Street Shadows

by Jerald Walker

  He exploded in violent laughter. He waved the other officers over and showed them my passport. “This man says he is black,” he told them, and while the others laughed he composed himself enough to light a cigarette. Smoke puffed from his mouth as he demanded more documentation. I gave him my driver’s license. He held it close to his face. The other men peered over his shoulders, all eyes darting between the two pictures and me. After a short debate in Shona, I was handed my identification. The officers stepped back from the car, and the one who had stopped me, frowning now, waved me forward with the barrel of his rifle.

  “This sucks,” I said as we drove away.

  “Yes, it does,” Brenda agreed. “And now you know what it’s like to be me. Sometimes I’m white, sometimes I’m black, sometimes I’m both, sometimes I’m neither. I’ve also been Indian, Pakistani, and Moroccan.” She laughed devilishly, clearly enjoying my indoctrination into her strange world of racial schizophrenia. It was kind of funny, I had to confess, and soon I was laughing too.

  For a while, it was our laughter that sustained us. We laughed when we were ignored in restaurants and retail stores; we laughed when pedestrians deliberately bumped into us; we laughed when we arrived at the hotels of tourist sites and were told that we had no reservations. For two weeks we laughed at every slight and insult that came our way, and we might have laughed for the rest of our trip had we not made the mistake one afternoon of ordering ice cream at an outdoor café, right in the heart of Harare.

  We’d just started eating our sundaes when two boys sat at our table. Shocked by their boldness, Brenda and I looked around, hoping one of the employees would chase them off, but no one paid us any attention. We tried ignoring our uninvited guests, as we had ignored countless other beggars, but the stench radiating from them was magnetic, pulling our gaze to its source. They could not have been older than ten. Neither one had a shirt or shoes; their skin was covered with open sores. Things moved in their hair. The boys said nothing, understanding, perhaps, that there was nothing to say. They were starving. We were not. They were poor. We were rich. They felt wronged. We felt guilty. We gave them our sundaes. It helped none of us very much.

  Sometimes we’d be driving and see on the roadside women and small children selling tomatoes. We’d stop and buy them all. We bought things obsessively, loaves of bread from old men on bicycles, potatoes from little girls who pulled them in wagons, and, from street vendors, dozens of knickknacks carved in stone. But that didn’t help either. In the end, to save ourselves, we learned to look through our guilt, as if it were no more than a dirty window, and concentrate on pleasant things in the distance. We let ourselves be colored.

  We started patronizing businesses staffed by whites because whites treated us better. We sought out white convenience stores, white malls, white gas stations. We preferred the company of whites when we should have despised it. Once, while eating in a white restaurant, the waiter asked where we were headed. We mentioned a certain park we’d heard was nice. “Oh, don’t go there,” he warned us. “It’s overrun by blacks.” We did not go.

  The friendliest white person we met there wasn’t from there at all. He was from Tyler, Texas, on safari with his family. He approached us while we were in a game reserve watching a giraffe nibble tree leaves. “I know Americans when I see them!” he bellowed, grinning, vigorously shaking my hand. “The minute I saw y’all, I said to my wife, ‘I bet you they’re Americans!’ “Southern drawls had always raised the hair on my neck and arms, but his was as comforting as a favorite song. I wanted nothing more, at that moment, than to board the nearest US-bound plane.

  For six weeks, while Brenda studied in the national archives, we learned the rules of this new race game, and we played it as best we could. But those were city rules. The rules in the Matebeland countryside were different. To many of the people living in thatched, clay homes, whose annual income was less than five dollars, we were amakiwa, white people, people whose likely purpose for being there was to make their fortunes rise or fall. This knowledge made me uneasy, because I knew, on some level, their kindness was based on fear or desire. And it also made me thankful, because whatever it was we inspired, it got us what we wanted. No one refused an interview. We took pictures at will.

  One day while we were taking pictures, a young boy sprinted over to us and began speaking hurriedly in isiNdebele to our translator. After he finished, our translator said, “We are wanted by the headman. Over there.” He pointed toward a gazebo-like structure a hundred yards away. We could not see anyone from our distance, but when we arrived, we found four men inside, sitting on straw mats and playing mancala, a popular game made of carved wood and plant seeds. The men continued to play with intense purpose, as if something so costly were at stake they could not pause to acknowledge our arrival. Our translator sat along the base of the wall and watched quietly. Brenda and I followed his lead.

  One of the men made a move that ended the game. As the good-natured banter that followed tapered off, the man who had won said something to our translator. When the response included the word Americans, the man’s eyes sparkled. “Welcome!” he said, speaking to me but not Brenda, as rural men often did. “I am Msizi Nkosi, the headman of this village.” I had not expected him to speak English. He seemed proud of this fact, and after his greeting, and after every question he subsequently asked, he offered his comrades a quick wink.

  Most of what he wanted to know was aimed at confirming or dispelling rumors about American culture, things about gangsters, Madonna, and sports. “This Michael Jordan is better than all the others,” he said. “You see, he is like me playing mancala with these men here.” He laughed heartily before his face settled on the wry smile that never left it, even when his questions took a twisted turn. “Tell me, my friend. Are you happy that your ancestors were taken to be slaves to America?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Ah, but I wish my ancestors were made slaves there,” he said. “Because then I would be living the good life, like you.”

