Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  You might never visit Haiti, and I don’t blame you for that. It’s not the prized touristic destination that it once was. I myself can’t describe the blue vistas of Haitian beaches since my last clear memory of Haiti was of two maids wishing us Godspeed, concerned about their next meals. Try as I might, I can’t remember the airport or even the flight into Quebec. I remember how cold and tingly the air was, and the Christmas lights at every streetlight of Montreal, which felt like a decadent dream.

  But as I age and my memory fades, I know that Haiti will continue to be conjured up in similarly unflattering lights. A crater. A crime-ridden cesspool, the mecca of the loud, bad, Black people.

  My disgust, anger, all-around beef with Trump isn’t as a Haitian. It comes from the part of myself that now identifies as American; the one that America taught better. The country I call my borrowed home these days and whose greatness was assembled and built by immigrants from all corners of the globe.

  But you will, in your daily life, run into Haitians and their children; fellow Americans whose country of origin the president adamantly only sees as the embodiment of an ill-defined foreign Black grossness. And when you do, you’ll hopefully remember that Haitians are not faceless AIDS carriers, as the president of the United States once said without consequences.

  You’ll at least know one thing about Haiti:

  That the 1791 revolution that freed the island of Haiti from French Colonial rule was and remains the only self-liberated slave uprising that led to the founding of a state ruled by nonwhite former captives.

  That’s objectively pretty cool, right? I’ve repeated it three times so that it sticks. It will not balance out the scales of everything you will keep hearing about Haiti, but if you take one thing from all my nonsense, let it be that. Imagine the fear and joy in that moment, all the way back in 1791, when a bunch of people who look similar turned to one another and realized that what they were seeing were people, and not tools as they’d been told their entire lives. That their scars were unnatural cysts inflicted upon them by other people no weaker or stronger than them. People who also could be made to feel pain. Imagine that first room full of hands realizing that their broken bodies discarded into piles upon expiration could lift barrels and toil the earth, yes, but also make fists and decide which way to aim them.

  It’s taken years for me to come close to accepting that my Blackness means something; that I wasn’t simply born Black the same way I was born right-handed or able to curl my tongue. I was born into Blackness. That false simplicity is something you convince yourself of in order to fit in and avoid drawing the eye.

  (And if you are distantly wondering what about the unfair inability to feel pride for being born into your whiteness right now, you and I are no longer friends. Every corner of the world, from museums to history, from Cartoon Network to CNN, from Westeros to Hogwarts, already cheers for your whiteness. I’ve been reading it since before I spoke a word of English.)

  This Blackness of mine is both the same as the Blackness of some wailing Black infant born that exact same minute as I was in some hospital of Springfield, Any State, USA, and also something else entirely.

  And while that child and I might have grown up rolling our eyes or screaming at the world with the exact same distrust and anger, my Blackness is specific. It’s Haitian.

  Twenty-Seven

  Smile Through It

  I’M TWENTY-FOUR again and sitting in a classroom of the UT-Austin campus, a good thirty-eight minutes before the fiction workshop is set to start. I like to give myself time to hike across campus and recover from desiccating from exposure to the Austin sun. James Magnuson, our professor and everyone’s favorite would-be granddad, isn’t there yet. Jane Williams walks in early, too. She is a third-year southerner and a department powerhouse in the sense that she has already published a novel, which is a climbed Everest to those of us who haven’t been published yet. We rarely talk, but today I say something or other and she laughs, so a conversation tumbles.

  “You’re actually not standoffish at all, are you?” she notes with that hint of a polished southern twang.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugs.

  “You have a fight face on but then you talk and it’s like ‘Oh, hi, Ben!’ ”

  She mimics unexpectedly bumping into someone and looking delighted at the surprise. The conversation stays with me. That night, I stand in front of the mirror, practicing my face. I stretch my neck, studying its angles. I put tinfoil over my teeth to make them look like grills while I frown and grimace until my gums start to bleed. I try on a T-shirt and then a dress shirt to see if there is a notable difference in approachability. There is. Jane is right; my face on neutral is, could be perceived as, mean. I want to say “defiant,” but perhaps just unlikable. Dynamite cheekbones, though. Credit where credit is due, old man.

