Blake didn’t respect the water and thus had to pay for her sins.

  To this day, I tend to victim-blame people who come back from vacation with green hair or complaining about anything other than getting sunburnt at the beach. Slipping on a rock while climbing waterfalls during your spring break trip to Cenote Tres Oches of Homún, Mexico, and breaking an ankle? Why were you there? Who told you that would be a good idea? Were you taking a selfie? Like, why would you put yourself in that position? Respect the waters, for they are deep and insidious.

  (This will all be 40 percent more poignant if I end up drowning one day.)

  I’M FIFTEEN, and Francis L. invites everyone to his parents’ cabin in the middle of the summer. I’m invited in the sense that I was included in the email that went out to thirty-eight people. The few who were omitted are purposeful and fuel hours of suburban high school gossip across phones and passive-aggressive Facebook posts. We get bored in the summers.

  My mom is initially thrilled. She’s always happy when I get out of the house and socialize. She doesn’t want our fatherless home to leave me asocial and misshapen. I understand where she’s coming from; I’m already getting fat. Like me, she takes a lot of comfort in the few instances in which I socialize on a large scale like this. The occasional big party, or a night out to Montreal in a group with three girls from the nerd lunchroom table we share. The table of high school g
irls who discreetly carry notebooks dedicated to tracking their diets and lemonades laced with cayenne pepper to school and where I’m always welcome and feel at home.

  “Go! Go have fun!” Mom says. She’s working now, and no longer just sits there watching me go to school with crisp freshly ironed clothes.

  “It’s at a lake,” I say. “In Magog.”

  My mom’s eyes widen.

  It’s an unspoken rule of our new two-head household. Local pools in backyards were fine. They’re communal holes—relatively safe, transparent, uniform, guarded—in which I’m free to paddle around; but natural holes, those always get that look from her. Julie Smith’s memory has not faded.

  “You’ll go to the next one,” she says, apologetically. It’s fine. I’ll go to the next one.

  As it turns out, being an only child comes with extraordinary pressure not to die. I sometimes wonder if my mother’s Black worry was any different from the worry of mothers everywhere. Probably not. My friends’ white moms probably also worried about the strange bodies of water their kids would occasionally wander into without supervision. Maybe every mother carries that same burden of worry, regardless of race or creed. Maybe what was different in my mother’s case was the additional dread that having taken a Black child from Haiti only to have them drown in a lake of Magog, Quebec, would indeed be nothing short of “nonsense.”

  Twelve

  Boomerangs Come Back

  I’M FIFTEEN and, somewhere between Linkin Park and My Chemical Romance blaring, with some mainstream Kanye slipping in, and the near-constant state of boyish self-discovery that I find myself in within my bedroom, I don’t see it coming. Him coming back, that is.

  “Why are we talking about Dad again?” I ask bluntly with a frown when he comes up in too precise of an anecdote, free of vitriol, around the dinner table.