How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  Eventually I took her home with me, to a version of New York she may never have seen her entire four years at school in the city. To a girl like that, there was no reason to take the L train to the very last stop in Brooklyn—instead, she might take the L train from the city a few stops into Brooklyn for vegan ice cream in a gentrified neighborhood. I explained that Canarsie, the neighborhood that surrounded the last stop of the L train, used to be filled with white people until, according to my mother, the black people drove them out, not on purpose but just by being black. I told Cecilia that there were three Jamaican families on my block, and almost every other family was from another Caribbean island. And for Cecilia’s part, she invited me into her social group, and then I was interacting with the kinds of people, particularly white people, I’d sit next to in classes but never really hang out with. I even let Adam’s friend, Ryan, make out with me one night when we’d drunk too much wine and he offered to walk me to the train station. When he’d kissed me before I walked down the stairs to catch the L train, it reminded me of the kind of thing I would see in a movie set in New York City. Snowflakes were falling gently from the sky, and it was the kind of winter day that was comfortably cold. Moments like those, New York opens itself up, surprises me, whispers its secrets to me, even calls me by name, and I am left believing that the city really is as magical as people are always saying. He’d put his hand on my face and looked into my eyes, both of which a man had never done with me before. When a man looks at you like that, it’s easy to believe that you’re beautiful, which is why I smiled the whole train ride home.

  * * *

  —

  The first time New York opened up for me was when I was fifteen and spending the summer participating in an arts program at Stuyvesant High School. I was in the Visual Arts track, and when all the tracks came together to eat lunch, I noticed two black guys sitting a table away. Later I would learn that they were brothers who lived in the Bronx. My closest friend in my track was a Dominican boy named José, who called me “girl”—as in, “Girl, that painting is looking fierce.” On the first day, we’d introduced ourselves by saying our name and which high school we went to, and when I said that I was a rising junior at John Dewey in Brooklyn, José interrupted, excited to say that that’s where his cousin went. Afterwards, he came up to me to ask if I knew his cousin. I didn’t know her, but when he showed me a photograph on his phone I recognized her because she’d fought another girl on the train, the both of them pulling each other’s hair and throwing punches. The train car had been packed with onlookers and instigators from our high school crowding around the two of them. Eventually, when José’s cousin reached to the back of her own head and looked at the wad of hair in her hand, she’d started to cry and got off the train at the next stop, which meant that the other girl, a brolic type everyone said was bisexual, had won. I didn’t know how to say all of this to José—that I’d seen his cousin beaten and crying—so I said that I’d never seen her before. After that, he worked next to me in the studio, and at lunch he sat next to me.

  One day that summer, José asked if I would deliver a note for him. He motioned to one of the black brothers, explaining that a note was his way of pursuing Malik. “Wait, how do you even know he’s gay?” I asked. José only laughed. I delivered the note and immediately José and Malik were lovers, holding hands as we walked in the West Village in the afternoons after classes, along with Malik’s younger brother Maurice, who everyone called Baby. We were sidekicks, Baby and myself. I was disappointed to discover that Baby was bisexual, because once when he’d held my hand and looked very carefully at my fingers to see how badly I’d bitten my nails I’d felt shy, but I was intimidated and turned off by the fact that he was also interested in men. When I really thought about it, I was a Jamaican girl entirely out of my comfort zone.

  Malik and Baby took us to where they lived in the Bronx. I’d never been anywhere like that before—the bathroom and kitchen surfaces were overrun with baby cockroaches, the smell of pee sliced the air, and the little grandmother paid us no mind because she was too old, too far gone, to notice us. There were the nieces, two chatty little girls with hair badly in need of combing. I watched one of them smash a baby cockroach between her fingers, and I looked around quickly for some kind of explanation and commiseration, but Malik and José were behind a closed door and Baby was watching a daytime talk show with his grandmother.

