CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE CLASP IS NOT here, around my neck.
It does not sit in the hollow of my clavicle. It never has. It has not been delicately handled and hidden and passed down through generations, an easy legacy that can be seen, held, and quantified. If there is a clasp to bind up all your hopes and dreams for the human spirit, I have never seen it. Not with my eyes open.
Yes, there were such trinkets in the colonial period and in the forced labor period and even in the heyday of the Tubman years and beyond. But I never saw any of them outside a museum case. I created the clasp in order to tell the story, nothing more.
Ten years on, Kollie—our black diamond—back but never actually really here the way he was before, the way we need him to be; Ma finally divorced from Papi, as she should have done years ago; and I still don’t know. I don’t know anything except this: The truth is fluid and fungible and untrustworthy and won’t abide by any one telling. And sometimes, in inventing the truth, we can discover something deeper. We can find our place in the story, because that, at least, is one thing we can make for ourselves. A story. No matter how busted our family, how lost our history.
If you were me and your older brother had been exiled to a country he only remembered as a waking nightmare, and if he came back so changed and so silent and damaged that you could count on one hand the number of complete conversations you had with him in the years he’s been back, you would have done the same. If words were the only tools at your disposal to make sense of a lineage in two countries that never seemed to align or intersect in ways that made you feel like anything but a perpetual foreigner in either place, you too would have spent the last three years trapped in a small room behind a computer screen, desperately punching out an invented history. You too would have dug up every scrap and half story that might or might not have basis in historical or family fact and carefully assembled it with other pieces and bits collected from your life, your research, or the collective unconscious, to create what one of my creative writing professors might call a fictional canvas of fact. You too would have shamelessly stolen most parts of your brother’s story and thrown it on the page. You too would have spent months in research libraries and on databases, gathering every article and every book you could get your hands on that detailed the colonial experience for those first African American settlers in Liberia. You would have even flown to Monrovia, hired a car to drive you to Grand Bassa County, and walked on your own two feet to interview the few men still alive who had lived through the horrors of forced labor in the 1920s and somehow survived with their families and dignity mostly intact. And you would have dragged your reluctant but supportive black American girlfriend along with you, because without her, you weren’t sure you’d ever find your way back. Instead of years of therapy, you would find solace and comfort, and most of all meaning, in a manufactured family narrative. More than that: an invented national narrative spanning two continents, one ocean, and so many forgotten bodies. I decided to make whole in story what, in point of fact, will always be broken in reality. Wholeness and story can be a choice. It can be decided upon; it can be conjured into being. It can be as tough as an old pair of hand-me-down boots and as sweet as a stolen mango. It can shimmer like a Friday-night-on-the-town dress. If one doesn’t have a coherent and unified country or family or story to call home, one may simply grab the facts she can and dream them up. What are facts if not the soil from which our dreams grow?
If you insist on The Facts alone, however (in the conventional sense in which I know you mean the word), what I will tell you is this: Kollie lives in Des Moines, Iowa, now and works as an insurance adjuster. After he returned from those five miserable years in Liberia, he went off to college at the University of South Dakota. He did very well there. He even played soccer. So, from my parents’ point of view, sending him away was right and justified. From my point of view, and Kollie’s, however (although we have never talked about it), it was an unmitigated disaster. (The story you were expecting after Papi left Kollie at the airport? Whatever it was you imagined? It happened too. If not to Kollie, then to someone else.) He wrote me while he was there, begging me for money, to find a way to get him back home, to appeal to the Old Ma and Papi to buy him a ticket back. He wrote that the relatives there were not feeding him regularly—not because they didn’t want to, but because like most other Liberians, they simply didn’t have the money. He said he had no clothes that were not old and ripped, and that he had to walk more than three miles every day to get to school. I still have the letter where he tried to explain how the other students treated him, gleefully bullying the strange and uppity American kid. They call me fucking “White Boy” here, Sis. White Boy! Me, darker than most of them, me, child of Bigazi. They gather round me in a circle if I’m not paying attention or if I’m not quick enough, and beat on me to try to give them American dollars that I don’t have.
