by Ben Philippe
This poor, thickly accented man has moved the couches to the back of the common room and is actually practicing his backstroke on the floor. There’s a swimming video on his propped-open laptop, and it’s the most endearing thing in the world.
“You’re not going to fail,” I say, helping him move the furniture back as quietly as possible. Our living situation is a suite in the sense that introverts who did not want to take risks of rooming with friends could opt to live in a row of adjacent singles with common bathrooms and kitchens as shared spaces.
“No one fails the swim test,” I reassure him. “They’ll let you take it again, even in the summer after graduation if you don’t manage to get the check mark.” It’s truly a ridiculous tradition.
“I have to go back to China,” he answers, voice already wavering before going on to describe the nightmare that was getting a missing piece of paperwork to the school from his small town.
Somewhere in our chats, I had adopted the persona of chill, laid-back Black friend to Tuo. I know this because he had once laughed and said, without a hint of acid to his voice, that I was “the cool friendly Black guy of our suite,” and something about the language, cultural, and follicle barriers had made it impossible not to chuckle along.
“It’s also very nerve-wracking. Swimming in front of other people,” Tuo eventually says and sighs.
He was right, there. With a double major in economics and mathematics, Tuo didn’t have the time or the bandwidth to top it off with a weekly swimming course. Being shirtless and practicing your backstroke in the same pool as Columbia’s hairless and chiseled swim team is nothing short of emotional trauma. I was offended on both of our behalfs.
“You have to take it too, right?” he asks. I nod for him to follow me to my room where I hand him a beer from my mini-fridge filled with groceries from the CTown supermarket north of campus encroaching into Harlem, with non-Ivy League prices.
“I have to take it.”
“You know how to swim?” Tuo inquires, accepting the beer.
“My dad has a pool,” I say, casually. I’ve gotten into the habit of lying like this sometimes around school. For no purpose other than to maybe wipe the footprints I’m leaving behind and confuse my story.
He nods and looks at me in a way that I’ve looked at dozens of people in my two years here—with a confused awe at what my life must default to once finals are out of the way at the end of every semester. Somewhere along the way, I had soaked up enough privilege and cockiness that I did not plan on swimming the swim test to collect that diploma.
“Can you not swim?”
I mean, look: if you drop me into a very still lake fifty feet or less from the shore, I will not die. Any other situation, I might die. But as a Black person who already has a history of family diabetes coupled with a true addiction to sugar, I have enough of a survival instinct to stay away from larger bodies of water. I’m not backflipping off a natural waterfall with you, you absolute methhead.
Black people being less likely to know how to swim has everything to do with them having less access. You drop a white kid who didn’t live by the beach, summer at the lake, use summer as a verb, vacation at water parks, or take swimming lessons at the Y, and he probably can’t swim either.
As a Black man who doesn’t know how to swim with any sense of forward momentum, my drowning survival tactic is to idle until the rescuers make their way to me or to negate the risk entirely by sitting on the rocks checking my news feed while friends jump off waterfalls when on vacation.
Sure, I could potentially manage and waddle my way forward for three lengths of the pool, surrounded by chiseled classmates without hints of man-tits, but I also resented this ritualistic humiliation being levied against my freaking Ivy goddamn League degree after dozens of essays, exams, and all-nighters.
Could I have taken the test and passed? We’ll never know.
In the Japanese anime and manga Naruto, which introduces us to a world of paramilitary ninja villages, young ninjas are expected to take a written exam early on in their formation. Bear with me here. The exam is extraordinarily difficult by design and the whole point isn’t to answer the questions but to find an inconspicuous way to cheat in a way that reflects your specific set of skills. So, the telepath takes over a nearby proctor’s body and quickly memorizes the answers; the sound ninjas—there are sound ninjas—tap the answers to one another; the dog whisperer whispers to his dog; and so on and so forth. (Hinata just shows her exam to Naruto so he can copy the answers from her because she has low self-esteem and is truly a sloppy outline of a character, a fact I intend to break down over 390 pages in my next oeuvre.)
This is how I see the Columbia Swim Test. Actually taking the test was for peasants lacking in imagination. The memory of an ocular conversation between my aunt and mom had convinced me not to mess with large bodies of water and thus avoid every given opportunity to learn to swim. Resourcefulness will now be required. Yes, that is how badly I don’t want to take my shirt off in front of the swim team, who would surely cease practicing immediately, point at me, burst into uproarious laughter, and then give me some horrible nickname.
My friend Colleen is getting an exemption from it because of a note from her therapist she’s trying to seduce. Two boys from one of my fiction seminars who went to Harvard-Westlake talk about how they got their former swim coach to “send an email.” Nora intends to play the long game and delay it to the summer after graduation and swim elsewhere in a pool managed by her friend.
For my part, there is no mind-swiping in the works. No whispering dogs, or insects, or mirrors. All I have is an ID card with a bad, featureless photo—and that’s all it will take.
I meet him at the gates of Columbia, by the 116th Street/Columbia University subway station. The ad he is replying to is simple and straightforward.