  This isn’t a Black thing, it’s a Ben thing. A part of me wonders if this was what Jolene had first spotted across that party. A dangerous, mean-faced Black thug.

  I practice smiling more often. Not simply raising the corners of my face, but a goofier, even more harmless smile. One that wrinkles my forehead upward like a Saint Bernard. I train myself to default to this smile, even at rest. It’s my personal sphincter-tightening Kegel exercise.

  Distantly, I wonder if all this face stretching will age me faster but ultimately decide, after coming up with a satisfied expression, that it may save my life. Being Black and looking mean in this country could kill you—or at the very least keep you lonely. I seek to avoid both. Smile, boy. After all, “Black don’t crack.”

  That bit of Black-skin mythos is, unfortunately, tragically, not true; our skin might stay youthful a bit longer, sure, but when it cracks, boy, does it crack. See: my uncle Arnold’s forehead. Cracked. Broken. Shattered. Shards all over—under the fridge, everywhere—and not enough glue or Retinol to pull it all back together. The man will look seventy through his fifties and beyond. (Sorry, Uncle.)

  I’M TWENTY-EIGHT and it’s becoming harder to keep smiling in America. I’m angry. I wake up angry, and my face naturally slips into what is, at its best, a weird rage rictus. The fight face is back.

  As much as I would like to, I cannot put all my rage on that microwaved Troll doll currently serving as president. Little by little, the world is growing more comfortable saying the quiet part out loud. Young YouTubers I expect to break down the latest episode of Game of Thrones instead speak of a Zionist agenda, and the likes are adding up. The news cycle now makes a distinction between “racist,” “white nationalist,” and “nationalist.”

  I walked around angry. Angry at the bright-smiled folks who still proudly claim “No Blacks or Asians, just a preference” when swiping through dating profiles, at the friends who tell tales of their grandmothers spewing racism at Thanksgiving like it’s a fun anecdote. I argue in my Twitter mentions (the practice of the deranged), and blame Obama for galvanizing the MAGA folks with his audacity. I also blame Oprah for not doing enough and Beyoncé for not holding a hunger strike, and myself for doing nothing about it beyond tweets. I delete all my tweets after every rant.

  But that’s still not enough anger. I’m equally angry at people joking about leaving America for Canada, rolling my eyes at their presumption that my adoptive motherland is a wide field of snow and simpletons, begging to be infected by this nonsense.

  “I’m serious,” a woman I don’t know says a few seats down the dinner table of a dinner party. “Toronto is lovely. I’m going to look into it.”

  No, you’re not, I think and then say, quieting down our corner of the dinner party. “Why lie? You’re not moving anywhere. You’re going to make sourdough bread in your apartment and tweet about Trump while secretly hoping he wins again because you like the sense of community it gives you to dump on him or whatever.”

  Yes, I’m occasionally mean. I am immediately downgraded from friendly to unstable acquaintance by the party host. I will not be invited to another dinner
again. It’s at times intoxicating, this new anger. My snark and witty banter have metastasized into a weird new anger I don’t quite know what to do with.

  “When did you get so political?” my coworker Crystal asks, walking back to work one day that year.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your social media,” she says. “It’s like, angry as hell, these days.”

  “Aren’t you mad?”

  “Of course I am! But that’s not productive. All this negativity.”

  “Apologies,” I say. “I’ll retweet one of your cactus plant shelves to make up for it tonight.”

  “I didn’t vote for Trump, dude!” she snaps, after a beat.

  No, but Nassau County, New York, hasn’t been declared a universal shithole. You can find him disgusting from the sidelines, knowing these nerds in khakis and tiki torches marching for whiteness are not headed toward your house or the houses of people who look like you. You’re still thriving under him.