  Another time, on our way to where Malik and Baby lived, we bumped into their sister a few blocks from the apartment. She was braless under a white T-shirt and with a man who had a large scar across one of his cheeks. I was afraid because I’d never been around drug addicts before. Later, in the apartment, amidst the baby cockroaches, the sleeping old woman, and the little girls playing with Barbie dolls on the dirty floor, Malik and Baby showed José and me a new dance they’d taught themselves. They danced to a Britney Spears song in the kitchen, and for reasons I didn’t quite understand, they’d incorporated knives—big shiny ones that looked out of place in that dilapidated apartment—into the routine. One slip and someone would have to call my mother. But Malik and Baby held tight, they danced and lip-synched, and I watched with some astonishment, thinking about how much larger and diverse the world and its people were than I had realized. We all stayed friends till the end of summer.

  * * *

  —

  The next time I saw Cecilia, she was excited when she asked about the walk to the subway with Ryan. “He’s a nice guy,” I said, wondering if Ryan had spilled that we’d kissed. I hadn’t planned to tell her about the kiss, because she would have made it into more than it was. “I think he really likes you,” she told me.

  It seemed clear that Cecilia was the kind of black girl who didn’t think about her race as much as I did. It seemed to me that the world wouldn’t let me forget. This was why I couldn’t help rolling my eyes when Cecilia said something like “I just love blue-eyed men.” “You should read The Bluest Eye,” I’d challenged her. “I’ve read it,” she said, looking annoyed. “Toni Morrison is a goddess,” she added. I’d read that book the semester before, and it explained so many of the stories black women tell themselves. I didn’t understand how Cecilia could say that she liked blue eyes as though there wasn’t anything to liking blue eyes. As if blue eyes were an innocent desire for a black woman.

  Adam broke up with Cecilia around the time we’d started hanging out, which was probably one of the reasons we’d gotten close. She had more time to invest in her relationships with women and she liked hearing that I thought she could do better than Adam. I observed that every man she pointed to in school or around the city, men she joked about rebounding with, were all white.

  “You seem to like white men,” I told her.

  “I like all men. Somehow, I’ve managed to keep my inner ho restrained,” she said, smiling.

  “But you seem to especially like white men.”

  “That’s not true at all.”

  One time we got into a mini-argument because Cecilia thought it was hypocritical for black women like me to say that we prefer black men but then judge black women who prefer white men.

  “What’s the difference?” she asked, and I was so surprised that for a moment I only stood there shaking my head.

  Then I said, “When it comes to race relations, the white man is the single most oppressive entity in the world, and you’re asking me what’s wrong with a black woman preferring white men? Are you serious?”

  We continued to debate, but in the end we were the same women as when we began the conversation, because we still disagreed. The only change, now that I think about it, is that we disliked each other a little bit.

  * * *

  —

  It’s easy to think of why I liked Cecilia. She was the best friend I’d always wanted. When she let you in, she was a mother and a sister and a friend all at once. She didn’t laugh or act surprised w
hen I told her that I was still a virgin. She only nodded and said, “We have to get you laid.” Around Cecilia I was more beautiful. Sometimes she would look at me and say, “You’re so pretty,” and coming from her it felt true. We walked around the city with coffee in our hands—with Cecilia I learned to enjoy coffee—as we explored different neighborhoods, browsing stores we couldn’t afford, our conversations alternating between meaningful and carefree. It reminded me of a few years earlier, exploring the city with Malik, Baby, and José, all of us still technically kids, and how watching a bearded person strut by in green high heels on Christopher Street made me feel that life had so much possibility.

  It was on one of those walks that Cecilia told me that she used to make herself throw up when she was sixteen. I told her that one of my high school teachers pushed his hand into the back of my jeans, grabbing my ass, and I had let him because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t tell anyone, but I stopped attending his class and doing any of the assignments, and when the semester ended I received an A for the class.

