Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 54

If You Want to Be Married Young, You Should Marry While Young

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte and Julia Shaw are debating the virtues of marrying young. I found myself agreeing with a lot of what Shaw said, but this brought me up short:

Sometimes people delay marriage because they are searching for the perfect soul mate. But that view has it backward. Your spouse becomes your soul mate after you've made those vows to each other in front of God and the people who matter to you. You don't marry someone because he's your soul mate; he becomes your soul mate because you married him.

As long-time readers of this of this blog know, I have a somewhat contentious relationship with the idea of marriage. I've been with my wife for fifteen years. We got married two years ago, mostly because I was afraid of exactly what happened to me two weeks ago taking place, and their being some confusion about who was charged with my affairs. If we were religious, we probably would have married right away.

At any rate, I entered the long-term, monogamous portion of my relationship when I was 23. My son was born when I was 24 and my partner (now wife) was 23. The seal was our son. We were pretty clear that our 20s -- as they exist in the popular American mind -- were over when he was born. Whatever. We weren't doing shit but drinking and smoking anyway. Besides I thought she was sort of cool. And she thought I was sort of cool. And we both thought cool people might make a cool kid together. 

And knowing that you don't meet cool people every day, and knowing, too, that coolness is force in the universe which cool kids don't always understand, and that four cool hands are cooler than two, we thought it imperative that we play some Al Green, and, like, stay together, and, like, make sure that cool kid become a cool dude.

Here is where I relate to Shaw -- the act of making the boy was the act of making me a man. Before creating family, I was prepared to subject myself to any number of stupid things. Knowing that other people suffer when you suffer has a way of leading you from childish things. (If you are cool.) 

And that's been good. But it's been good with a lot bumps in the road -- some of them existential. I don't know how it is for other people, but my sense is that any long-term relationship, any long happy marriage, has had points when its primary advocates could see the end. And not a theoretical end, an actual end; a path untaken, but very much possible.

Where I differ with Shaw isn't in the advantages she sees in marrying young, but in the certainty and determinism. The notion that the declaration of marriage can make a human, with all their hard flaws, into something as abstract and moist as a "soul-mate" strikes me as off. Even if it's on for you, to declare it as such for the world strikes me as surely off. 

To decide to romantically cohabitate with another person for the rest of your life, to make a family with that person, is to go to war. To borrow the language of my mother -- you had best love their dirty drawers, because you will be seeing them. And it strikes me that you should understand that cool people fail at being cool together all the time. Sometimes they fail for lack of morality, but very often not. 

That women -- with all they have to lose in this world, having to struggle to secure the kind of things that the other half of the world takes for granted (the body, for instance) -- would be particularly discerning about such a decision, that they would wait until accumulating some amount of power, financial and otherwise, seems logical. The dynamics of power -- societal and personal -- are inseparable from marriage. Those of us who've, thus far, managed to navigate those dynamics should probably be more thankful than boastful. May our days ever be thus.

Letters to a French Autodidact

My study in Switzerland was pretty intense. Class began at about 8:30 every morning and went until 1. There was une brève pause from 10 to 10:30. I was still working on east coast time, so my studies began at about 3 in the morning and finished around 7. Much to my tutor's amusement, I spent the first half of class just trying to get my head in the game. I would have an exercise, know the answer, and take two minutes to actually bring out. In the afternoons there was often some sort extracurricular activity. I went out to a vineyard on Wednesday in the small town of Aigle. Best wine in the world.

What I picked up from my study is what I already knew--acquiring a new language is hard, and people who claim that you can do so inside of a year without changing anything else about your life probably have their hand in your pocket. It isn't to say that no one can do it. But if you're going to learn a new language you should expect a fight and gird yourself accordingly. You should even expect it to be hard if it's your child.

My tutor here in the States learned French when she was six at an immersion school. Her recollections of picking up French are bracing: long periods of not knowing and knowing you don't know; French teachers yelling at you for doing something wrong, and you not being sure what it was. My son has just started his French studies (his request, not mine) and they're going to intensify over the summer, so I expect him to get a little bit of the same. It's obviously true that it's easier to acquire language when you're younger. But this has no meaning to the individual experiencing it--your only frame of reference is your own skin.

