“As man and wife, if you are prepared to enter into a marital definition with a superficial medical student — soon to become an intern — who will not have serious income for a few years yet.”
“Can you put that into plain English?”
“Will you marry me?”
Dorothy slipped her arm through his and tugged him toward the water. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “And then what?” “I will likely say yes.”
“In that case, how about if you say it now. Just to ease the mind of a poor, broken down, unsophisticated —”
“Yes, I’ll marry you. How is that for an answer? But aren’t you supposed to be offering me a ring or something? Oh, never mind, sociologists don’t stand on principle. Yes. Yes. YES!”
“Ring? Yes, a terrific idea. How about a little engagement ceremony?” Langston whistled between his teeth. A truck pulled up from around the corner. Mario, their co-tenant at Pembroke Street, was behind the wheel. He stepped out of the front seat with a bouquet of roses.
“Look at them all!” Dorothy laughed. “How many roses have you brought?”
“Fifty-four. For this year.”
Mario hugged Langston and kissed Dorothy. “The roses were my idea,” he told her. “My idea, but he went for it in a big way.”
Langston removed a small box from his pocket. “This ring, however, is my idea.”
Chapter 7
WHAT WERE THE FIRST THINGS I noticed about Baltimore? I had to turn off Sarah’s heater, and roll down a window. The air was humid. I had left the remnants of winter in Toronto and arrived in spring in Baltimore. The air seemed pregnant with things to come. It seemed to be saying, I’m in your face, sucker, so breathe me in before I get too hot. Exiting from Highway 83 South, I saw a boy of twelve or so saunter across Twenty-ninth Street. He kept his back to the car. Didn’t even look around. Timed it so that he would be out of my way by a foot or so as I went by. All I saw were the jeans tight around his ass and the brown of his neck and the hair shaved close to his head.
Through my side window, I watched a boy standing outside a store with bars in the window, taking something from the hand of a man and running down the sidewalk. Then something snapped my head up and down and made my teeth crash together. I mashed the brakes. Sarah stalled. I figured I had hit a pothole. I started her up again, and hit another hole in the road. I listened for the clunking sound of a round tire gone flat. Nothing. Sarah was all right. I kept driving.
Apart from potholes, I noticed the absence of vegetation. There were no trees or grass. If my father had come to Toronto complaining about the lack of trees, he sure as hell hadn’t come from Twenty-ninth Street just east of Highway 83. Deals were going down in doorways. People were handing bags to each other. Nobody walked in the streets or on the sidewalk. People either stood in doorways, or, if they had to get out, they ran. Cars drove fast. A number passed me. Drivers seemed to know where the potholes were. I came to a red light. I stopped. We tend to do that in Canada. But another car behind me and one lane over surged through the light. Two youths ran up to my car wielding something in their hands. Here we go, I thought. First I failed to avoid a pothole, then I failed to run a red light. They have caught on to the fact that I’m an out-of-towner. One of the boys, who was fifteen or so, stood outside my windshield and smiled. He raised his arm. Here we go. He lowered his arm, and I saw he was carrying a squeegee. He washed my windshield. He cleaned it very well, I will say that for him. The light turned green. The windshield washer’s younger helper stood in front of the car. The washer came around to my side and signaled for me to roll down the window.
“That’s a dollar, mister.”
“Hope you don’t mind foreign currency.”
“Say what?”
A car blasted us with a horn and flew by on our left.
“Never mind. Here’s a dollar. Thanks for the wash.” I dropped a Canadian loonie in his hand and saw him turn over the coin and look at it critically. I drove off. In the rearview mirror, I saw the boy shrug and give the loonie to his partner.
I went through another light. The street switched as quickly as a TV channel. Now I had a park on my left, and trees topping red-brick low-rise apartments on my right. I also saw white people. They were walking in the street. One of them stopped to kiss the woman beside him. I turned north on Charles Street into the Homewood campus area of Johns Hopkins University.
