Terroir Read online

  The Late Show

  I saw Auntie only on some weekends, or for a week or two in the summer. She went to bed before me, and I slept on the sofa bed in the living room. I watched the 11:30 p.m. movie, Desiree or Forever Amber, the film version of a book I read on my mother’s recommendation (she no longer remembered the titillating plot, the rise of a sexual adventuress and mistress to Charles II).

  The strongly scented blue-green powder of Spic and Span dissolved into warm water and burned my hands as I washed Auntie’s floors. I then polished them with Johnson’s wax, rubbing in brown goo and taking pleasure in the shiny result. And I cooked for Auntie, baked chicken and rice, and chocolate chip cookies. At seventeen, it wasn’t fun to spend time with an increasingly feeble old woman, but I felt the obligation and my mother reminded me of it. I let Auntie win at checkers.

  Where Are You From?

  A few days before I turned eighteen, and the same night that I graduated from high school, Auntie died, although I didn’t find out until a few days later. She left me her almost-new mattress and box spring, three hundred dollars cash, her mahogany secretary (care of my mother), and a gold and diamond pin. Auntie had worked as a bookkeeper at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. After twenty-five years, she got a gold pin, the company name stamped on a gold ribbon swirling over the top like a war medal; every ten years, she got another gold bar connected with gold chain; at fifty years, a half-carat diamond. After college, I had a jeweler work the gold into a ring with the stone and gave it to my mother. I was too young for a diamond, I knew from reading etiquette books.

  Auntie also left me a large, ornately framed photo of her at age eighteen. The black-and-white photo with pastel highlights hangs in my study. Her long, thick hair is pulled into a bun at the back of her neck. Her skin is heavily powdered. She is no beauty, but there’s tenderness in her eyes. She wears a bare-shouldered, silk chiffon dress and offers the camera a demure and sidelong glance: before she married, long before she met me, a young woman on the verge of life.

  When people ask where I’m from, I could say “Auntie.” I could show them the ring that my mother wore. I could say I am from Auntie as if she were a tree and I a bird nesting on strong branches. In those green leaves, I found safety, acceptance, and love. I learned to fly from a nest so high up no one noticed it.

  X, Y, and Z

  Helen Severs, née Vollmer, April 8, 1895

  m. John A. Severs 1918

  d. June 1, 1973

  Eros and Philia

  Eros

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked from behind the prep counter, holding up a ripe orange mango blushed with red. His accent mixed Jamaican and Cockney, a glottal stop at the end of “what,” the th in “this” almost a d. We were separated by stainless steel in the steamy hotel kitchen where servers were yelling for orders, cooks were yelling “PICK UP.”

  I’d spent two years in Europe after college, including one in Paris, where mangos were plentiful. “Of course,” I said, stopping to face him. I wore a brown seersucker blouse with a name tag. He cut a slice of the peeled mango and extended it on his palm. I took it, not just because refusing would be rude, but because my eyes drank in the triangle of satiny, espresso-colored neck exposed by the folded-back corner of his white chef’s uniform. His fine features, lips no fuller than mine, revealed Scottish and Arawak Indian heritage.

  “I’m Tyrone,” he said. “People call me Terry, too.”

  Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my father called black people “duzzum” or “jungle bunnies” or, sometimes, “niggers.” Did he pick up these terms from the US Army in Germany? On the street in New York? From coworkers? Was he trying to fit in? In my algebra class on April 5, 1968, I remarked that King was “another hoodlum.” Why did I parrot my father? My teacher said, firmly, “Dr. Martin Luther King was not a hoodlum, and we should all be sorry he was murdered.” I felt ashamed and resolved to pay more attention to who was who. Not long after, I read The Feminine Mystique and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. When my father used racial slurs, I asked, “Why do you talk that way?” His racism and his view on the Vietnam War (we needed to vanquish communism) shaped me, in opposition. As did my mother’s fear of losing my father’s love if she took sides. I never wanted to be that weak.