[ACTIVITY PARTNERS]
“LOOKING FOR MALE AFRICAN AMERICAN SWIMMER”
(THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2011)
Asking for a photo via email would have been a risk, but I swiped his name through social media and got the sense that we were at least the same hue. Up close, we look nothing alike. He has sharper features, is taller, skinnier. I have no doubt that he’s an actual swimmer and spends a considerable number of hours at the gym. His nails are unhealthy, I notice; chipped at the base and glistening like glued-on props. You wouldn’t even buy us as cousins from a crooked family tree. No Robert here.
He has acting aspirations, which my email reply avoided. It is “sort of” acting and could lead to other opportunities. If I’m ever casting a film, I’ll have a proven Black swimmer.
“Right.” He nods as we chitchat our way through campus, a good foot apart in height. “So, what is this?”
He’s hesitant until I hold up the ID.
“A Black person didn’t take this photo,” he says with a snort, and it’s the first smile I’ve gotten from him.
“Nope.” I sigh, relieved.
He collects half of the money, takes the ID, which will be scanned twice—once at the turnstiles, face down, and later as he gets in line to take the exam. I picked a crowded time when, presumably, the administrators will be slightly overwhelmed by the flow of students. He stops at the steps of the Dodge Fitness Center, takes in the size of the building, and backtracks to me.
“What if they catch me?”
I look back at the school and then at him. I have no exit strategy. Just the confidence of an Ivy Leaguer getting increasingly used to cutting administrative corners.
“. . . They won’t catch you,” I assure him.
He nods slowly. He’s counting the money more than my words but eventually goes in. Thirty-seven minutes later, he comes out with a damp T-shirt collar under his zip-up. If his hair is still wet, I can’t tell. He shuffles his feet while collecting my profuse thanks.
“How was it?”
“I followed your directions, found the pool pretty easily.”
“And the test?”
&n
bsp; “It’s swimming.” He shrugs and collects the other half of his money, vaguely unhappy with the transaction. There’s no easy chatter. He’s withholding now, and I get the sense that he’s mad at me but won’t disclose why unless pushed. I don’t push and thank him for his services with a professional handshake. It’s 2011 and there’s a gig economy ahead—we should both get used to doing things we don’t want to for a bank account that traffics in the red.
Later that evening, I will receive an email that notifies me that my swim test requirement has been fulfilled. Of course it has. You can find anything on Craigslist. Apartments, roommates, sublets, Missed Connections, fellow misanthropes to complain about the ethnic people moving in in the Rants & Raves section—or even narcotics if that is what you are looking for. (I’m not. I’m a good little boy; I’m just saying.) Even Black bodies.
That night, after reading the 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup and underlining a few key quotes for the paper I have to finish drafting that weekend, I dream of the plantations of Louisiana. Of being a cog in that system. After the day’s events, the book stays with me in a way I don’t like. The writing is too good, the words are too precise. Solomon’s despair gets under your skin. The heat and endless fields. In a few years, I will step out of the Austin airport, committed to the rigors of a graduate program, take a fistful of the Texan sun right to the jaw, and think of this dream again.
In this dream I watch two men in rags the color of the Haitian flag run with danger behind them. They run like the ninjas from Naruto with their arms thrown back behind them. The danger gets closer and one of them, the fatter one, gains the lead, only to trip his running partner, who tumbles behind as he himself keeps running.
I wake up in the middle of the night, parched. I fell asleep without showering. I realize I haven’t showered since Tuesday and it’s not Tuesday. In the kitchen, I lean forward and drink water straight from the tap, maybe just for the drama of it. I notice the common-room chairs pushed aside again and take a 4 a.m. shower in the empty communal bathrooms. Snap out of it. I touch my lower back, wet after a shower, and try to imagine what the lash of a whip feels like. Not a cinematically directed cloud of red mist, but the actual opening gash of a whip slicing air and flesh. I wonder what holding a whip feels like; if it rings up your arm. If you care. Snap out of it.
I sit on my bed, wet, and finish the essay in one stream by the time the sun starts to rise. I email it to the professor, six days early and without proofreading. I want it away from me. Snap out of it. Keep waddling forward and pretend it’s the same as swimming. Pretend there’s a clear shore ahead.
The American stereotype that Black people can’t swim did not come out of thin air.1 Across the United States, more than ten people drown every day, and Black children are drowning at something close to three times the rate of white children. Sixty-four percent of Black children can’t swim. These are regurgitated statistics I’m feeding you right now, yes, but that doesn’t make them any less true.
This is not genetic. Our bones aren’t heavier, our lungs don’t take in more water. The reason is the same as for so many other things in this country: years of racial segregation. White public officials and white swimmers did not want Black men to interact with white women in such an intimate public space. Jim Crow laws, baby. Racial discrimination became normalized and institutionalized across the country.
In 1964, during a staged jump-in by protestors against racial segregation at the Monson Motor Lodge in Saint Augustine, Florida, the owner, James Brock, poured acid into his own pool to get people out. Imagine! Some would rather pour acid into their own pool than let Black people near it.
