Americanah

CHAPTER 31

After Ifemelu broke up with Curt, she told Ginika, “There was a feeling I wanted to feel that I did not feel.”

“What are you talking about? You cheated on him!” Ginika shook her head as though Ifemelu were mad. “Ifem, honestly, sometimes I don’t understand you.”

It was true, she had cheated on Curt with a younger man who lived in her apartment building in Charles Village and played in a band. But it was also true that she had longed, with Curt, to hold emotions in her hand that she never could. She had not entirely believed herself while with him — happy, handsome Curt, with his ability to twist life into the shapes he wanted. She loved him, and the spirited easy life he gave her, and yet she often fought the urge to create rough edges, to squash his sunniness, even if just a little.

“I think you are a self-sabotager,” Ginika said. “That’s why you cut off Obinze like that. And now you cheat on Curt because at some level you don’t think you deserve happiness.”

“Now you are going to suggest some pills for Self-Sabotage Disorder,” Ifemelu said. “That’s absurd.”

“So why did you do it?”

“It was a mistake. People make mistakes. People do stupid things.”

She had done it, in truth, because she was curious, but she would not tell Ginika this, because it would seem flippant; Ginika would not understand, Ginika would prefer a grave and important reason like self-sabotage. She was not even sure she liked him, Rob, who wore dirty ripped jeans, grimy boots, rumpled flannel shirts. She did not understand grunge, the idea of looking shabby because you could afford not to be shabby; it mocked true shabbiness. The way he dressed made him seem superficial to her, and yet she was curious about him, about how he would be, naked in bed with her. The sex was good the first time, she was on top of him, gliding and moaning and grasping the hair on his chest, and feeling faintly and glamorously theatrical as she did so. But the second time, after she arrived at his apartment and he pulled her into his arms, a great torpor descended on her. He was already breathing heavily, and she was extracting herself from his embrace and picking up her handbag to leave. In the elevator, she was overcome with the frightening sense that she was looking for something solid, flailing, and all she touched dissolved into nothingness. She went to Curt’s apartment and told him.

“It meant nothing. It happened once and I am so sorry.”

“Stop playing,” he said, but she knew, from the unbelieving horror that was deepening the blue of his eyes, that he knew she was not playing. It took hours of side-stepping each other, of drinking tea and putting on music and checking e-mail, of Curt lying faceup on the couch, still and silent, before he asked, “Who is he?”

She told him the man’s name. Rob.

“He’s white?”

She was surprised that he would ask her this, and so soon. “Yes.” She had first seen Rob months before, in the elevator, with his unkempt clothes and unwashed hair, and he had smiled at her and said, “I see you around.” After that, whenever she saw him, he looked at her with a kind of lazy interest, as though they both knew that something would happen between them and it was only a matter of when.

“Who the fuck is he?” Curt asked.

She told him that he lived on the floor above hers, that they said hello to each other and nothing else until that evening when she saw him coming back from the liquor store and he asked if she’d like to have a drink with him and she did a stupid, impulsive thing.

“You gave him what he wanted,” Curt said. The planes of his face were hardening. It was an odd thing for Curt to say, the sort of thing Aunty Uju, who thought of sex as something a woman gave a man at a loss to herself, would say.

In a sudden giddy fit of recklessness, she corrected Curt. “I took what I wanted. If I gave him anything, then it was incidental.”

“Listen to yourself, just fucking listen to yourself!” Curt’s voice had hoarsened. “How could you do this to me? I was so good to you.”

He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.

“You won’t forgive me,” she said, a half question.

“Bitch,” he said.

He wielded the word like a knife; it came out of his mouth sharp with loathing. To hear Curt say “bitch” so coldly felt surreal, and tears gathered in her eyes, knowing that she had turned him into a man who could say “bitch” so coldly, and wishing he was a man who would not have said “bitch” no matter what. Alone in her apartment, she cried and cried, crumpled on her living room rug that was so rarely used it still smelled of the store. Her relationship with Curt was what she wanted, a crested wave in her life, and yet she had taken an axe and hacked at it. Why had she destroyed it? She imagined her mother saying it was the devil. She wished she believed in the devil, in a being outside of yourself that invaded your mind and caused you to destroy that which you cared about.

She spent weeks calling Curt, waiting in front of his building until he came out, saying over and over how sorry she was, how much she wanted to work through things. On the day she woke up and finally accepted that Curt would not return her calls, would not open the door of his apartment no matter how hard she knocked, she went alone to their favorite bar downtown. The bartender, the one who knew them, gave her a gentle smile, a sympathy smile. She smiled back and ordered another mojito, thinking that perhaps the bartender was better suited for Curt, with her brown hair blow-dried to satin, her thin arms and tight black clothes and her ability always to be seamlessly, harmlessly chatty. She would also be seamlessly, harmlessly faithful; if she had a man like Curt, she would not be interested in a curiosity copulation with a stranger who played unharmonious music. Ifemelu stared into her glass. There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. She got up and left a big tip on the counter. For a long time afterwards, her memory of the end with Curt was this: speeding down Charles Street in a taxi, a little drunk and a little relieved and a little lonely, with a Punjabi driver who was proudly telling her that his children did better than American children at school.

SOME YEARS LATER, at a dinner party in Manhattan, a day after Barack Obama became the Democratic Party’s candidate for President of the United States, surrounded by guests, all fervent Obama supporters who were dewy-eyed with wine and victory, a balding white man said, “Obama will end racism in this country,” and a large-hipped, stylish poet from Haiti agreed, nodding, her Afro bigger than Ifemelu’s, and said she had dated a white man for three years in California and race was never an issue for them.

“That’s a lie,” Ifemelu said to her.

“What?” the woman asked, as though she could not have heard properly.

“It’s a lie,” Ifemelu repeated.

The woman’s eyes bulged. “You’re telling me what my own experience was?”

Even though Ifemelu by then understood that people like the woman said what they said to keep others comfortable, and to show they appreciated How Far We Have Come; even though she was by then happily ensconced in a circle of Blaine’s friends, one of whom was the woman’s new boyfriend, and even though she should have left it alone, she did not. She could not. The words had, once again, overtaken her; they overpowered her throat, and tumbled out.

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”

The host, a Frenchwoman, glanced at her American husband, a slyly pleased smile on her face; the most unforgettable dinner parties happened when guests said unexpected, and potentially offensive, things.

The poet shook her head and said to the host, “I’d love to take some of that wonderful dip home if you have any left,” and looked at the others as though she could not believe they were actually listening to Ifemelu. But they were, all of them hushed, their eyes on Ifemelu as though she was about to give up a salacious secret that would both titillate and implicate them. Ifemelu had been drinking too much white wine; from time to time she had a swimming sensation in her head, and she would later send apology e-mails to the host and the poet. But everyone was watching her, even Blaine, whose expression she could not, for once, read clearly. And so she began to talk about Curt.

It was not that they avoided race, she and Curt. They talked about it in the slippery way that admitted nothing and engaged nothing and ended with the word “crazy,” like a curious nugget to be examined and then put aside. Or as jokes that left her with a small and numb discomfort that she never admitted to him. And it was not that Curt pretended that being black and being white were the same in America; he knew they were not. It was, instead, that she did not understand how he grasped one thing but was completely tone-deaf about another similar thing, how he could easily make one imaginative leap, but be crippled in the face of another. Before his cousin Ashleigh’s wedding, for example, he dropped her off at a small spa near his childhood home, to get her eyebrows shaped. Ifemelu walked in and smiled at the Asian woman behind the counter.

“Hi. I’d like to get my eyebrows waxed.”

“We don’t do curly,” the woman said.

“You don’t do curly?”

“No. Sorry.”

Ifemelu gave the woman a long look; it was not worth an argument. If they did not do curly, then they did not do curly, whatever curly was. She called Curt and asked him to turn around and come back for her because the salon did not do curly. Curt walked in, his blue eyes bluer, and said he wanted to talk to the manager right away. “You are going to fucking do my girlfriend’s eyebrows or I’ll shut down this fucking place. You don’t deserve to have a license.”

The woman transformed into a smiling, solicitous coquette. “I’m so sorry, it was a misunderstanding,” she said. Yes, they could do the eyebrows. Ifemelu did not want to, worried that the woman might scald her, rip her skin off, pinch her, but Curt was too outraged on her behalf, his anger smoldering in the closed air of the spa, and so she sat, tensely, as the woman waxed her eyebrows.

As they drove back, Curt asked, “How is the hair of your eyebrows curly anyway? And how is that hard to fucking wax?”

“Maybe they’ve never done a black woman’s eyebrows and so they think it’s different, because our hair is different, after all, but I guess now she knows the eyebrows are not that different.”

Curt scoffed, reaching across to take her hand, his palm warm. At the cocktail reception, he kept his fingers meshed with hers. Young females in tiny dresses, their breaths and bellies sucked in, trooped across to say hello to him and to flirt, asking if he remembered them, Ashleigh’s friend from high school, Ashleigh’s roommate in college. When Curt said, “This is my girlfriend, Ifemelu,” they looked at her with surprise, a surprise that some of them shielded and some of them did not, and in their expressions was the question “Why her?” It amused Ifemelu. She had seen that look before, on the faces of white women, strangers on the street, who would see her hand clasped in Curt’s and instantly cloud their faces with that look. The look of people confronting a great tribal loss. It was not merely because Curt was white, it was the kind of white he was, the untamed golden hair and handsome face, the athlete’s body, the sunny charm and the smell, around him, of money. If he were fat, older, poor, plain, eccentric, or dreadlocked, then it would be less remarkable, and the guardians of the tribe would be mollified. And it did not help that although she might be a pretty black girl, she was not the kind of black that they could, with an effort, imagine him with: she was not light-skinned, she was not biracial. At that party, as Curt held on to her hand, kissed her often, introduced her to everyone, her amusement curdled into exhaustion. The looks had begun to pierce her skin. She was tired even of Curt’s protection, tired of needing protection.

Curt leaned in and whispered, “That one, the one with the bad spray tan? She can’t even see her fucking boyfriend’s been checking you out since we walked in here.”

So he had noticed, and understood, the “Why her?” looks. It surprised her. Sometimes, in the middle of floating on his bubbly exuberance, he would have a flash of intuition, of surprising perception, and she would wonder if there were other more primal things she was missing about him. Such as when he told his mother, who had glanced at the Sunday newspaper and mumbled that some people were still looking for reasons to complain even though America was now color-blind, “Come on, Mother. What if ten people who look like Ifemelu suddenly walked in here to eat? You realize our fellow diners would be less than pleased?”

“Maybe,” his mother said, noncommittal, and shot an eyebrow-raise of accusation at Ifemelu, as though to say she knew very well who had turned her son into a pathetic race warrior. Ifemelu smiled a small, victorious smile.

And yet. Once, they visited his aunt, Claire, in Vermont, a woman who had an organic farm and walked around barefoot and talked about how connected to the earth it made her feel. Did Ifemelu have such an experience in Nigeria? she asked, and looked disappointed when Ifemelu said her mother would slap her if she ever stepped outside without shoes. Claire talked, throughout the visit, about her Kenyan safari, about Mandela’s grace, about her adoration for Harry Belafonte, and Ifemelu worried that she would lapse into Ebonics or Swahili. As they left her rambling house, Ifemelu said, “I bet she’s an interesting woman if she’d just be herself. I don’t need her to over-assure me that she likes black people.”

And Curt said it was not about race, it was just that his aunt was hyperaware of difference, any difference.

“She would have done the exact same thing if I had turned up with a blond Russian,” he said.

Of course his aunt would not have done the same thing with a blond Russian. A blond Russian was white, and his aunt would not feel the need to prove that she liked people who looked like the blond Russian. But Ifemelu did not tell Curt this because she wished it were obvious to him.

When they walked into a restaurant with linen-covered tables, and the host looked at them and asked Curt, “Table for one?” Curt hastily told her the host did not mean it “like that.” And she wanted to ask him, “How else could the host have meant it?” When the strawberry-haired owner of the bed-and-breakfast in Montreal refused to acknowledge her as they checked in, a steadfast refusal, smiling and looking only at Curt, she wanted to tell Curt how slighted she felt, worse because she was unsure whether the woman disliked black people or liked Curt. But she did not, because he would tell her she was overreacting or tired or both. There were, simply, times that he saw and times that he was unable to see. She knew that she should tell him these thoughts, that not telling him cast a shadow over them both. Still, she chose silence. Until the day they argued about her magazine. He had picked up a copy of Essence from the pile on her coffee table, on a rare morning that they spent in her apartment, the air still thick with the aroma of the omelets she had made.

“This magazine’s kind of racially skewed,” he said.

“What?”

“Come on. Only black women featured?”

“You’re serious,” she said.

He looked puzzled. “Yeah.”

“We’re going to the bookstore.”

“What?”

“I need to show you something. Don’t ask.”

“Okay,” he said, unsure what this new adventure was but eager, with that childlike delight of his, to participate.

She drove to the bookstore in the Inner Harbor, took down copies of the different women’s magazines from the display shelf, and led the way to the café.

“Do you want a latte?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

After they settled down on the chairs, paper cups in front of them, she said, “Let’s start with the covers.” She spread the magazines on the table, some on top of the others. “Look, all of them are white women. This one is supposed to be Hispanic, we know this because they wrote two Spanish words here, but she looks exactly like this white woman, no difference in her skin tone and hair and features. Now, I’m going to flip through, page by page, and you tell me how many black women you see.”

“Babe, come on,” Curt said, amused, leaning back, paper cup to his lips.

“Just humor me,” she said.

And so he counted. “Three black women,” he said, finally. “Or maybe four. She could be black.”

“So three black women in maybe two thousand pages of women’s magazines, and all of them are biracial or racially ambiguous, so they could also be Indian or Puerto Rican or something. Not one of them is dark. Not one of them looks like me, so I can’t get clues for makeup from these magazines. Look, this article tells you to pinch your cheeks for color because all their readers are supposed to have cheeks you can pinch for color. This tells you about different hair products for everyone—and ‘everyone’ means blonds, brunettes, and redheads. I am none of those. And this tells you about the best conditioners — for straight, wavy, and curly. No kinky. See what they mean by curly? My hair could never do that. This tells you about matching your eye color and eye shadow — blue, green, and hazel eyes. But my eyes are black so I can’t know what shadow works for me. This says that this pink lipstick is universal, but they mean universal if you are white because I would look like a golliwog if I tried that shade of pink. Oh, look, here is some progress. An advertisement for foundation. There are seven different shades for white skin and one generic chocolate shade, but that is progress. Now, let’s talk about what is racially skewed. Do you see why a magazine like Essence even exists?”

“Okay, babe, okay, I didn’t mean for it to be such a big deal,” he said.

That evening, Ifemelu wrote a long e-mail to Wambui about the bookstore, the magazines, the things she didn’t tell Curt, things unsaid and unfinished. It was a long e-mail, digging, questioning, unearthing. Wambui replied to say, “This is so raw and true. More people should read this. You should start a blog.”

