Black Is the Body Read online

  “What about Burundi?” she asked one day when she finally returned a phone call. She wasn’t one to waste words, not even hello.

  My stomach dropped. “We never talked about Burundi,” I said and tried to push back a creeping image of Helen with closed eyes sticking pins randomly into a map of Africa.

  “Maybe she’ll start making up countries,” I said to John when he came home. We both laughed distractedly. At first we had called Helen’s coarse manner and unpredictable ways harmless, but the deeper in we got with her, the harder it became to view her through that lens. We were no longer charmed. Instead we began to experience a creeping sensation that something was wrong, like climbers slowly losing purchase on a rope. Ironically, perhaps, the more uneasy we became, the more desperately we clung to Helen and her promises. She had helped so many others, we reasoned. It would all surely work out in the end.

  * * *

  —

  But today in Quebec City, there is no angst, only joy. I shower and dress, conscious of every movement: the future is happening now. Mundane activities take on tremendous significance. I brush and floss rigorously but carefully. I pull my shoelaces taut and double lace them. I am almost a mother; it’s time to start setting examples.

  John and I have breakfast near our hotel and then take a walk through the Joan of Arc Garden in Battlefields Park. Brilliant formations of sunflowers, freesia, and daisies line the path on the way to the bronze statue of the French warrior and saint. The sun shines ecstatically. In Ethiopia, it is the rainy season.

  The twins are eight months old and do not have names, only nicknames. We discuss possibilities.

  “I always wanted a daughter named Julia,” I tell him, “after my aunt.”

  “How about with the Italian spelling?” So, Julia becomes Giulia.

  “Okay, and then Elizabeth.” I blame my father for my penchant for British names. We agree on Isabella, another Italian variation of a name I love. John’s musical passions determine our choices of middle names. Giulia gets Naima, after the John Coltrane ballad. For Isabella, we choose Pannonica, after Pannonica “Nica” de Koenigswarter, the bebop baroness without whose patronage the careers of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and others would have taken a different course. Bernard and Gennari will be third and last names, respectively.

  “Those are big names for little girls,” a friend says when I tell her, and I imagine the names balanced on the tiny torsos of the babies in the photograph Helen emailed to us. They can’t walk or speak words, but their stories are already as mighty as mountains. To us, the names are melodious and sublime, but what is most attractive to me is the collision of cultures and histories they represent. Welcome to your lives with us. I send the thought flying across the Atlantic.

  * * *

  —

  The rules concerning independent adoptions in Ethiopia have recently become more stringent, we discover along the way. We find this out not from Helen, but from an American agency that has hired her. The agency is proficient in Chinese adoptions, but they are new to Africa. In fact, we are part of their pilot program. We contact the agency ourselves after Helen becomes more and more difficult to reach. When she does return our calls, she is dodgy, giving us vague answers to basic questions about what to expect in Ethiopia. The agency hired Helen because of her experience with Ethiopian bureaucracy, but the director quickly tires of her imperious manner and unwillingness to follow protocol. In fact, when John and I contact Marjorie, the agent assigned to our case, we discover she has never heard of us. Helen has kept our case a secret, most likely because the adoption scenario she has designed for us is, at best, irregular. The agency fires Helen and cautions us not to communicate with her anymore. The problem is, they don’t know anything about our case, which, though irregular, is not illegal. Because they want their program to succeed, and because they want to help us, they decide that we should go along with Helen’s plan, which is to arrange a meeting right away between us and the twins’ maternal family.

  It is impossible not to maintain contact with Helen. She is enraged by her termination. The real reason she was fired, she tells us, is because the agency is corrupt. The director went to Ethiopia to buy babies, Helen insists, but she intervened. As revenge against her, she explains, Yonas, the Ethiopian liaison to the agency, is trying to sabotage our adoption. In November, she hands down an ultimatum: we must sever ties with the agency if we want to become parents to the twins.

