Never Look an American in the Eye

by Okey Ndibe

  Fafunwa was one of Nigeria’s most august intellectuals. Even though I had followed him and read about him from afar, I had formed the impression that he projected a constancy of values. He was the kind of person in whose company I took great pleasure.

  He seemed in no hurry to wave me off and return to his reading. I asked how he could read surrounded by all the bedlam. He laughed hard, wiping his eyes. Then he said he had few options. He was too far past his dancing prime to keep up with the youngsters at his daughter’s party. Then he joked that, whether he retained anything from the book or not, reading seemed his only option.

  As he spoke, I sensed a raconteur’s aura about him. He was a man stocked full of anecdotes, memories, insights. And he came across as willing to share his cocktail of tales with me—a much-younger man but always inquisitive, indeed myself an eager trader in stories. For me, for as long as he indulged me, holding him in conversation was simply irresistible. I had badgered Justin into coming out to the party, but there I was—for that moment—indifferent to what was happening inside the party.

  I pulled a chair and sat across from the professor. Then I asked him questions or made remarks that provoked him to speak on this or that subject, moving from the vicissitudes of Nigerian education to the turf of politics.

  He was in the middle of making some point, and I was listening intensely, when I became aware of a hovering presence.

  “Dad, why not let him come to the party and dance?”

  I looked in the speaker’s direction. She was square shouldered, somewhat petite, and wore her hair in the kind of low-cut fashion I had always fancied. Her voice was soft, but there was something assured and steely about her tight, athlete’s physique. Her father was dark hued, but her light skin suggested a Caucasian mother. I imagined her born and bred in the United States, as her speech had no trace of Nigerian accent.

  “Ah, but I’m not holding him prisoner,” her father protested lightheartedly. “He’s free to go.” And even before I rose to answer his daughter’s summons, he had picked up his book.

  I went away with mixed emotions. The professor had not held me hostage. I hadn’t cried out to be rescued. I was enjoying the conversation with him and wasn’t prepared to have it cut short so unexpectedly. Then it struck me: perhaps the birthday celebrant had intervened, not to liberate me from the tangle of her father’s stories but to rid the old man of me, a pest with an insatiable hunger for stories. Perhaps the professor had refrained himself, out of a sense of grace, from telling his daughter that I was the one who pestered him, deflected his attention from reading.

  I could not dwell on the thought for long. “My name’s Sheri Fafunwa,” she said as we walked to the venue of the party.

  “Okey Ndibe.”

  I was drawn to her remarkable physical beauty but also impressed by some feeling that she was down-to-earth, devoid of fecklessness. I had arrived at her party uninvited, determined to crash it. And there she was, a genial host, ushering me in.

  The party room was dimmed, festooned with balloons. Despite the dim light, I recognized a few of the dancers as well as some guests, seated, chattering away. The music reverberated, made the air shudder.

  Sheri and I began dancing the moment we walked in. It was a sort of fluid evolution. I had fashioned a peculiar style of dancing, best described as the art of moving as the spirit dictated. It was a whimsical routine, and it demanded a large, free space. I could stand on a spot and sway my shoulders from side to side. Or I could roam a room, a restless, shuddering mass of energy. My repertoire combined various elements. I punched and spun and kicked and bobbed and jumped and glided. Those who saw me for the first time often responded with awe, amazement, or laughter. My routine was a sort of mime act with a comedic core. But this much was guaranteed: little that I did on the dance floor was repeatable. My act was less virtuosic and choreographed than improvised, free, and playful.

  Sheri’s party was a bit too crowded for my kinetic style. Not to worry. As we danced, I deliberately, delicately bumped into other dancers, forcing them to back away. Soon I created and annexed a small space. Within it, I began to display my routine. My strange orchestration got Sheri’s attention. She bore a wide, amused smile. Then the music slowed. She and I closed in, our bodies sweat-fused. As we danced, we talked, shouting into each other’s ear to be heard.