  I had heard variations on this reasoning before, the notion that blacks should view their history through the lens of capitalism, a lens that often values means less than ends, humanity less than goods. What about the brutality the slaves endured? The suffering? The rapes and murders? I tried to make this point, but the headman was having none of it. “Ah, but you must not dwell on these things,” he countered. “You are in America, so just be happy. Or would you rather be here, losing games of mancala to me?” I did not respond. He winked at the other men. I looked toward our translator, lifting and lowering my eyebrows, trying to communicate nonverbally that we should go. When I caught his attention, he nodded, but I wasn’t sure if it was to say Yes, let’s get away from this crazy person, or Yes, you are in America, so just be happy.

  “Tell me,” the headman continued. “Why do you people call yourselves African Americans?”

  I considered explaining that it was a way to offer a sense of belonging to a displaced people, but my heart wasn’t in the argument, so I said nothing.

  “You are not Africans,” he said. His smile remained, but his voice had a sharp edge to it now. “Do you know that you insult Africans when you say that you are one of us?” I still did not respond.

  But I did wonder, during our ride back into town, what the headman’s definition of an African was. I wondered how he viewed his white countrymen, people whose ancestors had arrived from England two centuries prior and had taken over the land. Maybe he didn’t see them as Africans either. Or maybe they were the only Africans, while the blacks were something else, something more—perhaps that was what was being conveyed by the phrase indigenous peoples that Brenda and I had heard frequently since our arrival. I wondered, too, what the headman would have thought of Farai, a black native who had made a fortune in banking, now owned a taxi service and rental properties, and lived in a house that could have passed for a small Marriott. What would the headman have thought of her Olympic-sized pool, her t
ennis court, the crystal chandeliers and marble floors and ceilings made of inlaid cedar? What would he have thought watching her field servants toil all day in rows of maize and potatoes, or watching her house servants cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and laundering until they collapsed in the shacks behind the house that had neither electricity nor running water?

  And what, I wondered, would the headman have thought of “African night”?

  “What night?” Brenda had said at its first mention. We had been in the country for about ten days then.

  “African night,” Farai said. “I have invited some of my friends to join us for a girls’ night out, and we have decided to call it African night.” This, she explained while giggling, would entail wearing traditional African clothes. Farai did not own any of these clothes, nor did any of her friends; they had to go to the mall to purchase them explicitly for this occasion. It was the same mall to which they’d return for dinner, where there was a restaurant popular among tourists because it served mopane, a local delicacy of deep-fried caterpillars. When the plates of mopane arrived, the women shrieked and gasped and refused to eat them. And then they went back to their vodka martinis while the cook prepared their new orders of apricot-glazed chicken with peaches and raisins.

  I’d thought of my sister Linda, and all the other people I knew who regularly wore African garments, and here were these genuine Africans, these indigenous peoples, wearing the clothing as if for Halloween or a masquerade. Brenda and I had found the irony of all this hilarious. When she’d returned from the restaurant, her head and body still adorned in yards of colorful patterned cotton, we’d stayed up late into the night laughing until our eyes watered, because so many things were still funny then. But not much was funny anymore. Just confusing. The only thing that was clear was that, whatever the definition of an African was, it did not apply to me. Neither did the words colored or amakiwa. I was black, plain and simple, and in the days leading up to our departure I looked forward to reclaiming this identity because, before I actually boarded the plane, I still thought I could.

  But the truth hit me during the flight, bringing with it that sickening feeling I sometimes get while driving to a new destination when I suddenly realize that I am lost. Occasionally the source of the error can be traced to someone’s faulty directions, though usually the mistake is mine for not paying attention. I prefer when it’s the former so I can dole out rather than accept the blame. Now, cruising at thirty-thousand feet, I considered the directions I had been given regarding race, which made no mention of how unfixed it is, how fluid, how utterly unscientific the process by which we assign and accept racial labels. Who, I wondered, could I blame for this?

  When I reached a few tentative conclusions, I shook Brenda’s shoulder, waking her. She turned to face me, wide-eyed, I could see from the dim light of the cabin, and asked me what was wrong.

  “My parents,” I said, “messed me up.”

  After a brief pause, just long enough for the pupils of her widened eyes to roll, she mumbled, “How this time?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “Well, when you are entirely sure, let me know.” She turned away, burrowing her head back into the pillow she’d propped between her shoulder and the window.

  “You messed me up, too,” I added, but I’d whispered it so she could not hear, since I wasn’t entirely sure how she had done so either. But I suspected it was related to a story she’d once told me about a boy named Billy. When she met him, she was six years old and attending a mostly white school. Besides her, Billy was the only other black student. When some of the other children refused to play with him because of his race, Brenda refused, too, banding with the white kids who had accepted her as one of their own. That night at dinner, she told her parents, “We didn’t play with Billy today because he’s black,” thereby triggering an enlightening discussion about race in general, her African father in particular, and her own 50 percent blackness.

