Into the Go Slow Read online

  PRAISE FOR INTO THE GO-SLOW

  “Into the Go-Slow tells the story of a place, a family, and a time through the worlds of a woman as she moves from grief to healing. Bridgett M. Davis writes with passion, precision, and a wide-open heart.”

  —Linda Villarosa, director, City College Journalism Program and author of Passing for Black

  “Into the Go-Slow spans continents and years, and traces the lives of sisters linked by loss and discovery. Bridgett M. Davis vividly renders the troubled, idealistic 1970s and the what’s-left-to-dream-about 1980s, offering a powerful narrative driven by the all-too-human bafflement about how to resolve what could have been with what is.”

  —Farai Chideya, host of One with Farai on Public Radio International

  “Into the Go-Slow is an exquisitely executed journey enriched by the depth and complexity of the characters, the detailed specificity of the varied communities of Nigeria, and, above all, the poignant rendering of the yearning heart of the one who was left behind. Just beautiful.”

  —Wilhelmina Jenkins, moderator for Literary Fiction by People of Color, Goodreads

  Into the Go-Slow

  Bridgett M. Davis

  Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  Text copyright © 2014 by Bridgett M. Davis

  All rights reserved.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing September 2014

  Cover design by Herb Thornby

  Text design by Suki Boynton

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, Bridgett M., author.

  Into the go-slow / by Bridgett M. Davis.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-55861-864-0 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-55861-865-7 (ebook)

  1. African Americans—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Nigeria—Fiction. 3. Families—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.A9556I58 2014

  813.6—dc23

  2014023465

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Into the Go-Slow

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  HOME

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  IKEJA

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  SURULELE

  Chapter 11

  YABA

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  KANO

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  HOME, AGAIN

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also Available from the Feminist Press

  About the Feminist Press

  To the memory of my sister,

  Deborah Jeanne Davis,

  Whose shimmering brilliance still lights my way.

  “In the world through which I travel,

  I am endlessly creating myself.”

  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

  HOME

  ONE

  She found it, but Angie had hoped for more. From the doorway, she saw that the turnout was low. An aging black man with a white ponytail was speaking to the tiny crowd. He stood beneath a giant sign that read “National Coalition for Black Reparations in America.” His voice was hoarse. She entered the room reluctantly, already disappointed.

  “This is what we must fight for, my brothers and sisters,” croaked the speaker. “They ripped us from the shores of Africa and used our free labor to build their land of milk and honey! Reparations are our justice!”

  The six or seven people forming an arc around the man nodded in agreement. A woman with dreadlocks hanging down her back sat behind a table of books about revolutions. Someone had hung up against a chalkboard the Ethiopian flag with its green, yellow, and red colors. Empty chairs formed a large circle, as though a lecture had already taken place hours before.

  In one corner, a wide-shouldered man leaned against the ledge, arms folded. He seemed to be half-listening. Angie hesitated, feeling shy, but after a few moments she approached him.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Is this the African Liberation Day celebration?”

  “It is, yes.” He had a British accent, and the faintest tribal markings scratched across his angled cheeks. She was certain he was Nigerian, which made her hopeful.

  “Were more people here earlier?”

  He gave a faint smile. “This, I’m afraid, is our critical mass.”

  He looked vaguely familiar. She wondered whether he’d known her sister Ella. It seemed to Angie that the handful of Africans who had found their way to Detroit had all known Ella.

  She glanced back at the few attendees. “I thought it would be bigger somehow.” She’d circled the date on her calendar, May 25, been excited when she’d read about the celebration in Wayne State University’s campus newspaper. And for her to attend the same event that Ella had first attended when she was twenty-one had to mean something. Angie was wearing the tie-dyed caftan that her sister had brought back from Africa that year.

  “They used to be very big affairs when I first came to this country from Nigeria,” he said.

  Angie beamed. She’d been right!

  “Ah, but that was back when the idea of liberated African countries was still exciting,” he noted.

  The white-haired man droned on, punctuating his creaky words with a fist in the air, “We never got our forty acres and a mule, my people!”

  Angie looked more closely at the Nigerian. “When exactly did you come here?”

  “Nine years ago, in 1978,” he said. “Back then, one hundred or more people showed up to these celebrations. We even had an after-party once, at a girl’s house. Lasted until dawn. Fabulous party.”

  Angie nodded vigorously. “That was my house! I’m sure it was. My sister threw a lot of parties back then, Ella Mackenzie? That’s whose party you went to, right?”