Accordingly, I had a French session yesterday and picked up the intensity. Two hours, instead of the usual hour. All of it in French. If I didn't understand something my tutor was trying to explain, oh well. C'est Français. By the end, my brain was cake batter. Language really is different that other intellectual pursuits in its physicality. Learning to properly pronounce "Vevey" isn't a matter of abstract theory--it's a matter of training your mouth and tongue, in the same way a ballerina or singer trains, in the same way one would master a jump shot. There's just no way to make that go quicker. Hours must be put in. Reps must be performed. There's no other way.

In many ways I compare it to my journey of becoming a healthy person. The same get-rich-quick claims revolve around language-learning, as around weight loss. But I found that becoming a healthier person meant acting, thinking and making the kind of decisions that a healthier person would. It was not enough to say that I wanted to lose 20 pounds, any more than it would be enough to say I want to speak French. In both cases, I have had to learn to think like the man I wanted to be. Your old self can't come with you. In both cases I found that I what I doing was more important than what I consider myself to be. Words like "intelligence" and "discipline" held no power for me. Words like "practice" and "planning" did.

I don't say this to ward anyone away from a foreign language, or from French specifically. On the contrary, there's a beautiful democracy to it all. I am not convinced that anyone can be a Baudelaire. But I am convinced that anyone can understand, and make themselves understood. It's just that the work is unrelenting. It's a law of nature. There's no way around it.

Letters To A French Autodidact

My study in Switzerland was pretty intense. Class began at about 8:30 every morning and went until 1. There was une brève pause from 10 to 10:30. I was still working on east coast time, so my studies began at about 3 in the morning and finished around 7. Much to my tutor's amusement, I spent the first half of class just trying to get my head in the game. I would have an exercise, know the answer, and take two minutes to actually bring out. In the afternoons there was often some sort extracurricular activity. I went out to a vineyard on Wednesday in the small town of Aigle. Best wine in the world.

What I picked up from my study is what I already knew--acquiring a new language is hard, and people who claim that you can do so inside of a year without changing anything else about your life probably have their hand in your pocket. It isn't to say that no one can do it. But if you're going to learn a new language you should expect a fight and gird yourself accordingly. You should even expect it to be hard if it's your child.

My tutor here in the States learned French when she was six at an immersion school. Her recollections of picking up French are bracing: long periods of not knowing and knowing you don't know; French teachers yelling at you for doing something wrong, and you not being sure what it was. My son has just started his French studies (his request, not mine) and they're going to intensify over the summer, so I expect him to get a little bit of the same. It's obviously true that it's easier to acquire language when you're younger. But this has no meaning to the individual experiencing it--your only frame of reference is your own skin.

Accordingly, I had a French session yesterday and picked up the intensity. Two hours, instead of the usual hour. All of it in French. If I didn't understand something my tutor was trying to explain, oh well. C'est Français. By the end, my brain was cake batter. Language really is different that other intellectual pursuits in its physicality. Learning to properly pronounce "Vevey" isn't a matter of abstract theory--it's a matter of training your mouth and tongue, in the same way a ballerina or singer trains, in the same way one would master a jump shot. There's just no way to make that go quicker. Hours must be put in. Reps must be performed. There's no other way.

In many ways I compare it to my journey of becoming a healthy person. The same get-rich-quick claims revolve around language-learning, as around weight loss. But I found that becoming a healthier person meant acting, thinking and making the kind of decisions that a healthier person would. It was not enough to say that I wanted to lose 20 pounds, any more than it would be enough to say I want to speak French. In both cases, I have had to learn to think like the man I wanted to be. Your old self can't come with you. In both cases I found that I what I doing was more important than what I consider myself to be. Words like "intelligence" and "discipline" held no power for me. Words like "practice" and "planning" did.

I don't say this to ward anyone away from a foreign language, or from French specifically. On the contrary, there's a beautiful democracy to it all. I am not convinced that anyone can be a Baudelaire. But I am convinced that anyone can understand, and make themselves understood. It's just that the work is unrelenting. It's a law of nature. There's no way around it.