  I found out she was earning an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, with ceramics as her medium. She was also the assistant residence director at Coolidge Towers, a hall of residence for students. The job came with a spacious residence, a living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen. I told her I was in Amherst as founding editor of a new magazine, African Commentary.

  During a lull in the music, I excused myself to get some refreshment. All the food and drinks were laid out in the kitchen, set off at one end of the living room. I was spooning food onto a large paper plate when, from just behind me, somebody called my name. I turned to face Georgina Eze, a jovial woman that Nigerians in the Amherst area called Mrs. Eze. She always teased me about my amorous pursuits. There was a peculiar expression on her face: a steady mischievous grin and unblinking eyes that held me, accusingly, in their gaze. I knew that look well—from my mother. In my younger days, whenever I got into trouble—which was often—my mother would put on that disconcerting expression. It translated into major peril for me, meant that some illicit scheme of mine had been uncovered.

  “Mrs. Eze,” I said. My tone was calculatedly smooth, designed to counter her accusatory stance.

  For a moment, her expression remained unchanged. She just regarded me, her facial features frozen. Then she said my name again, slowly this time, drawing out every syllable. Shaking her head, she pointed to her eyes and pointed at me.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “I saw you,” she said, again demonstrating by pointing to both her eyes and me. Suddenly, she wagged her finger at me. “This one is special. This one is not for fun.”

  I feigned confusion, even though I understood full well. In those days, not without justification, I had acquired a quasi-playboy reputation. I was fond of courting women who combined beauty and intelligence. Some of them were students, some academics in one of the area’s five colleges. I basked in their company, felt buoyed by their attention. It was a phase of my life when I was too restless, too adventure-minded, to contemplate settling down with any one woman. My eyes “roved”; my heart hankered for the next relationship, dissatisfied with any luckless woman who had requited my affection. I was allergic to pressure from any girlfriend to get serious. I felt safer, freer, when I juggled several relationships at once, when all understood that little was at stake. Whenever any woman broached the idea of commitment, I ran 4-40—Nigerian parlance for a fast getaway.

  My dread of serious relationships was at once ironic and understandable. I’d suggest that its root was in my parents’ exemplary marriage, a relationship that inspired amazement and admiration in each town where we lived. My parents were models of fidelity and closeness at a time and in a society where public displays of affection were rare.

  It was a different story for many of my friends’ parents. They kept to their separate paths in the waking hours. Some of the men frequented ramshackle bars where they drank, ate, and retailed bawdy stories with other habitués. If these other parents commingled at all, it was at night, in the secrecy of bedrooms, away from the gaze of others.

  As a youngster, I went through a period when I felt embarrassed on account of my parents’ closeness. At one point, I formed the perverse opinion that “real men” were the ones who went to bars, the ones who were not shy about sharing ribald jokes, even with impressionable children about. Sometimes, I wondered if my father was a wimp. Why else had he embraced the ideal of romantic love, when many of his fellows believed that marriage was merely an arrangement to sire children? Why did he accept the Christian idea that, in wedlock, husband and wife became one? At t
he height of my strange anguish, I wished that my father would emulate the men of the bars, husbands who did not seem in the least averse to cheating on their wives.

  Despite my infantile fantasies, Father remained constant, guileless in his relationship with Mother, unwavering in his love for her and for us, their five children. In a sense, he and our mother projected to me a standard of affection and commitment that I found altogether unattainable, even superhuman in scale. When I began to develop an interest in women, I looked to the “bar men,” not to my father, for a model. I had never sat down to refine some romantic ethos. Yet, I had drifted toward being both a maximalist and a minimalist. I felt most pleased and comfortable when I had several girlfriends; and I ensured that, in each relationship, I made an emotional investment that was decidedly shallow, pallid, minimal.

  Mrs. Eze was not going to let me off quite so easily. “I’m warning you,” she spelled it out. “Sheri is dear to my husband and me. If you’re not serious, don’t go there.”

  “I just danced with her,” I protested.

  She set her face into that disconcerting expression. “I just want you to know I saw you.” She gestured again to her eyes, to me.

  “We just danced, Mrs. Eze,” I restated.

