New York, My Village

by Uwem Akpan

  “In all my vast experience in publicity,” Jack said, touching his beard, “I can tell you this book is going to fly off the shelves! I’m really, really excited about this one.”

  “So are we all. Except, perhaps, Ekong,” Emily said, looking at my face.

  “Yeah, Ekong, what’s your take?” Bob Hamm said.

  “Maybe it’s because he’s not been exposed to this kind of writing,” Jack cut in, laughing. “I’m sorry, Ekong, I just wanted to chip that in before you speak!”

  I shrugged and said, “Well, it’s not exactly my thing. I’m not saying it’s not good or anything like that … but there are so many flaws.”

  “And, yes, sometimes choosing one book over another is exactly as Ekong says,” Molly defended me. “Not every work resonates with everyone.”

  “No, I meant my comment in a good way,” Jack said.

  “I know,” Molly said. “But I’m saying it’s not even a question of competence, but of taste, you know. He’s not here to learn editing for the American market, but to understudy our operations and edit his anthology.”

  “Okay, noted,” Jack said. “Ekong has raised an important issue, though—the flaws—but I truly believe they are very fixable. Trust me, Ekong, this could even be a learning curve for you when you see Molly’s ideas on how to fix things. If all these other publishers want the book, it usually means they see a way around the weaknesses. Besides, no novel is perfect! Anyway, at least we have more diversity for you than usual in the novels we’re discussing this week …?”

  “No, it’s not about that,” I pushed back politely, surprised to see him so vocal.

  “I think Jack means this in the best possible way, you know,” Bob clarified. “Personally, I’m glad we’re considering minority works!”

  “Yes, I truly understand what Ekong means,” Jack continued in a tone that said otherwise.

  “I like what Molly said about individual tastes,” Emily said.

  Angela raised her two hands and said: “Maybe Ekong’s enthusiasm is a bit flat because he isn’t acquainted with our publishing world and could use a bit of background: this author is an established author and did publish a part of this book in The New Yorker. Not Atlantic Monthly, not Harper’s, not Paris Review … the freaking New Yorker! Maybe we don’t know what you could compare The New Yorker to in your African publishing. Look, beyond the unbelievable storytelling in Mistress, once you publish there, you’re bankable and, in terms of marketing and publicity—which is how Jack and I approach stuff—it makes our jobs easier. I think this is the author’s best book, which is why there is such a buzz! So it’s a big, big yes from my marketing team.”

  Though I knew of these magazines, I was shocked at the influence they wielded in these decisions. Nonetheless, I held a poker face and crossed my arms and thought about some of The New Yorker fiction online I had hated like shit. It was a magazine our growing noisy Nigerian literary tribe was killing each other to get into and bearing those who did eternal gratitude or grudge. Yet it was something our larger Nigerian society mistook for the New York Times, if it noticed at all. However, I felt my colleagues were doing everything to carry me along or, at least, to sincerely show me how they made their choices. I appreciated the attention they were lavishing on me, a Fellow.

  “But I really understand you,” Angela said to me. “What I’m saying is different from what Jack is saying.”

  “That’s not how I meant it,” Jack said in frustration, dividing and holding his red beard in each hand like two short tusks. “I didn’t mean Ekong couldn’t enjoy other writing. Anyway, never mind …”

  “No, I understand you, Jack,” I said, laying a hand flat on my chest.

  Relieved, Jack leaned in to announce in a near-whisper: “I say we’re even lucky we’re considering this novel! Molly and Angela know how hard I’ve worked to convince my friend Chad Twiss—he’s a super-agent—that we might be able to compete or even outbid the big houses on this particular one! The scouts say Random House’s CEO can’t stop talking about this book. If the author’s editor and friend at Knopf hadn’t died last year, we wouldn’t even have this possibility. Molly would be a great editor for him. And just imagine how wonderful it would be if we took this one from the major houses!”

  “By the way, Ekong, Chad has been to a few Nigerian book festivals,” Angela said.

  “Wow!” I exclaimed.

  “He’s really crazy about all this great literature pouring out from your country,” she said. “He was so pissed about the embassy nonsense. You’ll soon meet him, if you keep hanging around Jack, his pal.”

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen, please, don’t let me slow you down from buying Mistress!” I said, to get attention away from my ignorance. “Even in the best of democracies, an eight-to-one vote is a landslide, no? Look, I’m just a bumbling Fellow.” I hated to appear as the only stumbling block to their dream acquisition. “And, you know what, it’s not as though I didn’t like anything at all in the book,” I said belatedly, gesticulating for effect. “I actually did. The love scenes were out of this world. I think they should be placed alongside the powerful sea and pirate passages.” Folks giggled their agreement, as though in polite company it would be wrong to go into details of the sex passages.

  “Well, I’ve already spoken to Liam about how important this one is,” Molly confided, looking at Jack and Angela, like they three had been having private business meetings. “Liam—Ekong, Liam Sanders is our owner and CEO—is very sold on it. He’ll support our going to the mid-six-to-seven figures. Yes, Jack is right. It would be a really huge statement that Andrew & Thompson is serious. We can’t do it without committing to a big publicity and marketing budget … For now, let’s just be cautiously optimistic. The bidding could get way out of our range. I know Knopf wants to keep him!”