  One of our favorite things to do was to walk along the Hudson River. In one of the parks along the river, we discovered maybe the cleanest public bathroom in all of Manhattan. We went to places that never interested me before, like the time we went to a sex shop, and between giggles, bought vibrators. The city had never seemed more holy to me. When it got too late to go home, I’d sleep in Cecilia’s dorm bed with her. She changed in front of me, stripping off her underwear as though it wasn’t anything, and eventually I surprised myself by being able to do the same.

  I’d never met anyone funnier than Cecilia. She was honest in the way a white girl was honest, saying the exact things in her head regardless of how personal the details of her stories were. White girls don’t need to earn your trust before they talk their business. It was easy to forget that Cecilia’s parents were Jamaican. Once she told me about the time her mother walked into her bedroom and caught her masturbating. Her mother was quiet for a while before she said, “I’ve stepped into something,” and she then walked out of the room. They never talked about it. These were the kinds of stories that had us laughing too loudly when we were supposed to be studying.

  * * *

  —

  I try to imagine Cecilia’s life before she came to New York. Unlike the two-bedroom apartment my mother and I shared on the second floor of a house, the Wellington family residence, Cecilia told me, was an entire house with a backyard, a front yard, and an attic. Of course, they had a dog. On Saturday mornings, she and her mother would get lattes at the farmers’ market, and on Mondays, when her father was off from work, he mowed the lawn. When her mother wasn’t teaching economics, she was gardening, and when her father wasn’t teaching chemistry, he was watching sports. It all seemed so quintessentially upper middle class.

  My mother takes care of white people’s children in the city—nowadays it’s red-haired twins, Anna and Aaron, who are two. She never went to college, which is why it was so important that I went, and why it was so crucial that I didn’t major in something as impractical as photography. Sometimes, when I was in the city, I would see black nannies pushing strollers with white children and I couldn’t help thinking about my mother. It couldn’t be easy spending whole days with other people’s children and having to be patient with them. Once, when Cecilia and I walked past a park in the city with more than a few black nannies, she shook her head and called it—the fact that black women were caring for white babies—“modern racism.” “Oh yeah, what do your parents do for a living?” I had asked. She clearly couldn’t imagine the possibility that for women like my mother there weren’t many options. We’d only begun hanging out and it wasn’t until some time later that Cecilia learned how my mother made her money, but we never revisited that conversation.

  I imagine that the Wellingtons were proud to tell people that their only daughter was studying in New York. Her parents seemed to be people who had lost some sense of who they were. When I told Cecilia that my favorite food was oxtail and that my mother was making it for my dinner, and that she should come over, she said, “Oxtail? That sounds familiar to me.” She grew up eating American food. When her mother gave her cornmeal porridge, she complained and asked for boxed cereal with cold milk. Her mother wasn’t like mine, who had the hard way of Caribbean mothers and therefore used to tell me that if I didn’t eat what she put in front of me, then I wasn’t going to eat.

  * * *

  —

  Two months after Adam broke up with Cecilia, I saw him holding hands with a girl, but I didn’t say anything to Cecilia because I knew it would hurt her. I’d been with Ryan, where he’d done this thing in his dorm room that involved putting his head between my legs, and when I climaxed I regretted that I wasn’t invested in doing everything else with a boy who wanted to love me. Afterwards, he’d walked me out of his dormitory, where we bumped into Adam, who was holding hands with some chick. Two days later, Cecilia called me on the phone.

  “Adam is fucking Lindsey,” she said, crying.

  “Who’s Lindsey?” I asked.

  “This girl I used to hang out with last year. Do you think they were fucking when he and I were together?”

  “No, not necessarily. They could have hooked up afterwards.”

  “I know, but it’s, like, so suspicious. He told me that he didn’t want to be in a serious relationship and now he’s in a serious relationship.”

  “Fuck him. You can do so much better.”

  “I know. But she’s so skinny. When he was with me, he told me that he doesn’t like when women are too skinny and that blondes are overrated.”

  “What are you doing right now?” I asked, but she ignored me.

