Americanah

  Ifemelu bought a small condominium. She had been startled, when she first saw the listing in the real estate section of the paper, to realize she could afford the down payment in cash. Signing her name above the word “homeowner” had left her with a frightening sense of being grown-up, and also with a small astonishment, that this was possible because of her blog. She converted one of the two bedrooms into a study and wrote there, standing often by the window to look down at her new Roland Park neighborhood, the restored row homes shielded by old trees. It surprised her, which blog posts got attention and which were hardly clicked on. Her post about trying to date online, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” continued to draw comments, like something sticky, after many months.

  So, still a bit sad about the breakup with The Hot White Ex, not into the bar scene, and so I signed up for online dating. And I looked at lots of profiles. So here’s the thing. In that category where you choose the ethnicity you are interested in? White men tick white women, and the braver ones tick Asian and Hispanic. Hispanic men tick white and Hispanic. Black men are the only men likely to tick “all,” but some don’t even tick Black. They tick White, Asian, Hispanic. I wasn’t feeling the love. But what’s love got to do with all that ticking, anyway? You could walk into a grocery store and bump into someone and fall in love and that someone would not be the race you tick online. So after browsing, I cancelled my membership, thankfully still on trial, got a refund, and will be walking around blindly in the grocery store instead.

  Comments came from people with similar stories and people saying she was wrong, from men asking her to put up a photo of herself, from black women sharing success stories of online dating, from people angry and from people thrilled. Some comments amused her, because they were wildly unconnected to the subject of the post. Oh fuck off, one wrote. Black people get everything easy. You can’t get anything in this country unless you’re black. Black women are even allowed to weigh more. Her recurring post “Mish Mash Friday,” a jumble of thoughts, drew the most clicks and comments each week. Sometimes she wrote some posts expecting ugly responses, her stomach tight with dread and excitement, but they would draw only tepid comments. Now that she was asked to speak at roundtables and panels, on public radio and community radio, always identified simply as The Blogger, she felt subsumed by her blog. She had become her blog. There were times, lying awake at night, when her growing discomforts crawled out from the crevices, and the blog’s many readers became, in her mind, a judgmental angry mob waiting for her, biding their time until they could attack her, unmask her.

  Open Thread: For All the Zipped-Up Negroes

  This is for the Zipped-Up Negroes, the upwardly mobile American and Non-American Blacks who don’t talk about Life Experiences That Have to Do Exclusively with Being Black. Because they want to keep everyone comfortable. Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe space.

  CHAPTER 34

  Her blog brought Blaine back into her life. At the Blogging While Brown convention in Washington, D.C., during the meet-and-greet on the first day, the hotel foyer crowded with people saying hello to others in nervously overbright voices, she had been talking to a makeup blogger, a thin Mexican-American woman wearing neon eyeshadow, when she looked up and felt herself still and quake, because standing a few delicate feet from her, in a small circle of people, was Blaine. He was unchanged, except for the black-framed eyeglasses. Just as she remembered him on the train: tall and easy-limbed. The makeup blogger was talking about beauty companies always sending free stuff to Bellachicana, and the ethics of it, and Ifemelu was nodding, but was truly alert only to the presence of Blaine, and to him easing himself away from his circle, and moving towards her.

  “Hi!” he said, peering at her name tag. “So you’re the Non-American Black? I love your blog.”

  “Thank you,” she said. He didn’t remember her. But why should he? It had been so long since the meeting on the train, and neither of them knew then what the word “blog” meant. It would amuse him to know how much she had idealized him, how he had become a person made not of flesh but of little crystals of perfection, the American man she would never have. He turned to say hello to the makeup blogger and she saw, from his name tag, that he wrote a blog about the “intersection of academia and popular culture.”

  He turned back to her. “So are your mall visits in Connecticut still going okay? Because I still grow my own cotton.”

  For a moment, her breath stalled, and then she laughed, a dizzying, exhilarating laugh, because her life had become a charmed film in which people found each other again. “You remember!”

  “I’ve been watching you from the other end of the room. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you.”

  “Oh my God, what has it been, like ten years?”

  “About that. Eight?”

  “You never called me back,” she said.

  “I was in a relationship. It was troubled even then, but it lasted much longer than it should have.” He paused, with an expression that she would come to know well, a virtuous narrowing of his eyes that announced the high-mindedness of their owner.