What Is the Purpose of Foreign-Language Education?

I am almost two years into my study of French. I write okay. I read pretty poorly. I speak pretty poorly. And my ear is woeful. I'm somewhere in the A2 range, which is probably a good reflection of the actual directed hours I've put in. What I got clear on this week was the sheer amount of hours it takes to feel comfortable in a language. I thought that a kid who took, say, four years of high school French would be conversational in Paris. I'd expect her to be able to write a decent letter, order at a restaurant and generally get around. But now I'm not so sure about the conversational aspect. Many of my co-students were, themselves, high school students who'd taken French for years. They were right in A2 with me. (They were German, not American.)

I'm interested in what the general expectation and reasons we have for putting our kids in foreign language are.

Something else: What if we treated foreign language in America the way we treat sports. It is not unusual to see kids in high school spending two hours after school, every day, in football or basketball practice. In some private schools, sports are required. If I spoke French well and could get that type of time with a group of kids in Baltimore, threw on some competitions for elocution or writing, and topped it off with a trip to France every year, I could make some soldiers.

Maybe this is the zeal of the recent convert and someone's already doing this. At any rate, I would love to hear thoughts from those out in the field. How good do foreign language teachers tend to be in their particular language? Does it matter? Are we using foreign language as kind of weed-out for college? What is the ultimate goal?

What Is The Purpose Of Foreign Language Education?

I am almost two years into my study of French. I write OK. I read pretty poorly. I speak pretty poorly. And my ear is woeful. I'm somewhere in the A2 range  which is probably a good reflection of the actual directed hours I've put in. What I got clear on this week was the sheer amount of hours it takes to feel comfortable in a language. I thought that a kid who took, say, four years of high school French would be conversational in Paris. I'd expect her to be able to write a decent letter, order at a restaurant and generally get around. But now I'm not so sure about the conversational aspect. Many of my co-students were, themselves, high school students who'd taken French for years. They were right in A2 with me. (They were German, not American.)
I'm interested in what the general expectation and reasons we have for putting our kids in foreign language. 
Something else: What if we treated foreign language in America the way we treat sports. It is not unusual to see kids in high school spending two hours after school, every day, for football or basketball practice. In some private schools sports are required. If spoke French well, and coud get that type of time with a group of kids in Baltimore, through on some competitions for elocution or writing, and top it off with a trip to France every year, I could make some soldiers. 
Maybe this is the zeal of the recent convert and someone's already doing this. At any rate, I would love to hear thoughts from those out in the field. How good do foreign language teachers tend to be in their particular language? Does it matter? Are we using foreign language as kind of weed-out for college? What is the ultimate goal? 

Departures, Cont.

V. Fin

I think I've given all I should about Europe for now. Maybe not. I'm not sure. You can read each of the entries here, here, here and here. I'm not so much out of thoughts, as I want to hold some of this (Hi Corby) for the later. I haven't said much about the Swiss portion of my trip and I think there might be some juice there.

A few final notes:

1.) I want to thank Judah Grunstein a true gentleman who helped me see a lot of Paris which I would have missed. I also want to thank Jeffrey Burr who came out and met me in le Jardin du Luxembourg when I was feeling really lonely.

2.) I want to thank everyone who came in and commented on this journey. I learned almost from you guys as I did from the trip. I also want to thank you for enduring what is effectively a rough draft of personal history, with all the flaws, hiccups, mistakes and lack of reflection inherent to such a thing.

3.) All during this trip I've been reading Antony Beevor's tremendous history of World War II, The Second World War. A few weeks ago I noted that white racism is not particularly original in its scope, lethality, nor its cruelty. Nothing shows this off like the World War II where terrorism is just what states do. People are killed by the thousands seemingly for sport. There is a portion of the rape of Nanking (it's called the rape of Nanking, son) where the Japanese generals decide to practice their swordsmanship. To do so they line up a group of Chinese senior officers, and make them kneel. They then behead them one by one.

