The Candor of Strangers
2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.2017.0005
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Indigenous and Place-Based Education
ResumoThe Candor of Strangers Jackson F. Brown (bio) Jonah barely lifts his voice to utter, “No,” his eyes to register my features, when I inquire, struggling to match his scissor-leg strides, if we’re acquainted—run-of-the-mill game to trade words &, fingers crossed, pocket change, perhaps first names for future Mission Street run-ins. He bites, so I play out some line, let this fish wear itself out. “Diaspora face,” he claims, crossing the Tragic Wand threshold where, inside, teens flip stools onto countertops, swab terracotta tiles—the Mr. Potato Head of African facial features; black folk swear they’ve met him in every city on every continent in whose streets he’s yet lost himself: Dove-breast-shaped cheekbones fringed with working man’s half-beard, mouth an upside-down cookie—bottom lip browned; oven-burnt underside on top. Svelte violin nose both beaked and broad, eyes cobalt pools of volcanic ash. He fills a stained Senegalese travel mug with 3-hours-old Peruvian joe & 2 fingers of scotch, sets the palliative on a goatskin drum—dust-scrimmed, carved with Adinkra—behind his office desk, then stacks photos in balsa frames, one after another, on my unlaundered jeans. My knees quake beneath, late for their nightly liquor run, making the cheap wood clap like shutters in hurricane winds. He wants honesty rendered impartially from a stranger, someone without incentive to lie. He grins hopefully, jiggles the coffee cocktail just out of my reach. Truth is he reminds me of my first pal in 4th grade homeroom: Jonah, teaching rhythms of desktop knuckle wraps, the treble and bass cadences of fists on slick particleboard, to new kids like me. High school I sprinted, Jonah ran distance, for track, but we both kicked rhymes on bus rides back from meets, beating 4/4 time on ridged aluminum plates bolted below cold windows with unfamiliar lights of neighborhoods sliding past. Summer after graduation felt like purgatory, mowing cemetery grass part-time in 90-degree heat, naming headstones for old classmates who’d, like Jonah, moved on. “Look closely,” the man instructs. “Do you see,” he asks then backs up, runs at the question again: “Do you see me?” I search for diaspora in the faces of children pictured, the man’s two fair-skinned daughters—rainwater irises, curly tresses color of buckwheat, cattails. Mother marblesque, freckled. I want to assure him that Africa can’t be diluted—one drop guarantees legacy—that blackness stirs in bloodlines though not evident in faces, that slabs memorialize us all in due time. That the beat he—or, rather, Jonah—passed on to me passes through veins of atavistic memory, wherein he knows me & knows Jonah, as do his daughters, despite their faces—distant as they are from his phenotype. I scan their periphery: “High foreheads, both of them, like you. Left one’s got your half-lidded eyes; one on the right, with flared nostrils, your earlobes.” He nods: “What else?” I scent the scotch & the shakes start again in earnest, cheap wood frames clattering [End Page 755] on my knees, streak of craving threading an icy path down my legs, from pelvis to spine to skull & I break—photos shoved to the floor, sneakers cracking Plexiglass as I extend for the drum, the Senegalese travel mug, but it’s no use. Jonah hustles me to the darkened street easily, chilly compared to the shop’s warmth. He turns the door sign to CLOSED, locking up once the teens have exited, & doesn’t appear to see me seated across the quiet highway, smoking a Newport, staring back, during his long gaze into the night. [End Page 756] Jackson F. Brown JACKSON F. BROWN is Administrative Manager for the Department of Black Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and a contributing and advisory editor of Callaloo, for which he formerly served as Managing Editor and taught in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in Barbados. He received the MFA in creative writing from Indiana University. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press
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