Green City in the Sun (100 page)

     Still, she had tried to stay with them, to keep her place among them, because she needed
a place
, just as she needed to surround herself with a barrier to keep out the overwhelming waves of pain that lay just at the edge of a threatening shore.

     She had left Kenya without saying good-bye to Christopher or Sarah.

     Someone jostled past her, knocking her arm so that her Coke spilled. She backed up against the wall, to be as out of the way as possible while still being part of the crowd. Christmas music blared from overhead speakers; long tables groaned with food; the two fireplaces at either end of the hall were blazing, even though it was a warm, balmy Southern California evening and everyone was dressed in summer clothes.

     Deborah pressed herself against the wall and watched the boisterous, happy, multifaceted mob with growing dizziness, as if she were watching a merry-go-round spinning faster and faster.

     She wasn't used to crowds. Classes at the University of Nairobi had been small; student gatherings were always intimate. But this fast-paced campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean boasted a population of twenty thousand, and it seemed to Deborah that every single one of them was at this Christmas party tonight.

     The crowds and speed of California life were only one of the many culture shocks Deborah had experienced since fleeing Kenya and seeking refuge here. There was so much that she didn't understand, and feared she never would—inside jokes and references which evoked responses from everyone else but which only left her baffled. She had once asked where the Twilight Zone was, and everyone had laughed. She didn't ask questions after that. Eventually she had discovered that much of the California way was derived from television, something which, in all her life, Deborah had never seen. She felt as if she had missed out on a wedge of history, as if she were some sort of Rip Van Winkle who had slept through a revolution. So much of what she observed and overheard seemed to be connected in some way to television or derived from it—language, mannerisms, jingles, even fashion and food. But more perplexing to her was that she had found, directly alongside this deep-rooted cultural anchor to television, a sweeping denial, by those same people, of ever watching it!

     The four Afro-American women laughed suddenly. They stood at the nucleus of popularity, at ease with their blackness and their sense of superiority. The one who called herself Fatma—in reality, Frances Washington— was the one who had cut Deborah from their radius.

     Fatma was the most militant of the group. She belonged to the Black
Panthers and was a close friend of Angela Davis's. She gave speeches and spoke out against three centuries of racial abuse. "Why does the white man refer to us as though we were edible?" she had once cried at a meeting of sisters. "Read their novels! Listen to how they talk! Black women are described as cocoa-skinned, café au lait, chocolate, licorice, brown sugar. We are
black.
We are not pieces of food!" It was Fatma who had approached Deborah one day early in October, when Deborah had been a member of the group for only a short time, and asked her how she was able to finance herself through such an expensive school. Fatma, having assumed like everyone else that Deborah was from England, had been surprised to learn that she was from Kenya and that she had come to America on one of the university's Uhuru scholarships.

     "But," Fatma had said, "those scholarships are meant for Africans!"

     "I am African. I was born in Kenya."

     "But that money was intended to go to a black student."

     "I'm half black."

     
Not black enough
, Fatma's look had said. "You know what I mean. That money was intended for our oppressed black brothers and sisters. Students who need our help."

     
"I
need the help. I have no money, no family. And I did win it fairly. I competed against fifteen hundred others."

     "You should have given it to a black sister."

     "Why?"

     "Because you have advantages that she does not."

     "What advantages do I have?"

     "You're white."

     By that time Deborah's Kenya tan was mellowing to a dark gold, and her short, curly hair, growing out, was straightening. She realized then that the Afro-American women did not really regard her as a sister because she didn't have the necessary appearance.
But in my soul I am African!
she wanted to cry.
I am more African than any of you! My father was David Mathenge, the great Mau Mau freedom fighter!

     She watched them move now among the crowd with an arrogant self-confidence that seemed almost to be a dare. Ten years earlier these four
might not have been admitted to this exclusive school; now everyone, it seemed to Deborah, in this age of sudden liberal consciousness, was anxious to curry their friendship.