The point here is that white racism isn't a big deal. On the contrary it is a big deal, because it belongs to us. You don't get to ignore your high blood pressure, because your neighbor has lung cancer. And it may be true that slaughtering a city is more carnage than slaughtering a village, but if you are a survivor of that village it is an Apocalypse all the same. More, white racism's power is not limited to America even if the pain of racism feels different in Paris than it does in New York. It also feels different in Atlanta.

3A.) Here is something else--there are other ways of looking at the world besides "Is mine bigger than yours?" Among them, noting that there is nothing intractable, incurable or petrifying about racism. White racism is a particular problem of power. The world is filled with other such problems, the effects of which have been all around me the past week.

3AI.)I leave confirmed in the belief that if you are reading a history of feminism in America to see if white women or black men have had it harder, you have already failed on several important levels. One of our failings on the left is our tendency to default to the most base usage of categories, assume that they are always the best way to see an individual, and then make broad assumptions of power. "I don't know anything about this because I'm white" is neither endearing nor self-. It's a cop-out. ("I don't know anything about this because I haven't researched/experienced/read/thought much about it," is not.)

3AII.) I leave confirmed in the advice of my friend Jelani Cobb--whenever someone, noting a pathology, begins a sentence with "Black people are the only people who..." they are in trouble.

4.) I bought a nice pair of expensive headphones for this trip. I have not used them since I got off the plane. Very odd.

5.) It was a brazil nut that clipped me. I feel like 50--they should have bodied me when they had the chance.

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Departures, Cont.

IV. Dimanche

On my last afternoon in Paris I summoned all the courage I could muster, walked into a small café and said,  "Bonjour Madame. Je voudrais diner, s'il vous plaît." My phrasing was awkward--almost rude perhaps. But madame just smiled and escorted me to my seat. Whatever fluency is, I am far removed from it. I am told that someday I will dream in French and that will be the sign. 

I tell you again that this is as far from home as I've ever been in my life. I was more afraid walking the streets of Paris than I have ever been walking through the projects. American violence, I know well. Your raise your hands. You run. You curl up in a ball. You choke a man out. You stay strapped. This is a dialect of my early years. I think of that scene in The Wire where Bunny Colvin is working with group of alleged scrappers. These kids have seen the worst of West Baltimore. Then Bunny takes them to a steakhouse, where they are flummoxed by the specials, the quietness, the difference between the waitress and the hostess. The curtain fails away to reveal our hardrocks presently transformed into shook ones. On North Avenue we are kings. In Ruth's Chris we are peasants. And we know this.

So sitting there on that last afternoon, I was feeling good for the come-up. I ordered the cheeseburger and salad with sautéed potatoes on the side. The café grew crowded. A larger party came in. I was asked to move to another table. I obliged. I watched a young man and his cherie, sans neck-tie, in a beautiful navy suit. I watched a group of high school kids and thought of my son, who would have saw them here trading coffee, cigs and laughter, and thought them the pit of cool  I had a Konigsberg. Then I had another.

I was high when I left, but walking the streets, and then walking through le jardin du luxembourg, I fell down again. I was headed out to meet a new friend. Le jardin is a manicured walking space where the gravel rivals the green. That afternoon it throbbed with Parisians in the way that the bars in New York throb after a blizzard shuts the whole town in. The children raced small pedal cars. A group of old men assembled under a bandshell. There were rows of leafless trees sculpted into brown boxes. 

I felt myself as horrifyingly singular there. A language is more than grammar and words, is the movement of The People, their sense of appropriate laughter, their very conception of space. In Paris the public space was a backyard for The People and The People's language was not mine.  Even if I learned the grammar and vocab so part of it must be off-limits to me.  it could never really be "mine." I had a native language of my own. I felt like a distant friend crashing a family reunion. Except the family was this entire sector of the city. I could feel their nameless, invisible bonds all around me, tripping my every step.

