accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation-I had been forced to look inside myself
and had found only a great emptiness there.
Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness? The folks back in Chicago thought so. It’ll be just like Roots, Will
had said at my going-away party. A pilgrimage, Asante had called it. For them, as for me, Africa had become an idea
more than an actual place, a new promised land, full of ancient traditions and sweeping vistas, noble struggles and
talking drums. With the benefit of distance, we engaged Africa in a selective embrace-the same sort of embrace I’d
once offered the Old Man. What would happen once I relinquished that distance? It was nice to believe that the truth
would somehow set me free. But what if that was wrong? What if the truth only disappointed, and my father’s death
meant nothing, and his leaving me behind meant nothing, and the only tie that bound me to him, or to Africa, was a
name, a blood type, or white people’s scorn?
I switched off the overhead light and closed my eyes, letting my mind drift back to an African I’d met while traveling
through Spain, another man on the run. I had been waiting for a night bus in a roadside tavern about halfway between
Madrid and Barcelona. A few old men sat at tables and drank wine from short, cloudy glasses. There was a pool table
off to one side, and for some reason I had racked up the balls and started to play, remembering those late evenings with
Gramps in the bars on Hotel Street, with their streetwalkers and pimps and Gramps the only white man in the joint.
As I was finishing up the table, a man in a thin wool sweater had appeared out of nowhere and asked if he could buy
me some coffee. He spoke no English, and his Spanish wasn’t much better than mine, but he had a winning smile and
the urgency of someone in need of company. Standing at the bar, he told me he was from Senegal, and was
crisscrossing Spain for seasonal work. He showed me a battered photograph he kept in his wallet of a young girl with
round, smooth cheeks. His wife, he said; he had had to leave her behind. They would be reunited as soon as he saved
the money. He would write and send for her.
We ended up riding to Barcelona together, neither of us talking much, him turning to me every so often to try to
explain the jokes on the Spanish program being shown on a TV-video contraption hooked up above the driver’s seat.
Shortly before dawn, we were deposited in front of an old bus depot, and my friend gestured me over to a short, thick
palm that grew beside the road. From his knapsack he pulled out a toothbrush, a comb, and a bottle of water that he
handed to me with great ceremony. And together we washed ourselves under the morning mist, before hoisting our
bags over our shoulders and heading toward town.
What was his name? I couldn’t remember now; just another hungry man far away from home, one of the many
children of former colonies-Algerians, West Indians, Pakistanis-now breaching the barricades of their former masters,
mounting their own ragged, haphazard invasion. And yet, as we walked toward the Ramblas, I had felt as if I knew him
as well as any man; that, coming from opposite ends of the earth, we were somehow making the same journey. When
we finally parted company, I had remained in the street for a long, long time, watching his slender, bandy-legged image
shrink into the distance, one part of me wishing then that I could go with him into a life of open roads and other blue
mornings; another part realizing that such a wish was also a romance, an idea, as partial as my image of the Old Man or
my image of Africa. Until I settled on the fact that this man from Senegal had bought me coffee and offered me water,
and that was real, and maybe that was all any of us had a right to expect: the chance encounter, a shared story, the act of
small kindness....
barré
(Barré)
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