  There was one mixed-race student in my high school, no other black kids. While the towns surrounding mine were also white, New York City had lots of people who were not white, and I often took the train to go to museums or just walk around. Skin color presented an otherness more dramatic than my own, a visible and permanent otherness. Although I wouldn’t have been able then to articulate why I felt more comfortable—even safer—around people of color, I think now that there was an equity principle involved. Because I’m female, I know I’m casually considered inferior. I thought black people might know what that was like and wouldn’t bully me as my father did. If my father found out that I’d driven the car outside the parameters he’d drawn, he called me “dreck,” dirt. At a Thanksgiving meal many years later, a friend noted, “Your father talks only to the men at the table.” Repelled by misogyny as deep as his Slavic accent, I became a feminist. And although I was equally repelled by racism, I did not see my own. White dominance was a uniform I wore, one that was rarely questioned.

  During freshman orientation at the University of Virginia, I met a lanky, black student from Richmond. Sitting on the grass between our dorms, we recommended books to each other, Hugh Prather’s Notes to Myself and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Later that fall, on our way to hear Eudora Welty read at Randolph Macon College, we stopped for fast food. The woman behind the counter had such a thick southern accent that I turned to my friend for translation. A metaphor, perhaps, for my seeking relationships that could expand the ways I understood the world. I eventually lost my virginity with him, relevant because in my mostly chaste life, Tyrone was the second black man I slept with. Did I fetishize the black body? Yes, I did, I realize as I recall a poem from that time, “Jamaican Rum,” an ode to the intoxicating quality of our physical differences. And yet, my attraction was, and still is, to the way people live through their bodies. Tyrone had an easy self-confidence, one that stopped far short of arrogance. His supervisor was a white woman in her twenties with a degree from the Culinary Institute of America. Tyrone winced when she referred to him as “my help” but bowed his head and continued carving a honeydew melon into a swan.

  The hotel where we met was in Washington, DC, and when Tyrone drove to New York to see his uncle, he offered me a ride so I could see my parents in New Jersey. In the car, he asked, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would that be?” I asked questions, too. I had him drop me off on Route 17, partly to save him from going out of his way, but also to avoid allowing my parents to see him. When we shook hands after that four-hour car trip, I wanted to sleep with him. I imagined kissing his strong hands, his smooth face. I liked men without body hair—another equalizing attribute perhaps, or a sign of humanness or even femininity. I had been attracted to women as well as men since puberty, but I hadn’t had a sexual relationship with a woman. I think we choose whom to fall in love with, and when. Tyrone’s boss at the Hilton kitchen invited me to her birthday party, but I declined, even though I was attracted to her. Maybe a biological impulse also moved me toward a relationship with Tyrone.

  At first I told friends that my relationship with Tyrone was about the good sex. What made it good was my ability to let go, to not worry about how I looked or what I said, because I trusted him. He held his knowledge about the world with restraint and patience. I loved that restraint in tandem with his physical strength—he could lift anything, even me. My best friend laughed, “Tyrone looks like he could break a man in two.” And I smiled, thinking of myself splayed on the bed, and him running a finger down my naked back.

  Entering a swimming pool, a middle-aged white man held the door for me and said, “So, are you going to take my lane?” It was supposed to be a joke. Tyrone wo
uld hold the door open, “After you, Madame,” and he would be happy to share a lane. My friends noted his charm, saying, “He doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder like American black men.” I repeated this myself until I realized how wrong it was. Putting nationality ahead of skin color was a way to not confront my own internalized racism. The questioning of Kamala Harris’s identity after the 2019 Democratic debates is another example. As the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, she was accused by alt-right commentator Ali Alexander of not being a black American, despite being born and having grown up in the United States. In other words, parsing the fine points of any person of color’s identity is a maneuver that lets racism win. White Americans don’t react the same way to black people who are not Americans; their guilt is distanced and abated, they aren’t made to admit their dominance.