  I didn’t fool her. Of course, I had an eye for Sheri; she was the kind of woman I was drawn to. Mrs. Eze, without realizing it, had just handed me an idea for a courting strategy. After eating, I sought out Justin and suggested that we leave. He was chatting with acquaintances and seemed at ease, enjoying himself. But he apparently still nursed resentment at not being invited. He agreed to leave.

  I went to Sheri, thanked her for welcoming me to her party, but announced I had to leave.

  “Why? The party is still going strong,” she said, surprised.

  “Yes, but I promised to look in at another party. And then I have to go home and do some work.” I had no other party lined up for the night. Nor did I have any urgent job to do. I was merely striking a pose, leaving the impression that I was busy, that I was not impressed enough to stay, that I was something of a prized guest at parties.

  Sheri tried to persuade me to tarry a little before leaving. I dug in my heels, insisted that I really had to go.

  “This is a terrific party. I wish I could stay longer. But maybe we can get together sometime,” I proposed.

  Sheri and I exchanged telephone numbers.

  “I hope to hear from you, then,” she said.

  “I’ll call you. Tomorrow, in fact,” I promised.

  “You will?”

  “It’s a promise.”

  A promise? I didn’t call her the next day. Nor did I call the day after the next. For the next six days, I didn’t call. On the seventh day, confident that I had branded in Sheri’s mind the impression of a busy, desirable guy, I made a note to call her that evening. Instead, she rang me at work.

  “I was going to call you today,” I said, once she had identified herself.

  “Yes, I believe you!” she said, her doubt poured into the retort. “Just like you kept your promise to call the day after my party.”

  “I’ll explain it all,” I said. “It’s been a crazy, hectic week.”

  “I believe you,” she said, unimpressed.

  At the end of our conversation, we’d agreed to go on a first date. My designs were the same as for all my previous relationships. I would bob and weave and skirt around, the romantic equivalent of the floating Muhammad Ali. I would fit Sheri somewhere in the chaotic web of my relationships. I didn’t care that Mrs. Eze had tried to warn me off. I ran a mini-empire of romances, and my Oliver Twist mind wanted more and more and more. My mission was to be my father’s ultimate counterfoil, the guy from whose dictionary the words “faithfulness” and “commitment” had been ripped off.

  I used to tell my friends that I knew better than to submit to the repressive regime of marriage. Yet, two and a half years after I first met Sheri, she and I got married. By then, Sheri had graduated and relocated to New Britain, Connecticut, where she had a teaching post at Central Connecticut State University. How our relationship metamorphosed to a stage where marriage was in the equation is a matter, for me, of a measure of mystery—and a story for another day. It’d be a lie to assert that I never saw it coming. I saw it coming, all right. But I also did my best, in a way that was often clumsy, and with what waning powers were at my emotional disposal, to fend it off. Each evening, I discussed the strange prospect of marriage with a cousin, Ejike Akubude, who shared my apartment in Amherst. It was an unusual colloquy: I’d outline the case against, my cousin saddled with the role of advocate.

  One weekend, I traveled to see Sheri in New Britain, promising my cousin that I would propose. Once at her apartment, I lost my nerves. On my return, my cousin couldn’t wait to hear how it all went.

  “I didn’t do it,” I confessed. “I couldn’t.”

  He grabbed the phone and dialed Sheri’s number. “Oya,” he commanded, “you’re going to propose to her now. Over the phone.”

  I spoke to Sheri, in words garbled enough to register my reserve and nervousness, but sensible enough to convey the idea I was suggesting we get married. She seemed surprised by my move—or perhaps perplexed that I would choose the mode of a phone call. Even so, she collected herself to thank me and to indicate that she was open to marrying me.

  Then began another, more intensive phase of my anxiety. Why had I proposed without first discussing the matter with my parents? My parents treasured romance, but they also believed that marriage was between two families, not just a groom and his bride. How would they react when I finally brought up the matter? For that matter, how would Aunty Mgbogo, who had pleaded with me not to bring home a white bride, take it? Would she have a good laugh, amused at how I had split the difference—marrying a woman whose father was African, her mother a Caucasian American?