I had to pay cash up front to rent a room for one week in a residence owned by the university. At $185 U.S. a week, I didn’t want to extend my stay. The apartment overlooked the corner of Thirty-third and St. Paul streets. I heard three ambulances go by in my first hour there. But the space was good enough. It had a bedroom, a bathroom, a furnished kitchen, and a desk. I began my search for housing the next day in the Homewood area. Saw a few For Rent signs. One place was both expensive and filthy. Another flat was answered by a little man, in his early fifties, with a goatee and John Lennon spectacles. He looked me up and down and up and down again and mumbled something half under his breath that was so outrageous I couldn’t believe he had said it. What I thought I had heard was “Octoroon, I presume.” Where I came from, not very many people knew the word meant someone who was one-eighth black. But Baltimore was obviously not Oakville. He asked me if I was clean and had clean habits. While I tried to ingest the question and figure out what answer to spit back, he offered “reduced rent in exchange for certain nocturnal services, to be specified at your request.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “Octoroons don’t go in for such things.” I looked for puzzlement or reaction in his eye. What I saw was a slight lifting of the brow and a grin that pulled his upper lip above a silver canine tooth.
“We must not know the same octoroons,” he said, still speaking barely above a whisper, and condensing the word into two syllables, so that it sounded like octroons.
I took my apartment search elsewhere. For two days, I checked the Baltimore Sun and tramped up and down Charles Street, St. Paul, North Calvert, and Greenmount, as well as the perpendicular east—west streets from Thirtieth to Thirty-fourth. Little was available. I found nothing that I could afford or would care to live in.
On my third day of searching, I found a crowd of people at the corner of Thirty-second and North Calvert. Each person was shelling out a buck-fifty for a kebab of barbecued meat. A black man who seemed about my age was grilling the meat on a makeshift stand. He sat on a miniature foldaway picnic chair — a backless variety that would have been appropriate for a six-year-old — next to a paper bag full of bread rolls. He shifted his weight continually from the back of his butt to the tips of his toes, as he sat forward. He was lean, and gave off the air of someone who was relaxed, yet ready to run. His eyes were young and abundant — too big for his slender face. He wasn’t as young as he first looked — he had star-shaped wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his tightly curled hair held silver threads. I watched as he managed eight kebabs over the sizzling coals. He lifted the metal skewer off the grill with his bare fingertips, moving deftly. He opened a roll, clamped it around the kebab, pulled the meat off, and asked the final customer in the crowd: “Special Cameroonian hot sauce for you?”
The young woman, who looked like a first-year Hopkins student, asked her friend: “Is it any good?”
“Absolutely,” her friend said. “Get it with the sauce. It’s awesome.”
“I’ll have it with sauce.” She took the kebab after the man poured sauce onto it from an opaque plastic bottle. “What kind of sauce did you say it was?”
“Special Cameroonian hot sauce,” he said. She still looked puzzled. “It’s a delicacy from the Republic of Cameroon.” “That’s like Africa, right?”
“Yes. Very good. Cameroon is in West Africa, bordered by Nigeria, Chad — “
“Okay, enough, my brain is fried, I can’t handle a geography lesson right now. But it’s really good. Thanks.” The young woman and her friend walked away.
“Would you like one,
too?” the vendor asked me. “Or two, perhaps. It’s getting late. I will give you one for a buck-fifty, or two for two-fifty. Closing down deal.”
“Just one, thanks,” I said.
“Come on, my friend, take two for two-fifty. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you two for two dollars. This will make you happy. When you eat them, it will be truly impossible to be sad.”
“Okay, you win, give me two,” I said. This seemed to please him. He hummed as he pulled the meat off the kebabs. I ordered his Cameroonian hot sauce.
“You say that very well. You’ve heard of Cameroon?”
“Yes. I’ve been to Mali.”
“That’s wonderful. Students around here, they like my kebabs, but they don’t know Cameroon. They don’t know where it is, even. Some of them do not even know where the continent of Africa is. And these students, let me tell you. They are very wealthy.” He gave a meaningful rub of his thumb and index finger.
The barbecue stand was cheap. Very cheap. It looked like a model you could buy for ten dollars at the hardware store. Beside it was a cardboard sign with Yoyo’s Fine Foods in black letters.
“Your name is Yoyo?” I asked.