A month ago I was giving a talk at a college where someone asked my why it was wrong for white people to use the word "nigger" in a friendly way. I responded, as I always do, by pointing out that the names people use depend on their relations. That I should not expect to call another man's wife "honey" by pointing out that he calls her the same thing. That my wife and her friends use the word "bitch" between them, but that is not a name I should expect (or want) to employ. That whatever they say, I have no desire to address my gay friends as queer. If you respect the humanity of black people, then you respect that they get to do what other humans do--ironically employ epithets in a communal way.

But walking through le jardin, I saw the problem from another angle. Perhaps it isn't simply that black people have used "nigger" in irony (as all people tend to do with epithets) but that we have made "nigger" beautiful. Our artists, our writers, our comedians, our people have turned poison into wine that only we may drink. That hard alienation must sting a bit for those who, as sure I have no sense of the history of Paris, have no sense of the history of black folks. We don't know why we're shut out. And somehow it feels unfair. It isn't. I am an American and an Anglophone. With that tile I could, at any moment, make myself understood here. It takes a particular kind of tyranny to demand access to everyone's power, to everyone's family reunion.

The next day I packed my bags and went  to Gare de Lyon. I was headed back to Switzerland where I would spend the week studying French. I had to buy my ticket at the main office. To buy a ticket I had to take another ticket with a number and a letter on it. I then had to watch the screen for my number. The office looked like it was erected by the same people who built the DMV, and constructed specifically to spite MItt Romney. But I got my ticket,  boarded the train. and descended further into the European continent.

The loneliness was intense. I knew at a least few people in Paris. But this train winding through high and gorgeous country, leaving behind small Hallmark towns, was truly taking me into foreign depths. For most of the ride there were English translations. But when I transferred at Lausanne, the pretensions dropped away and there was only French.  I have spent almost as much time away from home in the past year as I've spent with them. Is this how it's supposed to be? Is learning forever winding through these strange and foreign places?  Is study the opposite of home?

In Vevey, I was met at the station by a mother and her daughter. They gave me the layout of the town. They showed me how to catch the train to school. They told me how to lock up their house. They poured me red wine, served bread and cheese. This was immersion. I was given a room. I called my wife then went to bed. That night everyone in my dreams spoke French.  I could not understand a word they said.

Departures, Cont.

III. Samedi

I woke up this morning, wrote, took a long shower and then dressed. I walked to a pâtisserie, ordered a pain au chocolat and a coffee (it's becoming a ritual) and thought mostly of my wife. I was watching the people come and go. I was watching the children here, lost in their strange freedom unlike anything I've ever known. They range the city--embracing, grazing, laughing. 

When I was a kid in West Baltimore the cops called this loitering. Childhood was a suspect class always bordering on the edge of the criminal. You play football on the traffic island and the cops chase you off. Never mind that it's the only long patch of green in your neighborhood. You fly your kites from the second level of Mondawmin Mall and the les gendarmes are in effect. Go back to watching the Wonder Years and dreaming.  You nail a crate to a telephone pole, because all the courts near you have been stripped. The city doesn't send people to repair the courts, but to tear down your crate. 

Perhaps somewhere in Paris it is the same. But what I have seen is a place with a different sense of the Public, with children loosed in such a way that I have not seen even in wealthy areas. In America you structure the lives of your children, or they will be structured by the hands of all you fear. A child's mind is naturally devilish, and needs correction even more than safety. 

But I was in the pâtisserie thinking of my wife, who beat me here by seven wise years because she is woman whose vision sends me to sonnage. I have always been a simple man, and left to my devices, my guiding principles would revolve around warm snugglies, Word of Warcraft and intravenous pizza. Except that I have never really walked alone. Instead I've been surrounded by people who insisted upon other languages. When I was nine my mother remanded to the tender clutches of a man who taught swimming out in the county in his back yard. On the first day I learned to hold my breath. On the second I floated. On the third I front crawled. On the fourth, I cried as he tossed me into the deep end over and over. And on the fifth, I crawled in the deep end, and it was all I ever wanted.

I think now that violence is my first language, the one I truly respect and understand. Learning through immersion is a kind of violence, a humiliation, a shaming which you must embrace as sure as I had to embrace what looked to me like infinite depths. I earned everything I have under the gun, or with a foot in my ass. My older brother and my father sent me out in the streets. They would not live me alone with D&D and my collection of X-Factor. I had to know the culture of the community in which I lived. And I acquired it violently. I came to West Baltimore illiterate, and came out--not a poet--but fluent just the same.