Blogs were new, unfamiliar to her. But telling Wambui what happened was not satisfying enough; she longed for other listeners, and she longed to hear the stories of others. How many other people chose silence? How many other people had become black in America? How many had felt as though their world was wrapped in gauze? She broke up with Curt a few weeks after that, and she signed on to WordPress, and her blog was born. She would later change the name, but at first she called it Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America. Her first post was a better-punctuated version of the e-mail she had sent to Wambui. She referred to Curt as “The Hot White Ex.” A few hours later, she checked her blog stats. Nine people had read it. Panicked, she took down the post. The next day, she put it up again, modified and edited, ending with words she still so easily remembered. She recited those words now, at the dinner table of the French and American couple, while the Haitian poet stared, arms folded.

The simplest solution to the problem of race in America? Romantic love. Not friendship. Not the kind of safe, shallow love where the objective is that both people remain comfortable. But real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved. And because that real deep romantic love is so rare, and because American society is set up to make it even rarer between American Black and American White, the problem of race in America will never be solved.

“Oh! What a wonderful story!” the French host said, her palm placed dramatically on her chest, looking around the table, as though to seek a response. But everyone else remained silent, their eyes averted and unsure.

A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor

White Girlfriend and I are Michelle Obama groupies. So the other day I say to her — I wonder if Michelle Obama has a weave, her hair looks fuller today, and all that heat every day must damage it. And she says — you mean her hair doesn’t grow like that? So is it me or is that the perfect metaphor for race in America right there? Hair. Ever notice makeover shows on TV, how the black woman has natural hair (coarse, coily, kinky, or curly) in the ugly “before” picture, and in the pretty “after” picture, somebody’s taken a hot piece of metal and singed her hair straight? Some black women, AB and NAB, would rather run naked in the street than come out in public with their natural hair. Because, you see, it’s not professional, sophisticated, whatever, it’s just not damn normal. (Please, commenters, don’t tell me it’s the same as a white woman who doesn’t color her hair.) When you DO have natural Negro hair, people think you “did” something to your hair. Actually, the folk with the Afros and dreads are the ones who haven’t “done” anything to their hair. You should be asking Beyoncé what she’s done. (We all love Bey but how about she show us, just once, what her hair looks like when it grows from her scalp?) I have natural kinky hair. Worn in cornrows, Afros, braids. No, it’s not political. No, I am not an artist or poet or singer. Not an earth mother either. I just don’t want relaxers in my hair — there are enough sources of cancer in my life as it is. (By the way, can we ban Afro wigs at Halloween? Afro is not costume, for God’s sake.) Imagine if Michelle Obama got tired of all the heat and decided to go natural and appeared on TV with lots of woolly hair, or tight spirally curls. (There is no knowing what her texture will be. It is not unusual for a black woman to have three different textures on her head.) She would totally rock but poor Obama would certainly lose the independent vote, even the undecided Democrat vote.

UPDATE: ZoraNeale22, who’s transitioning, asked me to post my regimen. Pure shea butter as a leave-in conditioner works for many naturals. Not for me, though. Anything with lots of shea butter leaves my hair grayish and dryish. And dry is my hair’s biggest problem. I wash once a week with a silicone-free hydrating shampoo. I use a hydrating conditioner. I do not towel-dry my hair. I leave it wet, divide it in sections, and apply a creamy leave-in product (present favorite is Qhemet Biologics, other preferred brands are Oyin Handmade, Shea Moisture, Bask Beauty, and Darcy’s Botanicals). Then I put my hair in three or four big cornrows, and knot my satin scarf around my head (satin is good, it preserves moisture. Cotton is bad, it soaks up moisture). I go to sleep. The next morning, I take out the cornrows and voilà, a lovely fluffy ’fro! Key is to add product while hair is wet. And I never, ever comb my hair when it’s dry. I comb only when wet, or damp, or totally drenched in a creamy moisturizer. This plait-while-wet regimen can even work for our Seriously Curly White Girlfriends who are tired of flatirons and keratin treatments. Any AB and NAB naturals out there who want to share their regimen?

CHAPTER 32

For weeks, Ifemelu stumbled around, trying to remember the person she was before Curt. Their life together had happened to her, she would not have been able to imagine it if she had tried, and so, surely, she could return to what was before. But before was a slate-toned blur and she no longer knew who she had been then, what she had enjoyed, disliked, wanted. Her job bored her: she did the same bland things, writing press releases, editing press releases, copyediting press releases, her movements rote and numbing. Perhaps it had always been so and she had not noticed, because she was blinded by the brightness of Curt. Her apartment felt like a stranger’s home. On weekends, she went to Willow. Aunty Uju’s condo was in a cluster of stucco buildings, the neighborhood carefully landscaped, boulders placed at corners, and in the evenings, friendly people walked their handsome dogs. Aunty Uju had taken on a new lightheartedness; she wore a tiny anklet in the summer, a hopeful flash of gold on her leg. She had joined African Doctors for Africa, volunteering her time on two-week medical missions, and on her trip to Sudan, she met Kweku, a divorced Ghanaian doctor. “He treats me like a princess. Just like Curt treated you,” she told Ifemelu.

“I’m trying to forget him, Aunty. Stop talking about him!”

“Sorry,” Aunty Uju said, not looking sorry at all. She had told Ifemelu to do everything to save the relationship, because she would not find another man who would love her as Curt had. When Ifemelu told Dike that she had broken up with Curt, he said, “He was pretty cool, Coz. Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes, of course.”

Perhaps he sensed otherwise, and knew of the slight unsteadiness of her spirit; most nights she lay in bed and cried, berating herself for what she had destroyed, then telling herself that she had no reason to be crying, and crying all the same. Dike brought up a tray to her room, on which he had placed a banana and a can of peanuts.

“Snack time!” he said, with a teasing grin; he still did not understand why anybody would want to eat both together. While Ifemelu ate, he sat on the bed and told her about school. He was playing basketball now, his grades had improved, he liked a girl called Autumn.

“You’re really settling in here.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his smile reminded her of what it used to be in Brooklyn, open, unguarded.

“Remember the character Goku in my Japanese anime?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You kind of look like Goku with your Afro,” Dike said, laughing.

Kweku knocked and waited for her to say “Come in” before he poked his head in. “Dike, are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes, Uncle.” Dike got up. “Let’s roll!”

“We’re going to the community center, would you like to join us?” Kweku asked Ifemelu, tentatively, almost formally; he, too, knew she was suffering from a breakup. He was small and bespectacled, a gentleman and a gentle man; Ifemelu liked him because he liked Dike.

“No, thank you,” Ifemelu said. He lived in a house not far away, but some of his shirts were in Aunty Uju’s closet, and Ifemelu had seen a face wash for men in Aunty Uju’s bathroom, and cartons of organic yogurt in the fridge, which she knew Aunty Uju did not eat. He looked at Aunty Uju with translucent eyes, those of a man who wanted the world to know how much he loved. It reminded Ifemelu of Curt, and made her feel, again, a wistful sadness.

Her mother heard something in her voice over the phone. “Are you sick? Did anything happen?”

“I’m fine. Just work,” she said.

Her father, too, asked why she sounded different and if all was well. She told him that all was well, that she was spending much of her time after work blogging; she was about to explain this new pastime of hers, but he said, “I’m fairly familiar with the concept. We have been undergoing a rigorous computer literacy training in the office.”

“They have confirmed your father’s application. He can take his leave when my school vacates,” her mother said. “So we should apply for our visa quickly.”

Ifemelu had long dreamed of, and talked about, when they would be able to visit her. She could afford it now, and her mother wanted it now, but she wished it could be another time. She wanted to see them, but the thought of their visit exhausted her. She was not sure she would be able to be their daughter, the person they remembered.

“Mummy, things are very busy at work now.”

“Ahn-ahn. Are we coming to disturb your work?”

And so she sent them invitation letters, bank statements, a copy of her green card. The American embassy was better now; the staff was still rude, her father said, but you no longer had to fight and shove outside to get in line. They were given six-month visas. They came for three weeks. They seemed like strangers. They looked the same, but the dignity she remembered was gone, and left instead something small, a provincial eagerness. Her father marveled at the industrial carpeting in the hallway of her apartment building; her mother hoarded faux-leather handbags at Kmart, paper napkins from the mall food court, even plastic shopping bags. They both posed for photos in front of JC Penney, asking Ifemelu to make sure she got the entire sign of the store. She watched them with a sneer, and for this she felt guilty; she had guarded their memories so preciously and yet, finally seeing them, she watched them with a sneer.

“I do not understand Americans. They say ‘job’ and you think they have said ‘jab,’ ” her father declared, spelling both words. “One finds the British manner of speaking much preferable.”

Before they left, her mother asked her quietly, “Do you have a friend?” She said “friend” in English; the tame word parents used because they could not desecrate their tongues with “boyfriend,” even though it was exactly what they meant: somebody romantic, a marriage prospect.

“No,” Ifemelu said. “I have been very busy with work.”

“Work is good, Ifem. But you should also keep your eyes open. Remember that a woman is like a flower. Our time passes quickly.”

Before, she might have laughed dismissively, and told her mother that she did not at all feel like a flower, but now she was too tired, it felt too much of an effort. On the day they left for Nigeria, she collapsed onto her bed, crying uncontrollably, and thinking: What is wrong with me? She was relieved that her parents had gone, and she felt guilty for feeling relief. After work, she wandered around the center of Baltimore, aimlessly, interested in nothing. Was this what the novelists meant by ennui? On a slow Wednesday afternoon, she handed in her resignation. She had not planned to resign, but it suddenly seemed to be what she had to do, and so she typed the letter on her computer and took it to her manager’s office.

“You were making such progress. Is there anything we can do to make you change your mind?” her manager asked, very surprised.

“It’s personal, family reasons,” Ifemelu said vaguely. “I really appreciate all the opportunities you’ve given me.”

So What’s the Deal?

They tell us race is an invention, that there is more genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroids. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what’s the deal, doctors in the house? Is race an invention or not?

CHAPTER 33

The blog had unveiled itself and shed its milk teeth; by turns, it surprised her, pleased her, left her behind. Its readers increased, by the thousands from all over the world, so quickly that she resisted checking the stats, reluctant to know how many new people had clicked to read her that day, because it frightened her. And it exhilarated her. When she saw her posts reposted on another site, she flushed with accomplishment, and yet she had not imagined any of this, had never nursed any firm ambition. E-mails came from readers who wanted to support the blog. Support. That word made the blog even more apart from her, a separate thing that could thrive or not, sometimes without her and sometimes with her. So she put up a link to her PayPal account. Credits appeared, many small and one so large that when she saw it, she let out an unfamiliar sound, a blend of a gasp and a scream. It began to appear every month, anonymously, as regular as a paycheck, and each time it did, she felt abashed, as though she had picked up something valuable on the street and kept it for herself. She wondered if it was from Curt, just as she wondered if he followed the blog, and what he thought of being referred to as The Hot White Ex. It was a halfhearted wondering; she missed what could have been, but she no longer missed him.

She checked her blog e-mail too often, like a child eagerly tearing open a present she is not sure she wants, and read from people asking for a drink, telling her she was a racist, giving her ideas to blog about. A fellow blogger who made hair butters first suggested advertising and, for a token fee, Ifemelu put up the image of a bounteous-haired woman on the top right side of the blog page; clicking on it led to the hair butter website. Another reader offered more money for a blinking graphic that showed, first, a long-necked model in a tight dress, then the same model in a floppy hat. Clicking on the image led to an online boutique. Soon there were e-mails about advertising Pantene shampoos and Covergirl makeup. Then an e-mail from the director of multicultural life at a prep school in Connecticut, so formal she imagined it typed on hand-cut paper with a silver crest, asking if she would speak to the students on diversity. Another e-mail came from a corporation in Pennsylvania, less formally written, telling her a local professor had identified her as a provocative race blogger and asking if she would lead their annual diversity workshop. An editor from Baltimore Living e-mailed to say that they wanted to include her in a Ten People to Watch feature; she was photographed next to her laptop, her face doused in shadow, under the caption “The Blogger.” Her readers tripled. More invitations came. To receive phone calls, she wore her most serious pair of trousers, her most muted shade of lipstick, and she spoke sitting upright at her desk, legs crossed, her voice measured and sure. Yet a part of her always stiffened with apprehension, expecting the person on the other end to realize that she was play-acting this professional, this negotiator of terms, to see that she was, in fact, an unemployed person who wore a rumpled nightshirt all day, to call her “Fraud!” and hang up. But more invitations came. Hotel and travel were covered and the fees varied. Once she said, on an impulse, that she wanted twice what she had been offered the previous week, and was shocked when the man calling from Delaware said, “Yeah, we could do that.”

Most of the people who attended her first diversity talk, at a small company in Ohio, wore sneakers. They were all white. Her presentation was titled “How to Talk About Race with Colleagues of Other Races,” but who, she wondered, would they be talking to, since they were all white? Perhaps the janitor was black.

“I’m no expert so don’t quote me,” she started, and they laughed, warm encouraging laughter, and she told herself that this would go well, she need not have worried about talking to a roomful of strangers in the middle of Ohio. (She had read, with mild worry, that openly sundown towns still existed here.) “The first step to honest communication about race is to realize that you cannot equate all racisms,” she said, and then launched into her carefully prepared speech. When, at the end, she said, “Thank you,” pleased with the fluidness of her delivery, the faces around her were frozen. The leaden clapping deflated her. Afterwards, she was left only with the director of human resources, drinking oversweet iced tea in the conference room, and talking about soccer, which he knew Nigeria played well, as though keen to discuss anything but the talk she had just given. That evening she received an e-mail: YOUR TALK WAS BALONEY. YOU ARE A RACIST. YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL WE LET YOU INTO THIS COUNTRY.

That e-mail, written in all capital letters, was a revelation. The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence. They had not read her blog but they had heard that she was a “leading blogger” about race. And so, in the following weeks, as she gave more talks at companies and schools, she began to say what they wanted to hear, none of which she would ever write on her blog, because she knew that the people who read her blog were not the same people who attended her diversity workshops. During her talks, she said: “America has made great progress for which we should be very proud.” In her blog she wrote: Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it. Still more invitations came. She hired a student intern, a Haitian American, her hair worn in elegant twists, who was nimble on the Internet, looking up whatever information Ifemelu needed, and deleting inappropriate comments almost as soon as they were posted.

Ifemelu bought a small condominium. She had been startled, when she first saw the listing in the real estate section of the paper, to realize she could afford the down payment in cash. Signing her name above the word “homeowner” had left her with a frightening sense of being grown-up, and also with a small astonishment, that this was possible because of her blog. She converted one of the two bedrooms into a study and wrote there, standing often by the window to look down at her new Roland Park neighborhood, the restored row homes shielded by old trees. It surprised her, which blog posts got attention and which were hardly clicked on. Her post about trying to date online, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” continued to draw comments, like something sticky, after many months.

So, still a bit sad about the breakup with The Hot White Ex, not into the bar scene, and so I signed up for online dating. And I looked at lots of profiles. So here’s the thing. In that category where you choose the ethnicity you are interested in? White men tick white women, and the braver ones tick Asian and Hispanic. Hispanic men tick white and Hispanic. Black men are the only men likely to tick “all,” but some don’t even tick Black. They tick White, Asian, Hispanic. I wasn’t feeling the love. But what’s love got to do with all that ticking, anyway? You could walk into a grocery store and bump into someone and fall in love and that someone would not be the race you tick online. So after browsing, I cancelled my membership, thankfully still on trial, got a refund, and will be walking around blindly in the grocery store instead.

