(Humanista, Your piece was beautiful. I've been pushing this around for awhile. And you've inspired me to post it here despite its length. Thank you. l'ar-0)
Going to Come Back
As a child I was playing match-box cars with my friend Andre under the awning of his porch on a blazing summer afternoon. His brother, who was older, was sketching out ideas for his clothing line, when suddenly he looked up and said, “as soon as I’m old enough I’m going to Paris. ‘Cuz that’s where a nigger can be free.” I said that word over and over to myself—“Paris.” Later, I’d heard people speak with deep longing for other places. And by the time I finished high school, I was sure of one thing: “anywhere is better than here”—the rest of the world had become the Promised Land. So, the winter after graduation, upon hearing Peter Tosh’s warm voice for the first time I broke out. I put down nearly all my money on a ticket to the Caribbean, one way. First stop, the Virgin Islands, where I could work, be warm, and then push off hopping from island to island amid sun and positive vibrations.
The plane shot through bleak clouds and broke into clear blue skies. Soon, I’d be sleeping on the beach pulling fruit down from trees. I really cared less about details, just so long as it was different. Tosh’s refrain, “Catch-a-shubie, shubie, shubie tonight” echoed in my head while we came over the island.
As the plane touched down in Charlotte Amalie I saw metal hangers that had been torn like paper. There was the tail of a white and orange Cessna snapped off in a bundle of chain link fence on the edge of the airstrip. I heard someone say, “It was a bad one.” Heard “Hurricane,” and “Hugo,” and “amazing fares.” That’s why the ticket had been so cheap. No matter. The sky was clear, the sun warm. Even “hurricane” sounded exotic to me. I pictured people—I pictured myself—tied to a palm tree outlasting the blow.
Walking into town, I saw blue plastic tarps tied where roofs had been. But the sun was on my face and it felt great to break a sweat. There were houses leaning into each other without any windows. I’d seen blankets for windows at home too. But the weather was good and my bones were beginning to thaw. I saw a shadow move inside one of the tumbled houses. The beach looks out onto the sea anyway. This was paradise. Nothing could keep me from smiling while bathed in sun. Trucks belched out heavy smoke and subwoofers thumped by. The sidewalk turned into a rut meandering through broken concrete and glass. Paradise was looking more and more familiar. I realized that I’d hoped for more than a change seasons.
Bottles of ginger beer floated in a tub of ice on the side of the road. I was thirsty and here was something new. I smiled, explained I’d only just arrived. The man with dreds next to the bucket turned away and waited for me to leave. I bought a newspaper from a man who’d stepped back on to the corner after having made a pass between idling cars. He didn’t talk to me either, just took the money. Front page explained that race riots had entered their second day on St. Criox—the next island over.
I crested a hill and saw an enormous white cruise ship floating out in the bay. I was excited just to see something so large. In Detroit we’d only had the Bobo boat—more of a ferry—that went between the city and an amusement park. The boat always reappeared after winter, until the park closed, and the hull was cut up for scrap.
Along the narrow streets, people rushed by with shopping bags. Bargains were in all the windows. People wearing signs for restaurants barked out specials. In doorways others tried to hand out menus and guide people inside. They let me walk by. I must have looked like a hobo—cut-off jeans, a flimsy bag slung over my shoulder—or just young and broke. There was a crane swinging a pallet high over the streets. The air smelled of the sea and fresh tar. Windows were polished. Everything had the look of being new. There was a Benetton. I’d never seen one before, just the adds, and wished I had money to buy the “Unites Colors.” First, I’d have to find a job; and, as it turns out, all I had to do was ask.
A surf shop hired me on the spot, saying everyone left for Hugo and hadn’t come back. The owner showed me a sailboat in the marina with a broken mast; told me it was an insurance claim, that I could call it home, and that there was a housing pinch on the island. I worked mornings, spent my afternoons hanging off the deck of the boat reading in the sun. I tried to limit my trips to the supermarket in town—too many angry faces.
About a week later, while I was stocking sunglasses, a young woman came in. She was gorgeous and the radiance of her smile made me melt. She was sharply dressed and had a resume. I felt self-conscious about my cut off shorts and ratty t-shirt. The boss thanked her and said, “We’ll be in touch.” We needed someone and I couldn’t wait to start working with her. After she’d left he told me, “If any of them come in, be polite, but when they leave file it.” And by way of demonstration, he let her resume slip into the trash.
That afternoon while hanging off the end of the boat, reading, I turned and looked up into town. I felt like I’d become part of something bad. Leave, I thought. Go home and start over. Go home and go somewhere else. The next day I said there was an emergency. He paid me more money than I’d earned. I told him how I thought people only came there to take and didn’t give anything back. He laughed. I landed in Miami and caught a Grey Hound back north to winter. Back in my mother’s over-lit kitchen, she said, “That’s everywhere. You could of at least stuck it out till spring.” Paris came back to mind.
Andre’s brother, Dmitri, was mostly right. It seemed people of different shades mingled freely in the cafes, bars, and parks of Paris. But since I didn’t have working papers I’d have to try and find something under the table, which didn’t bother me in the least. While job hunting, an American restaurateur told me, “No. You don’t understand. That work’s not for you. It’s for Algerians, North Africans. Besides, if an inspector saw you with them, there’d be too many questions. They’d assume you were a fugitive.” He told me to improve my French, and then maybe it would be easier to blend in.