When I was 17 mother forced me out that fluency, out of Baltimore, into the Mecca of Howard University. Why should I want to go? What was out there but strange people, wild customs and gruesome words. But they pushed me and I learned that Black is a country--that there is West Baltimore and there is Jack and Jill, that there are two South Sides of Chicago, that there are Trinidadians with their own rendition of blackness, and Ghanians with another, and though none match mine, all are real. 

Being shaped by the deep end, it is perhaps natural that I would spend the lionshare of my adult in the company of a woman who pushes. I never wanted to come to New York--a city which I knew was the pinnacle of discomfort and interpersonal low-grade war. But Kenyatta, worn down, as black girls will be, by closed minds and bourgeoisie orders, by Chicago in its jheri curled and high yellow Vanity years, had long dreamed of getting out. This is the difference between us I was always pushed, but never rejected. The people I grew up around never looked at the color of my skin and thought "You're not good enough." If anything they looked at me and thought "Why aren't you better?"

This sense of rejection powers most of my New York friends. They come to the city fleeing home, looking for some place that will accept them in all their weird ways. I don't know how this happend, but in Baltimore I felt both weird and accepted and so I missed the wisdom that comes with being outcast, with having a burning need to strike out.  And so I came to New York uncivilized, with my wife seeing things which I could not, and me falling in love with things which she'd discovered at half my age. 

She went to Paris in 2006. I had no interest. Why? More strange people. More strange words. But she came back with these pictures. The pictures were of great doors wooden doors, painted green, blue and brown. Their sheer size made you wonder what was inside. 

I thought of her sitting her while sitting in the pâtisserie, at the corner at the corner of Boulevard Raspail, wondering how she felt here, watching the knowing people come and go.

"You will love it," she told me. "Because you love old things."

 "You will love it," she said. "Go."

So I am here now, far from home, an iPhone my only tricorder, on a planet with no regard for the comforts of  Class M. I do not love it anymore than I loved New York, than I loved learning to swim, than I loved learning to write, than I loved my folk. I hate being alone. I hate the unfamiliar. I want burgers, fries and beer. And I want it English. Somewhere, I am convinced, that there is a man who lives just like that. But all my baptism are bloddy, and I know now that whether I love is pointless.  I know that I could, because I've loved difficult things before. Even now part of me is blooming, leaning toward another language, angling against home.

Departures Cont.

III. Samedi

I woke up this morning, wrote, took a long shower and then dressed. I walked to a pâtisserie, ordered a pan au chocolat and a coffee (it's becoming a ritual) and thought mostly of my wife. I was watching the people come and go. I was watching the children here, lost in their strange freedom unlike anything I've ever known. They range the city--embracing, grazing, laughing. 

When I was a kid in West Baltimore the cops called this loitering. Childhood was a suspect class always bordering on the edge of the criminal. You play football on the traffic island and the cops chase you off. Never mind that it's the only long patch of green in your neighborhood. You fly your kites from the second level of Mondawmin Mall and the les gendarmes are in effect. Go back to watching the Wonder Years and dreaming.  You nail a crate to a telephone pole, because all the courts near you have been stripped. The city doesn't send people to repair the courts, but to tear down your crate. 

Perhaps somewhere in Paris it is the same. But what I have seen is a place with a different sense of the Public, with children loosed in such a way that I have not seen even in wealthy areas. In America you structure the lives of your children, or they will be structured by the hands of all you fear. A child's mind is naturally devilish, and needs correction even more than safety. 

But I was in the pâtisserie think of of my wife, who beat me here by seven wise years because she is woman whose vision sends me to sonnage. I have always been a simple man, and left to my devices, my guiding principles would revolve around warm snugglies, Word of Warcraft and intravenous pizza. Except that I have never really walked alone. Instead I've been surrounded by people who insisted upon other languages. When I was nine my mother remanded to the tender clutches of a man who taught swimming out in the county in his back yard. On the first day I learned to hold my breath. On the second I floated. On the third I front crawled. On the fourth, I cried as he tossed me into the deep end over and over. And on the fifth, I crawled in the deep end, and it was all I ever wanted.