Comments came from people with similar stories and people saying she was wrong, from men asking her to put up a photo of herself, from black women sharing success stories of online dating, from people angry and from people thrilled. Some comments amused her, because they were wildly unconnected to the subject of the post. Oh fuck off, one wrote. Black people get everything easy. You can’t get anything in this country unless you’re black. Black women are even allowed to weigh more. Her recurring post “Mish Mash Friday,” a jumble of thoughts, drew the most clicks and comments each week. Sometimes she wrote some posts expecting ugly responses, her stomach tight with dread and excitement, but they would draw only tepid comments. Now that she was asked to speak at roundtables and panels, on public radio and community radio, always identified simply as The Blogger, she felt subsumed by her blog. She had become her blog. There were times, lying awake at night, when her growing discomforts crawled out from the crevices, and the blog’s many readers became, in her mind, a judgmental angry mob waiting for her, biding their time until they could attack her, unmask her.

Open Thread: For All the Zipped-Up Negroes

This is for the Zipped-Up Negroes, the upwardly mobile American and Non-American Blacks who don’t talk about Life Experiences That Have to Do Exclusively with Being Black. Because they want to keep everyone comfortable. Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe space.

CHAPTER 34

Her blog brought Blaine back into her life. At the Blogging While Brown convention in Washington, D.C., during the meet-and-greet on the first day, the hotel foyer crowded with people saying hello to others in nervously overbright voices, she had been talking to a makeup blogger, a thin Mexican-American woman wearing neon eyeshadow, when she looked up and felt herself still and quake, because standing a few delicate feet from her, in a small circle of people, was Blaine. He was unchanged, except for the black-framed eyeglasses. Just as she remembered him on the train: tall and easy-limbed. The makeup blogger was talking about beauty companies always sending free stuff to Bellachicana, and the ethics of it, and Ifemelu was nodding, but was truly alert only to the presence of Blaine, and to him easing himself away from his circle, and moving towards her.

“Hi!” he said, peering at her name tag. “So you’re the Non-American Black? I love your blog.”

“Thank you,” she said. He didn’t remember her. But why should he? It had been so long since the meeting on the train, and neither of them knew then what the word “blog” meant. It would amuse him to know how much she had idealized him, how he had become a person made not of flesh but of little crystals of perfection, the American man she would never have. He turned to say hello to the makeup blogger and she saw, from his name tag, that he wrote a blog about the “intersection of academia and popular culture.”

He turned back to her. “So are your mall visits in Connecticut still going okay? Because I still grow my own cotton.”

For a moment, her breath stalled, and then she laughed, a dizzying, exhilarating laugh, because her life had become a charmed film in which people found each other again. “You remember!”

“I’ve been watching you from the other end of the room. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you.”

“Oh my God, what has it been, like ten years?”

“About that. Eight?”

“You never called me back,” she said.

“I was in a relationship. It was troubled even then, but it lasted much longer than it should have.” He paused, with an expression that she would come to know well, a virtuous narrowing of his eyes that announced the high-mindedness of their owner.

E-mails and phone calls between Baltimore and New Haven followed, playful comments posted on each other’s blogs, heavy flirting during late-night calls, until the day in winter when he came to her door, his hands sunk into the pockets of his tin-colored peacoat and his collar sprinkled with snow like magic dust. She was cooking coconut rice, her apartment thick with spices, a bottle of cheap merlot on her counter, and Nina Simone playing loudly on her CD. The song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” guided them, only minutes after he arrived, across the bridge from flirting friends to lovers on her bed. Afterwards, he propped himself up on his elbow to watch her. There was something fluid, almost epicene, about his lean body, and it made her remember that he had told her he did yoga. Perhaps he could stand on his head, twist himself into unlikely permutations. When she mixed the rice, now cold, in the coconut sauce, she told him that cooking bored her, and that she had bought all these spices only the day before, and had cooked because he was visiting. She had imagined them both with ginger on their lips, yellow curry licked off her body, bay leaves crushed beneath them, but instead they had been so responsible, kissing in the living room and then her leading him to her bedroom.

“We should have done things more improbably,” she said.

He laughed. “I like cooking, so there will be many opportunities for the improbable.” But she knew that he was not the sort of person to do things improbably. Not with his slipping on of the condom with such slow and clinical concentration. Later, when she came to know of the letters he wrote to Congress about Darfur, the teenagers he tutored at the high school on Dixwell, the shelter he volunteered at, she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine but had, instead, a firm reed of goodness.

IT WAS AS IF because of their train meeting years ago, they could bypass several steps, ignore several unknowns, and slide into an immediate intimacy. After his first visit, she went back to New Haven with him. There were weeks that winter, cold and sunny weeks, when New Haven seemed lit from within, frosted snow clinging on shrubs, a festive quality to a world that seemed inhabited fully only by her and Blaine. They would walk to the falafel place on Howe Street for hummus, and sit in a dark corner talking for hours, and finally emerge, tongues smarting with garlic. Or she would meet him at the library after his class, where they sat in the café, drinking chocolate that was too rich, eating croissants that were too grainily whole wheat, his clutch of books on the table. He cooked organic vegetables and grains whose names she could not pronounce — bulgur, quinoa — and he swiftly cleaned up as he cooked, a splatter of tomato sauce wiped up as soon as it appeared, a spill of water immediately dabbed at. He frightened her, telling her about the chemicals that were sprayed on crops, the chemicals fed to chickens to make them grow quickly, and the chemicals used to give fruits perfect skin. Why did she think people were dying of cancer? And so before she ate an apple, she scrubbed it at the sink, even though Blaine only bought organic fruit. He told her which grains had protein, which vegetables had carotene, which fruits were too sugary. He knew about everything; she was intimidated by this and proud of this and slightly repelled by this. Little domesticities with him, in his apartment on the twentieth floor of a high-rise near the campus, became gravid with meaning — the way he watched her moisturize with cocoa butter after an evening shower, the whooshing sound his dishwasher made when it started — and she imagined a crib in the bedroom, a baby inside it, and Blaine carefully blending organic fruits for the baby. He would be a perfect father, this man of careful disciplines.

“I can’t eat tempeh, I don’t understand how you like it,” she told him.

“I don’t like it.”

“Then why eat it?”

“It’s good for me.”

He ran every morning and flossed every night. It seemed so American to her, flossing, that mechanical sliding of a string between teeth, inelegant and functional. “You should floss every day,” Blaine told her. And she began to floss, as she began to do other things that he did — going to the gym, eating more protein than carbohydrates — and she did them with a kind of grateful contentment, because they improved her. He was like a salutary tonic; with him, she could only inhabit a higher level of goodness.

HIS BEST FRIEND, Araminta, came up to visit him, and hugged Ifemelu warmly, as though they had met previously. “Blaine hasn’t really dated since he broke up with Paula. And now, he’s with a sister, and a chocolate sister at that. We’re making progress!” Araminta said.

“Mint, stop it,” Blaine said, but he was smiling. That his best friend was a woman, an architect with a long straight weave who wore high heels and tight jeans and colored contact lenses, said something about Blaine that Ifemelu liked.

“Blaine and I grew up together. In high school, we were the only black kids in our class. All our friends wanted us to date, you know how they think the two black kids just have to be together, but he so wasn’t my type,” Araminta said.

“You wish,” Blaine said.

“Ifemelu, can I just say how happy I am that you’re not an academic? Have you heard his friends talk? Nothing is just what it is. Everything has to mean something else. It’s ridiculous. The other day Marcia was talking about how black women are fat because their bodies are sites of anti-slavery resistance. Yes, that’s true, if burgers and sodas are anti-slavery resistance.”

“Anybody can see through that whole anti-intellectual pose thing, Miss Drinks at Harvard Club,” Blaine said.

“Come on. A good education isn’t the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained! Even Shan makes fun of you guys. She does a great imitation of you and Grace: canon formation and topography of the spatial and historical consciousness.” Araminta turned to Ifemelu. “You haven’t met his sister Shan?”

“No.”

Later, when Blaine was in the bedroom, Araminta said, “Shan’s an interesting character. Don’t take her too seriously when you meet her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s great, she’s very seductive, but if you think she slights you or anything like that, it’s not you, it’s just the way she is.” And then she said, in a lower voice, “Blaine’s a really good guy, a really good guy.”

“I know.” Ifemelu sensed, in Araminta’s words, something that was either a warning or a plea.

Blaine asked her to move in after a month, but it took a year before she did, even though by then she was spending most of her time in New Haven, and had a Yale gym pass as a professor’s partner, and wrote her blogs from his apartment, at a desk he had placed for her near the bedroom window. At first, thrilled by his interest, graced by his intelligence, she let him read her blog posts before she put them up. She did not ask for his edits, but slowly she began to make changes, to add and remove, because of what he said. Then she began to resent it. Her posts sounded too academic, too much like him. She had written a post about inner cities—“Why Are the Dankest, Drabbest Parts of American Cities Full of American Blacks?”—and he told her to include details about government policy and redistricting. She did, but after rereading it, she took down the post.

“I don’t want to explain, I want to observe,” she said.

“Remember people are not reading you as entertainment, they’re reading you as cultural commentary. That’s a real responsibility. There are kids writing college essays about your blog,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to be academic or boring. Keep your style but add more depth.”

“It has enough depth,” she said, irritated, but with the niggling thought that he was right.

“You’re being lazy, Ifem.”

He used that word, “lazy,” often, for his students who did not hand in work on time, black celebrities who were not politically active, ideas that did not match his own. Sometimes she felt like his apprentice; when they wandered through museums, he would linger at abstract paintings, which bored her, and she would drift to the bold sculptures or the naturalistic paintings, and sense in his tight smile his disappointment that she had not yet learned enough from him. When he played selections from his complete John Coltrane, he would watch her as she listened, waiting for a rapture he was sure would glaze over her, and then at the end, when she remained untransported, he would quickly avert his eyes. She blogged about two novels she loved, by Ann Petry and Gayl Jones, and Blaine said, “They don’t push the boundaries.” He spoke gently, as though he did not want to upset her, but it still had to be said. His positions were firm, so thought-through and fully realized in his own mind that he sometimes seemed surprised that she, too, had not arrived at them herself. She felt a step removed from the things he believed, and the things he knew, and she was eager to play catch-up, fascinated by his sense of rightness. Once, as they walked down Elm Street, on their way to get a sandwich, they saw the plump black woman who was a fixture on campus: always standing near the coffee shop, a woolen hat squashed on her head, offering single plastic red roses to passersby and asking “You got any change?” Two students were talking to her, and then one of them gave her a cappuccino in a tall paper cup. The woman looked thrilled; she threw her head back and drank from the cup.

“That’s so disgusting,” Blaine said, as they walked past.

“I know,” Ifemelu said, although she did not quite understand why he felt so strongly about the homeless woman and her cappuccino gift. Weeks before, an older white woman standing in line behind them at the grocery store had said, “Your hair is so beautiful, can I touch it?” and Ifemelu said yes. The woman sank her fingers into her Afro. She sensed Blaine tense, saw the pulsing at his temples. “How could you let her do that?” he asked afterwards. “Why not? How else will she know what hair like mine feels like? She probably doesn’t know any black people.”

“And so you have to be her guinea pig?” Blaine asked. He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with “sort of,” and “the ways in which”; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief.

SHE TOLD her parents about Blaine, that she was leaving Baltimore and moving to New Haven to live with him. She could have lied, invented a new job, or simply said she wanted to move. “His name is Blaine,” she said. “He’s an American.”

She heard the symbolism in her own words, traveling thousands of miles to Nigeria, and she knew what her parents would understand. She and Blaine had not talked about marriage, but the ground beneath her feet felt firm. She wanted her parents to know of him, and of how good he was. She used that word in describing him: “good.”

“An American Negro?” her father asked, sounding baffled.

Ifemelu burst out laughing. “Daddy, nobody says Negro anymore.”

“But why a Negro? Is there a substantive scarcity of Nigerians there?”

She ignored him, still laughing, and asked him to give her mother the phone. Ignoring him, even telling him that she was moving in with a man to whom she was not married, was something she could do only because she lived in America. Rules had shifted, fallen into the cracks of distance and foreignness.

Her mother asked, “Is he a Christian?”

“No. He is a devil-worshipper.”

“Blood of Jesus!” her mother shrieked.

“Mummy, yes, he is a Christian,” she said.

“Then no problem,” her mother said. “When will he come to introduce himself? You can plan it so that we do everything at the same time — door-knocking, bride price, and wine-carrying — it will cut costs and that way he does not have to keep coming and going. America is far …”

“Mummy, please, we are taking things slowly for now.”

After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.

Job Vacancy in America — National Arbiter in Chief of “Who Is Racist”

In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folk who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn’t. Or maybe it’s time to just scrap the word “racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.

CHAPTER 35

Ifemelu woke up one night to go to the bathroom, and heard Blaine in the living room, talking on the phone, his tone gentle and solacing. “I’m sorry, did I wake you? That was my sister, Shan,” he said when he came back to bed. “She’s back in New York, from France. Her first book is about to be published and she’s having a small meltdown about it.” He paused. “Another small meltdown. Shan has lots of melt-downs. Will you go down to the city this weekend with me to see her?”

“Sure. What does she do again?”

“What doesn’t Shan do? She used to work at a hedge fund. Then she left and traveled all over the world and did a bit of journalism. She met this Haitian guy and moved to Paris to live with him. Then he got sick and died. It happened very quickly. She stayed for a while, and even after she decided to move back to the States, she kept the flat in Paris. She’s been with this new guy, Ovidio, for about a year now. He’s the first real relationship she’s had since Jerry died. Pretty decent cat. He’s away this week, on assignment in California, so Shan’s alone. She likes to have these gatherings, she calls them salons. She has an amazing group of friends, mostly artists and writers, and they get together at her place and have really good conversations.” He paused. “She’s a really special person.”

WHEN SHAN WALKED into a room, all the air disappeared. She did not breathe deeply; she did not need to: the air simply floated towards her, drawn by her natural authority, until there was nothing left for others. Ifemelu imagined Blaine’s airless childhood, running after Shan to impress her, to remind her of his existence. Even now, as an adult, he was still the little brother full of desperate love, trying to win an approval that he feared he never would. They arrived at Shan’s apartment early in the afternoon, and Blaine stopped to chat with the doorman, as he had chatted with their taxi driver from Penn Station, in that unforced manner that he had, forming alliances with janitors, with cleaning staff, with bus drivers. He knew how much they made and how many hours they worked; he knew they didn’t have health insurance.

“Hey, Jorge, how’s it going?” Blaine pronounced it the Spanish way: Hor-hay.

“Pretty good. How are your students over at Yale?” the doorman asked, looking pleased to see him and pleased that he taught at Yale.

“Driving me crazy as usual,” Blaine said. Then he pointed at the woman standing by the elevator with her back to them, cradling a pink yoga mat. “Oh, there’s Shan.” Shan was tiny and beautiful, with an oval face and high cheekbones, an imperious face.

“Hey!” she said, and hugged Blaine. She did not look once at Ifemelu. “I’m so glad I went to my Pilates class. It leaves you if you leave it. Did you go running today?”

“Yep.”

“I just talked to David again. He says he’ll send me alternative covers this evening. Finally they seem to be hearing me.” She rolled her eyes. The elevator’s doors slid open and she led the way in, still talking to Blaine, who now seemed uncomfortable, as though he was waiting for a moment to make introductions, a moment that Shan was not willing to give.

