Euphoria

by Lily King

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages? Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought & change? He turns his nose up at democracy. When I tried to explain that my grandmother was my imagined audience for Children of the KK, I think he was embarrassed for me. These conversations with B keep coming back. Perhaps because Fen doesn’t enjoy talking about work with me anymore. I feel him withholding, as if he thinks I’ll use his ideas in my next book if he says them out loud. It’s wretched now to think of our months on that ship home—the freedom of our talk, our lack of self-consciousness and restraint. It all goes back to this idea of ownership again. Once I published that book and my words became a commodity, something broke between us.