The first time I made this dish for Ficre he looked with suspicion at the roe. He knew it wasn’t one of the bottom-feeding shellfish his religion forbade eating in his childhood, along with pork, but I’d gotten him over that and onto Team Bacon. His curiosity always won over habit, and he was fascinated by watching the glossy meat turn brown, and the feel of the egg sacs popping in his mouth. It reminded me of the liver I never liked before he made it for me during my fist pregnancy when I craved meat, blood and its necessary iron. He made it with garlic and berbere and olive oil, cooked it in strips that turned crisp, and tossed with lots of parsley.
“It’s not easy to die, sweetie,” Ficre used to say to me, when I’d have night terrors and wake in a panic. “I’ve seen people survive, and I know.” I’d always had bad dreams and his words and presence were all that ever calmed me down, It’s not easy to die; life force is actually mighty, and I have life force. It is not indelible, but it can behave like it is. We all die, but we don’t die easily.
Though it seemed he slipped away, it could not have been easy. The heart inside of him beat all the beats it was allocated, but in his fifty years, the man lived. Not nearly enough, but not insufficiently. He found his life’s work thrice: as an activist; as a chef; and as a painter. He understood himself as something larger than himself: His mighty, extended family of origin; his beloved native land and its people. He found love and became part of a new extended family, and a new people. He had children and made family, most important of all to him.
A statue of Frederick Douglass stands at the quiet Seventy-seventh Street entrance of the New York Historical Society, tall and mighty. He is someone who journeyed to freedom, I think, and I was married to someone who walked to freedom. The culmination of the freedom was love and family. That’s all he did, that’s what he did.
I hear my voice to my children, your father walked to freedom.
At my father’s eightieth birthday I tell the room that when Ficre and I met, he told me he was not interested in anyone who did not love and honor her parents. He found too much of that in America.
In New York I feel joy overwhelming, and this same gratitude, for Ficre brought me here, I am sure of it, as sure as if he whispered in my ear, “Go, Lizzy. You are so much braver than you realize. Take the children and go.”
What are the odds, we used to say, what are the odds, that we would end up in the same place and fall in love? Once upon a time, halfway around the world, two women were pregnant at the same time in very different places, and their children grew up and found each other. It happens every day.
Nine
The last music he listened to at home was Yusef Lateef’s “The Plum Blossom.” It filled our home beginning the Sunday morning after his birthday. Even after he died, there were birthday present ribbons left in the living room. The music was a gift from Marcus, and Ficre played it over and over that sweet Sunday. The sound was delicate and essential, a single pipe note, a blue note, something impending and then sudden, like spring rain. It took its time. And then in came the piano, ever so slightly percussive. The sounds layered and built into a quietly mighty sound. Lateef played varied instruments from different global music traditions, strands of a unified sound. You hear him actually breathe into the bamboo flute and hear his palm on the drum. The music repeated is the warm and human breath in our house that Sunday.
For many years Ficre tended a Natal plum bonsai. We bought it in a shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the way home from a happy trip to Maine. It was a South African variety, which amused us when we happened upon it in New Hampshire. Africa is everywhere, baby, he said, with a smile. It was spiky and flowerless. For two years Ficre nipped and shaped it, watered it, talked to it to coax it into health and bloom. He insisted it live on the kitchen table, in the center of our lives.
One morning we came downstairs and the whole first floor was suffused with a rare and lovely smell. The bonsai had burst its first small, waxy pink blossom. It scented our home and bloomed for several weeks. Orchids would die and I’d throw them away, but he’d set them in the basement to patiently wait for a blossom. “Africans are patient, Lizzy,” he’d say, with a chuckle, but he meant it.
Ficre’s books: Chinese philosophy, organic gardening, Roman antiquity, Paul Cézanne, Hadrian’s Wall, African alphabets. When I was with him, I felt that there was suddenly enough time: to talk, to read, to think, to sleep, to make love, to drink coffee or tea, to practice yoga, to walk. I think that everyone felt that there was all the time in the world when they were with him.
We shared days I can only call divine. I don’t want to fix that last Sunday as the most significant Sunday, though one cannot help but do so. I think of my friend Melvin Dixon—also gone too soon, from AIDS, at forty-two—and his poem “Fingering the Jagged Grains,” a call and response that I took into my body. “What did I do?” I called to my village. The answer came, “You lived, you lived, and the jagged grains, so black and blue, opened like lips about to sing.”
Ten
New York friends who loved Ficre come over to welcome us to our new home. We eat and laugh and drink and play music. Afterwards I am so tired that I sleep unguardedly.