  Tyrone carried his legacy of slavery from growing up in Jamaica and the UK, from traveling the world, from living in the United States, and even from his own family. His mother often praised his younger brother’s beautiful light skin. She expressed that bias, and I expressed mine by emphasizing Tyrone’s foreignness. His accent marked him as an immigrant, and it sometimes gave him a pass in American culture, in the way that Angela Davis was treated with respect when she spoke French in a shoe store in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. By focusing on nationality instead of race or power, Americans seek opportunities to ignore inequity.

  I have an indefinite answer to the question, “Where are you from?” So did Tyrone, who came to London from Jamaica to join his parents when he was fifteen, after spending his early teens with an aunt, uncle, and cousins in rural St. Mary Parish. At sixteen, he’d finished mandatory schooling. With his talent for imagining and then building structures, he could have been an architect or a sculptor, but he was also dyslexic, and a working-class, black immigrant. That meant a job. He wanted to see the world, and the only opening in the British Merchant Navy was for a galley boy. Eventually, the navy sent him to cooking school, twice, and he climbed the ranks to executive chef, usually the only black man on a ship. On these ships he learned that white men liked to call him “Terry,” an English nickname. In South African and Australian ports, police assumed he was indigenous and repeatedly roughed him up, even jailing him until his white shipmates retrieved him. With the navy, he’d spent time in Houston, Los Angeles, and New York, so he was under no illusions about the United States, but since the advent of container shipping, the interesting weeks in exotic ports turned into stopovers of a mere twenty-four hours. Because of cousins in DC, Tyrone eventually landed there and, undocumented, started over again as a line cook.

  Tyrone was thirty-six, I was twenty-three when we met. The same number of years’ difference between my parents’ ages. But not the same dynamic, not at all. Our relationship balanced the power between us, a seesaw that didn’t often thump to the ground, leaving one of us stuck. If he was wiser and more mature, he was also more passive. I was willful and dominant. Tyrone was hurt by my bluntness, as when I’d state, “That shirt doesn’t look good on you.” I prized directness as truth-telling, and it drove me crazy that he wouldn’t say what he thought. He avoided confrontation, for instance by not calling me to tell me he couldn’t make it from DC to my student apartment in Baltimore, where I was earning a one-year master’s degree. After waiting for an hour or more, I would fume, then worry, and then fume again. We treated each other the way we ourselves liked to be treated. He was okay with plans hovering indefinitely in the future. I liked to know, even bad news. Yet despite this friction, we stayed together. Cupid is sometimes depicted as a blindfolded child. My inner child saw what I needed: to love and to be loved unconditionally, madly. The kind of love that makes a bonfire of the debris of the past, with its rejections and disappointments.

  A year and a half after that first drive, Tyrone and I rented a four-room row house in southeast DC. I was the only white person on the block. On Sunday mornings, the retired couple across the narrow street put speakers in their upstairs windows and broadcast gospel radio directly into our house. I closed the windows and wore earplugs. My suburban aunt visited once, in the daytime, noting the plastic chrysanthemums in neighbors’ window boxes as if she were doing an anthropological study of class. “My surgeon was black,” she said. Then she paused. “But a cook?”

  My parents never visited. They had retired to a Blue Ridge mountaintop in Virginia where their neighbors proclaimed, “We love it here ’cause there ain’t no chiggers and there ain’t no niggers.” Monthly phone calls began pleasantly. My mother then handed the phone to my father, and the call ended with one of us angrily slamming down the handset. “Go ahead,” I said, when he told me he was leaving his money to the Baptist home down the road. My parents didn’t care about religion, so the detail was almost funny. Yet disapproval smoldered through the phone wires like burnt garlic. It was obvious to Tyrone that my father disapproved of our relationship, but Tyrone also knew how to wait, another quality that attracted me to him, along with his willingness to change his mind. “I don’t really like cats,” he said, but a week after I insisted that we adopt one, he was walking around the house with the kitten draped happily around his neck like gray cashmere.

