Three
We courted over six weeks in the summer of 1996. At the end of the first week, we decided to marry but told no one. They’ll think we’re crazy! we’d say. It’s our secret. We were certain.
We ate little, drank sweet cafecitos, and listened to Ahmad Jamal, Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, Randy Weston, and Don Pullen, geniuses of the African diaspora we both celebrated. We wrote dozens of haikus back and forth in a shared notebook and he nicknamed himself “Basho in Africa.” Basho wrote in the seventeenth century in Japan’s Edo period and was thought to be the greatest practitioner of haiku, but he is even more renowned for leading others in renku, a collaborative, linked-verse poetry. No one had ever asked me to write poems together.
How I researched tiny Eritrea when I first met him! How I practiced saying his name correctly—FEE-kray Geb-reh-YESS-oos, playing his first answering machine message back over and over again to get it right. How I opened myself to learning this brand-new person from a brand-new, fascinating place. I came from the pig people and he came from the cow and the sheep people. Some of my people were midland slaves who made something from nothing and Massa’s leavings. Some of my people were fancy and free. He came from forever-free Christian Coptic highlanders who alternate seasons of harvest bounty and Lenten veganism. That was the interesting idea of us: East and West Africa married, descendant of slaves who survived, descendants of free people of color, descendants of freedom fighters never enslaved, the strongest of all to be conjoined in our children. Sometimes we talked about this. But mostly we just talked, the deepest thoughts, the sweetest thoughts, the questions we had waited to ask forever. He was a bottomless boat and the boat that would always hold me.
His teeth were straight, white, and bright without benefit of American orthodonture. In photographs he disdained “cheesing” and set his lips firmly closed, but his smile was quick and shone full sunshine. He shaved his head on account of his receding hairline, and surely no one ever looked more beautiful bald—brown like a chestnut, clear brown, like topaz or buckwheat honey (“Did you know that buckwheat is neither grass nor wheat and is closely related to rhubarb?” I can hear him say). He was of medium build and trim, though he tended towards a wee bit extra around the middle that I found lovely. His fitness was that of a man who worked on his feet and could do things. He was nimble and physically intelligent. He hoisted large objects and moved them, climbed up on ladders, crawled behind and under furniture, jerry-rigged solutions to household problems. Later, when we had a home together, he would often work in the garden all day in hot sun; he paced himself and never seemed to tire. “You got yourself an African ox, baby,” he’d say to me, as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of rocky dirt he’d dug to clear a patch for growing.
Nothing was out of place or excessive about him. He looked like one of several variations on an Abyssinian “type,” which is to say large, wide-set eyes, broad, smooth forehead, a particular luminosity to his brown color, a carved nose. But he was, of course, only himself. His voice lilted across a pentatonic scale. “How are you?” D-sharp, C, G-sharp. There was chocolate in his voice, a depth, a bottom.
In this still life I have forgotten to say, he was beautiful, and utterly without vanity.