  It is impossible to reconcile Helen’s bizarre tale of crime and general villainy with the kind, helpful, and utterly transparent communications we have received from the agency. It is impossible to heed either party’s advice, which is to cease contact with the other one. It is possible only to get out of bed in the morning, eat lunch at lunchtime, and remember, as I wash dishes, that my feet are on solid ground. I sit down to write and try to ration the moments in which I call up the picture of the girls on my computer. When I do, I try to resist the urge to think very deeply about the curve of their feet and the brilliance of their eyes. This, too, proves impossible. I tell the agency the truth, that I cannot turn away from Helen, and I lie to Helen and swear that I have broken with the agency. Helen, my anvil, my savior. Just as Tea Cake says of his lover Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, she holds the keys to the kingdom.

  In the meantime, John and I pack. We pack receiving blankets, wipes, pacifiers, bottles, clothes, and toys. We pack flashlights, a first-aid kit, and granola bars. In between the necessities, we wedge in a portable DVD player and three seasons of the HBO series The Wire. (We don’t consider the impracticality of these items until months later, when we have arrived back in the States and our daughters are safely and legally ours.) We ask Marjorie if we should bring diapers.

  “Don’t worry. You can find them anywhere,” says the director. She is wrong about this, and much else.

  * * *

  —

  In Addis Ababa, we are met by Yonas, the Ethiopian liaison of the agency, a gentle man with a slim, handsome face and a small, tidy beard. We are soothed by the sight of him; he projects confidence and calm. I decide not to think too deeply about the darkly comic game of espionage in which he immediately involves us. If we see Helen, who has been in Addis for months, we are to feign innocence while engineering conversations designed to reveal her whereabouts and activities in the city. Yonas helps us collect our bags, peering over the top of his tinted eyeglasses as he scans the terminal, which is sparsely populated with worn-out, slow-moving travelers. They are wonderful, these travelers, yawning luxuriously, hoisting bags elegantly onto carts, and lining up casually at currency exchange windows. I imagine myself as one of them, as if I, too, were going about unremarkable business on an unremarkable day in the capital city of Ethiopia.

  Across the room, I see Aster, a woman I met on the plane. She was asleep, shrouded in a large white shawl, when I gave her seat an inadvertent bump while trying to stuff my bag into the compartment above her. She graciously excused me and we talked across the aisle during the fourteen-hour flight.

  She and her twin sister run an import-export business. They own a textile factory in Addis, which manufactures blankets and clothing made of the same fine, hand-woven cotton that embraced her body. She leaned over to let me finger the soft, willowy cloth, called gabi, which is used in Ethiopia for clothing, shawls, and blankets. The baubles on her gold charm bracelet rang like tiny church bells as she showed me the edge of the fabric, threaded in the gold and blue of fine jewels. Our fingers nearly touched. Hers extended into shapely nails painted a subdued plum. She invited me to come and see her factory and meet her twin sister.

  “Do you like being a twin?” I asked.

  “We have our moments.” She smiled.

  Her daughter is a student at Amherst College. When Aster returns to the States, she will bring blankets made of gabi for her and her roommates, as her daughter requested. We talked
about daughters and mothers and sisters until our stories got shorter and our sentences sparser. After one more exchange, Aster said softly, “I’ll see you when we land.”

  * * *

  —

  I chat with Aster while Yonas tells John the details of the plan the agency has concocted for us to be able to meet (soon-to-be-called-if-all-goes-well) Giulia and Isabella swiftly and with no interference from Helen. First, we will visit the agency’s foster home, where the twins will be staying until the adoption is finalized. We will have some time to spend in Addis before we must return to the airport to make a flight to Mekele, the capital city in the Northern Tigray region, which will be followed by a three-hour drive to Adigrat. In the desert well beyond the city, the girls and their extended family are waiting.

