When I was almost fourteen, in the summer before tenth grade, I wrote a really bad poem about language. Actually, the poem described my struggle to claim a mother tongue. That phrase, “mother tongue,” had somehow worked its way into my imagination, perhaps borrowed from overheard conversations between my parents and their Caribbean friends. It was not an idiom I would have used in everyday speech, though I’m sure I must have been seduced by its grown-up sassiness.
The year was 1985 and my family had just moved from St. Croix to Florida. Before St. Croix, we lived briefly in New York (Brooklyn) and, before then, St. Kitts where I was born. Most of these moves followed changing work fortunes for my father, then a petroleum inspector; my mother, who worked as a nurse and domestic and optometric assistant—sometimes overlappingly—never did not work. So Miami it was, specifically an Opa-Locka apartment complex that housed other small-island immigrants (e.g. from Antigua, Dominica, St. Lucia) and black Americans. Though we had lived in apartments before, nearly everything felt foreign in this cavalcade of units around a dirty swimming pool unused for years. Not quite squalor but no one who owned the place seemed to want to care for it. Then as now, my literary inclinations absorb and animate the specificity of everything. As such, I remember this summer-living through the prism of Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca, that vibrant catalog of black Chicagoans living life.1 In Brooksian light, my Opa-Locka is a place of people heading off to work, having arguments, complaining about the cost and taste of bread at the Circle K across the street. There is, too, crime and social hardness, and Miami’s July heat. Sometimes, there’s music from a window or a car.
This memory could be of a black anywhere but it belongs to the diasporic circulations of Miami in the 1980s where a black boy dreams in language, loves Tina Turner, and makes lunch every summer weekday for Ms. Caroline, a family friend two doors down who was recovering from surgery. I knew Ms. Caroline from St. Kitts, though it had been at least seven years since I had seen her. Still, she remembered me with fondness and I was diligent in delivering daily a covered plate with a proper starch, a meat, and a vegetable. I wielded care as currency and soared on the faith of Ms. Caroline’s temporary adulation.
I was a fat femme boy who had two older sisters. I knew the gender aberration of being assigned this task of hospitality. I knew it was given to me partly as an act of diminishment, in the way that the domestic is imagined to feminize and demean. But the almost-fourteen me, of Virgo lineage, relished the chance to be adored for his creativity and diligence.
My mother-tongue poem features a transparent speaker (me) trying to figure out which English to speak. It is not a good poem but—because of—its mediocrity, it manages to compound what I understood as the treacheries of expression. The speaker (me) worries: about being misapprehended if he speaks a thick Caribbean demotic: about white high school teachers who might find the accent charming or illegible (both things happened, especially in a spelling bee when I pronounced the letter as “zed”): about being alienated further from the black American boyness he so craves, the slick lyric slang that eludes him (though I didn’t admit that being attracted to these boys deepened the alienation): about sounding more like Caribbean women than like men (my pitch, my propensity for teeth-sucking): about his affection for Peter Jennings, the longtime white Canadian anchor of ABC World News, whose lilt seemed like a voice of clear human authority: about the treason it would be to speak like Jennings, particularly how it would rile his father (all my speaking, in any register, seemed appalling to my father).
What is the relationship between the voice of one’s interior and the voice in which one speaks to the world?
This is the poem’s query though I am too young to phrase it this way. At almost fourteen, the chasm between my (exterior) silence and my (interior) tumult seems unbearable.2 And since my grandmother, my sole confidante, died six years earlier, I do my sussing-through in this messy poem which concludes, most amazingly, with a decision to lose weight. This conclusion is one of those non-sequitur shifts that flourishes in naïve verse. And still, abrupt as the volta is, it signifies my youthful appreciation of voice as a metaphor for subjectivity; it lays bare how much racial, ethnic, and national filiation rampages my adolescent consciousness … and how much this rampaging is indexed to an understanding of my fleshy feminine lispy dark-skinned boy body.
On the cusp of fourteen, I am a fat round jelly-ish boy with a soft high-pitched voice. I am of ordinary height if not outright short, am quick to smile so as to try to radiate warmth and curry favor. I am, perpetually, of quivering.
I live in terrifyingly disciplined apartment with three sisters, my mother, and my father—my father who is a tall husky handsome deep-voiced man, compelling and commanding, he who stammers when triggered to anger. Other than the stammering, I have no evidence of any wavering in his tenor or accent or clarity.
I am an introverted black boy, a migratory subject in a city of migratory subjects. I am almost fourteen and am grappling with what kind of male being I am and can become.3
This becoming happens in the inevitable shadow of my father but more precisely in the distinct sweet company of three men.