“The marketing director called me this morning. She had that really unbearable politeness that is worse than any insult, you know? And so she tells me how booksellers love the cover already and blah blah blah. It’s ridiculous,” Shan said.

“It’s the herd instinct of corporate publishing. They do what everyone else does,” Blaine said.

The elevator stopped at her floor, and she turned to Ifemelu. “Oh, sorry, I’m so stressed,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you. Blaine won’t stop talking about you.” She looked at Ifemelu, a frank sizing up that was not shy to be a frank sizing up. “You’re very pretty.”

“You’re very pretty,” Ifemelu said, surprising herself, because those were not the words she would have ordinarily said, but she felt already co-opted by Shan; Shan’s compliment had made her strangely happy. Shan is special, Blaine had said, and Ifemelu understood now what he meant. Shan had the air of a person who was somehow chosen. The gods had placed a wand on her. If she did ordinary things, they became enigmatic.

“Do you like the room?” Shan asked Ifemelu, with a sweep of her hand, taking in the dramatic furnishing: a red rug, a blue sofa, an orange sofa, a green armchair.

“I know it’s supposed to mean something but I don’t get it.”

Shan laughed, short sounds that seemed cut off prematurely, as though more were supposed to follow but did not, and because she merely laughed, not saying anything, Ifemelu added, “It’s interesting.”

“Yes, interesting.” Shan stood by the dining table and raised her leg onto it, leaning over to grasp her foot in her hand. Her body was a collection of graceful small curves, her buttocks, her breasts, her calves, and there was in her movement the entitlement of the chosen; she could stretch her leg on her dining table whenever she wanted, even with a guest in her apartment.

“Blaine introduced me to Raceteenth. It’s a great blog,” she said.

“Thank you,” Ifemelu said.

“I have a Nigerian friend who is a writer. Do you know Kelechi Garuba?”

“I’ve read his work.”

“We talked about your blog the other day and he said he was sure the Non-American Black was a Caribbean because Africans don’t care about race. He’ll be shocked when he meets you!” Shan paused to exchange the leg on the table, leaning in to grasp her foot.

“He’s always fretting about how his books don’t do well. I’ve told him he needs to write terrible things about his own people if he wants to do well. He needs to say Africans alone are to blame for African problems, and Europeans have helped Africa more than they’ve hurt Africa, and he’ll be famous and people will say he’s so honest!”

Ifemelu laughed.

“Interesting picture,” she said, gesturing to a photo on a side table, of Shan holding two bottles of champagne high above her head, surrounded by tattered, smiling, brown children in what looked like a Latin American slum, shacks with patched-up tin walls behind her. “I mean interesting literally.”

“Ovidio didn’t want it displayed but I insisted. It’s supposed to be ironic, obviously.”

Ifemelu imagined the insisting, a simple sentence, which would not need to be repeated and which would have Ovidio scrambling.

“So do you go home to Nigeria often?” Shan asked.

“No. Actually I haven’t been home since I came to the States.”

“Why?”

“At first I couldn’t afford to. Then I had work and just never seemed to make the time.”

Shan was facing her now, her arms stretched out and pushed back like wings.

“Nigerians call us acata, right? And it means wild animal?”

“I don’t know that it means wild animal, I really don’t know what it means, and I don’t use it.” Ifemelu found herself almost stammering. It was true and yet in the directness of Shan’s gaze, she felt guilty. Shan dripped power, a subtle and devastating kind.

Blaine emerged from the kitchen with two tall glasses of a reddish liquid.

“Virgin cocktails!” Shan said, with a childish delight, as she took a glass from Blaine.

“Pomegranate, sparkling water, and a bit of cranberry,” Blaine said, giving Ifemelu the other glass. “So when are you going to have the next salon, Shan? I was telling Ifemelu about them.”

When Blaine had told Ifemelu about Shan calling her gatherings “salons,” he had underlined the word with mockery, but now he said it with an earnestly French pronunciation: sa-lon.

“Oh, soon, I guess.” Shan shrugged, fond and offhand, sipped from her glass, and then leaned sideways in a stretch, like a tree bent by wind.

Shan’s cell phone rang. “Where did I put that phone? It’s probably David.”

The phone was on the table. “Oh, it’s Luc. I’ll call him back later.”

“Who’s Luc?” Blaine asked, coming out of the kitchen.

“This French guy, rich guy. It’s funny, I met him at the airport for fuck’s sake. I tell him I have a boyfriend and he goes ‘Then I will admire from afar and bide my time.’ He actually said ‘bide.’ ” Shan sipped her drink. “It’s nice how in Europe, white men look at you like a woman, not a black woman. Now I don’t want to date them, hell no, I just want to know the possibility is there.”

Blaine was nodding, agreeing. If anybody else had said what Shan did, he would instantly comb through the words in search of nuance, and he would disagree with their sweep, their simplicity. Ifemelu had once told him, as they watched a news item about a celebrity divorce, that she did not understand the unbending, unambiguous honesties that Americans required in relationships. “What do you mean?” he asked her, and she heard a looming disagreement in his voice; he, too, believed in unbending, unambiguous honesties.

“It’s different for me and I think it’s because I’m from the Third World,” she said. “To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.” She had felt clever to have thought of this explanation but Blaine shook his head even before she finished speaking and said, “That is so lazy, to use the Third World like that.”

Now he was nodding as Shan said, “Europeans are just not as conservative and uptight about relationships as Americans are. In Europe the white men are thinking ‘I just want a hot woman.’ In America the white men are thinking ‘I won’t touch a black woman but I could maybe do Halle Berry.’ ”

“That’s funny,” Blaine said.

“Of course, there’s the niche of white men in this country who will only date black women, but that’s a kind of fetish and it’s nasty,” Shan said, and then turned her glowing gaze on Ifemelu.

Ifemelu was almost reluctant to disagree; it was strange, how much she wanted Shan to like her. “Actually my experience has been the opposite. I get a lot more interest from white men than from African-American men.”

“Really?” Shan paused. “I guess it’s your exotic credential, that whole Authentic African thing.”

It stung her, the rub of Shan’s dismissal, and then it became a prickly resentment directed at Blaine, because she wished he would not agree so heartily with his sister.

Shan’s phone rang again. “Oh, that had better be David!” She took the phone into the bedroom.

“David is her editor. They want to put this sexualized image, a black torso, on her cover and she’s fighting it,” Blaine said.

“Really.” Ifemelu sipped her drink and flipped through an art magazine, still irritated with him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

Shan was back. Blaine looked at her. “All okay?”

She nodded. “They’re not using it. Everyone seems to be on the same page now.”

“That’s great,” Blaine said.

“You should be my guest blogger for a couple of days when your book comes out,” Ifemelu said. “You would be amazing. I would love to have you.”

Shan raised her eyebrows, an expression Ifemelu could not read, and she feared that she had been too gushing. “Yes, I guess I could,” Shan said.

Obama Can Win Only If He Remains the Magic Negro

His pastor is scary because it means maybe Obama is not the Magic Negro after all. By the way, the pastor is pretty melodramatic, but have you been to an old school American Black church? Pure theater. But this guy’s basic point is true: that American Blacks (certainly those his age) know an America different from American Whites; they know a harsher, uglier America. But you’re not supposed to say that, because in America everything is fine and everyone is the same. So now that the pastor’s said it, maybe Obama thinks so too, and if Obama thinks so then he isn’t the Magic Negro and only a Magic Negro can win an American election. And what’s a Magic Negro, you ask? The black man who is eternally wise and kind. He never reacts under great suffering, never gets angry, is never threatening. He always forgives all kinds of racist shit. He teaches the white person how to break down the sad but understandable prejudice in his heart. You see this man in many films. And Obama is straight from central casting.

CHAPTER 36

It was a surprise birthday party in Hamden, for Marcia, Blaine’s friend.

“Happy birthday, Marcia!” Ifemelu said in a chorus with the other friends, standing beside Blaine. Her tongue a little heavy in her mouth, her excitement a little forced. She had been with Blaine for more than a year, but she did not quite belong with his friends.

“You bastard!” Marcia said to her husband, Benny, laughing, tears in her eyes.

Marcia and Benny both taught history, they came from the South and they even looked alike, with their smallish bodies and honey complexions and long locs grazing their necks. They wore their love like a heavy perfume, exuding a transparent commitment, touching each other, referring to each other. Watching them, Ifemelu imagined this life for her and Blaine, in a small house on a quiet street, batiks hung on the walls, African sculptures glowering in corners, and both of them existing in a steady hum of happiness.

Benny was pouring drinks. Marcia was walking around, still stunned, looking into the trays of catered food spread on the dining table, and then up at the mass of balloons bobbing against the ceiling. “When did you do all this, baby? I was just gone an hour!”

She hugged everyone, while wiping the tears from her eyes. Before she hugged Ifemelu, a wrinkle of worry flickered on her face, and Ifemelu knew that Marcia had forgotten her name. “So good to see you again, thank you for coming,” she said, with an extra dose of sincerity, the “so” emphasized, as though to make up for forgetting Ifemelu’s name.

“Chile!” she said to Blaine, who hugged her and lifted her slightly off the floor, both of them laughing.

“You’re lighter than you were on your last birthday!” Blaine said.

“And she looks younger every day!” Paula, Blaine’s ex-girlfriend, said.

“Marcia, are you going to bottle your secret?” a woman whom Ifemelu did not know asked, her bleached hair bouffant like a platinum helmet.

“Her secret is good sex,” Grace said seriously, a Korean-American woman who taught African-American studies, tiny and slender, always in stylishly loose-fitting clothes, so that she seemed to float in a swish of silks. “I’m that rare thing, a Christian left-wing nut,” she had told Ifemelu when they first met.

“Did you hear that, Benny?” Marcia asked. “Our secret is good sex.”

“That’s right!” Benny said, and winked at her. “Hey, anybody see Barack Obama’s announcement this morning?”

“Yes, it’s been on the news all day,” Paula said. She was short and blond, with a clear pinkish complexion, outdoorsy and healthy, that made Ifemelu wonder if she rode horses.

“I don’t even have a television,” Grace said, with a self-mocking sigh. “I only recently sold out and got a cell phone.”

“They’ll replay it,” Benny said.

“Let’s eat!” It was Stirling, the wealthy one, who Blaine told her came from Boston old money; he and his father had been legacy students at Harvard. He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgment of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said often.

The food was eaten with a lot of praise and wine, the fried chicken, the greens, the pies. Ifemelu took tiny portions, pleased she had snacked on some nuts before they left; she did not like soul food.

“I haven’t had corn bread this good in years,” Nathan said, seated beside her. He was a literature professor, neurotic and blinky behind his glasses, who Blaine once said was the only person at Yale that he trusted completely. Nathan had told her, some months earlier, in a voice filled with hauteur, that he did not read any fiction published after 1930. “It all went downhill after the thirties,” he said.

She had told Blaine about it later, and there was an impatience in her tone, almost an accusation, as she added that academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.

Blaine said, “Oh, Nathan just has his issues. It’s not about being an academic.” A new defensiveness had begun to creep into Blaine’s tone when they talked about his friends, perhaps because he sensed her discomfort with them. When she attended a talk with him, he would make sure to say it could have been better, or that the first ten minutes were boring, as though to preempt her own criticisms. The last talk they had attended was his ex-girlfriend Paula’s, at a college in Middletown, Paula standing in front of the classroom, in a dark-green wrap dress and boots, sounding fluid and convinced, provoking and charming her audience at the same time; the young pretty political scientist who would certainly get tenure. She had glanced often at Blaine, like a student at a professor, gauging her performance from his expression. As she spoke, Blaine nodded continously, and once even sighed aloud as though her words had brought to him a familiar and exquisite epiphany. They had remained good friends, Paula and Blaine, had kept in the same circle after she cheated on him with a woman also named Paula, and now called Pee to distinguish them from each other. “Our relationship had been in trouble for a while. She said she was just experimenting with Pee but I could tell it was much more, and I was right because they’re still together,” Blaine told Ifemelu, and it all seemed to her to be too tame, too civil. Even Paula’s friendliness towards her seemed too scrubbed clean.

“How about we ditch him and go and have one drink?” Paula had said to Ifemelu that evening after her talk, her cheeks flushed from the excitement and relief of having done well.

“I’m exhausted,” Ifemelu had said.

Blaine said, “And I need to prep for class tomorrow. Let’s do something this weekend, okay?” And he hugged her goodbye.

“It wasn’t too bad, was it?” Blaine asked Ifemelu on their drive back to New Haven.

“I was sure you were going to have an orgasm,” she said, and Blaine laughed. She had thought, watching Paula speak, that Paula was comfortable with Blaine’s rhythms in a way that she was not, and she thought so now, as she watched Paula eat her third helping of collard greens, sitting next to her girlfriend Pee and laughing at something Marcia had said.

The woman with the helmetlike hair was eating her collard greens with her fingers.

“We humans are not supposed to eat with utensils,” she said.

Michael, seated beside Ifemelu, snorted loudly. “Why don’t you just go on and live in a cave?” he asked, and they all laughed, but Ifemelu was not sure he had been joking. He had no patience for fey talk. She liked him, cornrows running down the length of his scalp, and his expression always wry, scornful of sentimentality. “Michael’s a good cat but he tries so hard to keep it real that he can seem full of negativity,” Blaine had said when she first met Michael. Michael had been in prison for a carjacking when he was nineteen and he was fond of saying “Some black folk don’t appreciate education until after they go to prison.” He was a photographer on a fellowship and the first time Ifemelu saw his photographs, in black-and-white, in dances of shadow, their delicacy and vulnerability had surprised her. She had expected grittier imagery. Now one of those photographs hung on the wall in Blaine’s apartment, opposite her writing desk.

From across the table, Paula asked, “Did I tell you I’m having my students read your blog, Ifemelu? It’s interesting how safe their thinking is and I want to push them out of their comfort zone. I loved the last post, ‘Friendly Tips for the American Non-Black: How to React to an American Black Talking About Blackness.’ ”

“That is funny!” Marcia said. “I’d love to read that.”

Paula brought out her phone and fiddled with it and then began to read aloud.

Dear American Non-Black, if an American Black person is telling you about an experience about being black, please do not eagerly bring up examples from your own life. Don’t say “It’s just like when I …” You have suffered. Everyone in the world has suffered. But you have not suffered precisely because you are an American Black. Don’t be quick to find alternative explanations for what happened. Don’t say “Oh, it’s not really race, it’s class. Oh, it’s not race, it’s gender. Oh, it’s not race, it’s the cookie monster.” You see, American Blacks actually don’t WANT it to be race. They would rather not have racist shit happen. So maybe when they say something is about race, it’s maybe because it actually is? Don’t say “I’m color-blind,” because if you are color-blind, then you need to see a doctor and it means that when a black man is shown on TV as a crime suspect in your neighborhood, all you see is a blurry purplish-grayish-creamish figure. Don’t say “We’re tired of talking about race” or “The only race is the human race.” American Blacks, too, are tired of talking about race. They wish they didn’t have to. But shit keeps happening. Don’t preface your response with “One of my best friends is black” because it makes no difference and nobody cares and you can have a black best friend and still do racist shit and it’s probably not true anyway, the “best” part, not the “friend” part. Don’t say your grandfather was Mexican so you can’t be racist (please click here for more on There Is No United League of the Oppressed). Don’t bring up your Irish great-grandparents’ suffering. Of course they got a lot of shit from established America. So did the Italians. So did the Eastern Europeans. But there was a hierarchy. A hundred years ago, the white ethnics hated being hated, but it was sort of tolerable because at least black people were below them on the ladder. Don’t say your grandfather was a serf in Russia when slavery happened because what matters is you are American now and being American means you take the whole shebang, America’s assets and America’s debts, and Jim Crow is a big-ass debt. Don’t say it’s just like antisemitism. It’s not. In the hatred of Jews, there is also the possibility of envy — they are so clever, these Jews, they control everything, these Jews — and one must concede that a certain respect, however grudging, accompanies envy. In the hatred of American Blacks, there is no possibility of envy — they are so lazy, these blacks, they are so unintelligent, these blacks.

