Her father had, finally, found a job, as the deputy director of human resources in one of the new banks. He bought a mobile phone. He bought new tires for her mother’s car. Slowly, he was easing back into his monologues about Nigeria.
“One could not describe Obasanjo as a good man, but it must be conceded that he has done some good things in the country; there is a flourishing spirit of entrepreneurship,” he said.
It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father’s “Hello?” after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: “Ifem, how is the weather in America?”
Her mother asked breezy questions and accepted breezy replies. “Everything is going well?” and Ifemelu had no choice but to say yes. Her father remembered classes she’d mentioned, and asked about specifics. She chose her words, careful not to say anything about Curt. It was easier not to tell them about Curt.
“What are your employment prospects?” her father asked. Her graduation was approaching, her student visa expiring.
“I have been assigned to a career counselor, and I’m meeting her next week,” she said.
“All graduating students have a counselor assigned to them?”
“Yes.”
Her father made a sound, of admiring respect. “America is an organized place, and job opportunities are rife there.”
“Yes. They have placed many students in good jobs,” Ifemelu said. It was untrue, but it was what her father expected to hear. The career services office, an airless space, piles of files sitting forlornly on desks, was known to be full of counselors who reviewed résumés and asked you to change the font or format and gave you outdated contact information for people who never called you back. The first time Ifemelu went there, her counselor, Ruth, a caramel-skinned African-American woman, asked, “What do you really want to do?”
“I want a job.”
“Yes, but what kind?” Ruth asked, slightly incredulous.
Ifemelu looked at her résumé on the table. “I’m a communications major, so anything in communications, the media.”
“Do you have a passion, a dream job?”
Ifemelu shook her head. She felt weak, for not having a passion, not being sure what she wanted to do. Her interests were vague and varied, magazine publishing, fashion, politics, television; none of them had a firm shape. She attended the school career fair, where students wore awkward suits and serious expressions, and tried to look like adults worthy of real jobs. The recruiters, themselves not long out of college, the young who had been sent out to catch the young, told her about “opportunity for growth” and “good fit” and “benefits,” but they all became noncommittal when they realized she was not an American citizen, that they would, if they hired her, have to descend into the dark tunnel of immigration paperwork. “I should have majored in engineering or something,” she told Curt. “Communications majors are a dime a dozen.”
“I know some people my dad did business with, they might be able to help,” Curt said. And, not long afterwards, he told her she had an interview at an office in downtown Baltimore, for a position in public relations. “All you need to do is ace the interview and it’s yours,” he said. “So I know folks in this other bigger place, but the good thing about this one is they’ll get you a work visa and start your green card process.”
“What? How did you do it?”
He shrugged. “Made some calls.”
“Curt. Really. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I have some ideas,” he said, boyishly pleased.
It was good news, and yet a soberness wrapped itself around her. Wambui was working three jobs under the table to raise the five thousand dollars she would need to pay an African-American man for a green-card marriage, Mwombeki was desperately trying to find a company that would hire him on his temporary visa, and here she was, a pink balloon, weightless, floating to the top, propelled by things outside of herself. She felt, in the midst of her gratitude, a small resentment: that Curt could, with a few calls, rearrange the world, have things slide into the spaces that he wanted them to.
When she told Ruth about the interview in Baltimore, Ruth said, “My only advice? Lose the braids and straighten your hair. Nobody says this kind of stuff but it matters. We want you to get that job.”
Aunty Uju had said something similar in the past, and she had laughed then. Now, she knew enough not to laugh. “Thank you,” she said to Ruth.
Since she came to America, she had always braided her hair with long extensions, always alarmed at how much it cost. She wore each style for three months, even four months, until her scalp itched unbearably and the braids sprouted fuzzily from a bed of new growth. And so it was a new adventure, relaxing her hair. She removed her braids, careful to leave her scalp unscratched, to leave undisturbed the dirt that would protect it. Relaxers had grown in their range, boxes and boxes in the “ethnic hair” section of the drugstore, faces of smiling black women with impossibly straight and shiny hair, beside words like “botanical” and “aloe” that promised gentleness. She bought one in a green carton. In her bathroom, she carefully smeared the protective gel around her hairline before she began to slather the creamy relaxer on her hair, section by section, her fingers in plastic gloves. The smell reminded her of chemistry lab in secondary school, and so she forced open the bathroom window, which was often jammed. She timed the process carefully, washing off the relaxer in exactly twenty minutes, but her hair remained kinky, its denseness unchanged. The relaxer did not take. That was the word—“take”—that the hairdresser in West Philadelphia used. “Girl, you need a professional,” the hairdresser said as she reapplied another relaxer. “People think they’re saving money by doing it at home but they’re really not.”