I think now that violence is my first language, the one I truly respect and understand. Learning through immersion is a kind of violence, a humiliation, a shaming which you must embrace as sure as I had to embrace what looked to me like infinite depths. I earned everything I have under the gun, or with a foot in my ass. My older brother and my father sent me out in the streets. They would not live me alone with D&D and my collection of X-Factor. I had to know the culture of the community in which I lived. And I acquired it violently. I came to West Baltimore illiterate, and came out--not a poet--but fluent just the same.

When I was 17 mother forced me out that fluency, out of Baltimore, into the Mecca of Howard University. Why should I want to go? What was out there but strange people, wild customs and gruesome words. But they pushed me and I learned that Black is a country--that there is West Baltimore and there is Jack and Jill, that there are two South Sides of Chicago, that there are Trinidadians with their own rendition of blackness, and Ghanians with another, and though none match mine, all are real. 

Being shaped by the deep end, it is perhaps natural that I would spend the lionshare of my adult in the company of a woman who pushes. I never wanted to come to New York--a city which I knew was the pinnacle of discomfort and interpersonal low-grade war. But Kenyatta, worn down, as black girls will be, by closed minds and bourgeoisie orders, by Chicago in its jheri curled and high yellow Vanity years, had long dreamed of getting out. This is the difference between us I was always pushed, but never rejected. The people I grew up around never looked at the color of my skin and thought "You're not good enough." If anything they looked at me and thought "Why aren't you better?"

This sense of rejection powers most of my New York friends. They come to the city fleeing home, looking for some place that will accept them in all their weird ways. I don't know how this happend, but in Baltimore I felt both weird and accepted and so I missed the wisdom that comes with being outcast, with having a burning need to strike out.  And so I came to New York uncivilized, with my wife seeing things which I could not, and me falling in love with things which she'd discovered at half my age. 

She went to Paris in 2006. I had no interest. Why? More strange people. More strange words. But she came back with these pictures. The pictures were of great doors wooden doors, painted green, blue and brown. Their sheer size made you wonder what was inside. 

I thought of her sitting her while sitting in the pâtisserie, at the corner at the corner of Boulevard Raspail, wondering how she felt here, watching the knowing people come and go.

"You will love it," she told me. "Because you love old things."

 "You will love it," she said. "Go."

So I am here now, far from home, in an iPhone my only tri-quarter, on a planet with no regard for the comforts of  Class M. I do not love it anymore than I loved New York, than I loved learning to swim, than I loved learning to write, than I loved my folk. I hate being alone. I hate the unfamiliar. I want burgers, fries and beer. And I want it English. Somewhere, I am convinced, that there is a man who lives just like that. But all my baptism are bloddy, and I know now that whether I love is pointless.  I know that I could, because I've loved difficult things before. Even now part of me is blooming, leaning toward another language, angling against home.

Departures, Cont.

II. Vendredi

I have come to regard anyone who speaks more than one language as the bearer of great and unearned power. You say bilingualism and I imagine ice sleds, healing factors and flight. In New York, I am surrounded by the secret schoolmen of Salem. They speak and and my fingers dabble at the inhibitor collars. 

I am deep in my dark and twisted lab. I am building a machine of fantastic power and awesome savoir-faire. Soon I shall flip a switch, and all those who laughed at my "Parlay-vouz" and "Jay Nay Say Pahs" shall turn, light leaping from them into the cone of my terrible device. Then they will stagger before brilliant me, blinking and depowered. For now I just murmur "Mutie scum" under my breath and bide my time. 

I am in Geneva, like the only human on Asteroid M. They told me that the people would switch to English as soon as they heard my French. But this only happens when we are discussing money. An entire conversation will go over in French. Then from out of nowhere a merchant will say "twenty-five" and then there is nothing but French. I was unprepared for the loneliness of thought. The only spoken English is in my head.