Don’t say “Oh, racism is over, slavery was so long ago.” We are talking about problems from the 1960s, not the 1860s. If you meet an elderly American black man from Alabama, he probably remembers when he had to step off the curb because a white person was walking past. I bought a dress from a vintage shop on eBay the other day, made in 1960, in perfect shape, and I wear it a lot. When the original owner wore it, black Americans could not vote because they were black. (And maybe the original owner was one of those women, in the famous sepia photographs, standing by in hordes outside schools shouting “Ape!” at young black children because they did not want them to go to school with their young white children. Where are those women now? Do they sleep well? Do they think about shouting “Ape”?) Finally, don’t put on a Let’s Be Fair tone and say “But black people are racist too.” Because of course we’re all prejudiced (I can’t even stand some of my blood relatives, grasping, selfish folks), but racism is about the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don’t get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don’t get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don’t give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don’t stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don’t choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don’t tell white kids that they’re not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don’t try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don’t say they can’t use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered “aspirational” by the “mainstream.”

So after this listing of don’ts, what’s the do? I’m not sure. Try listening, maybe. Hear what is being said. And remember that it’s not about you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just telling you what is. If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.

Marcia said, “I love the part about the dress!”

“It’s cringe-funny,” Nathan said.

“So you must be raking in the speaking fees from that blog,” Michael said.

“Only most of it goes to my hungry relatives back in Nigeria,” Ifemelu said.

“It must be good to have that,” he said.

“To have what?”

“To know where you’re from. Ancestors going way back, that kind of thing.”

“Well,” she said. “Yes.”

He looked at her, with an expression that made her uncomfortable, because she was not sure what his eyes held, and then he looked away.

Blaine was telling Marcia’s friend with the helmetlike hair, “We need to get over that myth. There was nothing Judeo-Christian about American history. Nobody liked Catholics and Jews. It’s Anglo-Protestant values, not Judeo-Christian values. Even Maryland very quickly stopped being so Catholic-friendly.” He stopped abruptly and brought his phone out of his pocket and got up. “Excuse me, folks,” he said, and then in a lower voice to Ifemelu, “It’s Shan. I’ll be right back,” and walked into the kitchen to take the call.

Benny turned on the TV and they watched Barack Obama, a thin man in a black coat that looked a size too big, his demeanor slightly uncertain. As he spoke, puffs of cloudy steam left his mouth, like smoke, in the cold air. “And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States of America.”

“I can’t believe they’ve talked him into this. The guy has potential, but he needs to grow first. He needs some heft. He’ll ruin it for black people because he won’t come close and a black person won’t be able to run for the next fifty years in this country,” Grace said.

“He just makes me feel good!” Marcia said, laughing. “I love that, the idea of building a more hopeful America.”

“I think he stands a chance,” Benny said.

“Oh, he can’t win. They’d shoot his ass first,” Michael said.

“It’s so refreshing to see a politician who gets nuance,” Paula said.

“Yes,” Pee said. She had overly toned arms, thin and bulging with muscles, a pixie haircut and an air of intense anxiety; she was the sort of person whose love would suffocate. “He sounds so smart, so articulate.”

“You sound like my mother,” Paula said in the barbed tone of a private fight being continued, words meaning other things. “Why is it so remarkable that he’s articulate?”

“Are we hormonal, Pauly?” Marcia asked.

“She is!” Pee said. “Did you see she’s eaten all the fried chicken?”

Paula ignored Pee, and, as though in defiance, reached out to have another slice of pumpkin pie.

“What do you think of Obama, Ifemelu?” Marcia asked, and Ifemelu guessed that Benny or Grace had whispered her name in Marcia’s ear, and now Marcia was eager to unleash her new knowledge.

“I like Hillary Clinton,” Ifemelu said. “I don’t really know anything about this Obama guy.”

Blaine came back into the room. “What did I miss?”

“Shan okay?” Ifemelu asked. Blaine nodded.

“It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks of Obama. The real question is whether white people are ready for a black president,” Nathan said.

“I’m ready for a black president. But I don’t think the nation is,” Pee said.

“Seriously, have you been talking to my mom?” Paula asked her. “She said the same exact thing. If you’re ready for a black president, then who exactly is this vague country that isn’t ready? People say that when they can’t say that they are not ready. And even the idea of being ready is ridiculous.”

Ifemelu borrowed those words months later, in a blog post written during the final, frenzied lap of the presidential campaign: “Even the Idea of Being Ready Is Ridiculous.” Does nobody see how absurd it is to ask people if they are ready for a black president? Are you ready for Mickey Mouse to be president? How about Kermit the Frog? And Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?

“My family has impeccable liberal credentials, we’ve ticked all the right boxes,” Paula said, lips turned down in irony, twirling the stem of her empty wineglass. “But my parents were always quick to tell their friends that Blaine was at Yale. As if they were saying he’s one of the few good ones.”

“You’re being too hard on them, Pauly,” Blaine said.

“No, really, didn’t you think so?” she asked. “Remember that awful Thanksgiving at my parents’ house?”

“You mean how I wanted mac and cheese?”

Paula laughed. “No, that’s not what I mean.” But she did not say what she meant and so the memory was left unaired, wrapped in their shared privacy.

Back in Blaine’s apartment, Ifemelu told him, “I was jealous.”

It was jealousy, the twinge of unease, the unsettledness in her stomach. Paula had the air of a real ideologue; she could, Ifemelu imagined, slip easily into anarchy, stand at the forefront of protests, defying the clubs of policemen and the taunts of unbelievers. To sense this about Paula was to feel wanting, compared to her.

“There’s nothing to be jealous about, Ifem,” Blaine said.

“The fried chicken you eat is not the fried chicken I eat, but it’s the fried chicken that Paula eats.”

“What?”

“For you and Paula, fried chicken is battered. For me, fried chicken has no batter. I just thought about how you both have a lot in common.”

“We have fried chicken in common? Do you realize how loaded fried chicken is as a metaphor here?” Blaine was laughing, a gentle, affectionate laugh. “Your jealousy is kind of sweet, but there is no chance at all of anything going on.”

She knew there was nothing going on. Blaine would not cheat on her. He was too sinewy with goodness. Fidelity came easily to him; he did not turn to glance at pretty women on the street because it did not occur to him. But she was jealous of the emotional remnants that existed between him and Paula, and by the thought that Paula was like him, good like him.

Traveling While Black

A friend of a friend, a cool AB with tons of money, is writing a book called Traveling While Black. Not just black, he says, but recognizably black because there’s all kinds of black and no offense but he doesn’t mean those black folk who look Puerto Rican or Brazilian or whatever, he means recognizably black. Because the world treats you differently. So here’s what he says: “I got the idea for the book in Egypt. So I get to Cairo and this Egyptian Arab guy calls me a black barbarian. I’m like, hey, this is supposed to be Africa! So I started thinking about other parts of the world and what it would be like to travel there if you’re black. I’m as black as they get. White folk in the South today would look at me and think there goes a big black buck. They tell you in the guidebooks what to expect if you’re gay or if you’re a woman. Hell, they need to do it for if you’re recognizably black. Let traveling black folk know what the deal is. It’s not like anybody is going to shoot you but it’s great to know where to expect that people will stare at you. In the German Black Forest, it’s pretty hostile staring. In Tokyo and Istanbul, everyone was cool and indifferent. In Shanghai the staring was intense, in Delhi it was nasty. I thought, ‘Hey, aren’t we kind of in this together? You know, people of color and all?’ I’d been reading that Brazil is the race mecca and I go to Rio and nobody looks like me in the nice restaurants and the nice hotels. People act funny when I’m walking to the first-class line at the airport. Kind of nice funny, like you’re making a mistake, you can’t look like that and fly first class. I go to Mexico and they’re staring at me. It’s not hostile at all, but it just makes you know you stick out, kind of like they like you but you’re still King Kong.” And at this point my Professor Hunk says, “Latin America as a whole has a really complicated relationship with blackness, which is overshadowed by that whole ‘we are all mestizo’ story that they tell themselves. Mexico isn’t as bad as places like Guatemala and Peru, where the white privilege is so much more overt, but then those countries have a much more sizable black population.” And then another friend says, “Native blacks are always treated worse than non-native blacks everywhere in the world. My friend who was born and raised in France of Togolese parents pretends to be Anglophone when she goes shopping in Paris, because the shop attendants are nicer to black people who don’t speak French. Just like American Blacks get a lot of respect in African countries.” Thoughts? Please post your own Traveling Tales.

CHAPTER 37

It seemed to Ifemelu as though she had glanced away for a moment, and looked back to find Dike transformed; her little cousin was gone, and in his place a boy who did not look like a boy, six feet tall with lean muscles, playing basketball for Willow High School, and dating the nimble blond girl Page, who wore tiny skirts and Converse sneakers. Once, when Ifemelu asked, “So how are things going with Page?” Dike replied, “We’re not yet having sex, if that’s what you want to know.”

In the evenings, six or seven friends converged in his room, all of them white except for Min, the tall Chinese boy whose parents taught at the university. They played computer games and watched videos on YouTube, needling and jousting, all of them enclosed in a sparkling arc of careless youth, and at their center was Dike. They all laughed at Dike’s jokes, and looked to him for agreement, and in a delicate, unspoken way, they let him make their collective decisions: ordering pizza, going down to the community center to play Ping-Pong. With them, Dike changed; he took on a swagger in his voice and in his gait, his shoulders squared, as though in a high-gear performance, and sprinkled his speech with “ain’t” and “y’all.”

“Why do you talk like that with your friends, Dike?” Ifemelu asked.

“Yo, Coz, how you gonna treat me like that?” he said, with an exaggerated funny face that made her laugh.

Ifemelu imagined him in college; he would be a perfect student guide, leading a pack of would-be students and their parents, showing them the wonderful things about the campus and making sure to add one thing he personally disliked, all the time being relentlessly funny and bright and bouncy, and the girls would have instant crushes on him, the boys would be envious of his panache, and the parents would wish their kids were like him.

SHAN WORE a sparkly gold top, her breasts unbound, swinging as she moved. She flirted with everyone, touching an arm, hugging too closely, lingering over a cheek kiss. Her compliments were clotted with an extravagance that made them seem insincere, yet her friends smiled and bloomed under them. It did not matter what was said; it mattered that it was Shan who said it. Her first time at Shan’s salon, and Ifemelu was nervous. There was no need to be, it was a mere gathering of friends, but still she was nervous. She had agonized about what to wear, tried on and discarded nine outfits before she decided on a teal dress that made her waist look small.

“Hey!” Shan said, when Blaine and Ifemelu arrived, exchanging hugs.

“Is Grace coming?” she asked Blaine.

“Yes. She’s taking the later train.”

“Great. I haven’t seen her in ages.” Shan lowered her voice and said to Ifemelu, “I heard Grace steals her students’ research.”

“What?”

“Grace. I heard she steals her students’ research. Did you know that?”

“No,” Ifemelu said. She found it strange, Shan telling her this about Blaine’s friend, and yet it made her feel special, admitted into Shan’s intimate cave of gossip. Then, suddenly ashamed that she had not been strong enough in her defense of Grace, whom she liked, she said, “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

But Shan’s attention was already elsewhere.

“I want you to meet the sexiest man in New York, Omar,” Shan said, introducing Ifemelu to a man as tall as a basketball player, whose hairline was too perfectly shaped, a sharp curve sweeping his forehead, sharp angles dipping near his ears. When Ifemelu reached out to shake his hand, he bowed slightly, hand on his chest, and smiled.

“Omar doesn’t touch women to whom he is not related,” Shan said. “Which is very sexy, no?” And she tilted her head to look up suggestively at Omar.

“This is the beautiful and utterly original Maribelle, and her girlfriend Joan, who is just as beautiful. They make me feel bad!” Shan said, while Maribelle and Joan giggled, smallish white women in dark-framed oversize glasses. They both wore short dresses, one in red polka-dot, the other lace-fringed, with the slightly faded, slightly ill-fitting look of vintage shop finds. It was, in some ways, costume. They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.

“Here’s Bill!” Shan said, hugging the muscular dark man in a fedora. “Bill is a writer but unlike the rest of us, he has oodles of money.” Shan was almost cooing. “Bill has this great idea for a travel book called Traveling While Black.”

“I’d love to hear about it,” Ashanti said.

“By the way, Ashanti, girl, I adore your hair,” Shan said.

“Thank you!” Ashanti said. She was a vision in cowries: they rattled from her wrists, were strung through her curled dreadlocks, and looped around her neck. She said “motherland” and “Yoruba religion” often, glancing at Ifemelu as though for confirmation, and it was a parody of Africa that Ifemelu felt uncomfortable about and then felt bad for feeling so uncomfortable.

“You finally have a book cover you like?” Ashanti asked Shan.

“ ‘Like’ is a strong word,” Shan said. “So, everyone, this book is a memoir, right? It’s about tons of stuff, growing up in this all-white town, being the only black kid in my prep school, my mom’s passing, all that stuff. My editor reads the manuscript and says, ‘I understand that race is important here but we have to make sure the book transcends race, so that it’s not just about race. And I’m thinking, But why do I have to transcend race? You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.”

“That’s funny,” Blaine said.

“He kept flagging the dialogue in the manuscript and writing on the margins: ‘Do people actually say this?’ And I’m thinking, Hey, how many black people do you know? I mean know as equals, as friends. I don’t mean the receptionist in the office and maybe the one black couple whose kid goes to your kid’s school and you say hi to. I mean really know know. None. So how are you telling me how black people talk?”

“Not his fault. There aren’t enough middle-class black folks to go around,” Bill said. “Lots of liberal white folks are looking for black friends. It’s almost as hard as finding an egg donor who is a tall blond eighteen-year-old at Harvard.”

They all laughed.

“I wrote this scene about something that happened in grad school, about a Gambian woman I knew. She loved to eat baking chocolate. She always had a pack of baking chocolate in her bag. Anyway, she lived in London and she was in love with this white English guy and he was leaving his wife for her. So we were at a bar and she was telling a few of us about it, me and this other girl, and this guy Peter. Short guy from Wisconsin. And you know what Peter said to her? He said, ‘His wife must feel worse knowing you’re black.’ He said it like it was pretty obvious. Not that the wife would feel bad about another woman, period, but that she would feel bad because the woman was black. So I put it in the book and my editor wants to change it because he says it’s not subtle. Like life is always fucking subtle. And then I write about my mom being bitter at work, because she felt she’d hit a ceiling and they wouldn’t let her get further because she was black, and my editor says, ‘Can we have more nuance?’ Did your mom have a bad rapport with someone at work, maybe? Or had she already been diagnosed with cancer? He thinks we should complicate it, so it’s not race alone. And I say, But it was race. She was bitter because she thought if everything was the same, except for her race, she would have been made vice president. And she talked about it a lot until she died. But somehow my mom’s experience is suddenly unnuanced. ‘Nuance’ means keep people comfortable so everyone is free to think of themselves as individuals and everyone got where they are because of their achievement.”

