These Dreams of You

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Is this the way to answer the question? Is it better than “Because you’re black and we’re white,” if she doesn’t yet have a concept of black and white? Or is it an answer that only a naïve white person can give?

On the other hand, Sheba was adopted in the first place out of white naïveté, though less on the part of Viv who lived in Africa as a girl. Viv’s father was the city manager of Mogadishu — between Ethiopia and the sea — a freelancer whose career back home in the Midwest was subject to local elections, hired to bring running water and passable roads to a city half a world away. For Viv that was the year (her twelfth, which is to say when she was Parker’s age) of other kids’ parents abducted in the night never to be seen again, public hangings that were a social occasion, the ocean’s edge lined with the innards of gutted camels that attracted sharks when the reefs were breached, and, on a beach against the Indian Sea under an African moon, movies broadcast against a slab of rock. When Viv saw the movie about the monolith surrounded by apes who hurl a bone into the sky that becomes a space station, it actually was on a monolith.