  “Molly, just being part of it is exciting, you know, but I was so thrilled by this novel!” Emily said, while Jack looked on as though he wanted to eat her lips. She went on to explain how this book touched her, not just because of all the great passages that we had read out to each other, but because her great-great-grandparents came from near that European sea, a place she had visited before. She said the setting was so powerful she had scanned some pages and sent them to her grandfather in Alabama. “I really hope we go for broke, because, for so long, we have been talking about repositioning ourselves, but never quite doing it.”

  We were like a country that was going to the soccer World Cup for the first time, where being in the same league with perennial winners was like winning itself. My deepest joy came from seeing an underdog go up against the big, established names. I loved the positive, bullish atmosphere, like a universal salary raise would soon be announced. When you are a minority, even being part of big battles matters, win or lose.

  NEXT, WE UNCEREMONIOUSLY ELIMINATED The Thunderous Sundays of Washtenaw County before we got to Children of Elijah Moses, sponsored by Bob Hamm. But he fought in vain for this bakery race story. Jack and Angela eyed me warily as they attacked the book with unbelievable aggression. Though the previous night I had wanted to endorse Children and had concrete ideas on how to remedy the flaws, I did not jump to its defense because I did not believe Bob and I could convince the rest. But I was already mad at myself for not even praising the tantalizing aromas of Children’s bakery.

  I reserved my energy for Trails of Tuskegee.

  Now that I had a feel for how the meeting was going, I rehearsed my arguments silently. I knew I would be lining up behind Emily and Molly.

  I googled the author of Trails and discovered she had never published in The New Yorker or anywhere, for that matter. This did not deter me. As our people say, the war that has a date should never overtake the cripple, meaning Jack and Angela’s actions had forewarned me. If discussing Mistress had taught me anything, it was that Jack Cane and Angela Stevens were very powerful at Andrew & Thompson. But, seeing how slippery they were, I needed to figure out the best approach, especially wit
h Jack, who seemed to think race stories should be my forte. I was a bit unsettled by his meeting persona, all devoid of his quiet subtle humor and deep kindness. This was not the colleague I had lunch with, the diplomat who understood how to ask sensitive questions about our Nigerian ethnic groups, the friend who often visited my cubicle, or the guy who wanted to lynch Lagoon Drinker. But, at this point, my heart was beating like a drum. My belief in Trails was such that if I needed to send word to or ask for a private meeting with the owner, Liam Sanders, I was going to do so.

  Yet the gathering eyed me in a way that suggested I must have a bigger stake in Children of Elijah Moses, the race manuscript under consideration. I began to feel pressure and, slowly, my feeling of being the luckiest Fellow in the world began to wane. Then the tension spilled over into the room as Molly talked for a long time about the book, sometimes reading out a striking dialogue but skipping the words nigger, chink, and wetback, sometimes trying so hard to summarize passages they became incomprehensible. I supposed she fought to take the pressure off me. But then I felt my perception could have just been me living out my super-minority complex, something merely in my head. I felt so lost, so out of place, I looked down and began to crack my fingers. It was so strange that, suddenly, there were all these voices buzzing about in my head, as if I were a madman.

  Would they have had a whole different or smoother conversation if they didn’t need to use my face as the register of political correctness? said one voice.

  I don’t know, said another.

  Shame on you for not speaking up for this book!

  What if you lose out on Trails?

  But what are you even doing at this table?

  This last accusatory voice made me look up, to catch everyone staring at my fingers. I hid my hands under the table.

  I myself disliked this Ekong Otis Udousoro, because he was uncomfortable in his own skin, like one long weekend of itches and welts and scratching had jinxed it. Then I worried over whether I had been actually cracking or scratching my fingers. Now Molly looked like someone who was afraid if she stopped talking, the silence could explode. It dawned on me that it must have been difficult for them, too, because this could have been the first time some of them were experiencing a Black presence at deliberations like this. To get everyone out of jail, as it were, I inhaled and raised my hand and Molly hushed:

  “The humble opinion of a Fellow: I wouldn’t publish this book. It’s just too flat.”

  WE ALL BEGAN TO TALK at the same time about its demerits. It was like an extremely brutal MFA workshop without the teacher. And, this time, nobody accused me of not understanding the unique forces within their publishing industry.

  The book was a dead rubber. Even the editor who championed it had gone back to extoling the powers of Mistress, as if to console himself. Thus, it came as comic relief when Angela said she really hoped we could outbid Random House for Mistress, just to get back at the managing director who fired her many moons ago. Short litanies of firings and migrations came tumbling out, some still bitter, some hilarious.

  WHEN TRAILS OF TUSKEGEE came up, Molly said how much she loved it, that the humor kept her crying and laughing in equal measure. Like me, she swooned to the infectious hope the characters had in America, despite their ordeal. I was not surprised how pained she was about the discrimination, given her reaction to my embassy shit and family history. As she spoke, Emily jotted furiously on a pad. Jack watched Molly sympathetically. Angela folded her arms tightly like they were lashed with ropes, nodding the whole time.