“Maybe you should turn it into a novel,” Maribelle said.

“Are you kidding me?” Shan asked, slightly drunk, slightly dramatic, and now sitting yoga-style on the floor. “You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.”

“Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening,” Grace said.

“What about this recent book Monk Memoirs?” Mirabelle said.

“It’s a cowardly, dishonest book. Have you read it?” Shan asked.

“I read a review,” Mirabelle said.

“That’s the problem. You read more about books than you read actual books.”

Maribelle blushed. She would, Ifemelu sensed, take this quietly only from Shan.

“We are very ideological about fiction in this country. If a character is not familiar, then that character becomes unbelievable,” Shan said. “You can’t even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.”

Everyone laughed. Shan looked delighted, like a little girl showing off her singing to her parents’ eminent friends.

“The world just doesn’t look like this room,” Grace said.

“But it can,” Blaine said. “We prove that the world can be like this room. It can be a safe and equal space for everyone. We just need to dismantle the walls of privilege and oppression.”

“There goes my flower child brother,” Shan said.

There was more laughter.

“You should blog about this, Ifemelu,” Grace said.

“You know why Ifemelu can write that blog, by the way?” Shan said. “Because she’s African. She’s writing from the outside. She doesn’t really feel all the stuff she’s writing about. It’s all quaint and curious to her. So she can write it and get all these accolades and get invited to give talks. If she were African American, she’d just be labeled angry and shunned.”

The room was, for a moment, swollen in silence.

“I think that’s fair enough,” Ifemelu said, disliking Shan, and herself, too, for bending to Shan’s spell. It was true that race was not embroidered in the fabric of her history; it had not been etched on her soul. Still, she wished Shan had said this to her when they were alone, instead of saying it now, so jubilantly, in front of friends, and leaving Ifemelu with an embittered knot, like bereavement, in her chest.

“A lot of this is relatively recent. Black and pan-African identities were actually strong in the early nineteenth century. The Cold War forced people to choose, and it was either you became an internationalist, which of course meant communist to Americans, or you became a part of American capitalism, which was the choice the African-American elite made,” Blaine said, as though in Ifemelu’s defense, but she thought it too abstract, too limp, too late.

Shan glanced at Ifemelu and smiled and in that smile was the possibility of great cruelty. When, months later, Ifemelu had the fight with Blaine, she wondered if Shan had fueled his anger, an anger she never fully understood.

Is Obama Anything but Black?

So lots of folk — mostly non-black — say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black.

Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker — I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.”

CHAPTER 38

Blaine did not like Boubacar, and perhaps this mattered or perhaps it did not matter in the story of their fight, but Blaine did not like Boubacar and her day began with visiting Boubacar’s class. She and Blaine had met Boubacar at a university-hosted dinner party in his honor, a sable-skinned Senegalese professor who had just moved to the U.S. to teach at Yale. He was blistering in his intelligence and blistering in his self-regard. He sat at the head of the table, drinking red wine and talking drily of French presidents whom he had met, of the French universities that had offered him jobs.

“I came to America because I want to choose my own master,” he said. “If I must have a master, then better America than France. But I will never eat a cookie or go to McDonald’s. How barbaric!”

Ifemelu was charmed and amused by him. She liked his accent, his English drenched in Wolof and French.

“I thought he was great,” she told Blaine later.

“It’s interesting how he says ordinary things and thinks they are pretty deep,” Blaine said.

“He has a bit of an ego, but so did everyone at that table,” Ifemelu said. “Aren’t you Yale people supposed to, before you get hired?”

Blaine did not laugh, as he ordinarily would have. She sensed, in his reaction, a territorial dislike that was foreign to his nature; it surprised her. He would put on a bad French accent and mimic Boubacar. “ ‘Francophone Africans break for coffee, Anglophone Africans break for tea. It is impossible to get real café au lait in this country!’ ”

Perhaps he resented how easily she had drifted to Boubacar that day, after desserts were served, as though to a person who spoke the same silent language as she did. She had teased Boubacar about Francophone Africans, how battered their minds were by the French and how thin-skinned they had become, too aware of European slights, and yet too enamored of Europeanness. Boubacar laughed, a familial laugh; he would not laugh like that with an American, he would be cutting if an American dared say the same thing. Perhaps Blaine resented this mutuality, something primally African from which he felt excluded. But her feelings for Boubacar were fraternal, free of desire. They met often for tea in Atticus Bookstore and talked — or she listened since he did most of the talking — about West African politics and family and home and she left, always, with the feeling of having been fortified.

BY THE TIME BOUBACAR told her about the new humanities fellowship at Princeton, she had begun to gaze at her past. A restlessness had taken hold of her. Her doubts about her blog had grown.

“You must apply. It would be perfect for you,” he said.

“I’m not an academic. I don’t even have a graduate degree.”

“The current fellow is a jazz musician, very brilliant, but he has only a high school diploma. They want people who are doing new things, pushing boundaries. You must apply, and please use me as a reference. We need to get into these places, you know. It is the only way to change the conversation.”

She was touched, sitting across from him in a café and feeling between them the warm affinities of something shared.

Boubacar had often invited her to visit his class, a seminar on contemporary African issues. “You might find something to blog about,” he said. And so, on the day that began the story of her fight with Blaine, she visited Boubacar’s class. She sat at the back, by the window. Outside, the leaves were falling from grand old trees, people with scarf-bundled necks hurried along the sidewalk holding paper cups, the women, particularly the Asian women, pretty in slender skirts and high-heeled boots. Boubacar’s students all had laptops open in front of them, the screens bright with e-mail pages, Google searches, celebrity photos. From time to time they would open a Word file and type a few words from Boubacar. Their jackets were hung behind their chairs and their body language, slouching, slightly impatient, said this: We already know the answers. After class they would go to the café in the library and buy a sandwich with zhou from North Africa, or a curry from India, and on their way to another class, a student group would give them condoms and lollipops, and in the evening they would attend tea in a master’s house where a Latin American president or a Nobel laureate would answer their questions as though they mattered.

“Your students were all browsing the Internet,” she told Boubacar as they walked back to his office.

“They do not doubt their presence here, these students. They believe they should be here, they have earned it and thay are paying for it. Au fond, they have bought us all. It is the key to America’s greatness, this hubris,” Boubacar said, a black felt beret on his head, his hands sunk into his jacket pockets. “That is why they do not understand that they should be grateful to have me stand before them.”

They had just arrived at his office when there was a knock on the half-open door.

“Come in,” Boubacar said.

Kavanagh came in. Ifemelu had met him a few times, an assistant professor of history who had lived in Congo as a child. He was curly-haired and foul-humored, and seemed better suited for covering dangerous wars in far-flung countries than for teaching history to undergraduates. He stood at the door and told Boubacar that he was leaving on a sabbatical and the department was ordering sandwiches the next day as a going-away lunch for him, and he had been told they were fancy sandwiches with such things as alfalfa sprouts.

“If I am bored enough, I will stop by,” Boubacar said.

“You should come,” Kavanagh said to Ifemelu. “Really.”

“I’ll come,” she said. “Free lunch is always a good idea.”

As she left Boubacar’s office, Blaine sent her a text: Did you hear about Mr. White at the library?

Her first thought was that Mr. White had died; she did not feel any great sadness, and for this she felt guilty. Mr. White was a security guard at the library who sat at the exit and checked the back flap of each book, a rheumy-eyed man with skin so dark it had an undertone of blueberries. She was so used to seeing him seated, a face and a torso, that the first time she saw him walking, his gait saddened her: his shoulders stooped, as though burdened by lingering losses. Blaine had befriended him years ago, and sometimes during his break, Blaine would stand outside talking to him. “He’s a history book,” Blaine told her. She had met Mr. White a few times. “Does she have a sister?” Mr. White would ask Blaine, gesturing to her. Or he would say “You look tired, my man. Somebody keep you up late?” in a way Ifemelu thought inappropriate. Whenever they shook hands, Mr. White squeezed her fingers, a gesture thick with suggestion, and she would pull her hand free and avoid his eyes until they left. There was, in that handshake, a claiming, a leering, and for this she had always harbored a small dislike, but she had never told Blaine because she was also sorry about her dislike. Mr. White was, after all, an old black man beaten down by life and she wished she could overlook the liberties he took.

“Funny how I’ve never heard you speak Ebonics before,” she told Blaine, the first time she heard him talking to Mr. White. His syntax was different, his cadences more rhythmic.

“I guess I’ve become too used to my White People Are Watching Us voice,” he said. “And you know, younger black folk don’t really do code switching anymore. The middle-class kids can’t speak Ebonics and the inner-city kids speak only Ebonics and they don’t have the fluidity that my generation has.”

“I’m going to blog about that.”

“I knew you would say that.”

She sent Blaine a text back: No, what happened? Is Mr. White okay? Are you done? Want to get a sandwich?

Blaine called her and asked her to wait for him on the corner of Whitney, and soon she saw him walking towards her, a quick-moving trim figure in a gray sweater.

“Hey,” he said, and kissed her.

“You smell nice,” she said, and he kissed her again.

“You survived Boubacar’s class? Even though there were no proper croissants or pain au chocolat?”

“Stop it. What happened to Mr. White?”

As they walked hand in hand to the bagel sandwich store, he told her how Mr. White’s friend, a black man, came by yesterday evening and the two stood outside the library. Mr. White gave his friend his car keys, because the friend wanted to borrow his car, and the friend gave Mr. White some money, which Mr. White had lent him earlier. A white library employee, watching them, assumed that the two black men were dealing drugs and called a supervisor. The supervisor called the police. The police came and led Mr. White away to be questioned.

“Oh my God,” Ifemelu said. “Is he okay?”

“Yes. He’s back at his desk.” Blaine paused. “I think he expects this sort of thing to happen.”

“That’s the actual tragedy,” Ifemelu said, and realized she was using Blaine’s own words; sometimes she heard in her voice the echo of his. The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle?

“I talked to him for a bit. He just shrugged the whole thing off and said it wasn’t a big deal and instead he wanted to talk about his daughter, who he’s really worried about. She’s talking about dropping out of high school. So I’m going to step in and tutor her. I’m going to meet her Monday.”

“Blaine, that’s the seventh kid you’ll be tutoring,” she said. “Are you going to tutor the whole of inner-city New Haven?”

It was windy and he was squinting, cars driving past them on Whitney Avenue, and he turned to glance at her with narrowed eyes.

“I wish I could,” he said quietly.

“I just want to see more of you,” she said, and slipped an arm around his waist.

“The university’s response is total bullshit. A simple mistake that wasn’t racial at all? Really? I’m thinking of organizing a protest tomorrow, get people to come out and say this is not okay. Not in our backyard.”

He had already decided, she could tell, he was not merely thinking about it. He sat down at a table by the door while she went up to the counter to order, seamlessly ordering for him, because she was so used to him, to what he liked. When she came back with a plastic tray — her turkey sandwich and his veggie wrap lying beside two bags of baked unsalted chips — his head was bent to his phone. By evening, he had made calls and sent e-mails and texts and the news had been passed on, and his phone jingled and rang and beeped, with responses from people saying they were on board. A student called to ask him for suggestions about what to write on placards; another student was contacting the local TV stations.

The next morning, before he left for class, Blaine said, “I’m teaching back to back so I’ll see you at the library? Text me when you’re on your way.”

They had not discussed it, he had simply assumed that she would be there, and so she said, “Okay.”

But she did not go. And she did not forget. Blaine might have been more forgiving if she had simply forgotten, if she had been so submerged in reading or blogging that the protest had slipped from her mind. But she did not forget. She merely preferred to go to Kavanagh’s going-away lunch instead of standing in front of the university library holding a placard. Blaine would not mind too much, she told herself. If she felt any discomfort, she was not conscious of it until she was seated in a classroom with Kavanagh and Boubacar and other professors, sipping a bottle of cranberry juice, listening to a young woman talk about her upcoming tenure review, when Blaine’s texts flooded her phone. Where are you? You okay? Great turnout, looking for you. Shan just surprised me and turned up! You okay? She left early and went back to the apartment and, lying in bed, sent Blaine a text to say she was so sorry, she was just up from a nap that had gone on too long. Okay. On my way home.

He walked in and wrapped her in his arms, with a force and an excitement that had come through the door with him.

“I missed you. I really wanted you to be there. I was so happy Shan came,” he said, a little emotional, as though it had been a personal triumph of his. “It was like a mini-America. Black kids and white kids and Asian kids and Hispanic kids. Mr. White’s daughter was there, taking pictures of his photos on the placard, and I felt as if that finally gave him some real dignity back.”

“That’s lovely,” she said.

“Shan says hello. She’s getting on the train back now.”

It would have been easy for Blaine to find out, perhaps a casual mention from someone who had been at the lunch, but she never knew exactly how he did. He came back the next day and looked at her, a glare like silver in his eyes, and said, “You lied.” It was said with a kind of horror that baffled her, as though he had never considered it possible that she could lie. She wanted to say, “Blaine, people lie.” But she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” He was looking at her as though she had reached in and torn away his innocence, and for a moment she hated him, this man who ate her apple cores and turned even that into something of a moral act.

“I don’t know why, Blaine. I just didn’t feel up to it. I didn’t think you would mind too much.”

“You just didn’t feel up to it?”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you about the lunch.”

“How is this lunch suddenly so important? You hardly even know this Boubacar’s colleague!” he said, incredulous. “You know, it’s not just about writing a blog, you have to live like you believe it. That blog is a game that you don’t really take seriously, it’s like choosing an interesting elective evening class to complete your credits.” She recognized, in his tone, a subtle accusation, not merely about her laziness, her lack of zeal and conviction, but also about her Africanness; she was not sufficiently furious because she was African, not African American.

“It’s unfair of you to say that,” she said. But he had turned away from her, icy, silent.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” she asked. “I don’t understand why this matters so much.”

“How can you not understand? It’s the principle of it,” he said, and at that moment, he became a stranger to her.

“I’m really sorry,” she said.

He had walked into the bathroom and shut the door.

She felt withered in his wordless rage. How could principle, an abstract thing floating in the air, wedge itself so solidly between them, and turn Blaine into somebody else? She wished it were an uncivil emotion, a passion like jealousy or betrayal.

She called Araminta. “I feel like the confused wife calling her sister-in-law to explain her husband to her,” she said.

“In high school, I remember there was some fundraiser, and they put out a table with cookies and whatever, and you were supposed to put some money in the jar and take a cookie, and you know, I’m feeling rebellious so I just take a cookie and don’t put any money in, and Blaine was furious with me. I remember thinking, Hey, it’s just a cookie. But I think for him it was the principle of it. He can be ridiculously high-minded some times. Give him a day or two, he’ll get over this.”

But a day passed, then two, and Blaine remained caged in his frozen silence. On the third day of his not saying a single word to her, she packed a small bag and left. She could not go back to Baltimore — her condo was rented out and her furniture in storage — and so she went to Willow.