  Tyrone held within himself a reserve that no one could touch, not even me. If I developed in antagonism to my father, he developed in antagonism to his mother. After he talked to her in Jamaica, he closed the door in a foul mood, perhaps because of his guilt. She and Tyrone’s father were raising his son, Adrian, abandoned by the mother while Tyrone was at sea. Although he supported his son financially, Tyrone knew him only from occasional visits. Tyrone didn’t talk about his responsibilities as a father with me. His parents were also raising three of his much younger brothers, born after his parents returned to Jamaica from London. His mother—never without a job or a business or both—hustled on their behalf, arranging DC schools and work for them. She asked Tyrone to buy them air tickets, but after he did, his siblings returned to Kingston within a month. Tyrone shook his head over his brothers’ lack of grit. He preferred to love his mother from a distance of fifteen hundred miles in the way a tree might love a hurricane. And she loved him the way the hurricane loves its eye, the still center.

  The row house we rented was owned by a legal secretary who speculated in real estate, hoping to fund her retirement. A white woman in her forties, our landlady bought and was renovating another house on Capitol Hill. We paid $380 monthly rent. Built in 1913, the house had been cheaply updated. All the windows, even the bathroom skylight, had bars—which Tyrone asked the landlady to remove. He told me he felt like a caged animal. She said, “Why don’t you wait a few weeks and then let me know?” Upstairs, the pistachio and brown shag carpeting was three inches high. Downstairs, ebony-stained wood floors, exposed brick walls, and the original working fireplace gave the space charm. We placed Tyrone’s Argentine sword on the mantel and under it his carved wooden statue from Thailand, African drum, and collection of jazz LPs. I had the notion that if a single white woman could live on D Street, so could we.

  In high school and college, I was taught to treat the history of US slavery and racism as a parallel track for a train I did not need to board. I watched it with the disorienting feeling that I was moving, but when it passed, I was standing still. Forty years ago, I thought that the color of Tyrone’s skin made him likely to be accepted on D Street and that my choosing him was a “get onto D Street free” card. I’m chagrined to admit that I thought I had proven my lack of racism merely by living with Tyrone. I was vaguely aware that some black men internalized their racist preference for white standards of beauty and chose white women as trophies, but our relationship still felt like a victory over racism. It was a victory with a hollow center because—and I didn’t know this then—no matter what I did or said, I profited from the racial power inequity in our culture. I didn’t know enough about history to understand why our neighbor might be raising her grandchild, like Tyrone’s mother. And I didn’t think abo
ut what it meant to be part of a community—not just tolerated but trusted, the person you might ask to feed your cat. I didn’t try to be that person on D Street. Not because I hadn’t watched my parents make friends with every one of their neighbors, but because I didn’t even think to try.

  As DC was built up beyond its old core in the early twentieth century, developers’ deeds included restrictions on selling to Jews and black people. When these restrictions were challenged in court, many white people moved to the suburbs, a flight accelerated by riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Civil Rights Act (which included the Fair Housing Act), passed days after Dr. King’s death, was supposed to end segregation. Although it did not, and while income disparity in DC is the highest in the country, the city continued to attract African Americans to jobs in government, resulting in many middle- and upper-class African American homeowners.

  The new Capitol Hill Safeway stocked pig hocks and collard greens as well as Häagen-Dazs ice cream and fresh baguettes. A couple—he black Senegalese and she French and white—opened a French bakery nearby. When I decreed an Irish pub “all right,” Tyrone said, “You mean it’s all white.” We played darts there, and we also tried neighborhood bars with only black patrons, but although we were welcomed in both, neither space felt quite right.

  “Gentrification” suggests that newcomers push out oldtimers, but when property taxes remain affordable, existing owners are not forced to move. Low property taxes underfund public schools, however, so newcomers send their children to private schools, another kind of segregation. Moreover, gentrification destroys existing community bonds, and it can increase crime because people coming and going are not recognized, and because newcomers make wealthier targets for property theft. Still, the only crime I was a victim of was when a ten-year-old boy reached into my pocket while I was standing in line to buy a sandwich. I grabbed his wrist with my five-dollar bill still in it.