Chapter XLII. Fade to Black.
XLII.
FADE TO BLACK.
LOS ANGELES.
“Where’s your brother?”
“He doesn’t want to come.”
Two days before the presidential election I summon the kids for a run to our favorite ice-cream spot, as a distraction from the news cycle. It has become all-consuming. And despite my best efforts, I’ve begun to internalize it. But when I file into the car, only Lucie follows suit.
“Julien is turning down Sweet Rose? That’s not like him.”
“He’s not in a great mood, Mom. He and Ava broke up.”
“What? When? What happened?”
She shrugs, noncommittal. “Her parents. I don’t think they were happy about them dating. They’re pretty conservative.”
I stare at her for a second. Attempting to read between the lines. “Conservative how?”
“He said Ava told him that her mom found out they were dating and told her it was okay for them to be friends but if her dad ever knew it was more than that he would not be happy. She said it wasn’t personal, though, because her mom really likes Julien.
She just thought Ava’s dad would be uncomfortable with it. ”
“Uncomfortable with it?? Uncomfortable with what? Her dating in general or her dating him?”
Lucie shrugs, then looks away. “I think it’s the second thing, but I think you have to ask Julien.”
“Did he tell you something? What did he tell you, Luce?”
“You have to talk to Julien.”
I find him later in his room playing Minecraft. His expression sullen. “Honey, do you have a moment?”
“Can it wait?”
“I’d rather it not.”
“Ugh.” He stops building his perfect world, reclines in his chair, turns his face to me.
“Lucie told me something happened with you and Ava. I’m sorry.”
He shrugs, looking away. “Yeah, it’s … whatever.”
For a moment I stand in the doorframe, taking in my son’s face. His brow suddenly prominent, his jaw square, his skin clear. His cheekbones that had recently made themselves known. His braces removed. How he’d changed since our arrival.
“It’s not ‘whatever,’ Julien,” I say. “I don’t know all the details, but I know you really liked her.
And I know she liked you. And from what I could see you were kind to each other and that is so important.
And when relationships end—especially when they’re good, kind relationships, and the ending doesn’t feel organic—it hurts. ”
He’s quiet for a second, his eyes fixated elsewhere. “What do you mean ‘doesn’t feel organic’?”
“Like abrupt. Like maybe you both don’t feel like it ran its course.”
He mulls it over for a bit, pressing his lips together.
“Did her parents say something to her?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about them.” He stiffens, his expression pained.
And for the millionth time I wonder what the upside is of being in America and subjecting my son to this. And whether this lesson is necessary for him to grow. To see the world for what it is. And does he need to learn it at such a vulnerable age?
“Okay,” I say, eventually, wanting deeply to stroke his face, his curls, but knowing he would recoil. “Just … I’m here. If you want to talk.”
“Okay,” he says. “Can you close the door on your way out?” And then he returns to Minecraft.
Sometimes I think I’ve given my children the ultimate gift by unburdening them of race.
I’ve cultivated vessels that could move in and out of crowds, undetectable as offensive.
Unidentifiable. Unassuming. An invisibility cloak of sorts.
What a triumph! And other times, I am hit with the painful reality that I’ve robbed them of something special.
That I’ve stolen their birthright. Their identity.
That no tribe would look at them and claim them as their own.
Maybe not even the “mix-up/mix-up” Jamaicans. Maybe not even them.
On Tuesday night, after they’ve called the election results, my mother telephones from Florida.
“I think you and Francois are going to need a bigger apartment.”
“So you and Daddy can have your own room?”
“Exactly.”
“Tell CeCe we’re not going anywhere,” my father yells in the background. “We’re American now. Nothing and no one’s going to force us out.”
That Friday, at the end of a sobering week, Anouk turns forty.
We talked about ringing in the new decade somewhere memorable: Tahiti or the Maldives.
But any plans were forgotten when we fell apart.
And I have to settle with being forwarded directly to voicemail.
Knowing a response will not be forthcoming.
On Sunday, I head to the Jamaican grocery on Crenshaw, a good forty-five-minute drive from home.
I pick up some saltfish and ackee to cook for the family later, and half a dozen fresh patties.
And on the way back to the Westside, the car smelling of buttery pastry and spiced beef, I switch on NPR and subject myself to more postelection commentary. A nation in shock.
On This American Life, they are interviewing a Black British woman.
The mother of one of the show’s producers who is living in the Midwest, where she and her husband raised their children.
She is sharing a recent experience she had with her daughter in a supermarket parking lot, where she was threatened by a white man over her driving skills. The event had left her shaken.
“It used to be a regular nightmare of mine was, you know, one of you children being shot dead. Why live here if you don’t have to?
If you have options to be elsewhere, why choose here?
… And quite honestly, you know it’s just, I’ve lived my whole life being symbolic Black and I’m quite happy to do that, but I really, I suppose, I don’t feel valued enough by this society to do what it takes to live here and to struggle and to try to make the difference in order to make this place better. ”
The feeling comes over me sharply. Like the first minutes of an IV drip.
Ice in my veins. The chill going straight to the bone.
The freeway becomes blurry then, pointillist, like a Seurat.
Like Kusama’s Infinity Nets. I move to turn on the windshield wipers and realize it is not raining.
Of course not. It never rains here. My tears are what’s fogging my vision.
I pull off at the next exit. And somewhere on Sepulveda Boulevard, northbound, I let go.
All that I’ve been keeping bottled up. My feelings about Anouk and Francois and Leelou and Lucie quitting ballet and Julien not being good enough for Ava’s parents and Los Angeles and America.
Uncertainty and guilt and privilege and fear and loss.
What on earth was I doing here? A place, a life, where I might never fit in. Where something in my soul did not sit well. What was it James Baldwin had said? “To be a negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all the time.”
On the radio, the British mum continues to advise her journalist son. Her melodic lilt sweet and resonant. “Don’t worry about this country,” she says. “As they say, a country gets the government it deserves. So, you know, good luck to them with it.”
It stings. And yet I can’t help but think that perhaps she is right.
And that living here in this skin was exhausting enough, but returning after time away was even more so.
That the burdens of my skinfolk that I had fled had once again become mine.
Except they were heavier. Because after twenty years without, I’d grown out of the habit of carrying them.