There were times when the stress of being a Poor Righteous Teacher could overwhelm. He pulled down the shades in his room, waked and baked, missed lectures, begged me not to leave him alone, spent hours studying the Supreme Alphabet and the Supreme Mathematics, which to me looked like only note book after note book filled with letters and numbers in incomprehensible combinations. At other times he appeared well suited to the task of global enlightenment. Serene and knowledgeable, sitting cross-legged like a guru upon the floor, pouring out hibiscus tea for our little circle, “dropping science,” bopping his head gently to his namesake on the stereo. I had never before met a boy like this. The boys I’d known had had no passions, not really, they couldn’t afford them: it was the act of not caring that was important to them. They were in a lifelong contest with each other—and with the world—exactly to demonstrate who cared less, who among them gave less of a fuck. It was a form of defense against loss, which seemed to them inevitable anyway. Rakim was different: all his passions were on the surface, he couldn’t hide them, he didn’t try to—that’s what I loved about him. I didn’t notice at first how hard it was for him to laugh. Laughter did not feel appropriate for a God in human form—much less for the girlfriend of a God—and I should probably have read a warning in that. Instead I followed him devotedly, to the strangest places. Numerology! He was besotted with numerology. He showed me how to render my name in numbers, and then how to manipulate these numbers in a particular way, in accordance with the Supreme Mathematics, until they meant: “The struggle to triumph over the division within.” I didn’t understand all of what he said—we were most often stoned during these conversations—but the division he claimed he could see inside of me I understood very well, nothing was easier for me to grasp than the idea that I was born half right and half wrong, yes, as long as I did not think of my actual father and the love I bore him I could tap this feeling in myself very easily.
Such ideas had nothing to do with, and no place in, Rakim’s actual schoolwork: his degree was in Business Studies and Hospitality. But they dominated our time together and little by little I began to feel myself under a cloud of constant correction. Nothing I did was right. He was repelled by the media that I was supposed to be studying—the minstrels and the dancing mammies, the hoofers and the chorus girls—he saw no worth in any of it, even if my purpose was critique, the whole subject for him was empty, a product of “Jewish Hollywood,” whom he included, en masse, in that deceitful ten percent. If I tried to talk to him about something I was writing—especially in front of our friends—he would make a point of diminishing or ridiculing it. Too stoned in company once, I made the mistake of trying to explain what I found beautiful about the origins of tap dancing—the Irish crew and the African slaves, beating out time with their feet on the wooden decks of those ships, exchanging steps, creating a hybrid form—but Rakim, also stoned and in a cruel mood, stood up, rolled his eyes, stuck his lips out, shook his hands like a minstrel, and said: Oh massa, I’s so happy on this here slave ship I be dancing for joy. Cut his eyes at me, sat back down. Our friends looked at the floor. The mortification was intense: for months afterward just the thought of it could bring the heat back to my cheeks. But at the time I didn’t blame him for behaving in this way, or feel I loved him any less: my instinct was always to find the fault in myself. My biggest flaw at the time, in his view and my own, was my femininity, which was of the wrong kind. Woman, in Rakim’s schema, was intended to be the “earth,” she grounded man, who was himself pure idea, who “dropped science,” and I was, in his judgment, far from where I should be, at the roots of things. I did not grow plants or cook food, never spoke of babies or domestic matters, and competed with Rakim when and where I should have been supportive. Romance was beyond me: it required a form of personal mystery I couldn’t manufacture and disliked in others. I couldn’t pretend that my legs do not grow hair or that my body does not excrete a variety of foul substances or that my feet aren’t flat as pancakes. I could not flirt and saw no purpose in flirting. I did not mind dressing up for strangers—when out at college parties or if we went up to London for the clubs—but in our rooms, within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anybody’s baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind that occurs between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends. These deep faults Rakim traced back to the blood of my father, running through me like a poison. But it was also my own doing, my own mind, too busy in itself. A city mind, he called it, the kind that can never know peace, because it has nothing natural to meditate upon, only concrete and images, and images of images—“simulacra,” as we said back then. The cities had corrupted me, making me mannish. Didn’t I know that the cities had been built by the ten percent? That they were a deliberate tool of oppression? An unnatural habitat for the African soul? His evidence for this theory was sometimes complex—suppressed government conspiracies, scrawled diagrams of architectural plans, obscure quotations ascribed to presidents and civic leaders which I had to take on faith—and at other times simple and damning. Did I know the names of the trees? The names of the flowers? No? But how could an African live this way? Whereas he knew them all, though this was due to the fact—which he didn’t care to broadcast—that he was a son of rural England, raised first in Yorkshire and then in Dorset, in remote villages, and always the only one of his kind on his street, the only one of his kind in his school, a fact I found more exotic than all his radicalism, all his mysticism. I loved that he knew the names of the counties and how they connected to each other, the names of rivers and where and how exactly they ran into the sea, could tell a mulberry from a blackberry, a copse from a coppice. Never in my life had I gone walking with no purpose, but now I did, accompanying him on his walks, along the stark seafront, down abandoned piers, and sometimes deep into the town, down its little cobbled lanes, crossing parkland, weaving through cemeteries and along A-roads, so far along that we would come upon fields finally and lie down in them. On these long walks he did not forget his preoccupations. He used them to frame what we saw, in ways that could surprise me. The Georgian grandeur of a crescent of houses facing the sea, their fa?ades white as sugar—these were, he explained, also paid for by sugar, built by a plantation owner from our own ancestral island, the island neither of us had ever visited. And the little churchyard in which we sometimes gathered at night, to smoke and drink and lie on the grass, this was where Sarah Forbes Bonetta was married, a story he retold with such verve you’d have thought he’d married the woman himself. I lay down with him on the scrubby grass of the cemetery and listened. A little seven-year-old West African girl, high born but caught up in intertribal war, kidnapped by Dahomey raiders. She witnessed the murder of her family, but was later “rescued”—a word Rakim placed in finger quotes—by an English captain who convinced the King of Dahomey to give her as a present to Queen Victoria. “A present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites.” This captain named her Bonetta, after his own ship, and by the time they’d reached England he’d realized how smart a little girl she was, how unusually quick and alert, as bright as any white girl, and when the Queen met her she could see all of this, too, deciding to raise Sarah as her god-daughter, marrying her off, many years later, when she came of age, to a rich Yoruba merchant. In this church, said Rakim, it happened in this church right here. I got up on my elbows in the grass and looked over at the church, so unassuming, its simple crenellations and solid red door. “And there were eight black bridesmaids in a procession,” he said, tracing their journey from the gate to the church door with the tip of a glowing joint. “Imagine it! Eight black and eight white, and the African men walked with the white girls and the white men with the African girls.” Even in the darkness I could see it all. The twelve gray horses pulling the carriage, and the magnificent ivory lace of the gown, and the great crowd gathered to see the spectacle, spilling out of the church, on to the lawn, and back all the way to the lych-gate, standing on the low stone walls and hanging in the trees, just to catch a look at her.