Russell Banks - The Darling

But then a second abyss opened between me and Zack. It was racial, and therefore political, and it surprised me because, until we found ourselves in Africa together, I had believed that Zack and I shared at least the same racial politics. We celebrated the same heroes and models — those white, nineteenth-century radical abolitionists who were devoted to the ideas of absolute racial justice and equality — and loved saying so to each other. We had both committed our lives up to then to extending the blessings and bounty of absolute racial justice and equality to all the dark-skinned peoples of the world. We would smash the Republic, if need be, or die in the effort to liberate our colonized black, brown, red, and yellow brothers and sisters both within and beyond the United States of America. That’s how we talked then. Back in New Bedford, night after night, just as we had in college, Zack and I had analyzed the symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism, the evolution from colonialism to imperialism, critiquing ourselves and each other in the attempt to expunge our residual racist attitudes, depriving ourselves of our racial privileges wherever we saw them lurking, and becoming in the process what we called “white-race traitors.” Together, we ground our racial consciousness to a fine powder.

Our ambition, however, our regularly stated intention, as I was slowly, reluctantly learning, was little more than a well-intended fantasy. In Africa the racial mythologies we’d grown up with were turned on their heads. A minority at home was a majority here; the majority was black, and the minority minuscule in number and white. And like many of the African-Americans who’d traveled to Africa in search of their roots, Zack believed that he’d come to a race-blind continent, and since surely he wasn’t a colonial, nor, given his radical politics, was he an imperialist, he could be race blind, too.

It seemed to me, however, that at bottom nothing had changed. Despite the beauty and energy of Accra, when I looked beyond its exoticism to the day-to-day reality of people’s lives, I saw that they were made poor and weak so that I could be rich and powerful; they watched their babies shrivel in their arms so that my children, should I ever want to bear them, could be inoculated against the plagues and run in the sun and someday go to Harvard. I could no more alter my relationship with the Africans who surrounded me in Ghana than I’d been able in the United States to alter my relationship with the Americans whose African ancestors had been enslaved and shipped to the New World. In the United States I’d been stuck with being white; in Africa I was stuck with being American.

And while this was not a problem for Zack, for me there was no morally acceptable response to it, other than guilt. Which, to be honest, was not a problem for me, even though it alienated me even farther from Zack. Over the years, I had learned to live with guilt and had even come to embrace it, for I was the strictly engineered product of an old New England puritan line, starting in the seventeenth century and ending with my parents. With my father in particular, who believed in his bones that one’s consciousness of guilt led straight to good works and awareness of God. One’s awareness of guilt was a barometer of one’s virtue. Absence of that awareness led straight to sinful self-indulgence and damnation. And unlike feelings of mere regret or remorse, which mainly work to separate people from one another, feelings of guilt, thanks to my father’s teachings, had always felt warmly humanizing to me. Even when I was a child, it was guilt that had let me join the species. And there in Africa, for the first time in years, those feelings emerged in a pure, de-racialized stream. It was all about class, I decided, not race, and I dove into the stream and swam as if born to it.

I knew I seemed cold to Zack. I couldn’t help it. His presence numbed me, as if by anesthesia. Whenever he bragged about how much money he made buying and selling Ghanaian art, I merely sniffed and turned away, and when in response he swarmed all over me with explanations and rationalizations, I could not bother to answer. I was a bitch.

Finally, there came the night that we both had been secretly waiting for. He’d shown up unexpectedly at the apartment where, having thought he was off to buy art, I’d gotten stoned and was sitting out on the balcony, blissfully watching the show below. I had seen him drive up in his van, but felt too heavy and thick bodied to move or put out the joint. He went straight to his bedroom, and changed his shirt for a fresh one. As he started back out he caught a whiff of the sticky sweet smoke from the balcony and followed his nose.

“Where’d you get the wee? Any good?” he asked, laughing and ruffling my hair affectionately. He plucked the joint from my fingers and took a hard hit. “You been copping my shit?”

“Once in a while.”

He laughed and handed back the joint. “Just don’t leave me an empty jar, that’s all. You oughta get outa this pad more. You’re gonna dry up and turn into one of those gray, sour-faced old ladies sitting on their verandas. Maybe you oughta get laid, for chrissakes,” he said. “C’mon, I’m heading over to Afrikiko’s. Let’s get juiced, do some dancing, and I’ll introduce you to some people.”

Afrikiko’s was a small, dim bar on Liberation Avenue where American expats sometimes hung out and traded job and housing information and bought and sold drugs, so I knew what kind of people he meant. His friends. Deadbeat dads on the lam, Black Panthers under indictment in the States, dope-smoking white Rastafarians who’d spent too much time in Jamaica. But he was right, I needed to get laid.

The place was crowded with men, most of whom were non-Africans, and a small number of women, most of whom were Africans. We grabbed a table in a corner, and Zack ordered us each a Gulder. When the waitress brought the beers and we’d taken a sip and had visually cruised the bar and hadn’t seen anyone Zack recognized or anyone I was in the slightest curious about or eager to meet, I suddenly, without forethought, blurted out, “I’m splitting, Zack.”

“We just got here. You are weird.”

“No, I mean splitting from Accra. From Ghana.”

He studied me for a moment. “Yeah, well, I kind of figured that’s what was up. You’re ready to cop a plea and go home to Mommy and Daddy. You’ve had that look for weeks, man. I can read it.” He lighted a cigarette, held up his empty Gulder bottle, and waved again for another. “Yeah, no shit. You and Mark Rudd and all the other wunderkinds. You guys bob up at press conferences with famous liberal lawyers at your side after making secret deals with federal prosecutors because you’re worried about turning thirty.”

“I don’t mean that, going aboveground. Besides, I’m already thirty-four. No, Zack, I’m just splitting. Splitting off from you. Going it alone from here on.”

“That’s not your style. There are followers and there are leaders,” he pronounced. “You, you’re a follower, believe me. Bernardine, Kathy, Tom, Bill Ayers, even Mark — I mean, they’re leaders , man. But you, you are not,” he said. “Me neither, if you want to know the truth,” he added and shrugged, as if he didn’t much care.

“Maybe I don’t have to be a follower or a leader. Maybe I can be something else.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“I don’t know. A loner. Myself.”

“A loner!” He snickered. “Yourself. Yeah, well, good luck. It’s a little late for that, I think.” The waitress finally brought him his Gulder, and he unfolded his long legs and stood as if to say goodbye. He paid her, picked up his drink, and crossed the room to another table, where a pair of white kids with matted brown dreadlocks were playing dominoes. Turning his back to me, he drank and smoked and from his great height watched them play.