Americanah

  WARRINGTON WAS a somnolent town, a town contented with itself; winding roads cut through thick woods—even the main road, which the residents did not want widened for fear that it would bring in foreigners from the city, was winding and narrow—sleepy homes were shielded by trees, and on weekends the blue lake was stippled with boats. From the dining room window of Aunty Uju’s house, the lake shimmered, a blueness so tranquil that it held the gaze. Ifemelu stood by the window while Aunty Uju sat at the table drinking orange juice and airing her grievances like jewels. It had become a routine of Ifemelu’s visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu’s visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.

  Sometimes she told the same story twice. How she had gone to the public library the other day, had forgotten to bring out the unreturned book from her handbag, and the guard told her, “You people never do anything right.” How she walked into an examining room and a patient asked “Is the doctor coming?” and when she said she was the doctor the patient’s face changed to fired clay.

  “Do you know, that afternoon she called to transfer her file to another doctor’s office! Can you imagine?”

  “What does Bartholomew think about all this?” Ifemelu gestured to take in the room, the view of the lake, the town.

  “That one is too busy chasing business. He leaves early and comes home late every day. Sometimes Dike doesn’t even set eyes on him for a whole week.”

  “I’m surprised you’re still here, Aunty,” Ifemelu said quietly, and by “here” they both knew that she did not merely mean Warrington.

  “I want another child. We’ve been trying.” Aunty Uju came and stood beside her, by the window.

  There was the clatter of footsteps on the wooden stairs, and Dike came into the kitchen, in a faded T-shirt and shorts, holding his Game Boy. Each time Ifemelu saw him, he seemed to her to have grown taller and to have become more reserved.

  “Are you wearing that shirt to camp?” Aunty Uju asked him.

  “Yes, Mom,” he said, his eyes on the flickering screen in his hand.

  Aunty Uju got up to check the oven. She had agreed this morning, his first of summer camp, to make him chicken nuggets for breakfast.

  “Coz, we’re still playing soccer later, right?” Dike asked.

  “Yes,” Ifemelu said. She took a chicken nugget from his plate and put it in her mouth. “Chicken nuggets for breakfast is strange enough, but is this chicken or just plastic?”

  “Spicy plastic,” he said.

  She walked him to the bus and watched him get on, the pale faces of the other children at the window, the bus driver waving to her too cheerfully. She was standing there waiting when the bus brought him back that afternoon. There was a guardedness on his face, something close to sadness.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, her arm around his shoulder.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Can we play soccer now?”

  “After you tell me what happened.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “I think you need some sugar. You’ll probably have too much tomorrow, with your birthday cake. But let’s get a cookie.”

  “Do you bribe the kids you babysit with sugar? Man, they’re lucky.”

  She laughed. She brought out the packet of Oreos from the fridge.

  “Do you play soccer with the kids you babysit?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, even though she played once in a while with Taylor, kicking the ball back and forth in their oversized, wooded backyard. Sometimes, when Dike asked her about the children she cared for, she indulged his childish interest, telling him about their toys and their lives, but she was careful not to make them seem important to her.

  “So how was camp?”

  “Good.” A pause. “My group leader, Haley? She gave sunscreen to everyone but she wouldn’t give me any. She said I didn’t need it.”

  She looked at his face, which was almost expressionless, eerily so. She did not know what to say.

  “She thought that because you’re dark you don’t need sunscreen. But you do. Many people don’t know that dark people also need sunscreen. I’ll get you some, don’t worry.” She was speaking too fast, not sure that she was saying the right thing, or what the right thing to say was, and worried because this had upset him enough that she had seen it on his face.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It was kind of funny. My friend Danny was laughing about it.”

  “Why did your friend think it was funny?”

  “Because it was!”

  “You wanted her to give you the sunscreen, too, right?”

  “I guess so,” he said with a shrug. “I just want to be regular.”

  She hugged him. Later, she went to the store and bought him a big bottle of sunscreen, and the next time she visited, she saw it lying on his dresser, forgotten and unused.

  Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism

  In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds—class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk.

  Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don’t merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There’s a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as WASP, and American Black is always on the bottom, and what’s in the middle depends on time and place. (Or as that marvelous rhyme goes: if you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back!) Americans assume that everyone will get their tribalism. But it takes a while to figure it all out. So in undergrad, we had a visiting speaker and a classmate whispers to another, “Oh my God, he looks so Jewish,” with a shudder, an actual shudder. Like Jewish was a bad thing. I didn’t get it. As far as I could see, the man was white, not much different from the classmate herself. Jewish to me was something vague, something biblical. But I learned quickly. You see, in America’s ladder of races, Jewish is white but also some rungs below white. A bit confusing, because I knew this straw-haired, freckled girl who said she was Jewish. How can Americans tell who is Jewish? How did the classmate know the guy was Jewish? I read somewhere how American colleges used to ask applicants for their mother’s surnames, to make sure they weren’t Jewish because they wouldn’t admit Jewish people. So maybe that’s how to tell? From people’s names? The longer you are here, the more you start to get it.