     She had gone to a small party at Dara's apartment, where the sisters, Deborah, and a few token whites had mingled in a kind of interracial ostentation. That was when Deborah had been introduced to California wine, had drunk too much of it, and had ended up by offending both camps with one of Aunt Grace's amusing stories about Mario. "She caught him in the kitchen one day, rolling meatballs against his bare chest and popping them into the pan!"

     Deborah's laughter had quickly died when she saw the faces staring at her, the room silent except for
Hair
playing on the stereo.

     Dara had said, "Why do you call him your houseboy?"

     And Deborah had not known what to say.

     "It seems to me," someone else said, "that Kenyan imperialists are no different from Rhodesians and South Africans. Racist bastards, all of them."

     Deborah had wanted to explain that they had it all wrong, that Kenya wasn't like that. Well, her uncle Geoffrey was a racist, but her aunt Grace and many others never were, and it seemed to Deborah that there was a great deal less racial bigotry in Kenya than there was in this pretentious country where people changed their names and put on costumes and pretended to be friends for an evening because that was the current trend. She had felt herself become angry toward these Americans. She had wanted to tell the "sisters" that they weren't African at all but some ludicrous parody and that Sarah wouldn't recognize them as one of her own and that, if they but knew, they wouldn't be so eager to be "African" because that meant being under the thumb of a husband or father and working in the fields and having one baby after another and carrying loads on their backs like animals. Then she thought of Sarah and her beautiful fabric and her inability to get help to produce it, and she thought of Christopher and their home by the Chania River, and she had burst into tears, and that had been the end of her membership in the black women's movement.

     But there were other groups on campus where she might find a home— associations that went by letters, such as SNCC and CORE, coalitions of
young progressive whites who didn't seem to judge a person by skin color, clothes, or way of speaking. Deborah had sought their companionship as a panacea for her growing loneliness and sense of alienation. And that, too, had ended in disappointment.

     "Hello," said a voice next to her.

     Deborah turned to find herself looking into a smiling, bearded face. She had seen him around school; there were a thousand of him. He marched in antiwar parades, dodged the draft, and wondered how Nixon had gotten into office when he and ten million others insisted that they hadn't voted for him.

     "Nice party, huh?"

     Deborah forced a smile. He stood too close to her. She felt trapped. And the pain, which she carried with her everywhere like a small, dark jewel, was starting to grow.

     "So," he said. "You a student here?"

     "Yes."

     "What's your major?"

     "I'm in premed."

     "No kidding. Philosophy myself, although I don't know what the heck I'll do with it. Premed, huh? Where are you going to go to medical school?"

     "I don't know."
I'm living one day at a time.

     "I like your accent. You from England?"

     "No. Kenya."

     "No kidding! I had a cousin who went there with the Peace Corps. He didn't last long, though. Too filthy, he said. I didn't know there were any whites left in Kenya. Wasn't there a Zulu uprising there about twenty years ago?"

     "Mau Mau," she said.

     He shrugged. "Same difference. Hey, can I get you something to eat? They've got a far-out curry here that's not to be believed. Hey! Where are you going?"

     Deborah fled through the crowd, found the double doors that opened onto the patio, and delivered herself into the warm California night.

     She ran across the lawn and found a deserted bench. She sat on it, tears
filling her eyes, and felt the dark gemstone of pain expand within her until it filled her body and began to cut with sharp facets. An alien night engulfed her; the soul of a land that was not her own moved stealthily about her, as if sizing her up, as if deciding whether or not to let her stay.

     
I must not love you, Christopher. I must never think of you in that way again
....

     Finally Deborah let the tears fall. She cried as she had cried almost every day since leaving Kenya, since the day she had found her mother's letters. Deborah remembered little of what had followed. With Mama Wachera's words ringing in her ears, she had found her way back to the mission, where she had telephoned her aunt's solicitor. "I want to sign this house over to the nuns," she had told him. "And I want you to sell Bellatu as quickly as possible. I don't care what you get for it. And everything inside is to go with it. I am leaving Kenya, and I am never coming back."