  She vividly remembered that party because she was twelve at the time, and had found a joint under the sofa cushion, wrapped in pink paper. She’d never had the nerve to smoke it. The wrinkled joint still lay inside her little wicker basket, one of several gifts Ella had brought her from Africa.

  The Nigerian stood upright and stepped back slightly. “You’re Ella’s little sister?”

  “Yes.” Angie felt a pull of disappointment when he didn’t say, Of course! You l
ook just like her. No one ever said that.

  He pointed to himself. “I’m Solo. Do you remember me?”

  “Yes! I remember her talking about you.” It was all rushing back to Angie now. “Solo, yes. She thought you had the coolest name ever.” Ella had called him one of the finest-looking Africans she’d ever seen—chestnut-colored skin, high cheekbones, distinctly tall. Now Angie could see what Ella had meant.

  He shook his head at time’s passage. “You were just a little girl back then. How old are you now? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

  “I’m twenty-one. I just graduated from here a week ago. From Wayne State, I mean.”

  “Ah-ha! I completed my PhD at this fine institution.” Solo pointed his finger back and forth between them. “We are both alumni.”

  “One more thing we have in common,” said Angie. This is what she’d been secretly hoping for—to be around someone who knew Ella, who would talk about her, not avoid saying her name. She wondered if Solo had ever dated her sister.

  The aging nationalist had stopped lecturing, and the dreadlocked woman was packing up her books. Angie and Solo watched as a young man wearing a mud-cloth dashiki took down the Ethiopian flag, furled it, and tucked it under his arm. The remaining handful of people filed out the door.

  “Come, let me walk with you,” said Solo, placing his hand in the small of her back as he guided her toward the exit.

  Cars cruised along Second Avenue as they walked side by side. Angie was nervous, wanting to seem sophisticated and worldly to this Nigerian man who’d known Ella. They passed by her favorite campus building, the historic Linsell House, with its white columns and air of distinction. She stared at its soaring Palladian window and tried to think of something interesting to say.

  “So you met my sister right after you came here?” she finally asked.

  “Yes,” answered Solo. “She’d been to Lagos, so she and I had much to talk about, since that is where I grew up.”

  “I remember everything she told me about that trip,” said Angie. “Sometimes I feel like I was there with her.”

  Solo smiled. “I am sure she had many tales. Everyone brings back wild stories from Lagos!”

  It was a warm night, and people had their car windows down, music blasting. I feel good, baby I feel good all over sang Stephanie Mills, her voice potent, then fading as a car zoomed by.

  “My apartment is here on campus, just a block away,” said Solo. “Would you like to come over for some tea?”

  His place was small, and crammed with possessions tastefully stored. Shelves lining the walls held an array of boxes and linens and books. Clothing hung neatly from a rack in the corner, and the bookcase holding the TV and stereo also served as a desk. It was evident that nine years of living had been stuffed into a campus studio meant for transient housing. Angie looked around greedily, wondering if Ella had ever visited him here. On the one free wall hung a photograph of Solo in traditional clothing, posing with a woman, and beside that was a poster of Fela, the popular Nigerian musician, his horn thrust forward in a phallic pose.

  Excited, Angie pointed to the image. “I saw him perform here last year at the Fox!”

  “You were there?” asked Solo. “I was there!”

  For Angie, the chance to see the same musician her sister had seen in Lagos—Africa’s rock star!—felt transcendent. She’d listened over and over to his one album Ella had brought back on cassette, knew the tunes well, could recite lines from the title song: Zombie no go go unless you tell am to go; Zombie no go stop unless you tell am to stop. Ella had spoken with awe of Fela’s activism, his allegiance with the poor of his country. Years later, playing Fela’s music in her car, en route to campus, Angie felt connected to something, if only briefly. She felt aware of a larger world in a way that her classmates were not. She longed to share this with someone. The concert at the Fox had done that for her, given her a community that shared this awareness, at least for one night. The Detroit performance was part of Fela’s first US tour after Amnesty International helped free him from prison. This fact, coupled with the plethora of whites and Africans in the audience, made Angie feel part of a community, possibly the same way Ella had felt. It was her twenty-first birthday that night. Fela performed for nearly three hours; even though Angie couldn’t understand much of what he sang about, she could feel the pulse of the music inside her, could feel her limbs elongate, could hear small little rhythms inside the big ones. As a finale, he performed “Beast of No Nation,” the song he’d written upon his release. “When I talk about beasts of no nation,” he explained, “I am talking about leaders who act like animals.” It was a powerful song and throughout it, he would pause from playing his sax and direct the audience to, “Say yeah, yeah!” Angie yelled back, “Yeah, yeah!” with such repeated gusto that her throat hurt for hours afterward.