  “Lindsey is one of those girls who would scheme, waiting for the opportunity to snatch a man. She would do that. She fucked one of her professors, a married man, and she didn’t even feel sorry about it.”

  “Do you want to get together? I’d have to get some work done but we can eat and talk.”

  “I’ll come over. You’re always coming here.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell my mother to cook.”

  * * *

  —

  My mother liked Cecilia because she likes all smart, good-looking black people. And then when she learned that Cecilia’s parents were Jamaican, she liked her even more because Cecilia wasn’t the type of Jamaican my mother called a “lowlife.” She wasn’t loud, and she didn’t have a long, bright-colored weave. She asked Cecilia what were her parents’ first and last names so that she could think if she knew them, and she was visibly disappointed that she didn’t recognize the names.

  When I told my mother that Cecilia was coming for the weekend, she said that I had to go to the Korean store to buy a few things, and then she called me over to show me the Facebook accounts of two of her high school classmates, who’d gotten married now that gay marriage was legal in New York. They were both women. One of them was pretty and curvaceous, and had been married to a man at one point, and the other one looked like a butch lesbian. “Mi cyaan believe it,” my mother said. “No one love man more than Shantel and look here! Jamaican come America and marry woman. Jesus! Di devil know who fi fool.”

  “What if I was gay?” I asked.

  “Are you gay?” My mother turned to me, suddenly interested.

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  * * *

  —

  I was sent to the Korean store to buy coconut milk for the rice and peas and a packet of curry for the chicken. I don’t know for sure that the woman at the counter is Korean. Caribbean people believe that all the Asian people who own those small grocery stores that sell the spices, packaged food, and ground provisions from back home are Korean, and maybe this is true. When I exited the store, I saw that amongst the small crowd of people leaving the train station was Cecilia. A boy who looked about our age, in baggy
jeans and sneakers, was talking animatedly to her, and she was smiling as though she believed him to be handsome. Meanwhile, I was wondering if Cecilia wasn’t a little shocked whenever she left Manhattan for the parts of Brooklyn that weren’t gentrified yet. I couldn’t imagine living in a place with a Starbucks on the corner and an H&M and a bougie sandwich shop on the same block. I was surprised when I saw that Cecilia was giving the guy with the baggy jeans her number.

  She told me his name was Troy. He called her an hour later.

  When she hung up, she said, “He wants to be a rapper, so this is obviously not meant to be. But isn’t he so hot? I swear my panties got wet just talking to him.”

  “Since I’ve known you, this is the first black guy you’ve been attracted to,” I told her, surprised that this was a thing that was happening. “Hold on, my brain might explode from shock,” I said, which made Cecilia laugh. At the very least, I could have imagined her with the type of black guy who went to Yale—certainly not a wanna-be rapper from Brooklyn. I would’ve been surprised if Cecilia could recite a single line from a Tupac song.

  The following night, Cecilia invited Troy to come with us to a party on the Upper West Side. Zoe, a girl Cecilia knew, was having the party, and I could tell from the size of the apartment that her parents were wealthy. Cecilia, Troy, and I were the only black people there. When I walked into the living room and saw Adam and Lindsey, I immediately questioned whether Cecilia had brought Troy to make Adam jealous. It seemed like the kind of thing she’d do. She could be more fragile than I preferred in a friend—always wanting me to validate her feelings, which were many and sensitive. It seemed as though we were always having the same conversations. I imagined that as an only child, she had been coddled—her parents asking how her day was and actually listening, quick to knead every one of her anxieties away. But there was also a little of that Jamaican wildness in Cecilia. She was the woman from a movie we once watched together, that woman with mascara running down her face, the quiet one, now standing in the rain in her lingerie because she had to beg the man to stay with her. Cecilia could be dramatic like that. Once, on a bus, I heard someone say that Jamaicans are the comedians of the Caribbean. But I think it’s more true that we’re the performers of the Caribbean. And that night as we walked into the party, I doubted that Cecilia would wear a dress that tight and such bright red lipstick without some kind of motive.