  E-mails and phone calls between Baltimore and New Haven followed, playful comments posted on each other’s blogs, heavy flirting during late-night calls, until the day in winter when he came to her door, his hands sunk into the pockets of his tin-colored peacoat and his collar sprinkled with snow like magic dust. She was cooking coconut rice, her apartment thick with spices, a bottle of cheap merlot on her counter, and Nina Simone playing loudly on her CD. The song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” guided them, only minutes after he arrived, across the bridge from flirting friends to lovers on her bed. Afterwards, he propped himself up on his elbow to watch her. There was something fluid, almost epicene, about his lean body, and it made her remember that he had told her he did yoga. Perhaps he could stand on his head, twist himself into unlikely permutations. When she mixed the rice, now cold, in the coconut sauce, she told him that cooking bored her, and that she had bought all these spices only the day before, and had cooked because he was visiting. She had imagined them both with ginger on their lips, yellow curry licked off her body, bay leaves crushed beneath them, but instead they had been so responsible, kissing in the living room and then her leading him to her bedroom.

  “We should have done things more improbably,” she said.

  He laughed. “I like cooking, so there will be many opportunities for the improbable.” But she knew that he was not the sort of person to do things improbably. Not with his slipping on of the condom with such slow and clinical concentration. Later, when she came to know of the letters he wrote to Congress about Darfur, the teenagers he tutored at the high school on Dixwell, the shelter he volunteered at, she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine but had, instead, a firm reed of goodness.

  IT WAS AS IF because of their train meeting years ago, they could bypass several steps, ignore several unknowns, and slide into an immediate intimacy. After his first visit, she went back to New Haven with him. There were weeks that winter, cold and sunny weeks, when New Haven seemed lit from within, frosted snow clinging on shrubs, a festive quality to a world that seemed inhabited fully only by her and Blaine. They would walk to the falafel place on Howe Street for hummus, and sit in a dark corner talking for hours, and finally emerge, tongues smarting with garlic. Or she would meet him at the library after his class, where they sat in the café, drinking chocolate that was too rich, eating croissants that were too grainily whole wheat, his clutch of books on the table. He cooked organic vegetables and grains whose names she could not pronounce—bulgur, quinoa—and he swiftly cleaned up as he cooked, a splatter of tomato sauce wiped up as soon as it appeared, a spill of water immediately dabbed at. He frightened her, telling her about the chemicals that were sprayed on crops, the chemicals fed to chickens to make them grow quickly, and the chemicals used to give fruits perfect skin. Why did she think people were dying of cancer? And so before she ate an apple, s
he scrubbed it at the sink, even though Blaine only bought organic fruit. He told her which grains had protein, which vegetables had carotene, which fruits were too sugary. He knew about everything; she was intimidated by this and proud of this and slightly repelled by this. Little domesticities with him, in his apartment on the twentieth floor of a high-rise near the campus, became gravid with meaning—the way he watched her moisturize with cocoa butter after an evening shower, the whooshing sound his dishwasher made when it started—and she imagined a crib in the bedroom, a baby inside it, and Blaine carefully blending organic fruits for the baby. He would be a perfect father, this man of careful disciplines.

  “I can’t eat tempeh, I don’t understand how you like it,” she told him.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Then why eat it?”

  “It’s good for me.”

  He ran every morning and flossed every night. It seemed so American to her, flossing, that mechanical sliding of a string between teeth, inelegant and functional. “You should floss every day,” Blaine told her. And she began to floss, as she began to do other things that he did—going to the gym, eating more protein than carbohydrates—and she did them with a kind of grateful contentment, because they improved her. He was like a salutary tonic; with him, she could only inhabit a higher level of goodness.

  HIS BEST FRIEND, Araminta, came up to visit him, and hugged Ifemelu warmly, as though they had met previously. “Blaine hasn’t really dated since he broke up with Paula. And now, he’s with a sister, and a chocolate sister at that. We’re making progress!” Araminta said.

  “Mint, stop it,” Blaine said, but he was smiling. That his best friend was a woman, an architect with a long straight weave who wore high heels and tight jeans and colored contact lenses, said something about Blaine that Ifemelu liked.

  “Blaine and I grew up together. In high school, we were the only black kids in our class. All our friends wanted us to date, you know how they think the two black kids just have to be together, but he so wasn’t my type,” Araminta said.

  “You wish,” Blaine said.

  “Ifemelu, can I just say how happy I am that you’re not an academic? Have you heard his friends talk? Nothing is just what it is. Everything has to mean something else. It’s ridiculous. The other day Marcia was talking about how black women are fat because their bodies are sites of anti-slavery resistance. Yes, that’s true, if burgers and sodas are anti-slavery resistance.”

  “Anybody can see through that whole anti-intellectual pose thing, Miss Drinks at Harvard Club,” Blaine said.

  “Come on. A good education isn’t the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained! Even Shan makes fun of you guys. She does a great imitation of you and Grace: canon formation and topography of the spatial and historical consciousness.” Araminta turned to Ifemelu. “You haven’t met his sister Shan?”

  “No.”

  Later, when Blaine was in the bedroom, Araminta said, “Shan’s an interesting character. Don’t take her too seriously when you meet her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s great, she’s very seductive, but if you think she slights you or anything like that, it’s not you, it’s just the way she is.” And then she said, in a lower voice, “Blaine’s a really good guy, a really good guy.”