“That’s what people call me,” he said, “because I bounce back when people try to knock me down. Where are you from, that you know of Cameroon and have been to Mali?”
“I am from Canada.”
“Canada? I have been to Canada. I worked ten years ago in Winnipeg. You know Winnipeg? It is the coldest city in North America. But I liked it very much.”
“Sure, I know Winnipeg. My mother was born and raised there.”
“Well, I lived there, one time, for about a year. I would have liked to go back, but it could not be arranged. There was a woman in that city, a woman I loved. Her name was Hélène Savoie. I would give anything to see her again. I would give anything to be back in Canada.”
I bit into the kebabs. The meat was succulent. They were the finest kebabs I had ever tasted. They fell apart in my mouth. “These things are absolutely incredible.”
“I can’t believe you used to work in Winnipeg,” I said.
“Well, I did. Hélène Savoie was a reporter there. So was another friend of mine, Mahatma Grafton. They’re both working in Toronto now.”
“I’ve met Mahatma Grafton. Black reporter, right?”
“That’s him,” Yoyo said. His smile vanished. “Here comes a cop. Give me my two dollars now quick, please.”
I handed over two ones.
A white officer — about six four, a belly as far out as a beer barrel, arms the size of some people’s legs, night stick in his hand — got out of the cruiser.
Yoyo spoke first. “Hello, Officer, would you like a kebab on the house?”
“You got a vendor’s permit?”
“I had one, Officer, but I lost it. Would you care to taste —” “You can’t sell this stuff without a vendor’s permit. Meat, huh? You need more than a vendor’s permit. You also need a license from the Maryland meat inspection department.”
Yoyo turned over a kebab, checking to see that it was perfectly done.
“Have one, Officer. Then do to me what you must. The day is late. My kebabs are so good, they have been known to produce orgasms.”
The cop actually grinned. I could not believe that a six-four white cop with a night stick in his right hand was grinning in the presence of a law-breaking African street vendor and a Canadian recently mistaken for an octoroon.
“Smells so good I’d fight back my own grandmother if she tried to take one outa my hand. Okay. Make one up for me. How much they cost?”
“It’s on the house, Officer,” Yoyo said. He lifted the kebab off the grill, clamped a bun around it, pulled away the skewer, and handed over the snack.
The officer bit into it carefully. He smiled. He glowed. He sighed. He burped. “Gimme another, would you? For my partner. You got something to wrap it in? No? Hell, then I’ll just have to eat it.” Yoyo surrendered his last kebab. The officer wolfed it down. “I’ve been barbecuing meat for twenty years and I never got it to taste this good. I’d ask you how to do it, but I got to run. Listen. I catch you selling here again, I’m gonna have to charge you with selling uninspected meat without a city permit. It could land you a big fine. So, don’t let me catch you here again. Deal?”
“Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much.”
The officer smiled, took a look at me, cocked his thumb back, and said, “Good stuff, isn’t it?” and got into his cruiser and drove off.
“I have to split,” Yoyo said.
“You know of a place to live around here, by any chance?” “What are you looking for?” “A room. With a private toilet, and shared or private cooking facilities. It should be clean and cheap.”
“I have just the thing for you. I will be pleased to assist a man whose mother comes from Winnipeg. And if I help you, maybe you can help me get into Canada again.”
“I’m afraid I have no influence at the border.”
“Well, don’t worry. Come along.”
“What are you going to do with the barbecue stand?”
Yoyo used pieces of cardboard to pick up the barbecue and hide it in some bushes in a park behind us. “I’ll be back to pick it up when it’s cold.”
“What if someone steals it?”
“In Cameroon, maybe. In my country, people can lift all kinds of hot items. But here, in the United States — never. Americans have no calluses on their fingers. So this, my friend, is too hot to pick up.” Yoyo grabbed his rolls and skewers and meat, and signaled for me to follow him. “I won’t fail you, my friend.”
Chapter 8
YOYO HAD AN ODD WAY OF WALKING. He wasn’t a tall man — only five eight or so — and he barely bent his knees as he walked. His hips had no choice but to swing, almost like a woman’s, to keep up a fast walking pace, and Yoyo knew only one walking speed — extraordinarily fast.