These days, it’s regular gentrification that is the driving force behind modern-day pool segregation. Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of private club pools developed in suburban communities. Meanwhile, public pools, our previous notion of them, are also disappearing. Since 2009, more than 1,800 public pools have closed, and there are now more than 10 million residential pools compared to the 300,000 public pools across the country.
I’M TWENTY-SEVEN and watch a documentary on the civil rights movement. And then another. And another. When I can’t find the full films, I settle for YouTube clips. I learn all these things and catch up on American history I did not have to take as an international college student. That visa was seen as overpowering the face on my ID card and somehow, these things are optional to a pristine education.
After absorbing all these facts, I feel a pit of shame at that missed opportunity back in college because that’s what it was: a gift I slapped away. I look up swimming classes at a fitness center on the Upper West Side. It’s relatively expensive, but I’m not as broke as I used to be these days. The class consists of twelve people. Two kids, siblings, wear arm floaties. The gray-haired woman looks shockingly like my aunt Atalante and I imagine her putting on an all-day frock the moment she gets home, hair still smelling of chlorine. Seven of us are Black.
The instructor is a young and peppy Latinx woman, Brenda. She makes us all feel like toddlers, and we laugh at our awkwardness diving under the water, holding air in our lungs. It is nowhere as stunning or fulfilling as a screening of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. The eight-week process is appropriately humiliating but less so than when surrounded by Ivy League classmates.
I still swim there, though only occasionally. I keep my headphones in while changing and affect an air of casualness about the whole thing. As if I’ve been doing this all my life at the country club. My backstroke is coming along and it’s good cardio. Mind you, I will never fully trust lakes. (Also? Abs. Like, the visible outline of abs. Purr for me.)
Twenty-One
Song of the South
AUSTIN, TX
YEAR: 2011
POPULATION: 828,694 (BLACK POPULATION: 7.7 PERCENT)
My time in Austin, Texas, which began in 2011 and ended in 2014, was a strange three-year stretch. In hindsight, not much happened. There is no tale of drug overdose ahead. I wasn’t chased down the side of the road by a truckload of Aryan ghosts.
One minute I was twenty-two and the next twenty-five, with a master’s in fiction and screenwriting from one of the most prestigious programs in America that will still have me browsing Craigslist for fast-paying gigs and guessing the email addresses of literary agents for a few years to come.
I spent three years wrestling with the promise of change and growth that being a full-time writer would, should bring. I sighed and drummed my pencil to the clock like Britney Spears in that puberty-triggering video of “. . . Baby One More Time,” but the flashback and colorful dance sequence never quite happened. I went to Texas for stories, and in the end, only have a half-deck of anecdotes, false starts, and a few memorable faces. No story.
It’s late August 2011 and I’ve just moved to Austin, Texas, for a literary fellowship.
Texas is a big and fictional location for me: a part of America that, until now, has been relegated to entertainment kitsch and stereotypes. But, the Michener Center for Writers is the golden ticket. It’s not just a literary fellowship, it’s the literary fellowship. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is slightly higher in the rankings but it doesn’t come with as generous or steady of a stipend. Plus, it doesn’t let you pursue screenwriting. You get a stipend, enough to live on full-time. It’s the closest to a paid writer I will be for a few years after graduation. An old-school writer with a patron. The syllabus is ridiculous. Fairytales, Fiction Workshop, Class in America, Screenwriting. The grades don’t matter; the work does.
Austin is a town at the center of cool. It’s a liberal haven in a conservative state. The best of Americana. Your future is set. After this, you’ll be an author. You’ll have salt to your earthiness. You might develop a twang. You might drive a truck.
The New Yorker in me rolls his eyes at the WELCOME TO AUSTIN, PLEASE DON’T MOVE HERE banner at the small, colorful airport. The signage is clear throughout the airport, the men are tall, and the undergr
aduates are flowing in, burnt-orange shorts and longhorn paraphernalia at the ready. A bee stings me on the nose coming out of the Austin Airport, and I’m already over this wretched state that feels like a new uncharted continent.
I’m also suddenly Black again. I was Black in New York, in a way that was unimportant and trivial. Where it’s rarer to step into a train without a dozen people like me. I’m not the only Black guy, by any means, but I am a Black guy, in a way that’s only noticeable after New York.
But it doesn’t matter, because, Michener, baby. Suck my nipples, rejection slush piles of the world! Their faculty is peppered with literary icons. Denis Johnson. Elizabeth McCracken. Zadie Smith is visiting this semester!
Their students aren’t writers or celebrities; they’re authors. With books and stuff. It’s the year of The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. There’s a cardboard poster in the lobby of the white, homey house that doubles as our department with a classroom upstairs. It’s the sort of environment that demands to be the backdrop to deep introspection and great art.
It’s a community of writers, and marketing will lead you to believe that is a good thing for us feral creatures to seek and develop. A community of peers.
My classmates are playwrights, fiction writers, and poets. Most of them are Americans. There are screenwriting courses in the class catalog, too, but no one in our incoming class of eleven defines themselves as such. The poets and playwrights, however, were poets and playwrights before they could hold a pen.