  Yonas whistles and waves and a dark-green Fiat pulls up to the curb. The driver, Eleazar, will ferry us around Addis for the duration of our stay, which is supposed to last only a week. Eleazar has large, smoky eyes and a sharply planed face. His blue jeans are crisp; his white linen shirt is lightly, elegantly rumpled. He is as calm as a glass of tap water while the city buzzes frantically on the other side of the car doors. The golden day is overcast with exhaust and dirt. We pass shanties and tall buildings in early stages of existence, their steel bodies framed by wooden scaffolding, like halo braces worn by people with spine injuries. Eleazar rests his elbow on the car door as he drives. At a stoplight, he chats with a child who wears a drawer full of candy strapped around his neck, like a 1940s cigarette girl. The boy is dusty everywhere except his teeth, which are strong-looking and even. He squints at us, foreigners even more foreign than this classic Italian car that, we soon learn, is ubiquitous in Addis. I wave at the boy and he waves back tentatively. Eleazar laughs a little, and then turns back to resume his deft weaving in and out of the congested city traffic.

  * * *

  —

  “My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples!” declaims Langston Hughes in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea. As a very young man, he worked on a ship that eventually docked in Dakar. “And me a Negro! Africa! The real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.”

  I had never dreamed of Africa, not once entertained fantasies of an innate bond between me and the continent, not like other African Americans I know or have read about who believe in a primordial tie that links them to the motherland, one as pure as placenta and persistent as the connective tissue that keeps the body’s organs in place. But as I stand holding the pole on the shuttle to the plane that will take us to Mekele, I feel I am in the middle of something, something bigger than myself, but in which I am somehow involved. I am surprised and pleased when people speak to me in Amharic, the way I seem to blend in, though that presumption of compatriotism doesn’t last long. My Americanness is all over me, beneath language, down to the way I laugh and move my hands. My Americanness is in me, too, in the assumptions I brought with me of which I was not even aware, assumptions about an “Africa” gleaned from news reports: famine, poverty, war. That version of Africa directly contradicts what I see around me: men and women lost in thought, sitting and standing in this short, accordion-like shuttle, a small waiting plane, mountains as distant as memories, a landscape both dignified and ordinary. This is the real thing, to be touched and seen. Upon boarding the plane, people talk in low voices through the airline attendant’s lecture on seat belts and emergency exits. Turn off your cell phones, stow your tray tables. I close my eyes as we take off.

  * * *

  —

  We meet Girma and Berhanu, our driver and translator, respectively, in the Mekele airport. The sun is already setting as we load ourselves and all of our bags into the Land Rover that will take the four of us to Adigrat.

  John holds the handrail inside the jeep and talks to the men. From Ethiopian culture, politics, and art, their conversation winds into American music; John praises a new favorite jazz musician, while Berhanu and Girma talk about the country music singers they like. Hank Williams Jr.’s woeful voice pours out of the speakers, followed by Norah Jones. In my hands, I hold small, square, black-and-white photographs of Giulia and Isabella. In these particular photographs, in this particular light, they look Siberian to me, with their ruddy cheeks and oval eyes. I tuck the pictures back into my purse. The hills around us appear dense and stubborn against a sky quickly fading from gray to white to black. A VW bus passes us, then what looks like an army tank. A shepherd leads a camel carrying saddlebags of salt as big and fat as barrels. The brush on the side of the road appears to thicken as the road narrows. Girma turns the radio dial to a station playing songs in Amharic. I open my purse and touch the pictures. I pray I will be good enough.

  The four of us have dinner in an Adigrat hotel where we will be spending the night. We sit close together at a square wooden table in the dimly lit room, scooping cubes of tender beef with pieces of tangy, porous injera. John records us on the video camera we brought with us.

  “Please say hello to our American friends,” he requests of Berhanu and Girma.

  “Hello,” they say.

  “What about me?” You can hear my voice, tiny and enthusiastic, beyond the view of the lens.

  John turns the camera toward me. “Hello!” I say and wave, chewing and wiping my fingers. I am happy. We’re almost there.

  * * *

  —

  It is 6:30 a.m. in Adigrat. Girma takes us slowly along the rough, packed earth. The mountains in front of us have seen everything. Their outlines are so precise they seem like cutouts in the sky.

  “The Savior of the World!” Berhanu says as we pull up to the Medhani Alen Catholic Church with its blond dome, red doors, and statue of Jesus with one arm raised high. We stop at a market for water and bread. Along the way, we pick up a distant cousin of the girls’.

