How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  Cecilia led Troy over to where Adam and Lindsey were sitting on the couch, and I was surprised when she bent to hug the both of them. Later, when I was waiting to use the bathroom, and it was Cecilia who exited, she whispered to me, “You should have seen how Lindsey looked at Troy. Apparently she wants to fuck every man I’m with.” After that I don’t know what happened, because Ryan and I sneaked off to another bathroom down the hall. Recently, Cecilia had said, “All you and Ryan do is kiss and go down on each other. You can’t have an adult relationship without real sex.” But it also wasn’t an adult relationship because he only remembered me when he saw me. Otherwise, he only texted once in a while. When Ryan and I were finished, and I was looking in the mirror to fix my hair, I finally said what I’d been thinking.

  “How long are we going to keep doing this?” I asked. What I meant was, When are you going to take me on a real date?

  “As long as it’s fun for both of us,” Ryan said, reaching to hold one of my hands.

  “It’s not fun for me anymore,” I said, daring him to ask why.

  “Okay, whatever you want,” he said, and I hated that he looked as self-possessed as white men always look to me. When he left, closing the door behind him, I regretted all the times I let him eat me out and especially the times I reciprocated.

  “I thought you don’t date white men,” Cecilia had said, when I finally told her what Ryan and I were doing.

  “I didn’t say I don’t date white men.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said I date white men but I prefer black men.”

  “Mmmm,” she said, but I could tell that I’d lost some kind of debate I didn’t even realize we’d been having.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back to the living room, I was fighting the urge to cry. Troy, Lindsey, Ryan, and almost everyone else were nowhere to be seen. Later, I would learn that they were on the roof smoking the weed that Troy had brought with him. Meanwhile, Adam and Cecilia were having an intense conversation on the couch. They were talking softly, their bodies leaning toward each other, the gravity of their words on their faces.

  Later, everyone was eating the Chinese food that Zoe had ordered and paid for after having rejected the offers to pitch in. One of the girls, a redhead named Kath, started talking about the latest episode of Girls. By this time I’d drunk too many rum and Cokes. I didn’t know what else to do. Ryan had left the party with another girl, and had the audacity to hug me before he left. Cecilia whispered that the girl he left with was only his friend. But I was only a friend, which is why I couldn’t help feeling jealous and more than a little crazy.

  This is how come when Girls came up I said too loudly, “I fucking hate that show.”

  “Since when do you hate it? We watch it together,” Cecilia said, giggling. It was true. We’d watched it together, and I was surprised that I’d found it to be charming at times. It was true that there were no black people, underrepresentation blah blah blah, but I couldn’t imagine any of the characters having black friends unless the black friends were as whitewashed as they were. Cecilia would have fit right in.

  “Do you hate it because it lacks racial diversity? That’s the only complaint I’ve heard,” Adam said.

  “Not entirely. I really can’t imagine Hannah or any of her friends having poc friends. Or at least not any poc friends who don’t share the same class and ideologies as they do.”

  Two people laughed. I noticed that Cecilia looked uncomfortable, but I didn’t care.

  “So why don’t you like the show then?” Kath asked.

  “Because I think it glorifies gentrification. A few years back there were neighborhoods where I wouldn’t see a single white person and now I see white people everywhere. White people walking their dogs. White people jogging. White people like Hannah live in neighborhoods that were overrun with minorities and immigrants but now the minorities can’t afford it. White people move in, rent goes up, and coffee shops and yoga studios are opened. It’s all so fucked up.”

  Someone, a boy I didn’t know, asked, “But what are we supposed to do if we can’t afford the rent in other neighborhoods?”

  “I just think it’s ironic the same white people who were rallying when that policeman shot that man are the same white people who move into minority neighborhoods and then the minorities are unable to afford the increased rent. White people oppress us without even trying.”

  Everyone, all ten of them sitting on the couches and carpeted floor, stayed silent for a moment, and then someone said, “I’m too high for this conversation.” The laughter helped with the tension.

  * * *

  —

  After the party had disintegrated, Cecilia and I walked to the train station. We were too buzzed to murmur anything besides how badly we yearned for a warm bed. We had planned to spend the night in Cecilia’s dorm room, as it was too late to travel all the way to Brooklyn. I watched as she reached into her bag for a tube of lotion. I had no idea why, so late at night, she was rubbing lotion into her hands. She kept tubes in all of her purses. I teased her about it—that incessant need to moisturize throughout the day—but I wondered if growing up dark-skinned in a place like the Bay Area had done a number on her. “You’re terrified of ashy skin, aren’t you?” I once half joked.