  My sister, who lived in New York, had met and liked Sheri. Even so, she wondered if our parents would not insist that I take a bride who, like me, was of Igbo ethnicity, not Yoruba, like Sheri. I spurned her offer to find me prospective Igbo brides from the New York area.

  Neither my sister nor I needed worry. Devout Catholics, my parents merely asked if my spouse-to-be belonged to the same faith. She’d accompanied me a few times to Sunday Mass, so I said yes. By tradition, my elder brother, John, was supposed to marry ahead of me. My parents ordered me to ask my brother’s permission to enable me to go first. John and I had a long, good laugh—and then he gave me his blessing. Auntie Mgbogo was ecstatic. She gave Sheri the praise name Obidie: “her husband’s heart.”

  In the end, everything worked out. Everything, that is, save my lingering jitteriness about marriage. I had been a lifelong playboy, astonished by my father’s gift for steadfastness, terrified by the whole notion of commitment. I suspected that marriage meant a wholly different, novel kind of adventure. What were my options as a married man? What kind of husband would I be?

  Years ago, if you’d asked me, and if I had been in a mood of candor, I would have declared that my father had disappointed all real men and me. He had been too steady a man, husband, and father where some men I knew and admired from afar were social prowlers—in fact, predators. Father had not lived by my creed of what a man looked and acted like.

  Then, a few years into my marriage, as Sheri and I welcomed each of our three children (Chibu, Chiamaka, and Chidebe, nicknamed “the Three Chis”), I became riveted by a revolution of mind that had begun to take place inside of me. I became more selfless. I began to enjoy cooking, for Sheri and the kids. I took delight in helping with other household chores. I exulted in telling folktales and other stories to our children and their friends. If I needed to stay up for the sake of a sick child, I did so without resentment. I became a student of life, began to learn the rudiments of communicating with my family—and the fine art of listening.

  In short, the
truth about my parents’ relationship dawned on me. I had been the disappointment and failure, not my father. I had been the wimp, too blind to see the majesty of my father’s example, too scared to commit, too self-absorbed to surrender to love.

  I am struck by the paradox that, after years of rebelling against my father’s peerless standard of fidelity, in marriage I had gradually, without at first realizing it, taken after the ancestor. There’s another paradox. It has taken Sheri, whose heart I won after crashing her birthday party, to soften me from within—and to lead me, with few words but many assured acts of love, patiently, slowly, through several ups and downs, to this light.

  Acknowledgments

  For me, the joys of communion with family and friends rival the delights of writing. My wife, Sheri, and our three “Chis”—Chibu, Chiamaka and Chidebe—irrigate my writing with their boundless love. I’m ever grateful for their patience and grace. At 91, my mother, E., remains a marvel of vitality, fueling my siblings and me with her unflagging affection and prayers. My late father, C., remains a deep presence, a dependable guardian angel. My brothers and sister—John, JC, Ogii, Ifeoma—are priceless treasures, reminding me that to love richly and be richly loved is to have every good thing. I celebrate my mother-in-law, Doris Fafunwa, for being a source of succor and good humor.

  I am indebted to many mentors, friends, and colleagues who spurred this work in one way or another. They include John Edgar Wideman, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Stephen Clingman, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Bill Strickland, Abdulaziz Ude, Clarence Reynolds, Okey and Hadiza Anueyiagu, Nana-Ama Danquah, Joshua Wolf Shenk, Kitty Axelson, Barbara Love, Chris Ikeanyi, Anani Dzidzienyo, Kango Lare-Lantone, Lenny Kindstrom, Tijan Sallah, Radha Radhakrishnan, Alessandra di Maio, Abioseh Porter, Ian Mayo-Smith, Krishna Sondhi, Christine Ohale, Cheryl Sterling, Obi Enweze, Lloyd Thomas, Bart Nnaji, Joyce Ashuntantang, Ugo Ubili, and three inspiring ancestors: Kofi Awoonor, Chinua Achebe, and Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa.