Blackness in America: Why the dinner table is the best place to have political discourse.
Dinner on Friday was long and sweet, with the intermittent odor of reality disturbing the shiny glassware. Around the round, white-clothed table, set in Birmingham, Ala., I sat with interesting friends. The six of us passed jokes around like the complimentary in-shell pistachios that we shuttled without a thought. The laughter from our rowdy table was a geometric triumph — a circle of dominoes starting from the progenitor of the anecdote then traveling clockwise to tickle everyone, one after the other and all the way back to the start.
We were in town for a food conference, laughing like it was all the vogue and eating deliciously at Highlands, an upscale restaurant on the south side of town. At the table were a food writer, an associate editor for a literary food publication and a magazine editor from San Francisco. Also, a cable news correspondent, along with a graduate professor of creative writing from Athens, Ga.
A pork chop, grilled with the bone in, was softly deposited in front of me, its glistening skin was grate-scarred as proof of excellent technique. Scott, my dapper editor friend, sat to the right of me in a white-collared shirt, covered smartly with a navy blue sports coat and further distinguished by a goldand-blue silk pocket square. His plate was medallioned with duck, tender and cascading. A week before Lent, he was as charismatic as Jesus on Palm Sunday, familiar and comfortable. The company was mature, cultured and raucous, and I was in the mood for a lively time.
The cocktail, performing in a rocks glass — the only way to imbibe a cocktail, in my opinion — did all it could to encourage. Everything I ate that evening came at the recommendation of Red Dog, the older and capable famous waiter of the Highlands, who had never been to the West Coast and was inconceivably the son of a 97-year-old mother. I watched as he emptied the table of wine glasses with the quietness of ballet feet, his Creole-colored hands transforming into a wine rack.
Then came a moment when I broke the ring of laughter. I didn’t realize it.
But Valerie, the university professor, brought it to the attention of the table.
She observed, and everyone concurred, that I had swallowed a bout of quiet.
Why? Was something wrong? I hadn’t an easy answer. All I had was a tragically rhombus-shaped thought too awkward to fit the soundly jovial table.
The awkward thought, which I didn’t say, was fear.
I was afraid of the future, of being deported, removed, from America because of my lapsed immigration status.
I was anxious, because having spent more of my conscious life in the United States than anywhere else, returning back to Nigeria ignominiously would be another, in a catalog of disappointments, for my parents.
And I felt rage, that I might not be allowed to finish my American story on my own terms. Those terms are etched in wild living, hard work and tears, which, as I grew, irrationally fell at the memories from my Nigerian childhood — like the time a few weeks ago in New Orleans, when I caught the familiar scent of the morning glories which grew in our backyard.
But dinner tables, especially ones with starched tablecloths, are rarely set to discuss the emotional landscape of vul- nerable migrants. So I retreated. I probably sold my dinner mates short. They probably would have engaged me in brisk conversation. They knew my work — I convene dinners across the country where race is discussed from the black perspective — and subsequently understood my contention that the dinner table should serve a higher purpose than escape. The dinner table is a space for provocation, the first step on the way to understanding difficult things.
Yet I wanted to escape, because I was tired.
Scott said something clever, a famous rib to get everyone laughing again, including me. My quiet was quickly forgotten, but my nose could still smell it, the permanent lingering odor of a threatened reality, tinged with my floral memories.
Since Trump, the last few months have been a series of panics. In the rush to explain an anemic national economy, difference has been scapegoated, and all that is complex, individual and myriad about people like me has been flattened into a singular objection: illegal.
Later that night, I snapped up from a slow-paced, non-adrenal nightmare.
My phone read 3:30 in the morning. I texted my little brother in Chicago.
“I LOVE YOU. HOW ARE YOU?”
Blinking against the glow of the screen, in the dark hotel room I waited, disoriented, for a response. He hadn’t replied by 3:33.
The air conditioner in the hotel room quietly reasserted itself, humming against my consciousness. The unknowable darkness was slowly dissolving in front of my eyes, and with it the evil I witnessed as I dreamed. Objects in the room slowly announced themselves, thanks to the thin horizon of light coming from the bottom of the hotel door.
Returning to normal, my heart wasn’t as loud in my ear. I could taste the dinner from the a few hours ago. I could taste metallic anxiety. I sat up and checked my phone again. 3:38. Still no reply from Chicago.