Ifemelu felt only a slight burning, at first, but as the hairdresser rinsed out the relaxer, Ifemelu’s head bent backwards against a plastic sink, needles of stinging pain shot up from different parts of her scalp, down to different parts of her body, back up to her head.
“Just a little burn,” the hairdresser said. “But look how pretty it is. Wow, girl, you’ve got the white-girl swing!”
Her hair was hanging down rather than standing up, straight and sleek, parted at the side and curving to a slight bob at her chin. The verve was gone. She did not recognize herself. She left the salon almost mournfully; while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a sense of loss. Curt looked uncertain when he saw her.
“Do you like it, babe?” he asked.
“I can see you don’t,” she said.
He said nothing. He reached out to stroke her hair, as though doing so might make him like it.
She pushed him away. “Ouch. Careful. I have a bit of relaxer burn.”
“What?”
“It’s not too bad. I used to get it all the time in Nigeria. Look at this.”
She showed him a keloid behind her ear, a small enraged swelling of skin, which she got after Aunty Uju straightened her hair with a hot comb in secondary school. “Pull back your ear,” Aunty Uju often said, and Ifemelu would hold her ear, tense and unbreathing, terrified that the red-hot comb fresh from the stove would burn her but also excited by the prospect of straight, swingy hair. And one day it did burn her, as she moved slightly and Aunty Uju’s hand moved slightly and the hot metal singed the skin behind her ear.
“Oh my God,” Curt said, his eyes wide. He insisted on gently looking at her scalp to see how much she had been hurt. “Oh my God.”
His horror made her more concerned than she would ordinarily have been. She had never felt so close to him as she did then, sitting still on the bed, her face sunk in his shirt, the scent of fabric softener in her nose, while he gently parted her newly straightened hair.
“Why do you have to do this? Your hair
was gorgeous braided. And when you took out the braids the last time and just kind of let it be? It was even more gorgeous, so full and cool.”
“My full and cool hair would work if I were interviewing to be a backup singer in a jazz band, but I need to look professional for this interview, and professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls but never kinky.”
“It’s so fucking wrong that you have to do this.”
At night, she struggled to find a comfortable position on her pillow. Two days later, there were scabs on her scalp. Three days later, they oozed pus. Curt wanted her to see a doctor and she laughed at him. It would heal, she told him, and it did. Later, after she breezed through the job interview, and the woman shook her hand and said she would be a “wonderful fit” in the company, she wondered if the woman would have felt the same way had she walked into that office wearing her thick, kinky, God-given halo of hair, the Afro.
She did not tell her parents how she got the job; her father said, “I have no doubt that you will excel. America creates opportunities for people to thrive. Nigeria can indeed learn a lot from them,” while her mother began to sing when Ifemelu said that, in a few years, she could become an American citizen.
Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Do WASPs Aspire To?
Professor Hunk has a visiting professor colleague, a Jewish guy with a thick accent from the kind of European country where most people drink a glass of antisemitism at breakfast. So Professor Hunk was talking about civil rights and Jewish guy says, “The blacks have not suffered like the Jews.” Professor Hunk replies, “Come on, is this the oppression olympics?”
Jewish guy did not know this, but “oppression olympics” is what smart liberal Americans say, to make you feel stupid and to make you shut up. But there IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities—blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews—all get shit from white folks, different kinds of shit, but shit still. Each secretly believes that it gets the worst shit. So, no, there is no United League of the Oppressed. However, all the others think they’re better than blacks because, well, they’re not black. Take Lili, for example, the coffee-skinned, black-haired and Spanish-speaking woman who cleaned my aunt’s house in a New England town. She had a great hauteur. She was disrespectful, cleaned poorly, made demands. My aunt believed Lili didn’t like working for black people. Before she finally fired her, my aunt said, “Stupid woman, she thinks she’s white.” So whiteness is the thing to aspire to. Not everyone does, of course (please, commenters, don’t state the obvious) but many minorities have a conflicted longing for WASP whiteness or, more accurately, for the privileges of WASP whiteness. They probably don’t really like pale skin but they certainly like walking into a store without some security dude following them. Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too, as the great Philip Roth put it. So if everyone in America aspires to be WASPs, then what do WASPs aspire to? Does anyone know?
CHAPTER 20
Ifemelu came to love Baltimore—for its scrappy charm, its streets of faded glory, its farmers market that appeared on weekends under the bridge, bursting with green vegetables and plump fruit and virtuous souls—although never as much as her first love, Philadelphia, that city that held history in its gentle clasp. But when she arrived in Baltimore knowing she was going to live there, and not merely visiting Curt, she thought it forlorn and unlovable. The buildings were joined to one another in faded slumping rows, and on shabby corners, people were hunched in puffy jackets, black and bleak people waiting for buses, the air around them hazed in gloom. Many of the drivers outside the train station were Ethiopian or Punjabi.
