by Ben Philippe
You’re seven or eight, and your world is not Creole anymore. “Do you know what tomorrow is?” Mrs. Germaine asks you on October 30, apart from the other students. “Do you have Halloween in Haiti?”
You don’t want to go to school the next day. You have clothes that adapt to the changing weather. No immigrant family allocates money for a day of make-believe when budgeting for this strange country. Please, God, don’t make me go to school. Ship me back to Haiti, I don’t care! They’re all going to be ninjas, and Batman, and princesses, and I won’t be anything!
“He’s going to school,” Dad scoffs from the kitchen, watching TV and eating without looking at you or your mom. You wish he wasn’t here.
“Mom,” you plead again. You know she would be happy to let you stay at home if it was just her.
“I’m thinking,” she says.
We’re poor here and are still settling in. We don’t have money for things like costumes you only wear for one day. She ties one of her big scarves around your neck and puts you in one of her paisley blouses with a belt around your waist. She inexplicably puts a line of lipstick on both of your cheeks and rubs them in with both thumbs.
“There! You’re a pirate now.” She smiles. “It’ll be fine. There will be candy.”
“That’s not a costume,” Simon, a tiny robot whose chest plate lights up, says during math hour later that day. George snickers with him in agreement. Simon licks his thumb and wipes it across my cheek. “You’re just Black like usual.”
Maude, a nice girl with fun erasers, raises her hand as soon as she sees and proceeds to reach for the ceiling until Mrs. Germaine finally calls on her.
“Rubeintz is crying.” She’s a well-meaning little narc.
“No, I’m not,” you say, sticking your head inside your school desk, a metal box with a wooden top where you keep your notebooks inside. “I’m just looking for my ruler!” It makes no sense, but it doesn’t have to.
“Kevin, George, Rubeintz,” Mrs. Germaine snaps from the board. “Stop playing around back there or no candy later!”
You’re fourteen, and your world is French. You’re walking home from school to your condo with Mom on the South Shore of Montreal and have your new iPod headphones in.
An angry, white man with a gray mustache and no hair pulls his blue sedan right next to you at the bus stop. “Hey, le noir!” (“Hey, blackie!”) You remove your headphones, and he repeats himself. “I said, pull up your damn pants here!”
They’re not loose, you bald bitch. That’s the whole point! “They used to fashionably sag a little, but my ass is expanding, sir!” you wish you’d screamed back as he drives away, but you didn’t. You almost recognize him. He lives around here. His neighborhood is changing and he’s afraid, you tell yourself. You never scream. Dad’s lessons run deep:
Fe Respow. Fait Ton Respect. Earn your respect.
Years later, famous sociologist Shamus Khan will define “respectability politics” at the board of his sociology lecture in the bowels of Knox Hall, clicking something into place.
You’re fifteen, and your world is French. You get into the habit of pressing your hands into your chest whenever your stretch or yawn, trying to push the nascent man-tits back in.
“You’re fat now,” Alex Yi notes flatly while you’re waiting to file into geography class. “All Black people are either super fit or just fat as hell. You’re the fat-as-hell kind.”
He’s big, too; the big-and-tall kind. He’ll be big all his life and thus carries it better. Your fat wobbles and weaves, expands and contracts. You adopt a new uniform under your school uniform; an undershirt a size too small, tucked in, followed by two polo shirts on top of it. You pop both collars like Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl. This slims down your man-tits. Scratch that: this elegantly contours your man-tits. You know a real man wouldn’t care about that, but you do.
You’re eighteen, and your world is English. You have to fulfill three science requirements to graduate and you’re—
Fucked. Wow, you are just so fucked. The Science of Psychology exam is around the corner, and you’ve done too much creative writing and essay vomiting to train your brain in analytics again. You’re a literary hipster now. Case in point: you have chosen to study in a bar in the middle of the afternoon because two hours ago, it was quiet. You never think ahead. More importantly, you’re fucked, fuckity, fucked—
“Can I sit with you?” someone says.