As we went to meet his landlady, I asked Yoyo, whose real name was Hassane Moustafa Ali, how he had come to settle in Baltimore.
Yoyo said he would tell me, although his story was a secret. “You have African blood, don’t you?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I was mistaken the other day for an octoroon.”
“That means one-eighth black, right?”
“I’m four times more than that,” I said, “but who’s counting?” “Left side, right side, left foot, right foot, it’s all the same to me,” Yoyo said. “You look like a man I can trust.” “Your secret is mine,” I said.
Yoyo said he had worked for a Cameroonian daily called La Voix de Yaoundé until April of the year before. That month, he was sent on a plum assignment to cover a United Nations conference in New York. While he was there, Cameroonian army officers staged a military coup. Yoyo’s newspaper had been government run, and when the government fell, the new regime arrested most of the editorial staff. One of Yoyo’s colleagues — also in New York for the conference — applied for political asylum. He was jailed and deported to Cameroon after three months of court arguments. Yoyo chose to go underground.
“So why did you come to Baltimore, of all places?” I asked.
“Baltimore is not so bad,” Yoyo said. “It has lots of black people — nearly three-quarters of the people here are black — so I blend in easily. Yet it also has a rich white population, so I can have people to sell kebabs to. Do you know that in half a year of selling kebabs in Baltimore, I have yet to sell to one black person?”
“I don’t count? You’re counting me as an octoroon after all, aren’t you?”
Yoyo laughed. “Other than you, I mean.”
“So you’re here illegally?”
“Shhh,” Yoyo said. “You can’t be too careful.”
As we walked, Yoyo held forth on his theory that there was an inverse relationship between the risk of mugging and the cost of renting. Proximity to risk had much more to do with lowering the price of a flat than, say, a broken toilet handle, or an uncomfortable bed, or a
fridge door that wouldn’t close. In the campus neighborhood, risk peaked near Greenmount and Twenty-eighth Street. The safest area was Charles Street, near Thirty-fourth, but Johns Hopkins University owned most of the buildings there and they were too expensive, anyway. St. Paul was slightly cheaper, but had the disadvantage of being an ambulance route.
Yoyo had settled on Adell Street, near Thirty-second Street, which was about dead center on the risk—cost axis. He showed me his flat. He had no kitchen, but had a two-burner hot plate on an old telephone stand. He had no counter or sink for dishwashing. His fridge was three feet high. Yoyo had bought it for eleven dollars from a university student. His bathroom was enormous. It had a large window overlooking a back alley, a long enamel bath with no shower head or shower curtains, a sink full of clean dishes, and a little rack for Yoyo’s shaving and toilet items. Yoyo’s bedroom had no bed, but a long straw pallet on a rug. Yoyo owned a vacuum cleaner — also purchased at a bargain price from the departing university student — and said he used it daily. When you slept on the floor, he said, you wanted to keep it clean. Indeed, when I looked around, I noticed that the apartment — from its light green walls to its hardwood floor in the small living room—eating area to the bathroom tiles to the bedroom rug to the windows — was immaculate.
Yoyo owned a television with a miniature satellite disk sprouting grasshopper antennae, and showed it to me proudly. Sony Trinitron. One of the best, he said. “I love this television. It helped me improve my English.” He also owned a radio, which he had wired to an old car battery. Yoyo attached a clip to one of the battery heads and switched on the radio. An announcer’s voice said we were listening to WEAA, Morgan State University Radio. “I pay for my own electricity. Why pay for the radio, when I can hear it for free?” He had found the battery in the alley behind Adell Street. It was cracked, and surely useless in a car, but it had enough juice for the radio.
Yoyo said an American friend had come over to visit once, and expressed horror at the apartment. “He said I was living in abject poverty. Abject — I had to look that word up. It means extreme, or absolute. But this isn’t poverty. I eat well, I sleep well, I am healthy, I am not cold at night, I am making some money, I don’t pay any taxes — my friend, this is not poverty. You have been to Africa. You know what I am saying.”