His work was in kitchens and in painting studios, so his everyday attire was T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. He stood long hours and tried many different kinds of footwear but always came back to sneakers. Later after we were together, when I traveled to give readings and talks, I would bring him back the most unusual T-shirts I could find, which he loved for his daily uniform: La Brea Tar Pits; University of Transylvania soccer team; Watts Towers Community Arts Center; Stax; Matthew Henson’s brown face framed by a fur-lined parka. His studio was never adequately heated nor cooled so when painting he would add on another shirt, a sweater, and his beloved grass-green fleece vest, often along with a bright wool scarf and a knit cap, to keep the heat in. When we went out on occasions, he wore vibrantly colored button-down shirts with his jeans, guayaberas or dashikis in the summer. Upon meeting him, one new friend commented, “Ooh, I love a man who isn’t afraid of a pop of color.” “Pop of color” became a phrase we loved to repeat, and certainly no man ever looked finer in hot pink.
We talked all day and all night for six weeks straight. He told me everything about life in Eritrea in his family’s compound, describing his father with children climbing all over him, laughing; his mother carefully choosing spices, or thread colors for embroidery, or paint colors for their walls, and letting him jostle her elbow so more clarified butter would go into the stew; he and his siblings washing the feet of the nuns who came by their house on Easter pilgrimage; the censers swinging through the Coptic church dispersing frankincense smoke; the big-eyed icons in stained glass, and the booming African drums making no mistake that this ancient Christianity was African; his reading the Italian newspapers aloud to his father; the Italian deco buildings of downtown Asmara, which remain the finest examples of that architectural style in the world; the best gelato ever accompanying his beloved cinema—pronounced in Italian—in the deco movie theater; his reverent love of the classroom and his teachers, who cherished him; the day his teacher read his essay aloud, and said, “Bambini, this one among you shall become a great writer”; his school chained shut the very next day as the Red Terror accelerated; neighborhood friends disappeared without explanation; the angles of growing fear and life-or-death protection.
During part of our six-week New Haven courtship, three of his young nieces Amal, Bana, and Aden visited from Nairobi and northern Virginia. We drove them to Cape Cod and pretended they were our children—for they were—and they danced magic spells around us, blessing our union. He and I would drive into New York late at night after he finished his shifts at the restaurant, and on slow days. He’d take me to the places that were most important to him when he lived in New York as an impassioned activist, also beginning to paint at his uptown kitchen table. We visited the Art Students League, Bob Blackburn’s printmaking workshop, and a performance of the Mingus Big Band. He loved to listen to “Fables of Faubus” over and over again, its oompah-loompah belying the sharp social commentary on the crumbling order of deep Jim Crow. We ate Italian food at a sidewalk café in the neighborhood he charmingly called “the” Soho. We walked to Veniero’s pastry shop in the East Village for millefoglie and espresso. Then we drove home to New Haven and here is one of dozens of small ways I knew I had met my love: me, the inveterate backseat driver began to fall asleep, safe with him at the wheel. I let go. It was perfectly quiet inside the car. And then I woke to a sentence he spoke, his rich, deep voice catching with emotion. “Lizzy,” he said, “you have land in Africa.”
Four
I returned to Chicago to my job, but we had pledged our troth. All we had to do was get through the teaching year and then I would move and we would be together. He had not yet met my parents but my father said, I know you and see how you are now that you are with him, so I know this man is right. He came to visit in Chicago and met my chosen family there. He cooked a feast for my people and their teenage children, and Mona and Bernardine—the groups’ elder sisters to me—telephoned my parents on the spot and had a very serious conversation with them: Yes, they’d met the man. This is why he is good. This is how he loves her. How did my life become so African? I whispered to Ficre with a smile, as we watched the modern-day village elders bless our union. Soon after we went to Washington to my parents, and after talking with him about history for hours after breakfast, my mother pronounced, “I have known him all my life.”