     She hadn't even spent that night at the mission; it was too haunted. She had packed hastily and gone down to Nairobi, where, after a terrible night at the Norfolk Hotel, she had caught the first flight to Los Angeles. The school had granted her an early check-in into the dormitory. And there Deborah had spent a week in solitude and spiritual turmoil. School had begun after that, and Deborah had dived into a consuming schedule of new classes and studies.

     She had tried to write letters to Christopher and Sarah. But she was unable to. Christopher must never know the truth. Incest was one of the worst and most condemning of Kikuyu taboos. It would haunt him for the rest of his life and bring him unhappiness.

     Neither had she been able to write to Sarah. Deborah had left the fabric with Sister Perpetua, with instructions to return it to Sarah Mathenge, and Deborah had not seen her friend after that.

     Someone was walking across the lawn in front of Deborah. She knew who it was. Pam Weston. Deborah hoped the young woman wouldn't see her sitting there alone on the bench and was relieved to see Pam join the crowd in the recreation hall.

     Pam Weston had been one of Deborah's new liberal friends. "My God," she had declared in the dining commons one evening, "virginity is just a
state of mind. Girls simply don't
save
themselves for marriage anymore. And any girl who does is deluding herself. She's allowing herself to be manipulated by male chauvinist tyranny."

     Those words had been spoken three weeks ago, when Deborah had lingered over evening coffee with her new friends. They had been more easily accepting of her than the militant black women had been, but even so, they had their requirements for membership. "Any girl who still shaves her legs isn't liberated," Pam maintained, and the group agreed.

     These were a strange breed of women to Deborah, who had never heard of women's liberation. News from overseas came late to Kenya and was reported in government-censored form. It had surprised these young women, who had thought by her accent that she was from England, to discover how ignorant she was. Deborah was unfamiliar with names such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and had no idea what male chauvinism was. Deborah seemed a paradox to them: on the one hand, white and articulate, educated and intelligent but, on the other, hopelessly naive and provincial.

     "If you look at women's clothing throughout history," Pam Weston declared, "you see how enslaved we were. Corsets, whalebone stays, eighteeninch waistlines! But at last women are waking up and dressing the way they want to. No longer will we let ourselves be at the mercy of male chauvinistic fashion designers!"

     "My best friend," Deborah had ventured quietly, "is designing the most beautiful dresses. She even batiks her own fabric."

     "I love batik!" declared the business major in a tie-dyed blouse. "I tried it once, but the colors kept running."

     "Sarah taught herself how to do it. She's clever like that. Her fabrics are actually works of art. I wouldn't be surprised if she became famous someday."

     "Would she make a dress for me?" the business major asked. "I would pay, of course."

     "Well, Sarah isn't here. She's in Kenya."

     "Oh, African batik. Even better!"

     "What's your friend doing in Kenya?" asked Pam Weston. "Is she in the Peace Corps?"

     "She lives there."

     "The whites have exploited East Africa long enough," said a student of political science. "Your friend should leave Kenya to its own people."

     "Well," said Deborah, "Sarah isn't white."

     They all looked at Deborah. "Your best friend is black?" Pam Weston said. "Why didn't you say so in the first place? Or are you ashamed of that fact?"

     Deborah closed her out. They simply didn't understand. In their eagerness to demonstrate their racial toleration, these liberal-thinking women perpetuated color consciousness. It had never occurred to Deborah to think of Sarah or Christopher as anything other than her friends, than as people.

     It was then that she had realized she would never fit in. Neither accepted by the blacks nor understood by the whites, Deborah was condemned to roam a kind of racial limbo. American ways were not her ways; its history and dialects were alien. She was a woman without a race, without a country, and now, finally, without a family.