The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 36

“And still … that still does not erase the war’s trauma,” she insisted.

“Sure, sure. I understand what you mean. But what I’m saying is, they protected us. They did whatever they could to protect us. I had a happy childhood. A blessed childhood.”

“They seem like wonderful people. And your mother,” she added, and I could tell she was closely watching my face. “But that doesn’t mean what you experienced was any less harmful. The childhood nightmares, your recurring dreams, they seem to be triggered when you experience feelings of loss … which makes sense. That’s a chapter of life it sounds like you never confronted. And your feelings of loss, your ability to deal with the adjustment to your new life after that trauma, even to your relationships, that’s all connected. And I wonder if … if you’ve thought of your recent relationships in that way.”

“In what way?”

“Well … what makes you leave?” she asked.

“A number of things have made me leave. But … I don’t think it’s linked to anything from my childhood.”

She gave me a Mam look. One that believed that everything is linked to everything else. What we have done to what we are doing, from where we’ve come to where we’re going, our five-year-old actions to this morning’s breakfast.

“Texas,” she began again. “Tell me about your time there.”

In the seventh grade, we were allowed to sit where we wanted in the lunchroom, and on my first day of this freedom, I sat with them. It was not a conscious choice, it was more a forced understanding that the table was the only place we belonged; so every day my gangly legs reached our haven in the back of the lunchroom where there was an empty seat waiting for me to sit with a dozen or so Blackgirls among the hundreds of white faces of our suburban middle school.

I had become inconspicuous, not only sounding and dressing like my classmates, but acting like them as well. At the table, I was still African, but I was one of them. Every day at lunch I went to our table, an array of brown faces with glossed lips, and either braids or shoulder-length relaxed hair. We were friends but we barely had anything in common. Except that we were black. Some of us athletes. Two of us in honors classes. Different interests, different backgrounds, different styles, different hygiene, different daddy stories, different momma stories, different tastes in boys, different accents, different grades, different, but we were friends because we were all black.

If we were beautiful then, we did not know it. True confidence was much too tiresome a pursuit, so we pretended. We were barely on television except for that channel, in the books we read except for that chapter, or in the magazines, and damn those magazines. They did not see us except when we were together. They called us the Blackgirl table and we did not mind it because they thought we were cool. And to maintain this blackness, this shiny, special thing that was bigger than any other part of our identity, so big that it had to go first—in order to maintain this blackness, we mimicked the only representations we saw of ourselves on those channels and in those books and in those magazines. We spoke louder, shouted even, yelled at each other in jest when we entered rooms. We created a language of gestures bigger than ourselves. We were children and how else would they see us? We performed our race, our prefix. When the others wanted to be our friends, they came to us snapping their fingers—though they were usually well-meaning people and could not know they were offensive—sometimes even rolling their eyes and placing nervous fists upon their waists.

These others, they didn’t ask us, when we were all together, about papers or school. Never about school. Never math or how well we did on the last test. That was not our purpose. We were the Blackgirls. Not Jasmin, not Kim, not Shabreka, not Olu, not Martina, not Charlotte, not Ashley, not Christine, not Jareika, not Sheri, not Roxanne, not Emily, not Ebony, not Lauren, not Sara, not Whitney, not Sheika, not me.

By then my experiences in my kindergarten class in Monrovia were a distant memory, the ease, the orange tint of mornings, the not knowing that the color of my skin they considered a stain across the ocean.

Spring, Texas, was a working- and middle-class suburbia that bordered one or two horse ranches and a shooting range. The residents were mostly peaceful, well meaning, and conservative. My parents quickly found a church they liked and we spent three days a week wedged between the pews, singing Southern Baptist hymns from memory. Because it was a white church, for us as we were growing up, Brother so-and-so and Sister so-and-so were all white. For Mam and Papa, Christ was their race and Christians, all Christians, were treated like extended family. They looked for God in people before they looked to skin color for clues on how the relationship would unfold. Casually watching basketball games, Papa would sometimes say, unprompted, “You know that guy is a believer” with pride, as if he knew him personally. I noticed this difference when I went to friends’ houses, where the phrase “you know how white folks are” first entered my psyche and made some things that happened in our new country make sense.

The children I attended middle school with were the same who stared at me on the first day I entered the citrus-smelling elementary school after our move to Texas. They knew my name and found it “neat” that I was African, all smiling, all curious, especially when they saw Mam at school events wearing a traditional lappa rather than one of the many pairs of jeans she had recently purchased. I did not talk about the war or Liberia beyond my classmates’ general knowledge that I was “African.” I