I got into so many fights with my parents during this time, screaming at them over and over again about how they had abandoned their son, that he would die there, that they would never forgive themselves. At first, they tried to reason with me and explained quietly why this was the best thing for everyone involved, until, at last, they just shrugged me off and would only say in a very tired voice, “He will be back.” Once, during a particularly bad fight, my father told me: “He can be mad-menh. He can even hate us-oh. But he will be alive.”
When Kollie was almost twenty-two, they brought him back. He was bigger, bulkier, talked even less than he did as a teenager, and mostly wanted nothing to do with me, my parents, or our entire extended Liberian family. His anger was palpable, as was his grief, and with everything he’d been through, I felt compelled to respect them both. My parents just kept saying—still keep saying—“It will take time for him to adjust-oh. Give him time and space.” To which I wanted to respond, “Why would he want to readjust to the two of you? To our fucked-up family?” But I don’t.
“Time and space.” I have traveled both now in these pages. I have found many things, but nothing like peace, nothing like rest for bone-deep weariness.
Other facts that may be of interest to you: My father tells half stories of his great-grandfather Togar once in a while. He occasionally drops scraps about Giakpee, the small but prosperous village in Grand Bassa County, where this Togar was apparently a person of some significance in his time. Papi has said nothing about him working on the Congo people’s plantations—that was a historical phenomenon I stumbled upon in my research and found appalling. Of course, Liberians don’t really talk about it—so much of their (or is it “our”? I never know) history is not written anyway. And the last thing people who have experienced trauma want is to relive it over and over again by narrating it. I found two older gentlemen who had some experience on Congo plantations and building roads and such who would talk to me a little bit about it while I was in country two years ago, but honestly, they couldn’t tell me that much. Or maybe it was also that I couldn’t hear that much of what they were saying, my Liberian English has fallen off so.
Do I have relatives who immigrated to Liberia in the colonial period and helped build the country and colony? Who became “Congo People”? Who went from being niggers fearing the lash to white people wielding it? Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. Certainly no one in our family has stories from that far back. But I was thinking, imagining what it must have been like for those African Americans who dreamed of true freedom and equality, and who thought that they might actually get it from making a new life in Liberia. How the United States abandoned them (or is it us?) so many times throughout history, and so how, of course, they would be eager to believe any kind of fiction an organization like the American Colonization Society would feed them about starting new and being champions of their own destinies. How they ended up reproducing in many ways, the unjust and violent conditions they were fleeing in America—this time on someone else, the indigenous. How we Liberians—both indigenous and Americo-Liberians—have never really reconciled that. How I have never really reconciled that. And how that might be something for me to think about, as I am eight months away from marrying an African American and the love of my life.
There is no closure in this story. No circle. Only an ever-turning spiral—characters, themes, and questions folding in on themselves over and over again. Time passes, oceans are crossed; circumstances change, or they do not. One continent is exchanged for another, but still the spiral does not become a circle. No, spirals rise and they fall. Sometimes it’s hard to know which.
And yes, you read that right. A wedding. Evidently I’ve placed my bet on rising.
My mother will talk to me a little bit about Felicia, will acknowledge that we live together, and plan to make a life together. She has even helped me plan some elements of the wedding and service. It fit you so fine-oh, the Old Ma, Fanewu, said when I first tried on the dress Felicia and I eventually chose for the wedding. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can feel my mother’s damp palm on the small of my back, tugging on the zipper gently, smoothing an imperceptible wrinkle. Her fingers tidying, fussing, and quietly loving the body of the daughter she’d carried to a moment she never dreamed of. And Felicia will love you in this, she said softly, and I could see the incipient smile she was trying to hide. The joy that not even her sterile blue scrubs could blunt. Her hand finally moving to grab mine while we looked at me, all white and regal, in the dress shop’s huge mirror, big enough for both of us. My beautiful daughter. Now a beautiful bride.