In my dream, two slight, indifferent men were holding my brother roughly. He looked sad and defeated. A resignation swallowed his face, the sort reserved for men on the precipice of a lynching. His captors spoke to me in a garbled language I didn’t understand. Every fear, urgency, rage, misery fell on me. I ran toward the panic, flying into a house to find the screams. They belonged to my brother. He was lying on the floor, obscured by his hovering captors. The first man stood over him. The second sat on haunches with a hacksaw shearing off my brother’s leg. Then I started screaming.
My brother responded to my text. It was 3:45. “Yo. What up?” “I’m good. I’m in Birmingham for a food conference. I had a nightmare about you.” “Dude. Stop tripping.” My younger brother, the love of my life, the once-small child with the soft cheeks and kissable chin, who would mix up his words, saying “am me a boy?” in earnest existentialism. My brother, now a man, balding, taller than me, handsome, a smoker despite our pleas. He is an earnest man, working to figure out life.
And like me, he has a vulis nerable immigration status.
We are neither one thing, nor entirely the sum of all the things that make us. Our identity is a Rolodex of the various skins we wear, each with its own glow and pimples. The privileged among us define ourselves and get to name our own skins, while many more of us possess skins that are stretched and pock-marked by other people’s labels. These imposed identities stick stronger than our hardwon ones — it’s the tragedy of nomenclature.
Like my brother, my imposed skin is undocumented, and since the somber second week in November when an unrepentantly xenophobic regime began its quick slither into the weak bowels of America, this skin has been pricked, poked, prodded, whipped by fear.
My other skin is cook. It’s a recent one, a toddler membrane I have worn for less than four years. I claimed it as mine through bluster, blisters and bullish will. This skin feels right when I hold a knife in my overbite grip, with fingers past the handle and pressed against the blade — it’s comfortable. Onions simmering in palm oil, trying to dodge the heat that is everywhere. Sizzling as all the teary moisture escapes it, the skin around my lips smile at this, my nose twitches in victory.
Layered over my chef sheath the writer skin. It might be talented, but it’s too self-involved and undisciplined to be sure. This writer skin keeps me in bed, in my head, through the morning and sometimes wakes me up in the middle of the night to write about panic. This skin procrastinates with poetry.
All these skins commingle interminably, continuously and eternally in my black skin, yet another skin I possess. Before I came to the United States, my black skin was always described as “the color of water.”
When I was 5, I once called the water white.
“Water isn’t white. Water has no color. Water is transparent,” my mother, my first instructor, corrected me.
“What is ‘transparent’?” I asked.
“Transparent is something that you can see through,” she said.
So my black skin was transparent, present but unnoticed. Then my transAtlantic migration forced a gradual opacity — and 17 years later, America has ignored my skins of cook and writer, and instead labeled me black and undocumented.
I woke up the next morning, my skin harrowed by the resurgent fear which had temporarily quieted me at dinner the night before, eating all my other skins away.
It was back to claim the cook, the writer and the black, leaving only the unprotected and undocumented. It was a bit before I could unscramble my brain, putting the pieces of me slowly back together into robust coherence.
Food, nourishing and celebratory, is one of many social spaces strafed with obscured and darkened nooks, and stuffed in these frightful shadows are violently exploited people. Food is the micro-concern, and what is true about food is even truer for the macrocosm of the American political body.
It is our duty as residents to brighten all the shaded and lonely spots; I chose the dinner table.
America only understands immigrants as “problems” or “products” — never as people. We are either poor and helpless or instruments of capital generation. And what happens when we have worn out our economic welcome, or when the American capacity for generosity is tested by terrorism and war? We become obsolete to the story America tells itself and like all useless things in a consumerist economy, we are disposed.
But I am not the emotionally convenient narrative that justifies consumption. I refuse to ask for consideration; I demand it.
This isn’t about me, or the millions others like me. This is about America. This country must save its (proclaimed) skins of freedom, equal protection under the law and happiness and its pursuit. Let us not conflate sharp criticism for a lack of love. Instead, be braver. Let us hold the contradictions, what is both objectionable and wonderful about America, and resolve them gracefully. There is time yet. Not time to eat and drink and be merry. But rather, time to eat and drink — and talk.
“The dinner table is a space for provocation, the first step on the way to understanding difficult things.” — Tunde Wey “America has ignored my skins of cook and writer, and instead labeled me black and undocumented.” — Tunde Wey