  Crystal purses her lips as if to signal she won’t be adding any more gas to this fire I’m so invested in starting. I wait for the easy retort that doesn’t come: You’re thriving too, Ben.

  “I think we shouldn’t talk about this,” I manage after being unable to tap into my go-to defuser smile. The one I reserve for tense situations. “I’m not, y’know, sleeping well.”

  “It’s okay.” Crystal smiles without believing me. “This is hard on everyone.”

  Every flare-up like this comes with a mention of my not sleeping well, or of me drinking too much coffee, or my considering adopting a “screenless bedroom” to center myself. It’s all lies. I sleep instantly and dreamlessly; I don’t own a coffee machine; and I nod off around 11 p.m. on most nights.

  This anger is untethered to any outside stimulus. This country and its shiny lights have bamboozled me. It’s illogical, but I realize that being a Black boy in Canada had not prepared me for the task of being a Black man in America. It’s a boss level that I don’t have the right weapons for. I’m using a slingshot and boomerang when what I need are arrows and magic spells.

  I also know that I will run out of people soon, if I keep this going. I’ll be the mercurial friend kept at a distance because people don’t want to think of themselves as actively unfriending a Black guy for being too angry about the world. I don’t want to be alone again, so my politics make way for a polite and functioning sort of social hypocrisy.

  “How about a rule?” I preempt, setting the three large bags of Chinese food delivered at my door down on the counter of my kitchen and reaching for the plates. “No politics tonight. No Trump, none of that.”

  My three guests all but audibly sigh in relief, like some dread has left them and they no longer regret RSVP’ing to my invite. Four others couldn’t make it that night and were pretty busy for the foreseeable future. It’s okay: I like leftovers.

  Twenty-Eight

  How to Live Strictly on Common Grounds

  No one is apolitical. Not a single person. The few people I’ve met who proudly consider themselves as such tend to assume that not paying attention, not voting, isn’t in itself a privilege. That it is not in itself proof that their day-to-day existence won’t be affected by choosing to stay on the sidelines, tending to literal gardens. The fact of the matter is that if you have a life that leaves you foolproof to politics, your politics approximate to “privileged.” Saying this out loud, however, isn’t always conducive to post-2016 friendships. I never mind a political disagreement; I just pick them wisely these days. Self-care and what have you.

  Johnny, for instance, is a friend I met during my sixteen-months-and-three-weeks stint working at a performing arts venue on the Upper West Side, teaching on the side and writing young adult manuscripts at night. He is Irish Catholic with a better work ethic than me, big blue eyes, and occasional attempts at a full vivid-red beard that he will grow for a few weeks and then shave off, unwilling to power through the awkward stages of patchiness.

  I love Johnny, and post-2016 elections, I find myself reminding myself of that fact more often than before. Somehow, we find ourselves discussing affirmative action, of all things. We are both usually more careful but today, the topic slips through.

  “Do you know how much student debt I have?” he says, always honest and steadfastly himself even while inhaling a burrito during our lunch hour. “Some people—who aren’t even citizens, by the way—end college without owing a single cent, and I’m going to be paying this off until I’m like fifty. How is that fair? I’m not some banker. I work in the performing arts! For kids!”

  I’m one of the said people who ended college without owing a cent, and Johnny and I both know it. I acknowledge this privilege without feeling bad about it. In fact, it floods my stomach with relief and gratitude whenever I walk by the gates of Columbia.

  “You had a two-something GPA in high school!” I exclaim in return. “What’s unfair about kids with good grades getting scholarships?”

  Sure, I’ve made it personal because why shouldn’t it be personal for both of us?

  “Two-point-four, dick. Both my parents worked all day,” he continues. “I had a kid brother to look after and part-time jobs since I was fourteen.”