What Academics Mean by White Privilege, or Yes It Sucks to Be Poor and White but Try Being Poor and Non-White

So this guy said to Professor Hunk, “White privilege is nonsense. How can I be privileged? I grew up fucking poor in West Virginia. I’m an Appalachian hick. My family is on welfare.” Right. But privilege is always relative to something else. Now imagine someone like him, as poor and as fucked up, and then make that person black. If both are caught for drug possession, say, the white guy is more likely to be sent to treatment and the black guy is more likely to be sent to jail. Everything else the same except for race. Check the stats. The Appalachian hick guy is fucked up, which is not cool, but if he were black, he’d be fucked up plus. He also said to Professor Hunk: Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can’t we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied — that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice. The black guy on the street in New York doesn’t want to think about race, until he tries to hail a cab, and he doesn’t want to think about race when he’s driving his Mercedes under the speed limit, until a cop pulls him over. So Appalachian hick guy doesn’t have class privilege but he sure as hell has race privilege. What do you think? Weigh in, readers, and share your experiences, especially if you are non-black.

PS — Professor Hunk just suggested I post this, a test for White Privilege, copyright a pretty cool woman called Peggy McIntosh. If you answer mostly no, then congratulations, you have white privilege. What’s the point of this you ask? Seriously? I have no idea. I guess it’s just good to know. So you can gloat from time to time, lift you up when you’re depressed, that sort of thing. So here goes:

When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult for you to join?

When you go shopping alone at a nice store, do you worry that you will be followed or harassed?

When you turn on mainstream TV or open a mainstream newspaper, do you expect to find mostly people of another race?

Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race?

When you apply for a bank loan, do you worry that, because of your race, you might be seen as financially unreliable?

If you swear, or dress shabbily, do you think that people might say this is because of the bad morals or the poverty or the illiteracy of your race?

If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as “different” from the majority of your race?

If you criticize the government, do you worry that you might be seen as a cultural outsider? Or that you might be asked to “go back to X,” X being somewhere not in America?

If you receive poor service in a nice store and ask to see “the person in charge,” do you expect that this person will be a person of another race?

If a traffic cop pulls you over, do you wonder if it is because of your race?

If you take a job with an Affirmative Action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race?

If you want to move to a nice neighborhood, do you worry that you might not be welcome because of your race?

If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you?

When you use the “nude” color of underwear and Band-Aids, do you already know that it will not match your skin?

CHAPTER 39

Aunty Uju had taken up yoga. She was on her hands and knees, back arched high, on a bright blue mat on the basement floor, while Ifemelu lay on the couch, eating a chocolate bar and watching her.

“How many of those things have you eaten? And since when do you eat regular chocolate? I thought you and Blaine eat only organic, fair trade.”

“I bought them at the train station.”

“Them? How many?”

“Ten.”

“Ahn-ahn! Ten!”

Ifemelu shrugged. She had already eaten them all, but she would not tell Aunty Uju that. It had given her pleasure, buying chocolate bars from the newsstand, cheap bars filled with sugar and chemicals and other genetically modified ghastly things.

“Oh, so because you are quarreling with Blaine, you are now eating the chocolate he doesn’t like?” Aunty Uju laughed.

Dike came downstairs and looked at his mother, her arms now up in the air, warrior position. “Mom, you look ridiculous.”

“Didn’t your friend say that your mother was hot, the other day? This is why.”

Dike shook his head. “Coz, I need to show you something on YouTube, this hilarious video.”

Ifemelu got up.

“Has Dike told you about the computer incident at school?” Aunty Uju asked.

“No, what?” Ifemelu asked.

“The principal called me on Monday to say that Dike hacked into the school’s computer network on Saturday. This is a boy who was with me all day on Saturday. We went to Hartford to visit Ozavisa. We were there the whole day and the boy did not go near a computer. When I asked why they thought it was him, they said they got information. Imagine, you just wake up and blame my son. The boy is not even good with computers. I thought we had left them behind in that bush town. Kweku wants us to lodge a formal complaint, but I don’t think it’s worth the time. They have now said they no longer suspect him.”

“I don’t even know how to hack,” Dike said drily.

“Why would they do this sort of rubbish?” Ifemelu asked.

“You have to blame the black kid first,” he said, and laughed.

Later, he told her how his friends would say, “Hey, Dike, got some weed?” and how funny it was. He told her about the pastor at church, a white woman, who had said hello to all the other kids but when she came to him, she said, “What’s up, bro?” “I feel like I have vegetables instead of ears, like large broccoli sticking out of my head,” he said, laughing. “So of course it had to be me that hacked into the school network.”

“Those people in your school are fools,” Ifemelu said.

“So funny how you say that word, Coz, fools.” He paused and then repeated her words, “Those people in your school are fools,” in a good mimicry of a Nigerian accent. She told him the story of the Nigerian pastor who, while giving a sermon in a church in America, said something about a beach but because of his accent, his parishioners thought he had said “bitch” and they wrote to his bishop to complain. Dike laughed and laughed. It became one of their stock jokes. “Hey, Coz, I just want to spend a summer day at the bitch,” he would say.

FOR NINE DAYS, Blaine did not take her calls. Finally he answered the phone, his voice muffled.

“Can I come this weekend so we can cook coconut rice? I’ll do the cooking,” she said. Before he said “Okay,” she sensed an intake of breath and she wondered if he was surprised that she dared to suggest coconut rice.

SHE WATCHED Blaine cutting the onions, watched his long fingers and recalled them on her body, tracing lines on her collarbone, and on the darkened skin below her navel. He looked up and asked if the slices were a good size and she said, “The onion is fine,” and thought how he had always known the right size for onions, slicing them so precisely, how he had always steamed the rice although she was going to do it now. He broke the coconut against the sink and let the water out before he began to nudge the white meat off the shell with a knife. Her hands shook as she poured rice into the boiling water and, as she watched the narrow basmati grains begin to swell, she wondered if they were failing at this, their reconciliatory meal. She checked the chicken on the stove. The spices wafted up when she opened the pot — ginger and curry and bay leaves — and she told him, unnecessarily, that it looked good.

“I didn’t overspice it like you do,” he said. She felt a momentary anger and wanted to say that it was unfair of him to hold out forgiveness like this, but instead she asked if he thought she should add some water. He kept grating the coconuts and said nothing. She watched the coconut crumble into white dust; it saddened her to think that it would never be a whole coconut again, and she reached out and held Blaine from the back, wrapped her arms around his chest, felt the warmth through his sweatshirt, but he eased away and said he had to finish before the rice got too soft. She walked across the living room to look out of the window, at the clock tower, high and regal, imposing itself on the other buildings of the Yale campus below, and saw the first snow flurries swirling through the late evening air, as though flung from above, and she remembered her first winter with him, when everything had seemed burnished and unendingly new.

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: A Few Explanations of What Things Really Mean

1. Of all their tribalisms, Americans are most uncomfortable with race. If you are having a conversation with an American, and you want to discuss something racial that you find interesting, and the American says, “Oh, it’s simplistic to say it’s race, racism is so complex,” it means they just want you to shut up already. Because of course racism is complex. Many abolitionists wanted to free the slaves but didn’t want black people living nearby. Lots of folk today don’t mind a black nanny or black limo driver. But they sure as hell mind a black boss. What is simplistic is saying “It’s so complex.” But shut up anyway, especially if you need a job/favor from the American in question.

2. Diversity means different things to different folks. If a white person is saying a neighborhood is diverse, they mean nine percent black people. (The minute it gets to ten percent black people, the white folks move out.) If a black person says diverse neighborhood, they are thinking forty percent black.

3. Sometimes they say “culture” when they mean race. They say a film is “mainstream” when they mean “white folks like it or made it.” When they say “urban” it means black and poor and possibly dangerous and potentially exciting. “Racially charged” means we are uncomfortable saying “racist.”

CHAPTER 40

They did not fight again until the relationship ended, but in the time of Blaine’s stoniness, when Ifemelu burrowed into herself and ate whole chocolate bars, her feelings for him changed. She still admired him, his moral fiber, his life of clean lines, but now it was admiration for a person separate from her, a person far away. And her body had changed. In bed, she did not turn to him full of a raw wanting as she used to do, and when he reached for her, her first instinct was to roll away. They kissed often, but always with her lips firmly pursed; she did not want his tongue in her mouth. Their union was leached of passion, but there was a new passion, outside of themselves, that united them in an intimacy they had never had before, an unfixed, unspoken, intuitive intimacy: Barack Obama. They agreed, without any prodding, without the shadows of obligation or compromise, on Barack Obama.

At first, even though she wished America would elect a black man as president, she thought it impossible, and she could not imagine Obama as president of the United States; he seemed too slight, too skinny, a man who would be blown away by the wind. Hillary Clinton was sturdier. Ifemelu liked to watch Clinton on television, in her square trouser suits, her face a mask of resolve, her prettiness disguised, because that was the only way to convince the world that she was able. Ifemelu liked her. She wished her victory, willed good fortune her way, until the morning she picked up Barack Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, which Blaine had just finished and left lying on the bookshelf, some of its pages folded in. She examined the photographs on the cover, the young Kenyan woman staring befuddled at the camera, arms enclosing her son, and the young American man, jaunty of manner, holding his daughter to his chest. Ifemelu would later remember the moment she decided to read the book. Just to see. She might not have read it if Blaine had recommended it, because she more and more avoided the books he liked. But he had not recommended it, he had merely left it on the shelf, next to a pile of other books he had finished but meant to go back to. She read Dreams from My Father in a day and a half, sitting up on the couch, Nina Simone playing on Blaine’s iPod speaker. She was absorbed and moved by the man she met in those pages, an inquiring and intelligent man, a kind man, a man so utterly, helplessly, winningly humane. He reminded her of Obinze’s expression for people he liked. Obi ocha. A clean heart. She believed Barack Obama. When Blaine came home, she sat at the dining table, watching him chop fresh basil in the kitchen, and said, “If only the man who wrote this book could be the president of America.”

Blaine’s knife stopped moving. He looked up, eyes lit, as though he had not dared hope she would believe the same thing that he believed, and she felt between them the first pulse of a shared passion. They clutched each other in front of the television when Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. The first battle, and he had won. Their hope was radiating, exploding into possibility: Obama could actually win this thing. And then, as though choreographed, they began to worry. They worried that something would derail him, crash his fast-moving train. Every morning, Ifemelu woke up and checked to make sure that Obama was still alive. That no scandal had emerged, no story dug up from his past. She would turn on her computer, her breath still, her heart frantic in her chest, and then, reassured that he was alive, she would read the latest news about him, quickly and greedily, seeking information and reassurance, multiple windows minimized at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes, in chat rooms, she wilted as she read the posts about Obama, and she would get up and move away from her computer, as though the laptop itself were the enemy, and stand by the window to hide her tears even from herself. How can a monkey be president? Somebody do us a favor and put a bullet in this guy. Send him back to the African jungle. A black man will never be in the white house, dude, it’s called the white house for a reason. She tried to imagine the people who wrote those posts, under monikers like SuburbanMom231 and NormanRockwellRocks, sitting at their desks, a cup of coffee beside them, and their children about to come home on the school bus in a glow of innocence. The chat rooms made her blog feel inconsequential, a comedy of manners, a mild satire about a world that was anything but mild. She did not blog about the vileness that seemed to have multiplied each morning she logged on, more chat rooms springing up, more vitriol flourishing, because to do so would be to spread the words of people who abhorred not the man that Barack Obama was, but the idea of him as president. She blogged, instead, about his policy positions, in a recurring post titled “This Is Why Obama Will Do It Better,” often adding links to his website, and she blogged, too, about Michelle Obama. She gloried in the offbeat dryness of Michelle Obama’s humor, the confidence in her long-limbed carriage, and then she mourned when Michelle Obama was clamped, flattened, made to sound tepidly wholesome in interviews. Still, there was, in Michelle Obama’s overly arched eyebrows and in her belt worn higher on her waist than tradition would care for, a glint of her old self. It was this that drew Ifemelu, the absence of apology, the promise of honesty.

“If she married Obama then he can’t be that bad,” she joked often with Blaine, and Blaine would say, “True that, true that.”

SHE GOT an e-mail from a princeton.edu address and before she read it, her hands shook from excitement. The first word she saw was “pleased.” She had received the research fellowship. The pay was good, the requirements easy: she was expected to live in Princeton and use the library and give a public talk at the end of the year. It seemed too good to be true, an entry into a hallowed American kingdom. She and Blaine took the train to Princeton to look for an apartment, and she was struck by the town itself, the greenness, the peace and grace of it. “I got into Princeton for undergrad,” Blaine told her. “It was almost bucolic then. I visited and thought it was beautiful but I just couldn’t see myself actually going there.”

Ifemelu knew what he meant, even now that it had changed and become, in Blaine’s words, when they walked past the rows of shiny stores, “aggressively consumer capitalist.” She felt admiration and disorientation. She liked her apartment, off Nassau Street; the bedroom window looked out to a grove of trees, and she walked the empty room thinking of a new beginning for herself, without Blaine, and yet unsure if this was truly the new beginning she wanted.

“I’m not moving here until after the election,” she said.

Blaine nodded before she finished speaking; of course she would not move until they had seen Barack Obama through to his victory. He became a volunteer for the Obama campaign and she absorbed all of his stories about the doors he knocked on and the people behind them. One day he came home and told her about an old black woman, face shriveled like a prune, who stood holding on to her door as though she might fall otherwise, and told him, “I didn’t think this would happen even in my grandbaby’s lifetime.”

Ifemelu blogged about this story, describing the silver streaks in the woman’s gray hair, the fingers quivering from Parkinson’s, as though she herself had been there with Blaine. All of his friends were Obama supporters, except for Michael, who always wore a Hillary Clinton pin on his breast, and at their gatherings, Ifemelu no longer felt excluded. Even that nebulous unease when she was around Paula, part churlishness and part insecurity, had melted away. They gathered at bars and apartments, discussing details of the campaign, mocking the silliness of the news stories. Will Hispanics vote for a black man? Can he bowl? Is he patriotic?

“Isn’t it funny how they say ‘blacks want Obama’ and ‘women want Hillary,’ but what about black women?” Paula said.

“When they say ‘women,’ they automatically mean ‘white women,’ of course,” Grace said.

“What I don’t understand is how anybody can say that Obama is benefiting because he’s a black man,” Paula said.

“It’s complicated, but he is, and also to the extent that Clinton is benefiting because she’s a white woman,” Nathan said, leaning forward and blinking even more quickly. “If Clinton were a black woman, her star would not shine so brightly. If Obama were a white man, his star might or might not shine so brightly, because some white men have become president who had no business being president, but that doesn’t change the fact that Obama doesn’t have a lot of experience and people are excited by the idea of a black candidate who has a real chance.”

“Although if he wins, he will no longer be black, just as Oprah is no longer black, she’s Oprah,” Grace said. “So she can go where black people are loathed and be fine. He’ll no longer be black, he’ll just be Obama.”

“To the extent that Obama is benefiting, and that idea of benefiting is very problematic, by the way, but to the extent that he is, it’s not because he’s black, it’s because he’s a different kind of black,” Blaine said. “If Obama didn’t have a white mother and wasn’t raised by white grandparents and didn’t have Kenya and Indonesia and Hawaii and all of the stories that make him somehow a bit like everyone, if he was just a plain black guy from Georgia, it would be different. America will have made real progress when an ordinary black guy from Georgia becomes president, a black guy who got a C average in college.”