  Then, before anybody could look in my direction, Emily said that, having grown up only fifty miles away from Tuskegee, she could look at the manuscript through an intensely personal lens. Even her extended family had been sucked into the tragedy. She touched me most with her pained confession that, as an inquisitive kid, she had asked her parents about Tuskegee, and while they did not only deny that the Tuskegee events happened, they claimed that stories of violence during slavery were wholly invented by African Americans to demonize white folks, when they should express gratitude for whites saving them from Africa.

  “I’m really, really in love with this child narrator, who eavesdrops into adult conversations,” Emily said, her voice cracking. “This Black boy speaks for me, too, because, in my childhood I also overheard whispers about my grandpa’s gay brother I never met. First, he was beaten up in 1952 for bringing syphilis back from Tuskegee to our white city. Then he was lynched for his love affair with a Black person. And, third, his body was burnt because his lover was a man. A relative outed him. Today, the more rights gay people have, the more divided my extended family is … I cried the days I misbehaved and my parents said my head was ‘as ugly as a Tuskegee male’ n-word, referring to the bulbous, ogre-shaped thing to which the experiment had altered the heads of Black men.

  “My worst memory of childhood was the day I fought a Black girl in primary school in 1991 for accusing our government of this evil. She insisted she heard it from her parents, just like she heard from her grandparents about the mass lynchings of their distant relatives in Arkansas like ornaments on Christmas trees, an image she said her pastor used often. Our whole class started calling her ‘Miss Christmas Ornaments’ and threatening on the playground to lash her to a tree. She didn’t change her story no matter how much we bullied her.

  “Unfortunately, that one day at school, I totally lost it and punched and bit her when she swore it was the syphilis America gave to her Tuskegee auntie in the womb that led to her saber shins. Folks, I went to war even without knowing what saber shin was.

  “Well, I never got the debriefing! Not even when my folks learned about the fight. Not from our white headmistress who suspended both of us, over the tears of the girl’s parents begging the school to say at the least that Tuskegee happened. The only hint I got was from Father Schmitz in the confessional. ‘My daughter, you’re too young to understand America or this sort of original sin!’ he’d said. ‘Now, are you wholeheartedly sorry for the mortal sin of beginning the fight or not?’

  “In college here in New York, I finally learned enough to research about slave plantations and found the sharecropper lynching photos. I called Father Schmitz to track down my old classmate in Alabama, and flew back to apologize to her not just for the fight but for calling her Miss Christmas Ornaments. Nobody understands the lingering guilt with which I listen to diversity stories these days—or how much this manuscript resonates with me. I’m sorry to be so personal!

  “I’m sorry, this has been a long winding way to saying, naturally, once the author’s agent, one of my best, Cecilia Myers, who knows a bit about my background, sent me this manuscript, I couldn’t resist the sheer power of the story. The tone, the voice, the characters, the structure, the setups, the payoffs, everything! Like I told Molly and Jack last week, I think the flaws, like the underdevelopment of the white character, are totally fixable. He needs to engage his racist family and hint at his complexities, his righteous anger, and dreams for America. Cecilia is setting up calls so I can talk with the author this week, but so far she liked the suggestions I emailed to her.

  “And, Ekong, I must say, like this white character, there are some of us in this company, or even in this room, who aren’t finding it funny we were lied to as kids about slavery, or that our parents didn’t plain know what to say—while Black kids grow up learning this history with their mother’s milk!”

  I put an arm around Emily’s shoulder and gave her a side hug.

  I raised my hand to speak and cleared my throat. But the image of Black kids breastfed on race atrocities nauseated me; it frothed to my throat and drowned my voice. I swallowed hard, strained and cracked my neck, yet gave up and signaled my support before dropping my head into the silence that had filled the room. The lessons of Emily’s personalized history of America made me dizzy. It touched me that she had apologized to the Black girl, for I knew the pain of being bullied in school, of being called Son of Bloody Trousers, of being
named after a family tragedy.

  This was the most emotional editorial meeting in my life, including the painful ones on our Biafra project back home. And, from my colleagues’ reactions, it was a fair guess nobody had ever been as confessional as Emily had been here. Yet, I was relieved that these white folks, not me, had made the most powerful case for the work. For the first time that day, the focus had completely shifted from me—from studying how this African was understanding fiction, from assessing whether I understood the white world enough to edit their stories.

  JACK WAS THE FIRST to recover. He left and returned with Kleenex for Emily.

  “Molly and Emily, I thank you for what you said!” Angela declared uneasily. “This is definitely a very moving book. To be honest, Emily, your very personal angle to the Tuskegee story has really made it relatable. I read somewhere someone said in apartheid South Africa that a country is like a zebra. Whether you shoot at the white or black stripes, the animal dies! Tuskegee haunts the collective soul of this nation, a story that needs to be told and retold.”

  Though I loved the zebra proverb, I refused to look at Angela because this did not sound like her at all. She and Jack could no longer deceive me.

  “It has helped me see the book in a clearer light!” someone said.

  “Oh Lord, Emily, I say it’s a home run,” another said.