He told me to meet him in front of the lobby at the Schomburg, less than ten blocks from my apartment. A few minutes after I got there, I saw a bald, light-skinned black man emerge from the door. He wore thick-rimmed glasses, and had a goatee and a dignified smile. After grabbing our smoothies from a small shop around the corner, he took me back to the Schomburg, a place that holds Langston Hughes’s ashes, signed documents from Toussaint Louverture, and a rare recording of a Marcus Garvey speech. Over ten million objects of the black diaspora are stored there.
Alexander led me down to the courtyard, where we spoke about what it meant to be black, especially in a place like Harlem. He told me that he had wanted to meet me in person because, although he thought my article was interesting, he found it to be incomplete and knew that there had to be more behind my words. He was right. At the time, I hadn’t been able to pick apart all my constantly shifting thoughts about who I was, and what Harlem meant to me.
Towards the end of our rendezvous, Alexander matter-of-factly declared, “Blackness is everything.” It was there in that courtyard where I began to see my neighborhood through a new lens. Blackness was everything. Harlem was everything. Neither Harlem nor blackness could exist in a bubble, in a pocket that I only turned inside out when I boarded the train uptown. It had to be my everything. My everywhere. Harlem was everywhere.
About four months after publishing that gentrification piece, after I published my first piece on The New Yorker’s Page-Turner, I received an email from Augustyna, a warm Polish woman who had been one of my biggest academic supporters as the undergraduate administrator of the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton. She’d left the school before I turned in my thesis, and besides a fortuitous crossing of paths during commencement weekend, when she’d met my parents, I had not seen her since, and I missed her. She asked if I would like to come to her home, a Dutch Colonial farmhouse situated in Somerset County, for lunch, and when I accepted she explained that her beloved husband was significantly older than her, and she was his caregiver. I told her not to worry; my mother was my late stepfather’s caregiver, and so I could understand what to expect. Relieved, Augustyna wrote back to say that her aunt and uncle would also be coming for lunch. They were interested in getting to know me, a student whom Augustyna had talked about, and they often visited their niece.
I had some preparation of my own to do. I stood in front of my freestanding mirror and undid my bun, letting my tight curls graze my shoulders. These were elderly European people after all, and I was worried that my naturally curly afro would be interpreted as too militant, or as a statement in the context of my politically charged articles. As a black woman, I feel it is one thing for me to wear my hair out in an afro when I am in public and interacting with people of many different backgrounds. It is quite another when I am invited to a white person’s home. I didn’t want to make Augustyna, her husband, or her aunt and uncle uncomfortable. Furthermore, I didn’t want to expend mental energy on figuring out how to maneuver away if anyone tried to reach and pet my hair. I eventually decided to moisturize my hair with water and shea butter before pinning it back into a bun, with some of my curls hanging to the side.
As soon as I descended the steps of the New Brunswick station, I could see Augustyna smiling through the windshield of her black truck. It was a gloomy, rainy day, but I had to restrain my excitement as I crossed a busy intersection to reach her. Her dirty-blonde hair was in loose curls, seemingly untilled by the bristles of a brush or comb, accentuating her easygoing personality. Exhaustion peeked through the inner corners of her eyes, but her charming smile reassured me that I did not have to apologize for being an extra burden.
Augustyna’s home was situated near a river. As we drew nearer, she suggested that I look through the passenger window at all of the farmhouses perched on acres upon acres of land. Apparently the area was famous for playing a part in the Revolutionary War, but all I could think about was how many black servants might have worked in each house, and where they would have lived.
As soon as Augustyna pulled up and turned off the truck’s engine, her aunt opened the front door and yelled for us to hurry and get out of the rain. No taller than I was at five feet, she had short brown hair, an infectious and constant laugh, and a thick Polish accent. Her husband was her foil in both appearance and demeanor—he was medium height. She greeted me with a hug, but he stood in front of me, emotionless, while his cold blue eyes fixated on my face. I nervously smiled and said hello; then Augustyna’s aunt tugged at her husband’s arm and said, “Say something to her in Russian. She speaks Russian. Say something to her in Russian.”
He held up his right hand, and she said no more.
My skin constricted. I had studied the language for four years, traveled to the country, and could even read medical science and technology articles without using a dictionary. I could handle whatever he threw at me, but I did not trust that he would be easy on me. He might pepper his sentences with archaic words not taught in Russian classes, and if I did not respond quickly enough he would think that I was a liar.
But instead he said, “I read your articles.”
My shoulders dropped. “Oh yeah?” I replied in a perky voice as we made our way to Augustyna’s living room, where her aunt relentlessly urged me to drink white wine.
Augustyna’s husband didn’t seem as sick as she’d implied. He was the one asking me the majority of questions about my work, my time at Princeton, and my reasons for getting into writing. All the while, the aunt was urging me to drink more, to drink more. I had nothing else in my stomach besides cornflakes and I worried that I would become tipsy before lunch was ready. The uncle barely said anything to me, just sat upright in his chair, his blue eyes unyielding. While Augustyna set the table in the dining room, I regaled the three of them with my deep dive into multiple languages, my travels to Japan, and my time in St. Petersburg. I made sure that I pulled my jaw back so that my mouth could not move too freely, allowing my voice to spill over with too much passion. I decorated the middles and ends of my sentences with flashy smiles and strained to keep my hands from making too many associative gesticulations. Augustyna’s aunt and husband were visibly impressed by all that I had accomplished, but I can’t recall her uncle even sipping the glass of wine that was in front of him. He was too preoccupied with studying me. I had become accustomed to that kind of stare when I was in Russia, and I knew how to carry on in spite of the scrutiny.
After Augustyna called us into the dining room, her aunt sat on my left and her uncle on my right. As I placed pear-and-arugula salad and some vegetables on my plate, he finally spoke.
“Morgan, I am sorry for not talking much. It’s just that you confuse me.”
I shot a glance at Augustyna, whose cheeks were reddening even as she smiled to ease the tension. “I confuse you? How do I confuse you?” I chuckled and picked at my plate.
“Forgive me for what I am about to ask. I’m not from here. I’ve lived here for many years and worked as a doctor. I have been around plenty black men, but you are the first black woman who I have ever met. It’s just that I don’t understand why you would want to call yourself black. Why not just call yourself a human? Now, it is obvious that you are a woman. But do you have to be a black woman? Why can’t you be a human?”
If I had been in the middle of swallowing a pear slice, it would have caught in my throat. I listened to the smooth violin music playing in the background and chuckled again—smiling, too, of course. I was not offended. I was stunned.
Augustyna interjected. “Morgan, you have to forgive my uncle. He’s not from here and sometimes he says things that are . . .” Her voice tapered off.