what i did not say at your table
I brought a degree, a company, a clean shave.That is what a guest brings to a house.I left the rest of myself in Lagoswhere I keep it. I dressed for you the night I met your parents.Button-up. Clean cut. Perfume.Not to look handsome. To look expensive.To look educated, arriving, safe,to build a shield tall enoughthat a person might see the shield firstand the skin second, or later, or never. Your mother was kind. Your father was polite.No one said a word against me.But the questions came at a certain angle,circling, gentle, curious,the questions of people working honestlyat a difference they had not solved,and I answered every one of them well.I have always answered well. Here is what I did not say. I did not say that we ran the streetsguiding a bald rubber tire with a stickfor the whole length of an afternoon,or that the yellow lid of a custard tinwas a wheel, a shield, a currency among boys. I did not say that we walked home from school for mileseating smoked fish and stewed yamfolded into newspaper, and that the inkof yesterday's headlines got into the oil,and that I have eaten in good restaurants sincein three or four countriesand remember none of them as clearly. I did not say that we crossed the gutterto the woman with the makeshift kitchen,twenty naira for beans in palm oil stew,two meat if the day was good,five naira for a sachet of cold waterthat you bit open at the cornerand drank with your head tipped back like a king. I did not say that when NEPA gave the light backthe whole house shouted like a goal had been scored,and we ran inside to catch whatever remainedof our programme on AIT, on NTA,praying to reach the end of itbefore the dark came back for its property. I did not say that I walked to the filling stationfor one hundred naira of petrolso the generator could hold the fans through the night,and that a boy carrying fuel home for his brothersfeels, at eleven years old, like a provider. None of this is poverty when you are inside it.It only becomes poverty when you try to say itat a table with cloth napkins. So I did not say it.I said Playgrounds. I said research. I said vision.I said the words that have passports. And behind that, the arithmetic I cannot stop.Is this a season for her, a door she is trying,and am I the door.Will they accept me, and if they smile and do not,will the not arrive later, quietly, in her ear.They gave me no evidence.I have never needed evidence.The counting does not wait for proof,it only waits for a room. I am not accusing your family.They were decent people meeting a strangerand doing the ordinary work of curiosity.The trouble was never entirely in that room.Some of it walked in wearing my shirt. And you were kind. Let me say that plainly.You never asked me to leave anything at the door.You would have listened to the tire and the stick,the custard lid, the sachet of cold water,the whole red street of it.I never offered them.That was not your doing. A man cannot be knownby people he has never introduced himself to.I have spent years being likedby rooms that never met me. The plates were cleared. Someone asked meabout the company, about where it goes from here,and I set down my glassand gave them the good answer,the practiced one,the one that has never once failed me. Somewhere behind my teetha boy was still running down a red streetwith a stick and a rolling tire,laughing at nothing,waiting to be introduced. — tachi
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