  Sometimes, I really did feel sorry for Cecilia because her upbringing meant there were so many black references that she was completely unaware of—one time I brought up the television show Girlfriends and was horrified to discover that she’d never heard of it. She had only ever been to Jamaica as a baby, and then for her high school senior trip, when she and her classmates had stayed at a resort. Every time her parents visited, she was in school or otherwise unable to go, and no one had thought it important enough for her to see the version of Jamaica not printed on postcards in resort gift shops. How could I describe to her the white flesh of a Jamaican apple—an apple totally unlike any American one? How could she understand my disappointment when I moved to Brooklyn as a child and discovered that the apple I loved was unavailable to me in this new place? How could she understand the loss of not being able to eat a fruit I picked by hand in my grandmother’s yard? How to have a conversation about the fact that some things, some parts of ourselves, are tied to other, faraway places? These kinds of silences between Cecilia and me felt as though something had been stolen from us. Who was to blame? Her parents? White supremacy? Assimilation? And why did it matter to me that she understood and appreciated our shared heritage?

  “So Adam and I are having coffee tomorrow,” Cecilia said then, slathering the lotion between her fingers.

  “Why?” I asked, shaking my head to refuse the tube of lotion.

  “What do you mean why?”

  “I literally mean why when I say ‘why.’ What is the point of getting coffee?”

  “We’re trying to be friends maybe. Tonight I asked him if he was fucking Lindsey when we were together. I told him I was surprised they’re hanging out since when we were together the both of us would always say that we kind of hated Lindsey, and he was always saying that he didn’t like women who were too skinny. So he explained that they’re, like, not a serious thing and that he still misses and loves me but since he’s traveling abroad next semester he isn’t into a long-term relationship.”

  “Did you really use a black dick to make a white man jealous?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Did you only bring Troy to make Adam jealous?” Troy had left the party earlier because he had another commitment somewhere in Brooklyn.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t have anything to do with him being black.”

  “So the first time you actually claim to be attracted to a black man, it’s actually because you want to make a white man jealous? You don’t see how fucked up that is?”

  “Everything is about r
ace with you.”

  “And not enough is about race with you.”

  “You embarrassed me tonight. All those things you were saying about gentrification and Girls, you embarrassed me.”

  “I embarrassed you?”

  “You came across as the eternally offended black woman.”

  “That’s because we are eternally being disrespected.”

  Cecilia was shaking her head at me.

  “Black people like you don’t have to think about race as much as the rest of us do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In many ways middle-class black people have the same ideologies as white people. Because more than any of us, they want what white people have. Your parents are Jamaican and you don’t know anything about the country—”

  “Fuck you,” Cecilia said, and I could see that she meant it. In the past we would say “Fuck you” between giggles.

  “You’re a nigga like the rest of us,” I said then, and I meant it too.

  She turned and started walking away from me.

  “My nigga? My nigga?” I called after Cecilia, taunting her half jokingly, and reminding her who we were, but she just kept on walking away from me. I’d wanted a reaction from her.

  I’d seen ahead. I’d had some sense of the consequences but I’d said what I said anyway. In part because I meant it and in part because I wanted to hurt Cecilia for complicated reasons including the fact that she seemed to carry a lighter burden on her back. She could forget herself. She would graduate without loans because her parents could afford to pay for her tuition. She could want to sleep with a white man and that desire came as a clean feeling. I envied her for reasons that weren’t even her fault. When Cecilia walked away from me, I don’t know why I was surprised. I only know that I was. I stood there on West Seventy-second, waiting and hoping that she would turn around, but I was too stubborn and maybe even too stupid to make any attempts at winning back my best friend’s favor. And anyway, I don’t know what I would have said.

  MASH UP LOVE

  Mama used to say that sinful things happen before light comes back in the sky. That’s how ignorant, how country, she was. She believed that when light isn’t there to keep people careful, they do what they wouldn’t ordinarily do. She lived by these warnings too, because I never saw her out at night, except church on Sunday and Wednesday nights, and if Cobby and I weren’t with her then, she always asked Old Henry to walk her home. Every morning I wake up early enough to run while it’s still dark, and sometimes I remember how Mama used to warn us about nighttime evil. One time Cobby ran home chased by three boys. One of them, a rough boy named Roger Boxx, threatened to cut my brother because he’d tried to ease his way on Roger’s girl. Cobby took off his white T-shirt and stuffed it into his briefs so that he could slip into the darkness. I was reading in the front room and Mama was sitting next to me, falling asleep and waking every other moment because she was too tired to get up and climb into bed, when Cobby knocked on the door. We looked at the bulge in front of him. Since he found his way home safely, it all seemed funny to him. He laughed as he told us about the three boys chasing him, and he made sure not to mention the girl until after Mama had gone to bed. But before Mama got up from the chair, the tiredness seemed to have faded from her, and she shook her head at Cobby. “Dats why mi warn yuh ’bout walk di street ah night,” she said. “But yuh don’t want fi listen to nothing mi sey.” Then she closed her bedroom door. Back then, Cobby and I looked forward to the time of night when Mama retired to her room. The front room, where we slept and ate and did our living, became a playground, a confessional, and a reprieve in that two-room house after she went to bed.

