When I was 10 or so, my father won an all-expense paid trip to Senegal. “We’re going to Africa!” my mother gleefully exclaimed. So we took the Amtrak train to New York to fly out of JFK and ignored the warnings of a pending Nor’easter, thinking the sheer and desperate determination of three Black Americans to make it to Africa would hold off the worst of the snow until we were airborne. It didn’t. New York City was shut down for three days, and by the time the airports opened, it didn’t make sense to fly out. We pushed the trip back indefinitely, and never made it. And so began my obsession with Africa, the place my even-tempered mother spoke of like it was some sort of Disneyland for Black people.
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"Are You An African'?"
Am I an African? I wondered.
A few months earlier, I’d been sitting in a plaza near the Spanish steps in Rome with a Jewish roommate, Stephie, who looked Italian. I was living overseas in London and we’d skipped our Art History classes about Italian art to actually go see the works in person.
We were sipping cappuccino like MC Lyte, pretending to be cosmopolitan when a few native Italian men asked if they could sit and chat. Going through the pleasantries, the men asked where we were from. Stephanie rattled off a few generations back tracing her family back to her great- great-grandfather heading to America on a boat from an Old World country I can no longer recall.
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