“What?”
She’s already sitting down across from you when you look up.
“This guy is being creepy,” she repeats, looking over her shoulder. “Can I sit with you for a bit?”
You look over at the bar and a guy with a bubble vest over a plaid shirt is shaking his head at you, pretending to smirk, but clearly annoyed. His prey has made it into the force field.
“Um, yeah, of course,” you say, moving your books aside to make room for her purse. You know why she picked your booth.
“Thanks.” She smiles and then starts browsing her phone. She doesn’t want to give you the wrong idea either. You exist as a threat of violence trying to memorize a paper on Positive Reinterpretation of Negative Emotional Images. You end that class with a C minus because science is nonsense.
You’re twenty-five, and your world is English. Texan English. With a touch of y’alls and Howdoyoudos.
You get home at 8:42 a.m. with a headache, still smelling like a stranger’s Axe Chocolate. The air-conditioning in your apartment is already low, and you kick it into the tundra and give yourself an AC cold. You still can’t fall asleep, and it’s only after taking a shower that you realize you’re wearing the wrong underwear. These are a lighter gray than your gray boxer briefs and a different brand than the bundle you buy. The sexiness of an anonymous Craigslist hookup is instantly vanquished by the fact that you sat in a cab with the aggressively skidmarked underwear of another man.
Two days later, you get an email from that Craigslist address you never expected to hear from again. It reads: “He found your underwear! You ruined my life!!!”
You’re on the outside of dramatic betrayal and hurled plates. You imagine your very own version of the poster of 1975’s Mandingo, with a cucked boyfriend in tears against a blood-orange painted backdrop with a tag that reads:
“Expect the savage. The sensual. The shocking. The sad. The powerful. The shameful . . . Now you are ready for Mandingo 2012, starring Ben Philippe.”
You can’t think of a reply so you don’t send one. Maybe that’s the easiest story for anyone to write in the end; collide into other people’s lives and leave them slightly wrecked around the edges? You’ll take it. It’s a good story but you have no friends to tell it to in this entire state. You’re lonely here, you realize. Maybe you’ve been lonely everywhere.
In training yourself to be less eager and to push people away, you’ve untrained yourself to doing the reverse motion. You wish you could move the furniture around, lie flat on the living room floor, and practice the motion of pulling them back in again without the danger of drowning. Somewhere along the way, you’ve made yourself into an outside dog of a human being. The type that should only be let in with careful supervision and the good carpet rolled up.
You’re twenty-six, and your world is English. You’re back in New York City at last, and Mark wants to start running together. As a lifestyle choice.
You say yes but then when the time comes to start jogging, you plop down on the couch, making yourself go limp, lazy, and barefoot in your basketball shorts. Your personal mascot is now Garfield, an aged cat who will never trim down like that asshole in the hat.
“No, dude,” Mark whines, sweatband on and ready. “You promised.”
“I’m a liar, Mark,” you say, dragging yourself counterclockwise around the couch until he’s upside down and you’re the Cheshire Cat. “You’ll learn that about me.”
“Ben!”
“I can’t afford running shoes right now, you butt,” you sigh, embarrassed. You
wiggle your toes near his head, hoping to gross him out of the entire endeavor.
He stares at your bare no-longer-ashy toes. “Really?”
“Really.”
You’re an Ivy League cautionary tale with seventy dollars in the bank account. You still have boxes in Texan storage, no money to get them back, and you’ll snap your shins right there in Riverside Park if you try running with your all-season pair of Timbs. There’s no grace, as it turns out, in being a starving artist. When you attempt to split a late $52 charge over three cards and two are denied, a T-Mobile operator with a loud keyboard tells you, “Never mind, hun. You’ve got another month. Just go for a walk, okay?”
“Okay, wait,” Mark says before disappearing into his room and then yours, and coming back with a box with a swoosh and a pair of socks from the laundry basket on your bed.