  I cut one of the limes Ann-Marie picks from the tree behind our house and I squeeze half of it into a cup, adding brown sugar and cold water from the fridge. Only a little sweet drink can wake me up and keep my body light enough to run. A long time ago, I watched a race on the television where a black man much blacker than me beat a whole bunch of white people and he smiled into the camera and his teeth were like sunlight forcing my eyes closed. That’s how bright his teeth shone with skin that black. He pointed up to God, maybe to say, “You was the one who made these legs to work so fast.” I started running after that. Don’t know why, it just felt like something a powerful type of man should do. This was back when I had just come from the country to attend university. I didn’t know anybody and didn’t know how to know anybody—the world closes up for a quiet man. I started running when it was dark because I was ashamed for anyone to see my stick legs doing anything beyond walking. Ann-Marie says I’m greedy for such a small man. What she doesn’t understand is that I’m eating more than enough so that I don’t become an even smaller man because of all the running I do.

  I touch my toes and then I stretch each leg on one of the low branches of the mango tree in our front yard. I start out slow, feeling the last of my sleep slip off, and eventually my legs feel stronger and then I am gaining speed. I always loop around our housing scheme, admiring the gleam of new houses built on what used to be bush. A few of the houses are still empty. They all tend to be larger than ours, with more expansive lawns. We wanted something more modest with trees mature enough to produce fruit—the only house in the scheme that hadn’t been built brand-new. I wanted to live in a house where Mama could visit and feel comfortable. She liked nice things but she was born and would die a countrywoman, so she was easily overwhelmed. When she lived with us, she looked around at the neighbors’ houses and asked, “So a wah? People wid money want dem ’ouse fi come white?” In the country, we never knew a white house. People who didn’t have the money left their houses the color of the cement blocks, while others painted their walls the color of dirt or leaves or the sky, anything but white.

  If people who know me could hear all the talk going on in my head while I run, they would be surprised. Because not only am I quiet, but I am also simple. Everything about me is quiet and simple—from the clothes I put on, to the ordinary way I talk that doesn’t bring attention for being an educated man, to the unfussy way I gratefully eat everything that Ann-Marie puts in front of me. It’s a combination that continues to surprise people when they hear how well I’ve done for myself. When they see the woman I’m with, they take a good look at her light skin and tall hair and they wonder how a Mawga foot man could get a woman like that. They don’t realize I can see the surprise in their faces as they look from Ann-Marie to me. They wouldn’t guess that my demeanor is what caught Ann-Marie’s eyes at UWI. Her father, a louder, bigger man, used to beat her mother, so I believe she took my quiet ways to mean I would treat her good, and I have. I knew cockier, more talkative men were looking her way, and because I didn’t think she would consider me, I didn’t think anything when she created opportunities to talk to me. One day she asked if I wanted a piece of the coconut drops she was eating in the last moments before our Human Resources class began. I looked past her to Devon Taylor, the handsomest boy in our class, whose people had money because his father was somehow involved in Parliament. Devon Taylor was looking at Ann-Marie, she was looking at me, and in that moment I considered how often she offered food to me and the times she bumped into me studying at my usual spot in the library. It didn’t make sense, but I put two and two together. It bothered me that my nature—which had caused people to misuse and ignore me all my life, especially in comparison to Cobby’s—could catch a woman’s attention because of the safety of being loved by a man like me. I started meeting Ann-Marie’s interest with my own.

  The next time Ann-Marie showed up at my study spot in the library, I told her I’d heard about a girl who was selling fried fish from her dorm room and I asked if she wanted to come with me to buy some. Every time that girl, I think her name was Keisha, went home, she came back to campus with a whole bunch of fried fish her mother and little sisters helped her fry, since her people lived by the sea and her father fished for a liv
ing. Keisha worked in the cafeteria at UWI, and selling fried fish was a way for her to make a little extra money. She always came back to campus late on Sunday nights, and by the following night all the fish would be sold. When sales were especially busy, customers had to form a line inside her dorm room.

  If I could pinpoint the exact moment when Ann-Marie and I started to come together, I would say it began with sitting on Keisha’s bed in a room crowded with customers, watching her lift two fried fish out of a pan. Keisha didn’t even ask if we wanted the fish wrapped separately. I saw how she looked from Ann-Marie’s face to mine, wondering how a country boy like me had anything to do with a pastor’s daughter. Those of us at UWI who came from nothing, we always could tell each other apart. Keisha could tell from the cleanliness of the few tired clothes I owned. If we had taken a class together, she might have been able to tell from how hard I worked, as though working was going out of style. She could imagine that I was raised on whatever edible our yard and the yards of our neighbors bore and the little meat my mother could acquire every now and then. Still, sitting on that bed, it occurred to me that Ann-Marie was mine; maybe I even guessed that I would marry her. It all felt powerful to me. Keisha and I came from the same type of place and I knew that Ann-Marie and I were going to eat what seemed to me to carry a little of the hope of country people. Though it could be that I alone rested meaning on those moments in Keisha’s bedroom and none of it ever occurred to Ann-Marie.