  “So what did you think of that show?” asked Solo.

  “Amazing!” said Angie. “Just to see Fela in person was riveting! And I loved that first song! Remember? It was called ‘Just Like That.’”

  Solo laughed heartily. “It’s true what he sings, O. In Nigeria, you can just be going about your business, reading a book or a newspaper, riding in an elevator, and they take away the power,”—Solo snapped his finger—“Just like that.”

  Angie laughed easily as she followed him into the compact living room. “I actually like his older songs more,” she noted, loving that she could show off her Fela knowledge. “The songs from the seventies?”

  “I am the same way!” said Solo. “When I was growing up, I used to go hear his band, Africa ’70, at the Shrine all the time, I am telling you! And it was fun music, man! You could dance to it and all of that. Now, he is, I must say, very political. And I like it. But I miss the old music.”

  He headed to his stereo and put on a Fela album. Dissonant, joyous music tumbled out. Angie sat down on the worn, corduroy couch. “I’d love to go to his club some day.”

  “I’m afraid it’s gone,” said Solo.

  “It’s gone?” She felt a pang of loss, of having missed out on something special.

  “That one, yes. It was in the courtyard of the Empire Hotel.” Solo paused. “But they say he built another one, in a place we call Ikeja.”

  “I’d like to go there,” she said wistfully. “Before that one’s gone too.”

  “Maybe you will,” offered Solo.

  Angie nodded. “I remember how Ella came back talking about the Shrine, how incredible it was.”

  “Ah yes, I think she played Fela’s music at that after-party.”

  “She even met him!”

  “Really?” Solo whistled. “Well, take heart that in her life, your sister did something quite extraordinary. She met the great Fela Kuti.”

  Hearing that made Angie smile. She was comforted to think Ella’s life had been spectacular in its brevity, like a meteor rushing across the sky, fast and brilliant. She swayed to the deeply sensuous music, grateful to be here, in Solo’s apartment, listening to the sounds of Afrobeat. She’d once hoped college would be like this, a life full of culture and music, spent hanging out with folks from the diaspora, her universe expanding. It hadn’t turned out that way. She’d gone to the University of Michigan for one semester, but ended up attending Wayne State after It happened, heeding her mother’s grief-stricken request to stay close. Her days became routine: classes each morning, then to her job at Northland Mall, where she worked at Lane Bryant, and back home. By the time Ella was Angie’s age, she was deep into the struggle, a dedicated Pan-Africanist, believing in something bigger than herself. Now it was 1987, and there was nothing to believe in anymore. Angie felt like a throwback to another era, like she hadn’t evolved at the same rate as her classmates and friends. Oddly enough, she felt both old beyond her years, and stunted in growth.

  Solo opened the cabinet of his little kitchen, and returned with two glasses and a
bottle of Cointreau. “Join me?” he asked.

  Angie took a glass, grateful he hadn’t invited her to get high. She’d managed to get through college never having smoked marijuana. She hadn’t even touched that joint hidden in her little wicker basket—so old it was surely dried out by now. She’d read in advanced psych that addictive personalities are set: once you start something, you can’t stop. Ella was clearly an addictive personality. Angie never tried drugs because she didn’t want to know. She worried about finding out that she wasn’t an addictive type, which would make her fundamentally different from her big sister.

  She sipped the drink Solo poured for her. She’d never had Cointreau and right away, she felt a dizzying warmth move to her head. She recalled that she’d barely eaten all day, only rice cakes and peanut butter with herbal tea.

  Solo sat down next to her on the couch. “I didn’t see Ella much after that party.”

  “She didn’t see much of anybody after that party,” said Angie. Ella had moved out of the house that very night.

  “Yes, drugs will do that,” said Solo.

  Angie gave him a how did you know look.

  He sipped his Cointreau. “Oh, I remember a lot of ganja being passed around at your sister’s party. And a few other mind-altering substances.”

  “Yeah, I guess there were.” She hated the conversation’s turn. She spun it around. “But Ella went to rehab and got clean,” she said. “Completely. That’s why she went back to Nigeria, as a kind of celebration, a reward.”

  Everyone had thought it was a good idea. And for the first time in years, Angie wasn’t afraid for Ella. She relaxed, hung out with her big sister the night before, waved goodbye at the airport. As Ella waved back and entered the plane, Angie panicked, just briefly. She calmed herself down. Ella had gone to Nigeria before and returned. Why wouldn’t she this time?

  Solo took her hand in his. “I am sorry that something so tragic for you took place in my country.” He paused. “Do you know exactly what happened?”

  “She got hit by a car,” Angie said, her voice flat.