We courted over six weeks in the summer of 1996. At the end of the first week, we decided to marry but told no one. They’ll think we’re crazy! we’d say. It’s our secret. We were certain.
We ate little, drank sweet cafecitos, and listened to Ahmad Jamal, Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, Randy Weston, and Don Pullen, geniuses of the African diaspora we both celebrated. We wrote dozens of haikus back and forth in a shared notebook and he nicknamed himself “Basho in Africa.” Basho wrote in the seventeenth century in Japan’s Edo period and was thought to be the greatest practitioner of haiku, but he is even more renowned for leading others in renku, a collaborative, linked-verse poetry. No one had ever asked me to write poems together.
How I researched tiny Eritrea when I first met him! How I practiced saying his name correctly—FEE-kray Geb-reh-YESS-oos, playing his first answering machine message back over and over again to get it right. How I opened myself to learning this brand-new person from a brand-new, fascinating place. I came from the pig people and he came from the cow and the sheep people. Some of my people were midland slaves who made something from nothing and Massa’s leavings. Some of my people were fancy and free. He came from forever-free Christian Coptic highlanders who alternate seasons of harvest bounty and Lenten veganism. That was the interesting idea of us: East and West Africa married, descendant of slaves who survived, descendants of free people of color, descendants of freedom fighters never enslaved, the strongest of all to be conjoined in our children. Sometimes we talked about this. But mostly we just talked, the deepest thoughts, the sweetest thoughts, the questions we had waited to ask forever. He was a bottomless boat and the boat that would always hold me.
His teeth were straight, white, and bright without benefit of American orthodonture. In photographs he disdained “cheesing” and set his lips firmly closed, but his smile was quick and shone full sunshine. He shaved his head on account of his receding hairline, and surely no one ever looked more beautiful bald—brown like a chestnut, clear brown, like topaz or buckwheat honey (“Did you know that buckwheat is neither grass nor wheat and is closely related to rhubarb?” I can hear him say). He was of medium build and trim, though he tended towards a wee bit extra around the middle that I found lovely. His fitness was that of a man who worked on his feet and could do things. He was nimble and physically intelligent. He hoisted large objects and moved them, climbed up on ladders, crawled behind and under furniture, jerry-rigged solutions to household problems. Later, when we had a home together, he would often work in the garden all day in hot sun; he paced himself and never seemed to tire. “You got yourself an African ox, baby,” he’d say to me, as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of rocky dirt he’d dug to clear a patch for growing.
Nothing was out of place or excessive about him. He looked like one of several variations on an Abyssinian “type,” which is to say large, wide-set eyes, broad, smooth forehead, a particular luminosity to his brown color, a carved nose. But he was, of course, only himself. His voice lilted across a pentatonic scale. “How are you?” D-sharp, C, G-sharp. There was chocolate in his voice, a depth, a bottom.
In this still life I have forgotten to say, he was beautiful, and utterly without vanity.
His work was in kitchens and in painting studios, so his everyday attire was T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. He stood long hours and tried many different kinds of footwear but always came back to sneakers. Later after we were together, when I traveled to give readings and talks, I would bring him back the most unusual T-shirts I could find, which he loved for his daily uniform: La Brea Tar Pits; University of Transylvania soccer team; Watts Towers Community Arts Center; Stax; Matthew Henson’s brown face framed by a fur-lined parka. His studio was never adequately heated nor cooled so when painting he would add on another shirt, a sweater, and his beloved grass-green fleece vest, often along with a bright wool scarf and a knit cap, to keep the heat in. When we went out on occasions, he wore vibrantly colored button-down shirts with his jeans, guayaberas or dashikis in the summer. Upon meeting him, one new friend commented, “Ooh, I love a man who isn’t afraid of a pop of color.” “Pop of color” became a phrase we loved to repeat, and certainly no man ever looked finer in hot pink.
We talked all day and all night for six weeks straight. He told me everything about life in Eritrea in his family’s compound, describing his father with children climbing all over him, laughing; his mother carefully choosing spices, or thread colors for embroidery, or paint colors for their walls, and letting him jostle her elbow so more clarified butter would go into the stew; he and his siblings washing the feet of the nuns who came by their house on Easter pilgrimage; the censers swinging through the Coptic church dispersing frankincense smoke; the big-eyed icons in stained glass, and the booming African drums making no mistake that this ancient Christianity was African; his reading the Italian newspapers aloud to his father; the Italian deco buildings of downtown Asmara, which remain the finest examples of that architectural style in the world; the best gelato ever accompanying his beloved cinema—pronounced in Italian—in the deco movie theater; his reverent love of the classroom and his teachers, who cherished him; the day his teacher read his essay aloud, and said, “Bambini, this one among you shall become a great writer”; his school chained shut the very next day as the Red Terror accelerated; neighborhood friends disappeared without explanation; the angles of growing fear and life-or-death protection.
During part of our six-week New Haven courtship, three of his young nieces Amal, Bana, and Aden visited from Nairobi and northern Virginia. We drove them to Cape Cod and pretended they were our children—for they were—and they danced magic spells around us, blessing our union. He and I would drive into New York late at night after he finished his shifts at the restaurant, and on slow days. He’d take me to the places that were most important to him when he lived in New York as an impassioned activist, also beginning to paint at his uptown kitchen table. We visited the Art Students League, Bob Blackburn’s printmaking workshop, and a performance of the Mingus Big Band. He loved to listen to “Fables of Faubus” over and over again, its oompah-loompah belying the sharp social commentary on the crumbling order of deep Jim Crow. We ate Italian food at a sidewalk café in the neighborhood he charmingly called “the” Soho. We walked to Veniero’s pastry shop in the East Village for millefoglie and espresso. Then we drove home to New Haven and here is one of dozens of small ways I knew I had met my love: me, the inveterate backseat driver began to fall asleep, safe with him at the wheel. I let go. It was perfectly quiet inside the car. And then I woke to a sentence he spoke, his rich, deep voice catching with emotion. “Lizzy,” he said, “you have land in Africa.”