? ? ?
I didn’t go to the show, couldn’t face it. I did not want to stand in the bleachers with Fern, feeling his resentment while watching funhouse versions of the dances we had both seen at their source. I told Aimee I was going and I intended to go but when eight o’clock rolled around I was still in my house sweats, lying half propped up on my bed with my laptop over my groin, and then it was nine o’clock, and then it was ten. I absolutely had to go—my mind kept repeating this fact to me and I was in agreement with it—but my body freeze-framed, felt heavy and immovable. Yes, I must go, that was clear, and just as clear was the fact I was not going anywhere. I got on YouTube, skipped from dancer to dancer: Bojangles up the stairs, Harold and Fayard on a piano, Jeni LeGon in her swishing grass skirt, Michael Jackson at Motown 25. I often ended up at this clip of Jackson, although this time as he moonwalked across the stage, the thing that really interested me was not the crowd’s ecstatic screams or even the surreal fluidity of his movements but the shortness of his trousers. And still the option of going did not seem lost or completely closed until I looked up from my aimless surfing and found eleven forty-five had happened, which signified we were now in the undeniable past tense: I hadn’t gone. Search Aimee, search venue, search Brooklyn dance troupe, image search, AP wire search, blog search. At first simply out of a sense of guilt, but soon enough with the realization that I could reconstruct—140 characters at a time, image by image, blog post by blog post—the experience of having been there, until, by one a.m., nobody could have been there more than me. I was far more there than any of the people who had actually been there, they were restricted to one location and one perspective—to one stream of time—whereas I was everywhere in that room at all moments, viewing the thing from all angles, in a mighty act of collation. I could have stopped there—I had more than enough to give a detailed account of my evening to Aimee in the morning—but I didn’t stop. I was compelled by the process. To observe, in real time, the debates as they form and coalesce, to watch the developing consensus, the highlights or embarrassments identified, their meanings and subtexts accepted or denied. The insults and the jokes, the gossip and rumor, the memes, the Photoshop, the filters, and all the many varieties of critique given free rein here, far from Aimee’s reach or control. Earlier in the week, watching a costume fitting—in which Aimee, Jay and Kara were being dressed up to resemble Asante nobles—I’d hesitantly brought up the matter of appropriation. Judy groaned, Aimee looked at me and then down at her own ghost-pale pixie frame wrapped in so much vibrantly colored cloth, and told me that she was an artist, and artists have to be allowed to love things, to touch them and to use them, because art is not appropriation, that was not the aim of art—the aim of art was love. And when I asked her whether it was possible both to love something and leave it alone, she regarded me strangely, pulled her children into her body and asked: Have you ever been in love?
But now I felt defended, virtually surrounded. No, I didn’t feel like stopping. I kept refreshing and refreshing, waiting for new countries to wake up and see the images and form their own opinions or feed off opinions already voiced. In the wee hours I heard the front door squeak and Fern stumbling into the apartment, surely straight from the after-party. I didn’t move. And it must have been at about four in the morning, while scrolling through the fresh opinions and listening to the birds chirp in the dogwood, that I saw the handle “Tracey LeGon,” the subtitle “Truthteller.” My contact lenses were brittle in my eyes, it hurt to blink, but I wasn’t seeing things. I clicked. She’d posted the same photo I’d seen hundreds of times by then—Aimee, the dancers, Lamin, the children—all lined up at the front of the stage, wearing the adinkra cloth for which I’d seen them fitted: a rich cerulean blue printed with a pattern of black triangles, and in each triangle there was an eye. Tracey had taken this image, expanded it many times, cropped it, so only the triangle and the eye were still visible, and underneath this image she asked the question: LOOK FAMILIAR?
Three
Returning with Lamin, we took the jet, but without Aimee—who was in Paris, being awarded a medal by the French government—and so had to process through the main airport, just like everybody, into an arrival hall packed with returning sons and daughters. The men wore fancy jeans of heavy denim, stiff, patterned shirts with stockbroker collars, branded hooded tops, leather jackets, the latest sneakers. And the women were likewise determined to wear all of their best things at the same time. Hair beautifully done, nails freshly painted. Unlike us, they were all familiar with this hall, and quickly secured the services of the porters, to whom they handed their mammoth suitcases, instructing them to take care—though each bag was wrapped in layers of plastic—before leading these hot and harassed young baggage carriers through the crowds toward the exit, turning back every now and then to bark instructions like mountain climbers with their Sherpas. This way, this way! Smartphones held up above their heads, indicating the route. Looking at Lamin in this context, I realized his traveling outfit must be a deliberate choice: despite all the clothes and rings and chains and shoes Aimee had given him this past month, he was dressed exactly as he had been when he left. Same old white shirt, the chinos and a simple pair of leather sandals, black and worn thin at the heel. It made me think there were things about him I had not understood—maybe many things.
We took a taxi and I sat with Lamin in the backseat. The car had three broken windows and a hole in the lower carriage through which I could see the road rolling beneath. Fern sat in the front, next to the driver: his new policy was to keep a cool distance from me at all times. On the jet he read his books and journals, in the airport he restricted himself to practical matters, get that trolley, join that queue. He was never mean, never said anything cruel, but the effect was isolating.
“Want to stop to eat?” he asked me now, by way of the rearview mirror. “Or you can wait?”
I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t mind skipping lunch, who could power through, like Fern often did, replicating the practice of the poorest families in the village by eating only once, in the late afternoon. But I was not that kind of person: I couldn’t miss a meal without getting aggravated. We drove for forty minutes and stopped at a roadside café opposite something called the American College Academy. It had bars on its windows and half the letters missing from the sign. Inside the café the menus depicted glistening American-style meals “with fries,” the prices of which Lamin read aloud, shaking his head gravely, as if encountering something deeply sacrilegious or offensive, and after a long conversation with the waitress three plates of chicken yassa arrived for a negotiated “local” rate.
We were bent over our food, eating in silence, when we heard a booming voice coming from the very back of the café: “My boy Lamin! Little brother! It’s Bachir! Over here!”
Fern waved. Lamin did not move: he had spotted this Bachir long ago and had been praying not to be spotted in return. I turned and saw a man sitting alone at the last table near the counter, in the shadows, the only other customer in the place. He was broad and muscular like a rugby player, and wore a dark blue suit with stripes, a tie, a tiepin, loafers without socks and a thick gold chain around his wrist. The suit was straining against his muscles and his face was running with sweat.
“He is not my brother. He is my age mate. He is from the village.”