  CHAPTER 18

  Manama’s new customer was wearing jeans shorts, the denim glued to her backside, and sneakers the same bright pink shade as her top. Large hoop earrings grazed her face. She stood in front of the mirror, describing the kind of cornrows she wanted.

  “Like a zigzag with a parting at the side right here, but you don’t add the hair at the beginning, you add it when you get to the ponytail,” she said, speaking slowly, overenunciating. “You understand me?” she added, already convinced, it seemed, that Mariama did not.

  “I understand,” Mariama said quietly. “You want to see a photo? I have that style in my album.”

  The album was flipped through and, finally, the customer was satisfied and seated, frayed plastic hoisted around her neck, her chair height adjusted, and Mariama all the time smiling a smile full of things restrained.

  “This other braider I went to the last time,” the customer said. “She was African, too, and she wanted to burn my damned hair! She brought out this lighter and I’m going, Shontay White, don’t let that woman bring that thing close to your hair. So I ask her, What’s that for? She says, I want to
clean your braids, and I go, What? Then she tries to show me, she tries to run the lighter over one braid and I went all crazy on her.”

  Mariama shook her head. “Oh, that’s bad. Burning is not good. We don’t do that.”

  A customer came in, her hair covered in a bright yellow headwrap.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’d like to get braids.”

  “What kind of braids you want?” Mariama asked.

  “Just regular box braids, medium size.”

  “You want it long?” Mariama asked.

  “Not too long, maybe shoulder length?”

  “Okay. Please sit down. She will do it for you,” Mariama said, gesturing to Halima, who was sitting at the back, her eyes on the television. Halima stood up and stretched, for a little too long, as though to register her reluctance.

  The woman sat down and gestured to the pile of DVDs. “You sell Nigerian films?” she asked Mariama.

  “I used to but my supplier went out of business. You want to buy?”

  “No. You just seem to have a lot of them.”

  “Some of them are real nice,” Mariama said.

  “I can’t watch that stuff. I guess I’m biased. In my country, South Africa, Nigerians are known for stealing credit cards and doing drugs and all kinds of crazy stuff. I guess the films are kind of like that too.”

  “You’re from South Africa? You don’t have accent!” Mariama exclaimed.

  The woman shrugged. “I’ve been here a long time. It doesn’t make much of a difference.”

  “No,” Halima said, suddenly animated, standing behind the woman. “When I come here with my son they beat him in school because of African accent. In Newark. If you see my son face? Purple like onion. They beat, beat, beat him. Black boys beat him like this. Now accent go and no problems.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said.

  “Thank you.” Halima smiled, enamored of the woman because of this extraordinary feat, an American accent. “Yes, Nigeria very corrupt. Worst corrupt country in Africa. Me, I watch the film but no, I don’t go to Nigeria!” She half waved her palm in the air.

  “I cannot marry a Nigerian and I won’t let anybody in my family marry a Nigerian,” Mariama said, and darted Ifemelu an apologetic glance. “Not all but many of them do bad things. Even killing for money.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” the customer said, in a halfheartedly moderate tone.

  Aisha looked on, sly and quiet. Later, she whispered to Ifemelu, her expression suspicious, “You here fifteen years, but you don’t have American accent. Why?”

  Ifemelu ignored her and, once again, opened Jean Toomer’s Cane. She stared at the words and wished suddenly that she could turn back time and postpone this move back home. Perhaps she had been hasty. She should not have sold her condo. She should have accepted Letterly magazine’s offer to buy her blog and keep her on as a paid blogger. What if she got back to Lagos and realized what a mistake it was to move back? Even the thought that she could always return to America did not comfort her as much as she wished it to.

  The film had ended, and in the new noiselessness of the room, Mariama’s customer said, “This one’s rough,” touching one of the thin cornrows that zigzagged over her scalp, her voice louder than it needed to be.

  “No problem. I will do it again,” Mariama said. She was agreeable, and smooth-tongued, but Ifemelu could tell that she thought her customer was a troublemaker, and there was nothing wrong with the cornrow, but this was a part of her new American self, this fervor of customer service, this shiny falseness of surfaces, and she had accepted it, embraced it. When the customer left, she might shrug out of that self and say something to Halima and to Aisha about Americans, how spoiled and childish and entitled they were, but when the next customer came, she would become, again, a faultless version of her American self.

  Her customer said, “It’s cute,” as she paid Mariama, and shortly after she left, a young white woman came in, soft-bodied and tanned, her hair held back in a loose ponytail.

  “Hi!” she said.

  Mariama said “Hi,” and then waited, wiping her hands over and over the front of her shorts.

  “I wanted to get my hair braided? You can braid my hair, right?”

  Mariama smiled an overly eager smile. “Yes. We do every kind of hair. Do you want braids or cornrows?” She was furiously cleaning the chair now. “Please sit.”

  The woman sat down and said she wanted cornrows. “Kind of like Bo Derek in the movie? You know that movie 10?”

  “Yes, I know,” Mariama said. Ifemelu doubted that she did.

  “I’m Kelsey,” the woman announced as though to the whole room. She was aggressively friendly. She asked where Mariama was from, how long she had been in America, if she had children, how her business was doing.

  “Business is up and down but we try,” Mariama said.