  “I’m not saying you didn’t have a full plate, dude,” I say. “But those kids with perfect GPAs did, too. And maybe a language barrier! And, oh yeah, the legacy of slavery, too, for Black ones. That little nugget.”

  He rolls his eyes, and the buckets of bright red paint start stacking up in my mind.

  “Irish people were slaves, too, you know.”

  “Here we go!” I scoff, pushing my plate forward and leaning back to cross my arms, somehow knowing this was coming. “White people love to say that Irish people were slaves, too. I swear you cum to that crap.”

  I start using bigger words, for no reason other than the fact that I can. Slavery belongs to African American history, so of course white people would try to co-opt it and make it fashion.

  “It’s a myth, by the way,” I say, biting into three stacked nachos. “Irish slavery? Yeah, that’s just conflated history that confounds seventeenth- and eighteenth-century facts about Irish servitude with Africa’s chattel slavery. Propagated by white nationalists for two centuries now.”

  “T-they were slaves! Black people don’t have a monopoly on slavery!” he says, getting loud, though not red, because Johnny doesn’t redden. “Slaves have existed throughout history.”

  “Are you kidding?” I ask, Haitian and louder, wondering how we got there so fast. “Irish colonial labor is not the same as American fucking slavery that built the bones of an entire country that still treats them like fractions.”

  “That’s—You’re Canadian!” he says with an angry laugh, half-nervous. “Haitian Canadian, whatever!”

  “Still Black, thank you very much.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Like you’d ever let anyone forget?”

  A better Ben—see also: taller Ben, sexier Ben—would be able to calmly and detachedly explain to Johnny that no ethnic kid took his spot at Harvard; that his privilege isn’t about the gates that are opened for you but the bags of sand he doesn’t have to go through the world carrying. This would all end in a hug. This Ben, unfortunately, does not exist.

  It’s Mean Ben who has something to say here. Something witty and intellectually unimpeachable that leaves Johnny feeling outmatched while highlighting the hypocrisy of his entire belief system.

  Johnny is upset and I could match his red with mine and leave the walls of this at-capacity Mexican restaurant bloody. In truth, part of me wants to. My mother went to high school with fifteen-year-olds at forty, you privileged little twat.

  Instead, I answer, “I get why you’re mad.”

  I stop myself there and we chew in silence for a while, separately defusing in the corners of our own brains.

  “I’m just saying,” Johnny then says, almost apologetic but not quite after another burrito bite, “like, the system is unfair for ever
yone, all over.”

  “The system is bullshit, dude.” I nod.

  It’s a universal platitude we can both take comfort in, and move into the blue again. If I can vent my anger over a president who just happens to share Johnny’s skin color, I can also listen to his rant about some tilted system that, in his mind, prioritizes people who look like me over people who look like him.

  If that anecdote outburst paints a problematic picture of Johnny or myself, well, you’re entirely not wrong. People are problematic. It has been my experience that they’re puzzle pieces that only “mostly” fit and never quite seamlessly. Only if you commit and give two pieces a good pounding, they might.

  I know that Johnny also loves the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in a borderline unhinged way, like you do. Johnny will likewise text you thoughtful memes and reaction GIFs curated to your specific interests, even if he has to Google five pages deep to find the correct one. Johnny will show up on a Sunday, having trekked to Harlem from Long Island to help you with a work assignment that leaves you completely out of your depth.

  There are, as I’ve come to find out, a lot of Johnnys out in the world. Some I’ve vanquished without ever looking back, but others I can make work. Johnny is a great person, and my life would be impossibly lessened by his absence. You are what you stand for, and I stand for this occasional friction.

  One day we might both hit that red zone and tumble into a topic that’s too sensitive to dance past or compartmentalize. He’ll go to his Roman Catholic roots, and I’ll meet him with my arrogant, Angry Black Man fight face. I already know that in the grand scheme of things, I’ll probably have the moral high ground. But I do not wish for that moment to happen.