  “I know.” Ifemelu sensed, in Araminta’s words, something that was either a warning or a plea.

  Blaine asked her to move in after a month, but it took a year before she did, even though by then she was spending most of her time in New Haven, and had a Yale gym pass as a professor’s partner, and wrote her blogs from his apartment, at a desk he had placed for her near the bedroom window. At first, thrilled by his interest, graced by his intelligence, she let him read her blog posts before she put them up. She did not ask for his edits, but slowly she began to make changes, to add and remove, because of what he said. Then she began to resent it. Her posts sounded too academic, too much like him. She had written a post about inner cities—“Why Are the Dankest, Drabbest Parts of American Cities Full of American Blacks?”—and he told her to include details about government policy and redistricting. She did, but after rereading it, she took down the post.

  “I don’t want to explain, I want to observe,” she said.

  “Remember people are not reading you as entertainment, they’re reading you as cultural commentary. That’s a real responsibility. There are kids writing college essays about your blog,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to be academic or boring. Keep your style but add more depth.”

  “It has enough depth,” she said, irritated, but with the niggling thought that he was right.

  “You’re being lazy, Ifem.”

  He used that word, “lazy,” often, for his students who did not hand in work on time, black celebrities who were not politically active, ideas that did not match his own. Sometimes she felt like his apprentice; when they wandered through museums, he would linger at abstract paintings, which bored her, and she would drift to the bold sculptures or the naturalistic paintings, and sense in his tight smile his disappointment that she had not yet learned enough from him. When he played selections from his complete John Coltrane, he would watch her as she listened, waiting for a rapture he was sure would glaze over her, and then at the end, when she remained untransported, he would quickly avert his eyes. She blogged about two novels she loved, by Ann Petry and Gayl Jones, and Blaine said, “They don’t push the boundaries.” He spoke gently, as though he did not want to upset her, but it still had to be said. His positions were firm, so thought-through and fully realized in his own mind that he sometimes seemed surprised that she, too, had not arrived at them herself. She felt a step removed from the things he believed, and the things he knew, and she was eager to play catch-up, fascinated by his sense of rightness. Once, as they walked down Elm Street, on their way to get a sandwich, they saw the plump black woman who was a fixture on campus: always standing near the coffee shop, a woolen hat squashed on her head, offering single plastic red roses to passersby and asking “You got any change?” Two students were talking to her, and then one of them gave her a cappuccino in a tall paper cup. The woman looked thrilled; she threw her head back and drank from the cup.

  “That’s so disgusting,” Blaine said, as they walked past.

  “I know,” Ifemelu said, although she did not quite understand why he felt so strongly about the homeless woman and her cappuccino gift. Weeks before, an older white woman standing in line behind them at the grocery store had said, “Your hair is so beautiful, can I touch it?” and Ifemelu said yes. The woman sank her fingers into her Afro. She sensed Blaine tense, saw the pulsing at his temples. “How could you let her do that?” he asked afterwards. “Why not? How else will she know what hair like mine feels like? She probably doesn’t know any black people.”

  “And so you have to be her guinea pig?” Blaine asked. He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with “sort of,” and “the ways in which”; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief.

  SHE TOLD her parents about Blaine, that she was leaving Baltimore and moving to New Haven to live with him. She could have lied, invented a new job, or simply said she wanted to move. “His nam
e is Blaine,” she said. “He’s an American.”

  She heard the symbolism in her own words, traveling thousands of miles to Nigeria, and she knew what her parents would understand. She and Blaine had not talked about marriage, but the ground beneath her feet felt firm. She wanted her parents to know of him, and of how good he was. She used that word in describing him: “good.”

  “An American Negro?” her father asked, sounding baffled.

  Ifemelu burst out laughing. “Daddy, nobody says Negro anymore.”

  “But why a Negro? Is there a substantive scarcity of Nigerians there?”

  She ignored him, still laughing, and asked him to give her mother the phone. Ignoring him, even telling him that she was moving in with a man to whom she was not married, was something she could do only because she lived in America. Rules had shifted, fallen into the cracks of distance and foreignness.

  Her mother asked, “Is he a Christian?”

  “No. He is a devil-worshipper.”

  “Blood of Jesus!” her mother shrieked.

  “Mummy, yes, he is a Christian,” she said.

  “Then no problem,” her mother said. “When will he come to introduce himself? You can plan it so that we do everything at the same time—door-knocking, bride price, and wine-carrying—it will cut costs and that way he does not have to keep coming and going. America is far …”

  “Mummy, please, we are taking things slowly for now.”

  After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.

  Job Vacancy in America—National Arbiter in Chief of “Who Is Racist”

  In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folk who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn’t. Or maybe it’s time to just scrap the word “racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.