He grabs your bare feet, joins them, and flips you around the couch.
“Let go of me!” you protest with the enthusiasm of a cat letting itself move around inside a sunbeam. “This is a violation of my autonomy and of—”
“Shut up,” he commands with a laugh. “God, you talk so much!”
His dog watches as curious as you are as Mark plops on his coffee table and places your foot between his thighs, unrolling a sock around it with a dedicated frown.
“You want me to sweat into your new shoes?”
“My mom mailed me two pairs and we’re both size tens.” They’re very good shoes. Flyknit with untouched white soles. You suspect he was saving these white ones for special occasions until a few moments ago.
“These are yours now.”
“What? No way, dude. I’m not—”
“Look, I’ll run barefoot right next to you if I have to,” he says, now lacing with a smile. “I’d just rather not.”
“I can do the other one myself,” you say, something now in your throat.
“Shh,” Mark says, still focusing on the lacing, leaving you with nothing to do but watch him. A friend is someone you’re a little in love with around the edges.
“There!” He grins, moving both your feet to the ground and squeezing them once.
“I hated that,” you grumble, getting to your feet.
“You just said you’re a liar,” he says. “Now hurry up!”
We will run three times a week for the next month until we are no longer roommates.
You’re twenty-six, and someone calls you a nigger.
It wasn’t a song lyric, or an accidental slip, or a broad slur to all African Americans. Nor was it a passing car. It was said to you and for you. “You nigger.” The specifics aren’t important. You won’t give the universe the satisfaction of writing it all out. You walk home missing your mom. You’ll call her, but later, not right now.
Racism is tiring in the most boring and unoriginal of ways. Sometimes, there is simply nothing to extract from it. You throw your apartment keys into the bowl and rest your head against the wall of your hallway for a second. A flamboyant man could have been called a faggot. A woman might have been called a cunt. An Asian person a chink. This world will never run out of ways of shrinking those on the margins to a pit they’ll then have to carry in their own stomach.
When you look up, it’s been half an hour, but you’re not quite ready again. You’ve never been a crier. The opening ten minutes of Pixar’s Up leaves your eyes completely dry. Don’t you cry now. Your parents were both born in villages 1,500 miles away, one of your grandmothers used to strap infants to her back and hike over a mountain to get them vaccinated and bring them back; you’ve never had a rope around your neck—how dare you cry because of a word, lost to the wind the moment it was spoken. Not one tear, you punk. Fe Respow.
You’re twenty-six, and your world is English. You’re in Los Angeles and taking general meetings. There’s a whole strand of your life that takes place over on the West Coast. It’s equal servings victories and humiliations but does not belong in this book.
Your Airbnb rental is a couch in Studio City meant to in turn minimize the cost of all your car rides around the city over the next four days, taking meetings that won’t lead to anything but a face sore from smiling in the end.
You hiss at an Uber driver gifting—not even selling, gifting—you a crystal. She’s a chatty part-time doula and one of no less than three part-time doulas you will bump into during that trip. Los Angeles is bright and prioritizes ease while everything about you screams effort and artifice. It’s not a match.
Your new manager Derek waits outside the restaurant for you, in sunglasses and a polo shirt, which is the Los Feliz equivalent of a business suit. In Los Angeles, your actual business suit might as well be a Downton Abbey tuxedo, complete with top hat and vintage monocle.
“Are you wearing a freaking tie right now?” Derek asks in a cackle. He’s accompanying you to the first few meetings.
“She’s from CBS!” you try. “That’s CBS sitting in there.”
“Nah, dude,” Derek says, putting his phone away. “They’re meeting a wunderkind Haitian writer from Harlem with an Ivy degree who grew up in French projects. No ties!”
He undoubles the Windsor knot around your neck with one hand, undoing the three replays of a YouTube tutorial you had to study to perfect, and rips it away from your neck leaving a rope burn, as cheap fabric tends to.
“You’re a New York Black guy, man.” He laughs. “Jesus! No jacket tomorrow, okay?”
