A creamy magnolia soon bloomed outside the window on my side of the bed. I can see our bedroom closet, the 1950s sparkling tile shelf, our bureaus side by side, the slant roof area he painted a color called cyan, which he told me was made by mixing green and blue light and which as dye was first derived from cornflowers. He painted the nook in which the kitchen garbage stood, green, bright green, watermelon-rind green. We kept family pictures on the built-in shelves leading up the stairs, an ancestral procession marking the way from the public first floor to our sleeping quarters.
I listened to Ficre sing the delicate Tigrinya melodies of his childhood as he rocked Solo in his golden room in the chair my students and colleagues gave me. Soon I knew the melodies as well and would sing like a silver bell, inserting the baby’s name and turning it every which way, mimicking the shared deep sounds of Ficre’s childhood, the pentatonic scales of Solomon’s father’s language. And I sang the songs of my own childhood, and my mother’s, some of which were from Tidewater Indians, some from Alabama Africans. Keemo Kimo Dairy-o, me-I, me-yo. I later look up the song and find that Nat King Cole sang a version of it, and he called it “the magic song.” Did Nat King Cole remember it from his own forbearers? Or did my grandmother sing it to me because Nat King Cole recorded it in 1947? It is all romance; all that imprecise romance rains down on the head of the beloved baby.
Ficre held Solo up to the birds in the trees because he believed that Solo could understand them. “Listen, they are singing back to him! They understood him!” he whispered.
For nine years we lived at 45 Livingston Street in New Haven, Connecticut, the house where we made family. We had our children there and welcomed extended relatives there for holidays and long stays as they were scattered by war, politics, and health challenges. One Easter a play-uncle of mine from Baltimore joined the table. “Your life is just like a foreign film!” he said, all of us around the table, drinking red wine and eating and talking and laughing. Ficre home-roasted coffee; string-tied boxes of Italian pastry appeared and disappeared in puffs of powdered sugar. Having grown up with one sibling, the children of two only children, my brother and I were without blood uncles, aunts, or cousins. “Your father was meant to be an African elder with all these children around for him to preside over,” my mother said. “We just didn’t want to actually have all those children.” That I would be at the center of a big, extended African family seemed somehow karmic balance, the inevitable chapter in this story.
Eight
“The days are long but the years are short,” some say, about the early years of child rearing. I remember some days being almost gelid in their slowness when Solo was a baby. I had never experienced time so consciously. Collapsed on the bed with him in strong afternoon sunshine, holding him up to the light and watching the light inside of him, listening to his birdsong. Time moved as though through honey.
And then, so quickly, two babies, with the arrival of Simon Alexander Ghebreyesus just a year and five months after his brother. We decided together that Ficre would commute to New York in those days as there was a rare opportunity to start a second Caffé Adulis in New York with his younger brother. He said he’d give it one year. We were builders! We were ambitious! We could do anything! But oh—the babies would wake chirping to the garbage trucks at five those mornings when Ficre was away, and I would count the minutes until Lulu’s cafe opened and I could make my way over with my two plump boys and steady myself for the day with her strong coffee and a split and toasted sesame panini, in the society of other babies and toddlers and parents. The night before my first return to university life to deliver a lecture, the boys were up all night frolicking, would not sleep. Ficre was working in New York. I called him on the phone at two in the morning and he sang to them over the wires until we all three fell asleep in our bed.
He called me Lizzy.
Time began to move quickly when he was back full time in New Haven. His mother and his aunties made sure that I knew that I was lucky because when he was a child he always loved his home and never strayed. He is man who has drunk his water, his mother would say, which is the best kind of man to marry: one who is experienced in the world, but who is sated, who has had enough, who needs no more than his wife and children and work and home. When he was a teenager he ran away to join the war—he wanted to be a freedom fighter, like his brother Kebede and so many others—and his mother went and brought him back. But that was another story, and another time. When I knew him, he had drunk his water.
Nine