I am twenty-six years old and only in these last few years have I finally come to something resembling an appreciation of my black-African-queer-woman’s body. I have seen it—in mirrors, in other people’s eyes, in this book—as a site of so many painful battles for myself and for my mother. And yet our bodies endure. More than that: They possess reserves of tenderness I didn’t think possible until that mirror showed me a flash of it.
Our bodies enclose the twisted threads of history—passed flesh to flesh, from parent to child, conqueror to conquered, lover to beloved.
But my father . . . I wonder if he will ever come around. And I don’t know—Felicia would kill me if she heard me say this—but maybe he has endured enough forced journeys on this spiral that it is unreasonable for me to expect him to take the turn that brings him face-to-face with his daughter’s love of a woman. All I know is my father is my father, he has always been opaque to me and probably always will be. We have never really understood each other. He wanted me to be a nurse and would not pay for my undergraduate degree in English. He still says I will never be able to make it as a writer, even though I got a full ride to graduate school, and several publishers have expressed interest in this manuscript. (And honestly I haven’t decided if I’m going to publish it yet—which drives both Felicia and my agent crazy—but it’s not their decision to make. I didn’t write it to get it published. I wrote it as a conjuring act. I am a magician, and my spells are words. They are not coins or even pages for other eyes to consume.)
Sociological tracts and books litter my father’s bedroom, close at hand for him, but hidden away from his few visitors. In Liberia, he had a master’s degree in sociology. But, though he is no stranger to hard, humbling work, he will not make the effort to re-earn the degree here. I feel like some part of him gave up and died in the process of leaving the refugee camps of Ghana and coming here. Like there was some vivacious, challenging, energetic part of him that Kollie and I never got. Because all that ended with the war and the violence the coup unleashed. That’s why I invented Evelyn. Because all my life, I have imagined in some shadowy part of my mind and heart that my father lost someone close to him, someone he loved deeply, and in doing so, lost his own dream too. Which is why he is so intent on the rest of us letting go of ours before they really start. At least now I know that he believes these losses are a kindness.
This room has that peculiar quality of two-in-the-morning-with-only-a-laptop-screen-for-illumination darkness that I’ve come to know very well. It has been too long now, so many hours I have sat here with you, typing, drawing the magic thread of story from one fragment of fact to the next. Trying to bring them all—all my people—here, into this basic studio apartment with peach walls and scarred wood floors. Trying to see the whole spiral at once. So many days, so many months. Years even.
On the other side of the room, Felicia snores softly, sleeping lightly as she always does on these nights when I can’t sleep and must write. Her chest rises and falls underneath the down comforter Papi gave me for college, her body forming an expectant hollow for mine. Though it is hard leaving her to follow the path of the spiral, she encourages me. She came to this city from Chicago for school. “I stayed in the frigid Great White North for your crazy ass,” she has said more than a few times. When this work leads me to despair and discouragement, I ask her to tell me about when she was a kid on the South Side, before she knew me. This is already a well-worn ritual in our still-young relationship, and she quickly obliges me with a story of the barber who gave her fades and made her look fly, cutting late at night or early in the morning so her mama wouldn’t stop her from tending to her maleness, and she could avoid the kids on the block who’d call her a dyke. Or, she will cajole me with a story of Uncle Nene, who told all the mamas and the papas he was taking the children to Bible study, when they ended up at Wilson’s Stop ’N Shop or the playground half the time.
“Why would you ever leave such a place to come here?” I ask. And her answer always brings me around again.
I am smiling now, my reader, my friend, as I close this file. I am done, weary after all the near misses and endless longing to be so much more than we are now, to be further around these relentless turns toward freedom. I too want a moment’s peace and quiet. But I am not resigned. I am not apathetic. I am not finished. No, I am in love. Undaunted and in love. Sliding in beside her, I slip my arm around the doughy center of her stomach, and she squeezes me, now us, back. I giggle into her neck, and she sighs in her sleep. I wish you could see us.
—Angel Yasmine Flomo