Her Ethiopian taxi driver said, “I can’t place your accent. Where are you from?”
“Nigeria.”
“Nigeria? You don’t look African at all.”
“Why don’t I look African?”
“Because your blouse is too tight.”
“It is not too tight.”
“I thought you were from Trinidad or one of those places.” He was looking in the rearview with disapproval and concern. “You have to be very careful or America will corrupt you.” When, years later, she wrote the blog post “On the Divisions Within the Membership of Non-American Blacks in America,” she wrote about the taxi driver, but she wrote of it as the experience of someone else, careful not to let on whether she was African or Caribbean, because her readers did not know which she was.
She told Curt about the taxi driver, how his sincerity had infuriated her and how she had gone to the station bathroom to see if her pink long-sleeved blouse was too tight. Curt laughed and laughed. It became one of the many stories he liked to tell friends. She actually went to the bathroom to look at her blouse! His friends were like him, sunny and wealthy people who existed on the glimmering surface of things. She liked them, and sensed that they liked her. To them, she was interesting, unusual in the way she bluntly spoke her mind. They expected certain things of her, and forgave certain things from her, because she was foreign. Once, sitting with them in a bar, she heard Curt talking to Brad, and Curt said “blowhard.” She was struck by the word, by the irredeemable Americanness of it. Blowhard. It was a word that would never occur to her. To understand this was to realize that Curt and his friends would, on some level, never be fully knowable to her.
She got an apartment in Charles Village, a one-bedroom with old wood floors, although she might as well have been living with Curt; most of her clothes were in his walk-in closet lined with mirrors. Now that she saw him every day, no longer just on weekends, she saw new layers of him, how difficult it was for him to be still, simply still without thinking of what next to do, how used he was to stepping out of his trousers and leaving them on the floor for days, until the cleaning woman came. Their lives were full of plans he made—Cozumel for one night, London for a long weekend—and she sometimes took a taxi on Friday evenings after work to meet him at the airport.
“Isn’t this great?” he would ask her, and she would say yes, it was great. He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being. She added quickly, though, that she liked it all, because she did like it and she knew, too, how much he needed to hear that. In bed, he was anxious.
“Do you like that? Do you enjoy me?” he asked often. And she said yes, which was true, but she sensed that he did not always believe her, or that his belief lasted only so long before he would need to hear her affirmation again. There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.
AND THEN her hair began to fall out at the temples. She drenched it in rich, creamy conditioners, and sat under steamers until water droplets ran down her neck. Still, her hairline shifted further backwards each day.
“It’s the chemicals,” Wambui told her. “Do you know what’s in a relaxer? That stuff can kill you. You need to cut your hair and go natural.”
Wambui’s hair was now in short locs, which Ifemelu did not like; she thought them sparse and dull, unflattering to Wambui’s pretty face.
“I don’t want dreads,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There’s a lot you can do with natural hair.”
“I can’t just cut my hair,” she said.
“Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. That picture you sent me, you had your hair covered on the boat. You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do. If you go natural and take good care of your hair, it won’t fall off like it’s doing now. I can help you cut it right now. No need to think about it too much.”
Wambui was so sure, so convincing. Ifemelu found a pair of scissors. Wambui cut her hair, leaving only two inches, the ne
w growth since her last relaxer. Ifemelu looked in the mirror. She was all big eyes and big head. At best, she looked like a boy; at worst, like an insect.
“I look so ugly I’m scared of myself.”
“You look beautiful. Your bone structure shows so well now. You’re just not used to seeing yourself like this. You’ll get used to it,” Wambui said.
Ifemelu was still staring at her hair. What had she done? She looked unfinished, as though the hair itself, short and stubby, was asking for attention, for something to be done to it, for more. After Wambui left, she went to the drugstore, Curt’s baseball hat pulled over her head. She bought oils and pomades, applying one and then the other, on wet hair and then on dry hair, willing an unknown miracle to happen. Something, anything, that would make her like her hair. She thought of buying a wig, but wigs brought anxiety, the always-present possibility of flying off your head. She thought of a texturizer to loosen her hair’s springy coils, stretch out the kinkiness a little, but a texturizer was really a relaxer, only milder, and she would still have to avoid the rain.
Curt told her, “Stop stressing, babe. It’s a really cool and brave look.”
“I don’t want my hair to be brave.”
“I mean like stylish, chic.” He paused. “You look beautiful.”
“I look like a boy.”
Curt said nothing. There was, in his expression, a veiled amusement, as though he did not see why she should be so upset but was better off not saying so.
The next day, she called in sick, and climbed back into bed.
“You didn’t call in sick so we could stay a day longer in Bermuda but you call in sick because of your hair?” Curt asked, propped up by pillows, stifling laughter.
“I can’t go out like this.” She was burrowing under the covers as though to hide.
“It’s not as bad as you think,” he said.