  I remembered this story making me sad—not for Brenda; she was fine, even playing with Billy the next day and persuading her friends to do the same—but because my parents had never had such a discussion with my siblings and me. There was never a moment when they told us we were black, or that they were, or what that designation meant for any of us. Race, in fact, was rarely discussed in the household of my youth. It was only while in the company of friends and relatives that I overheard grown-ups pontificate on racial matters, often concluding their observations with a shake of the head and the phrase, “Black folks are something else.“

  When I was very young, I thought this was an unkind reference to the prostitutes and addicts who shared our housing project stairwell, but by the time I turned ten, in 1974, when a new positive racial awareness was at its height, I understood it to mean that blacks were beautiful. Blacks were cool. Blacks had style and nerve and they could dance, dribble balls, and sing. Being black also now meant being African, a descendant of kings and queens, and while we did not learn that from our parents either, many people we knew spoke of it in the same breath they said that whites were evil. A few altercations I would have with white teens would reinforce this latter view; a few altercations I would have with white police would confirm it.

  But my exposure over time to a wider variety of people chipped away at all of these stereotypes; not many remained, I felt, by the time I turned twenty-five. By age thirty I was convinced they were completely gone, only to have them surface, one year later, in a country not my own, like a suddenly remembered dream. As soon as Brenda and I were told we were colored, I realized how many negative beliefs I had internalized about white people, beliefs that were still very much with me, whether consciously or not. But if my race could change so easily without any fundamental change in me, then race had no meaning, other than the false or superficial ones assigned it. All human behavior associated with race was a myth, a lie. I have found nothing in life more unsettling, or more liberating, than that discovery.

  Except for maybe this: I now understood that my parents knew all along what they were doing by not engaging us in discussions about race. They were trying to teach us, through their silence, that race was insignificant, that it shouldn’t and ultimately didn’t matter. They were trying to teach us to see character, not skin. These, I realized on that long flight home, were my parents’ directions for how to be an American. And I had not paid attention.

  FLOATED

  Buggy was a Vietnam vet who sometimes used liquor instead of pot. He’d be standing in his usual place in front of his parents’ house, his back grazing a high hedge as he took swigs from a bottle of rum. When he finished drinking he would laugh, curse, cry, throw punches, or stare blankly at a tree. But because this was what he always did, we assumed liquor had no special effect on him, or that, being crazy, nothing affected him at all.

  “He can’t feel liquor,” Zack said one night when the topic was raised. We were drinking liquor ourselves—peppermint schnapps—and it had affected us very much. The bottle was almost empty, an entire pint consumed in less than an hour in my garage. “Once you’re crazy,” Zack said, elaborating on his point, “you’re protected against any and all further mind alteration.”

  Greg agreed. “Like being dead.”

  “Exactly,” Zack responded.

  A car passed slowly in the alley, its wheels crunching the gravel. We froze, fearing the police, and then moved closer to the door. Louis opened it a crack and we all peeked out. A white Oldsmobile crept away, its high beams scattering a cluster of rats. After the door was closed we drifted back toward the center of the room. Above us, gnats attacked a lightbulb. Zack continued talking about Buggy. “I saw him drink a whole quart of rum once, and it didn’t faze him.”

  “Bullshit,” Greg said.

  “No lie,” Zack insisted. “He didn’t even fall.”

  “He fell,” Louis chimed in.

  Zack looked at Louis. “No, he didn’t.”

  “He did.”

  “How you
going to tell me what I saw, nigger? I was there.”

  “And I was with you,” Louis countered. “We were standing in front of my house watching him when he fell backward into the hedges. You even said, ‘Damn, Buggy’s so drunk he fell in the hedges.’ “

  Zack clarified his position. “I wasn’t speaking technically,” he said. “Technically, he didn’t fall because he never hit the ground. You have to hit the ground to fall. It was more like, you know, he floated.”

  We all stared at Zack for a few seconds. Greg cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was almost a whisper. “Zack,” he asked, “are you retarded?”

  Zack slapped him. Greg returned a blow. Then razors were drawn and they were yelling, “I’ll kill you!” Louis and I backed away while they circled each other, their weapons raised, missiles ready for launch. Zack was the more violent of the two and had studied Tae Kwon Do, but peppermint schnapps had leveled the field. A kick to the gut sent him staggering backward and tumbling over a folding chair. He landed on a pile of plywood stacked near the wall. Before he stood he cupped his right cheek and then checked his hand for blood. There wasn’t any. Unconvinced, he checked it again. “You all right?” I asked. Zack didn’t respond. He rubbed his wound, lightly moving his fingers over a small area that seemed to swell beneath his touch. He checked for blood once more before he stood and brushed himself off. He still had his razor in his hand. Greg still had his. I offered Zack the bottle. He hesitated before accepting it. He took a deep swallow and gave it back to me. I handed it to Greg, who took a turn and handed it to Louis. No one spoke until the cycle was repeated and the liquor was gone. Zack motioned his razor toward the plywood. “Technically,” he said, “I floated, too.”