  “But you couldn’t even have this business back in your country, right? Isn’t it wonderful that you get to come to the U.S. and now your kids can have a better life?”

  Mariama looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “Are women allowed to vote in your country?” Kelsey asked.

  A longer pause from Mariama. “Yes.”

  “What are you reading?” Kelsey turned to Ifemelu.

  Ifemelu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

  “Is it good?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a novel, right? What’s it about?”

  Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing. Ifemelu disliked the question; she would have disliked it even if she did not feel, in addition to her depressed uncertainty, the beginning of a headache. “It may not be the kind of book you would like if you have particular tastes. He mixes prose and verse.”

  “You have a great accent. Where are you from?”

  “Nigeria.”

  “Oh. Cool.” Kelsey had slender fingers; they would be perfect for advertising rings. “I’m going to Africa in the fall. Congo and Kenya and I’m going to try and see Tanzania too.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’ve been reading books to get ready. Everybody recommended Things Fall Apart, which I read in high school. It’s very good but sort of quaint, right? I mean like it didn’t help me understand modern Africa. I’ve just read this great book, A Bend in the River. It made me truly understand how modern Africa works.”

  Ifemelu made a sound, halfway between a snort and a hum, but said nothing.

  “It’s just so honest, the most honest book I’ve read about Africa,” Kelsey said.

  Ifemelu shifted. Kelsey’s knowing tone grated. Her headache was getting worse. She did not think the novel was about Africa at all. It was about Europe, or the longing for Europe, about the battered self-image of an Indian man born in Africa, who felt so wounded, so diminished, by not having been born European, a member of a race which he had elevated for their ability to create, that he turned his imagined personal insufficiencies into an impatient contempt for Africa; in his knowing haughty attitude to the African, he could become, even if only fleetingly, a European. She leaned back on her seat and said this in measured tones. Kelsey looked startled; she had not expected a minilecture. Then, she said kindly, “Oh, well, I see why you would read the novel like that.”

  “And I see why you would read it like you did,” Ifemelu said.

  Kelsey raised her eyebrows, as though Ifemelu was one of those slightly unbalanced people who were best avoided. Ifemelu closed her eyes. She had the sensation of clouds gathering over her head. She felt faint. Perhaps it was the heat. She had ended a relationship in which she was not unhappy, closed a blog she enjoyed, and now she was chasi
ng something she could not articulate clearly, even to herself. She could have blogged about Kelsey, too, this girl who somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally.

  “You want to use hair?” Mariama asked Kelsey.

  “Hair?”

  Maraima held up a pack of the attachments in a see-through plastic wrapping. Kelsey’s eyes widened, and she glanced quickly around, at the pack from which Aisha took small sections for each braid, at the pack that Halima was only just unwrapping.

  “Oh my God. So that’s how it’s done. I used to think African-American women with braided hair had such full hair!”

  “No, we use attachments,” Mariama said, smiling.

  “Maybe next time. I think I’ll just do my own hair today,” Kelsey said.

  Her hair did not take long, seven cornrows, the too-fine hair already slackening in the plaits. “It’s great!” she said afterwards.

  “Thank you,” Mariama said. “Please come back again. I can do another style for you next time.”

  “Great!”

  Ifemelu watched Mariama in the mirror, thinking of her own new American selves. It was with Curt that she had first looked in the mirror and, with a flush of accomplishment, seen someone else.

  CURT LIKED to say that it was love at first laugh. Whenever people asked how they met, even people they hardly knew, he would tell the story of how Kimberly had introduced them, he the cousin visiting from Maryland, she the Nigerian babysitter whom Kimberly talked so much about, and how taken he was by her deep voice, by the braid that had escaped from her rubber band. But it was when Taylor dashed into the den, wearing a blue cape and underwear, shouting, “I am Captain Underpants!” and she threw back her head and laughed, that he had fallen in love. Her laugh was so vibrant, shoulders shaking, chest heaving; it was the laugh of a woman who, when she laughed, really laughed. Sometimes when they were alone and she laughed, he would say teasingly, “That’s what got me. And you know what I thought? If she laughs like that, I wonder how she does other things.” He told her, too, that she had known he was smitten—how could she not know?—but pretended not to because she didn’t want a white man. In truth, she did not notice his interest. She had always been able to sense the desire of men, but not Curt’s, not at first. She still thought of Blaine, saw him walking along the platform at the New Haven train station, an apparition that filled her with a doomed yearning. She had not merely been attracted to Blaine, she had been arrested by Blaine, and in her mind he had become the perfect American partner that she would never have. Still, she had had other crushes since then, minor compared to that strike on the train, and had only just emerged from a crush on Abe in her ethics class, Abe who was white, Abe who liked her well enough, who thought her smart and funny, even attractive, but who did not see her as female. She was curious about Abe, interested in Abe, but all the flirting she did was, to him, merely niceness: Abe would hook her up with his black friend, if he had a black friend. She was invisible to Abe. This crushed her crush, and perhaps also made her overlook Curt. Until one afternoon when she was playing catch with Taylor, who threw the ball high, too high, and it fell into the thicket near the neighbor’s cherry tree.