“You got it.” You smile. Derek means well, keeps your nerves at bay, and signed you when he didn’t have to. What good is there in saying anything?
To this day, your books still are not TV shows, and you’re now too old to be a wunderkind.
You’re twenty-eight, and your world is English. Harlem English, with bursts of Spanish and Russian depending on the street. You love living in Harlem and taking your dog around St. Nicholas dog run twice a day. It’s peaceful and—
The finger snaps, less than a foot from your face, are what bring you out of whatever bit of prose or dialogue you were typing in your phone’s notes.
“Pay more attention,” the woman casually instructs.
You remove your headphones and smile, raising your eyebrows. Mode: friendly.
“Excuse me?”
She’s short, with dry blond hair that’s brown at the roots, and her dog-park style might qualify as military-inspired athleisure. Kickboxing, not yoga. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she won a middling season of Survivor a decade ago.
“You’ve been on your phone since you got here,” she says. “Isn’t the point to come here and play with the dogs?”
Now, your dog is both well behaved and adorable. No, really: that thing leapt right out of a Purina commercial. And this woman’s problem appears to be that Blue is currently too calm, scratching at and sniffing patches of dirt nearby.
“Are you . . . explaining what a dog park is to me?”
People start glancing your way, but you’ve recently decided that you were done keeping your voice low not to embarrass them. It’s small, so very small, but it’s a start.
The benevolent dog lover points to Blue, your fifty-five-pound white lab mix, happily chewing a stick in the sun and at a distance from the other dogs. She’s a loner, too. There are exactly four dogs she likes and will chase around this dog run, otherwise, only a chew stick from her favorite tree will hold her interest.
“He could choke on that.”
“She is not going to choke on that,” you say.
“Are you a vet?” she scoffs.
“I am, actually!” You grin. “Why? Are you a vet, too?”
She’s less certain now, but unfortunately for Karen/Sharron/Cheryll/Cheyenne/Kate/Marie, you’ve decided that Harlem is your neighborhood now. It was waiting for you since James Baldwin called it home a century ago. And now your neighborhood is changing and you’re the angry one. Who knows, she might have actually lived here longer than your four chronological years, but twenty-four years ago, she would not have been her
e, and fourteen years ago she wouldn’t have made eye contact with you, let alone snapped her fingers in your face.
“Do we know each other? Have we maybe run into each other at a vet conference?”
She’s exasperated with pretending to humor you, and your smiling annoys her, which now makes it genuine.
It’s a new combination: fake smile plus real endless pit of anger. Real because, actually, fuck you.
“I know you think this is very funny,” she says, “but I’m sure this dog’s owner is not paying you to be on your phone. You should play with her. She is so cute and bored.”
Let the record show, whatever else you may take away from this book, that my dog was not goddamn bored. This, I promise you.
“That’s my dog, lady!” You snap, you’re suddenly exhausted. “Black guys own dogs, too! We don’t just walk them.”
How dare she? Do people like that really exist outside of viral videos? Have they strayed this far north, to Harlem, of all places?
She rolls her eyes. “That’s obviously not what I was saying.”
“That’s exactly what you’re saying.”
“Look, calm down, I was just saying—” Uncertainty slips into her voice.
“No,” you say calmly but firm for once in your life, now having the collected confidence of an adjunct professor when addressing a room. “You started talking to me, so explain it to me. Why would you assume I’m the dog walker?”
She seems aware that you’re in public, that people are watching, and seems to regret her decision to enage. She gives you a once-over, looking for an easy one-word answer but not finding one.
“Your attire. It’s an honest mistake. I did not mean—”
Attire. Screw you, lady.
“I’m wearing a hoodie and sweatpants,” you interrupt. “Which is perfectly fine dog park attire. Your problem isn’t with my clothes. It might be clothing in general? Because you’re dressed for the geriatric Hunger Games.”
Someone chortles nearby, which is all you need. Bitch mode: activate.