“I agree,” Nathan said. And it struck Ifemelu anew, how much everyone agreed. Their friends, like her and Blaine, were believers. True believers.

ON THE DAY Barack Obama became the nominee of the Democratic Party, Ifemelu and Blaine made love, for the first time in weeks, and Obama was there with them, like an unspoken prayer, a third emotional presence. She and Blaine drove hours to hear him speak, holding hands in a thick crowd, raising placards, CHANGE written on them in a bold white print. A black man nearby had hoisted his son onto his shoulders, and the son was laughing, his mouth full of milky teeth, one missing from the upper row. The father was looking up, and Ifemelu knew that he was stunned by his own faith, stunned to find himself believing in things he did not think he ever would. When the crowd exploded in applause, clapping and whistling, the man could not clap, because he was holding his son’s legs, and so he just smiled and smiled, his face suddenly young with joyfulness. Ifemelu watched him, and the other people around them, all glowing with a strange phosphorescence, all treading a single line of unbroken emotion. They believed. They truly believed. It often came to her as a sweet shock, the knowledge that there were so many people in the world who felt exactly as she and Blaine did about Barack Obama.

On some days their faith soared. On other days, they despaired.

“This is not good,” Blaine muttered as they went back and forth between different television channels, each showing the footage of Barack Obama’s pastor giving a sermon, and his words “God Damn America” seared their way into Ifemelu’s dreams.

SHE FIRST READ, on the Internet, the breaking news that Barack Obama would give a speech on race, in response to the footage of his pastor, and she sent a text to Blaine, who was teaching a class. His reply was simple: Yes! Later, watching the speech, seated between Blaine and Grace on their living room couch, Ifemelu wondered what Obama was truly thinking and what he would feel as he lay in bed that night, when all was quiet and empty. She imagined him, the boy who knew his grandmother was afraid of black men, now a man telling that story to the world to redeem himself. She felt a small sadness at this thought. As Obama spoke, compassionate and cadenced, American flags fluttering behind him, Blaine shifted, sighed, leaned back on the couch. Finally, Blaine said, “It’s immoral to equate black grievance and white fear like this. It’s just immoral.”

“This speech was not done to open up a conversation about race but actually to close it. He can win only if he avoids race. We all know that,” Grace said. “But the important thing is to get him into office first. The guy’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. At least now this pastor business is closed.”

Ifemelu, too, felt pragmatic about the speech, but Blaine took it personally. His faith cracked, and for a few days he lacked his bounce, coming back from his morning run without his usual sweaty high, walking around heavy-footed. It was Shan who unknowingly pulled him out of his slump.

“I have to go to the city for a few days to be with Shan,” he told Ifemelu. “Ovidio just called me. She’s not functioning.”

“She is not functioning?”

“A nervous breakdown. I dislike that expression, it has a very old wives’ tale vibe to it. But that’s what Ovidio called it. She’s been in bed for days. She’s not eating. She won’t stop crying.”

Ifemelu felt a flash of irritation; even this, it seemed to her, was yet another way for Shan to demand attention.

“She’s had a really hard time,” Blaine said. “The book not getting any attention and all.”

“I know,” Ifemelu said, and yet she could feel no real sympathy, which frightened her. Perhaps it was because she held Shan responsible, at some level, for the fight with Blaine, for not wielding her power over Blaine to let him know he was overreacting.

“She’ll be fine,” Ifemelu said. “She’s a strong person.”

Blaine looked at her with surprise. “Shan is one of the most fragile people in the world. She’s not strong, she’s never been. But she’s special.”

The last time Ifemelu had seen Shan, about a month ago, Shan had said, “I just knew you and Blaine would get back together.” Hers was the tone of a person talking about a beloved sibling who had returned to psychedelic drugs.

“Isn’t Obama exciting?” Ifemelu had asked, hoping that this would, at least, be something she and Shan could talk about without an underlying prick of pins.

“Oh, I’m not following this election,” Shan had said dismissively.

“Have you read his book?” Ifemelu asked.

“No.” Shan shrugged. “It would be good if somebody read my book.”

Ifemelu swallowed her words. It’s not about you. For once, it’s not about you.

“You should read Dreams from My Father. The other books are campaign documents,” Ifemelu said. “He’s the real deal.”

But Shan was not interested. She was talking about a panel she had done the week before, at a writers’ festival. “So they ask me who my favorite writers are. Of course I know they expected mostly black writers and no way am I going to tell them that Robert Hayden is the love of my life, which he is. So I didn’t mention anybody black or remotely of color or politically inclined or alive. And so I name, with insouciant aplomb, Turgenev and Trollope and Goethe, but so as not to be too indebted to dead white males because that would be a little too unoriginal, I added Selma Lagerlöf. And suddenly they don’t know what to ask me, because I’d thrown the script out the window.”

“That’s so funny,” Blaine said.

ON THE EVE of Election Day, Ifemelu lay sleepless in bed.

“You awake?” Blaine asked her.

“Yes.”

They held each other in the dark, saying nothing, their breathing regular until finally they drifted into a state of half sleep and half wakefulness. In the morning, they went to the high school; Blaine wanted to be one of the first to vote. Ifemelu watched the people already there, in line, waiting for the door to open, and she willed them all to vote for Obama. It felt to her like a bereavement, that she could not vote. Her application for citizenship had been approved but the oath-taking was still weeks away. She spent a restless morning, checking all the news sites, and when Blaine came back from class he asked her to turn off the computer and television so they could take a break, breathe deeply, eat the risotto he had made. They had barely finished eating before Ifemelu turned her computer back on. Just to make sure Barack Obama was alive and well. Blaine made virgin cocktails for their friends. Araminta arrived first, straight from the train station, holding two phones, checking for updates on both. Then Grace arrived, in her swishy silks, a golden scarf at her neck, saying, “Oh my God, I can’t breathe for nervousness!” Michael came with a bottle of prosecco. “I wish my mama was alive to see this day no matter what happens,” he said. Paula and Pee and Nathan arrived together, and soon they were all seated, on the couch and the dining chairs, eyes on the television, sipping tea and Blaine’s virgin cocktails and repeating the same things they had said before. If he wins Indiana and Pennsylvania, then that’s it. It’s looking good in Florida. The news from Iowa is conflicting.

“There’s a huge black voter turnout in Virginia, so it’s looking good,” Ifemelu said.

“Virginia is unlikely,” Nathan said.

“He doesn’t need Virginia,” Grace said, and then she screamed. “Oh my God, Pennsylvania!”

A graphic had flashed on the television screen, a photo of Barack Obama. He had won the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“I don’t see how McCain can do this now,” Nathan said.

Paula was sitting next to Ifemelu a short while later when the flash of graphics appeared on the screen: Barack Obama had won the state of Virginia.

“Oh my God,” Paula said. Her hand trembling at her mouth. Blaine was sitting straight and still, staring at the television, and then came the deep voice of Keith Olbermann, whom Ifemelu had watched so obsessively on MSNBC in the past months, the voice of a searing, sparkling liberal rage; now that voice was saying “Barack Obama is projected to be the next president of the United States of America.”

Blaine was crying, holding Araminta, who was crying, and then holding Ifemelu, squeezing her too tight, and Pee was hugging Michael and Grace was hugging Nathan and Paula was hugging Araminta and Ifemelu was hugging Grace and the living room became an altar of disbelieving joy.

Her phone beeped with a text from Dike.

I can’t believe it. My president is black like me. She read the text a few times, her eyes filling with tears.

On television, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and their two young daughters were walking onto a stage. They were carried by the wind, bathed in incandescent light, victorious and smiling.

“Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states. We have been and always will be the United States of America.”

Barack Obama’s voice rose and fell, his face solemn, and around him the large and resplendent crowd of the hopeful. Ifemelu watched, mesmerized. And there was, at that moment, nothing that was more beautiful to her than America.

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: Thoughts on the Special White Friend

One great gift for the Zipped-Up Negro is The White Friend Who Gets It. Sadly, this is not as common as one would wish, but some are lucky to have that white friend who you don’t need to explain shit to. By all means, put this friend to work. Such friends not only get it, but also have great bullshit-detectors and so they totally understand that they can say stuff that you can’t. So there is, in much of America, a stealthy little notion lying in the hearts of many: that white people earned their place at jobs and school while black people got in because they were black. But in fact, since the beginning of America, white people have been getting jobs because they are white. Many whites with the same qualifications but Negro skin would not have the jobs they have. But don’t ever say this publicly. Let your white friend say it. If you make the mistake of saying this, you will be accused of a curiosity called “playing the race card.” Nobody quite knows what this means.

When my father was in school in my NAB country, many American Blacks could not vote or go to good schools. The reason? Their skin color. Skin color alone was the problem. Today, many Americans say that skin color cannot be part of the solution. Otherwise it is referred to as a curiosity called “reverse racism.” Have your white friend point out how the American Black deal is kind of like you’ve been unjustly imprisoned for many years, then all of a sudden you’re set free, but you get no bus fare. And, by the way, you and the guy who imprisoned you are now automatically equal. If the “slavery was so long ago” thing comes up, have your white friend say that lots of white folks are still inheriting money that their families made a hundred years ago. So if that legacy lives, why not the legacy of slavery? And have your white friend say how funny it is, that American pollsters ask white and black people if racism is over. White people in general say it is over and black people in general say it is not. Funny indeed. More suggestions for what you should have your white friend say? Please post away. And here’s to all the white friends who get it.

CHAPTER 41

Aisha pulled out her phone from her pocket and then slipped it back with a frustrated sigh.

“I don’t know why Chijioke not call to come,” she said. Ifemelu said nothing. She and Aisha were alone in the salon; Halima had just left. Ifemelu was tired and her back throbbed and the salon had begun to nauseate her, with its stuffy air and rotting ceiling. Why couldn’t these African women keep their salon clean and ventilated? Her hair was almost finished, only a small section, like a rabbit’s tail, was left at the front of her head. She was eager to leave.

“How you get your papers?” Aisha asked.

“What?”

“How you get your papers?”

Ifemelu was startled into silence. A sacrilege, that question; immigrants did not ask other immigrants how they got their papers, did not burrow into those layered, private places; it was sufficient simply to admire that the papers had been got, a legal status acquired.

“Me, I try an American when I come, to marry. But he bring many problems, no job, and every day he say give me money, money, money,” Aisha said, shaking her head. “How you get your own?”

Suddenly, Ifemelu’s irritation dissolved, and in its place, a gossamered sense of kinship grew, because Aisha would not have asked if she were not an African, and in this new bond, she saw yet another augury of her return home.

“I got mine from work,” she said. “The company I worked for sponsored my green card.”

“Oh,” Aisha said, as though she had just realized that Ifemelu belonged to a group of people whose green cards simply fell from the sky. People like her could not, of course, get theirs from an employer.

“Chijioke get his papers with lottery,” Aisha said. She slowly, almost lovingly, combed the section of hair she was about to twist.

“What happened to your hand?” Ifemelu asked.

Aisha shrugged. “I don’t know. It just come and after it go.”

“My aunt is a doctor. I’ll take a picture of your arm and ask her what she thinks,” Ifemelu said.

“Thank you.”

Aisha finished a twist in silence.

“My father die, I don’t go,” she said.

“What?”

“Last year. My father die and I don’t go. Because of papers. But maybe, if Chijioke marry me, when my mother die, I can go. She is sick now. But I send her money.”

For a moment, Ifemelu did not know what to say. Aisha’s wan tone, her expressionless face, magnified her tragedy.

“Sorry, Aisha,” she said.

“I don’t know why Chijioke not come. So you talk to him.”

“Don’t worry, Aisha. It will be okay.”

Then, just as suddenly as she had spoken, Aisha began to cry. Her eyes melted, her mouth caved, and a terrifying thing happened to her face: it collapsed into despair. She kept twisting Ifemelu’s hair, her hand movements unchanged, while her face, as though it did not belong to her body, continued to crumple, tears running from her eyes, her chest heaving.

“Where does Chijioke work?” Ifemelu asked. “I will go there and talk to him.”

Aisha stared at her, the tears still sliding down her cheeks.

“I will go and talk to Chijioke tomorrow,” Ifemelu repeated. “Just tell me where he works and what time he goes on break.”

What was she doing? She should get up and leave, and not be dragged further into Aisha’s morass, but she could not get up and leave. She was about to go back home to Nigeria, and she would see her parents, and she could come back to America if she wished, and here was Aisha, hoping but not really believing that she would ever see her mother again. She would talk to this Chijioke. It was the least she could do.

She brushed the hair from her clothes and gave Aisha a thin roll of dollars. Aisha spread it out on her palm, counting briskly, and Ifemelu wondered how much would go to Mariama and how much to Aisha. She waited for Aisha to put the money into her pocket before she gave her the tip. Aisha took the single twenty-dollar bill, her eyes now dried of tears, her face back to its expressionlessness. “Thank you.”

The room was dense with awkwardness, and Ifemelu, as though to dilute it, once again examined her hair in the mirror, patting it lightly as she turned this way and that.

“I will go and see Chijioke tomorrow and I’ll call you,” Ifemelu said. She brushed at her clothes for any stray bits of hair and looked around to make sure she had taken everything.

“Thank you.” Aisha moved towards Ifemelu, as though to embrace her, then stopped, hesitant. Ifemelu gripped her shoulder gently before turning to the door.

On the train, she wondered just how she would persuade a man who didn’t seem keen to marry to do so. Her head was aching and the hair at her temples, even though Aisha had not twisted too tightly, still caused a tugging discomfort, a disturbance of her neck and nerves. She longed to get home and have a long, cold shower, put her hair up in a satin bonnet, and lie down on her couch with her laptop. The train had just stopped at Princeton station when her phone rang. She stopped on the platform to fumble in her bag for it and, at first, because Aunty Uju was incoherent, talking and sobbing at the same time, Ifemelu thought she said that Dike was dead. But what Aunty Uju was saying was o nwuchagokwa, Dike anwuchagokwa. Dike had nearly died.

“He took an overdose of pills and went down to the basement and lay down on the couch there!” Aunty Uju said, her voice cracked with her own disbelief. “I never go to the basement when I come back. I only do my yoga in the morning. It was God that told me to go down today to defrost the meat in the freezer. It was God! I saw him lying there looking so sweaty, sweat all over his body, and immediately I panicked. I said these people have given my son drugs.”

Ifemelu was shaking. A train whooshed past and she pressed her finger into her other ear to hear Aunty Uju’s voice better. Aunty Uju was saying “signs of liver toxicity” and Ifemelu felt choked by those words, liver toxicity, by her confusion, by the sudden darkening of the air.

“Ifem?” Aunty Uju asked. “Are you there?”

“Yes.” The word had traveled up a long tunnel. “What happened? What exactly happened, Aunty? What are you saying?”

“He swallowed a whole bottle of Tylenol. He is in the ICU now and he will be fine. God was not ready for him to die, that is all,” Aunty Uju said. The sound of her nose-blowing was loud over the phone. “Do you know he also took anti-nausea so that the medicine would stay in his stomach? God was not ready for him to die.”

“I am coming tomorrow,” Ifemelu said. She stood on the platform for a long time, and wondered what she had been doing while Dike was swallowing a bottle of pills.