  “This is the day the girls were born,” the cousin tells us through Berhanu.

  In the United States, Helen had told us that the girls had no official birthdate. She gave us a range of possible dates and suggested we select a day in January. The agency agreed. But apparently, no one had bothered to ask the girls’ family.

  I write the cousin’s words down. I am certain that if I do not, in the future I will believe I must have dreamed them.

  * * *

  —

  We drive slowly as the road thins and then disappears, as if it has surrendered to the commanding natural landscape around us. Helen had told us the road would end and we would have to walk for an hour to meet the girls and their family. Marjorie dismissed this information as another one of Helen’s fantastic stories.

  Girma pulls the car to a gentle stop among small bunches of beavertail cactus with stems as wide and flat as paddles and decorated with bristles like stubble on a man’s face. There are only three yards between us, but the men’s voices sound tinny and faraway. Underneath my feet, the earth is as light and packed as brown sugar. Within arm’s reach is a small island of green bordered by a layer of rocks. In its center stands a tree with a thin trunk and a flowering crown, like a tall, skinny kid with an Afro. In the distance more trees, some dense and willowy, stand in a line on faded, cracked earth. The sky is thick with all the blue left in the world.

  It was important to set out early in the morning. We are near the Danakil Depression, one of the hottest places on Earth, where summertime temperatures can rise higher than one hundred twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. It is December and only seventy-five degrees at the moment, but a pressing question among our guides is, How much heat can the Americans take? Berhanu makes a joke about melting Americans, and I laugh a bold “Ha-ha!” up at the sky. I am certainly not one of those people. I’m from this place, somewhere and some time back there, after all. And anyway, I’m decked out in my hardiest gear: hiking boots, cargo pants, a white long-sleeved, button-down shirt, and a broad-brimmed hat.

  I nearly trip on titanic pieces
of shale; my boots catch in the valley of crevices between them. The sun quickly discovers the skin beneath my hair, hat, and the rest of my clothing. I feel its piercing impact in my joints and lungs. If we had been in the States, if we were anywhere else, I would have been preoccupied with how soon I could seek out a piece of shade under which to hide. But here, even as I stoop, stumble, and trudge my way forward, I begin to understand that beneath this piercing sun and breathtaking sky is exactly where I belong. Everything lies in front of me; nothing is behind. There is no shelter, nowhere to hide. This sun: it may be relentless but it is glorious, too, evaporating any doubt about the road ahead. I stand up straight. The heat is not something to shun, I decide, but only something else to carry.

  As we approach a group of thatched huts topped with perfect cylinders of long grass, my heart beats so rapidly that I reflexively cover it with my hand. I smooth my shirt and adjust my hat. I hope I look like what the family wants for their twins. As we are greeted by the people to whom the girls belong, I imagine a woman being presented to a groom at the inauguration of an arranged marriage.

  “Be prepared to be treated like royalty,” Helen had written in an unusually helpful email. Indeed the girls’ family has slaughtered a sheep in our honor. A large platter of the roasted sheep meat sits on a clay table; the loaf of bread we bought in Adigrat is placed on the side. Everyone gathers to eat, but after a few token bites, I sit back on a bench molded from the same clay as the table and walls of the wide, circular room. I try to arrange my features into an expression that communicates my appreciation for the food, my desire to enjoy it, and my inability to do so. I am not successful, it is clear from the quality of the murmurs. “Emily doesn’t like it,” Berhanu says and smiles sympathetically; I can tell he is trying to translate the disappointment I have caused. It is terrible to know that I am failing to demonstrate the boundless depth of the gratitude I feel for everyone in this room. A torrent of emotion clogs my throat. My palms sweat and tingle. I am rigid with anticipation, eager for the wonderful, terrible moment in which the girls will be placed in our arms. Beside me John eats heartily and drinks sheep’s milk from a tin cup. I cannot say no when the milk is offered to me. I feel multiple pairs of interested eyes on me as I bring the cup to my mouth.