A couple of months later, still improving my French, and nearly broke, I was smoking on the steps of the Paris Opera. I’d lost my ambition in the job search, was waiting for the afternoon when the first discarded tickets from the museums would litter the side-walk, giving me someplace else to go. I’d made some friends, and through one was offered work on a vineyard outside of Bordeaux. Either way, I couldn’t last much longer in Paris. A man interrupted my thoughts by asking for a cigarette in English.
“How did you know I speak English?” I asked him.
“It’s the only language I know,” he said. Turns out, Jake was from Bandera, Texas and had just arrived in Europe. He invited me for a beer. I knew of a place. We ducked down one street, then another. He kept asking where we were. When I didn’t really know the names of many of the smaller streets, I realized how familiar I’d gotten there, not to mention how much he trusted me. Over our first beer I asked why he left.
“They divide us,” he said, “class, color, just to keep us fight’n in our cages. And besides everything’s going temporary labor. Ain’t no life for a working man. I ain’t never going back,” he said.
“You tried to find anything here yet?” I asked.
“Naw, not yet. You?”
I just said, “I don’t like Paris much. It’s going to be getting cold here soon anyway.”
“You don’t buy beer. You rent it,” he said on the way to the bathroom.
In Bordeaux I worked on the vineyard and taught some English. I got to know some writers, musicians. One writer, Patrick, spoke constantly of history. “You’ve got to know your history!” he intoned. So, one day he and I went to Beziers. His family was from near there. We visited the ruins of the Cathars, a group condemned as heretics and annihilated in the thirteenth century. But they didn’t die alone, Patrick explained. The Cathars and the Catholics of Aquitaine fought side my side. So Arnold-Aimery of the northern French forces ordered to kill them all and God would sort them out.
Coming unstuck from Paris inspired me to keep moving. I hiked over the Pyrenees into Spain. I learned on the other side that I’d come through the same pass that the Republicans from Barcelona used to flee Franco. I was moving back through history. My own family had to leave Spain at the time of the Inquisition. Whether they were Muslims of Jews has been forgotten over the generations they spent in Italy before coming to the States. They had worked in New York. Then the next generation moved to Detroit. Still, my parents shook their heads over my wandering. But my mother told me she’d always wanted to visit what she considered the old country—which she pronounced, “It-ly.”
A few years later, with money in hand after careful saving, I flew her to Rome just before Christmas. It was her first time abroad. And I was curious to see Italy through her eyes. Before coming to meet her I had been in Poland, seeing where my father’s side had been before coming to America, which at the time of my Grandfather’s departure was part of Russia. But his high cheek bones, reddish skin, slanting eyes, and short stature was explained by my father: “You got to understand, when the Mongols came through there they killed all the men taller than a wagon wheel and took the women for themselves.” And visiting the farm of his birth, where distant cousins still lived, all I kept hearing through the translator: “They say you don’t look like them.”
I cut that portion of my trip short and went down to Budapest, but not before stopping in Auschwitz. The buildings had all been built in a neat row. The sun went down and the museum closed before I could know the dead. The buildings had all been built in a neat row. And there was a pond that was still grey with ash.
At the train station in Budapest a woman tried to rent me a room and warned me about gypsies. She told me they have dark hair and eyes. I pointed at my own. She told me, “No, you are American.” I remembered a photo from Auschwitz of a Romani tank commander who’s distinguished himself with Rommel in North Africa, before he too was incinerated.
In Rome, I met my mother at the airport. She was exhausted from the flight but refused to sleep. We scurried all over the city. She craned her neck. She gawked, open mouthed, at the facades of the buildings. She threw coins in every fountain and kept telling me to take more pictures. Her excitement refreshed me. And then she mentioned that she understood why I travel.
We took a walking tour of Rome. The guide pointed to a window in the Piazza Venicia where Mussolini would leave a light on all night, so people would think he never stopped working.
“Uncle Danny says we could be related,” my mother
whispered. “Maybe distant cousins. But not to tell anybody.”
We traveled together down to Naples and walked out onto the pier. There were battered trucks with furniture tied to the roofs waiting for a boat, going to who knows where. Up on a hill, over the city, there was a dark castle.
“That would have been the last thing they saw,” I said pointing. “If they even looked back.”
“Take a picture,” she ordered. “I want to show Grandma.”
Back in Rome before she left, we ducked into a café to take a break. While cradling her cappuccino her eyebrows twisted in anger and her mouth turned into a deep frown. Her cigarette burned unattended in the ashtray. She looked right through me and said, “I’m so fuckin’ pissed Robbie. It’s so beautiful here. Why’d they ever leave?”
“The family?” I asked. “Well,” I said, “you know, back then, there were wars, famine, disease.”
She looked out the window and said, “They could have stuck it out.”
When I wasn’t looking—between Asia, work, Europe, South America, and school—I’d settled in Chicago. And now people visit me. I go to some places for the first time. I can see where I live through their eyes.
Earlier this winter I went to the DuSable Museum of African American History with a friend. At the museum I acted as his translator when necessary. Dah Jah told people in a rudimentary English that he’d learned from Reggae albums, that he was an artist from Benin and French was the language spoken there. Everyone spoke to each other, reached out hands. It was a warm sea of conversation. Children roamed bubbling with laughter. It was Martin Luther King Day. And while I translated what someone had said, a young usher asked if I was from Africa too.
Earlier, as Dah Jah and I road the train to the museum there was a stretch of vacant lots, houses gutted by fire, boards over windows, space, lots of vacant space. It was snowing. He stared transfixed out the window.
“You asked about Detroit,” I said. “It looks something like this.”
“You have it here too,” he said, “I didn’t know.”