But people were as people usually are--kind. I expected less black folks. But they were there. They did not nod, or flash a secret sign, as they sometimes did back home. There's no real reason for them to do so. Skin prejudice in America is a specific thing, which is different than saying skin prejudice in America is a unique thing. How it shows up in Switzerland (beyond the obvious) I don't know. But I made no assumptions. 

I took a train into Paris--just under four hours--then the subway to my hotel. Here, the manager could smell all of America wafting off of me and spoke to me in English. 

"You won't mind if I inflict my terrible French on you, will you?" I said.

"Not everyone can speak French," she said politely laughing.

"Not yet freak," I thought. "The ion correlator still needs work."

I showered. Rested. Changed clothes. Walked the streets. No one should ever write a single word about Paris ever again. Everything has surely been said.  Forgive me for all that follows here. 

It was Friday. The blocks were overcome with people. The people came in all configurations. Teenagers together. Schoolchildren kicking a soccer-ball on the street, backpacks to the side. Older couples in long coats, scarves and blazers. Twenty-somethings leaning out of any number of establishments looking beautiful and cool. It reminded me of New York, but without the low-grade, ever-present, fear. The people wore no armor, or none that I knew. I was in the sixth arrondissement. I felt myself melting in the stew of it all. There were whole blocks which had doubtlessly sprouted a generation of poorly-executed romantic comedies, though they seemed a good idea at the time. Side-streets and alleys were bursting with bars, restaurants and cafes. Everyone was walking. Those who were not walking were embracing.  

I was feeling myself beyond any actual right. I was rocking a blue blazer, a mint-green button down and wing-tips. I had traded my writer's beard for a caesar sharp as the Wu-Tang sword.  In my head I heard Big-Boi sing "Sade in the tape deck, I'm moving in slow motion." 

I was walking with a homeboy from Brooklyn, who'd lived here for many years. We passed a row of restaurants. A man in jeans in New Balance bade us in. The establishment was the size of two large living rooms. The tables were jammed together and to be seated, the waitress had to pull one table out so that you could be wedged in. She did this by a kind of magic known only to her. You had to summon her to use the toilet. The waitress was nice, but did not flatter us. When my French failed she spoke through my friend. There were no false manners, nor ceremony. She was not there to make me feel like a king. I found all of that to be clarifying and oddly soothing. 

Everyone here seemed over 25.

We had an incredible bottle of wine. I had steak. I had a baguette accompanied with a kind of fat made from beef marrow. I had liver. I had expresso and a desert which I can't even name. In all the French I could muster I tried to tell the waitress the meal was magnificent. She cut me off, "The best you've ever had, right?" I nodded. This was true and not true all at once. What I will say is that when I rose to walk, despite inhaling half the menu, I felt light as a boxer. 

All that day I saw interracial couples around me. I did not notice them, so much as I noticed myself. It felt off--like someone noting that I am from Baltimore and Kenyatta from Chicago, and then dubbing us an "intergeographic couple." In another reality (maybe even in an another country) we could be an "interracial couple." The import of all this lives not in the blood, but in a system created by recent men of recent power, who decided that skin-color prejudice was an advantageous way of organizing the world. We adopt words to defend ourselves. And yet, somehow, we see them boomerang and reify the very thing against which we warred.  I think "Interracial couple" and know that I have said something of where I am from. But I wonder what I have said about the couple themselves. 

I feel, all at once, that I am not a race and but that I am from somewhere. That place--a nation called black America--shapes my mannerism and speech,  my world-view and words, my aesthetics. More, I believe in being from somewhere. I believe in patriotism. But I don't experience this present birth of cosmopolitanism as a threat.

How can that be? 

This comes to me as wholly unoriginal--a crisis not born of blackness, but born of humanity, a crisis of being from somewhere. I turn this over in my head and feel that I am hearing words from some great essay I was too lazy to read. Baldwin? Said? What I am feeling is something I can't quite name, something beyond Fuzzy Zoeller, fried chicken and Tiger Woods.

I am back at the lab. I need another language. I need more power. I need a big machine.