"Homemaking" by Nadia Owusu
“Homemaking” was first published in our Fall/Winter issue 2019. Nadia Owusu’s memoir, Aftershocks, published by Simon and Schuster, is out now.
I co-own a brownstone in the historically Black neighborhood of Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. The other co-owners are my boyfriend Seth, his brother, and their father. Mine is the smallest share.
The brownstone is 4,400 square feet and was built in 1910. It sits on a tree-lined street opposite a school that used to be called Boys High School, which is castle-like, with arched windows and a bell tower. In spring the trees on the street bloom white and pink. In summer the air smells both sweet and spicy, like linden trees and jerk chicken. Helmeted children careen down the sidewalk on bicycles: Look, no hands! Their laughter mingles with the chirping of birds. The street’s elders drag plastic folding chairs outside. They sit by their front gates with iced water and iced tea. They bask in the sun’s return. Good afternoon, they say to passersby, and How you doing, sister? Younger people nod at each other:
You good?
Good. You good?
Aight.
Aight.
In my neighborhood multiple generations of families live together in one brownstone. Next door to me and Seth, Miss Sophie lives under the same roof as her three middle-aged sons and their wives and partners. Down the block, Barry rents apartments at below market rate to his cousins and niece. Hip hop drones from open car and apartment windows. Church bells ring reassuringly every hour on the hour. On Sundays women walk toward the bells in veiled hats, full skirts, sheer black stockings, stilettos. Their hairstyles—natural curls, long weaves, bobbed wigs, relaxed updos—are always on point.
The Trachy men bought the brownstone as an investment and a home for Seth, the only Trachy man who lives in New York. Seth’s father lives on the Virginia side of the border between Virginia and North Carolina. Divorced from Seth’s mother, a retired school librarian who lives near Wilmington, North Carolina, and remarried to a retired teacher, he has been with his girlfriend—an acupuncturist—for two decades. Whereas my parents, after their divorce, rarely uttered each other’s names, Seth’s parents and their significant others get along. They make casual mention of having spoken to each other on the phone. They remind me of an article I read about how plants talk to each other through their roots. They live separately on the surface but are forever connected underneath.
When the Trachy men bought the brownstone, it was beautiful on the outside—terra cotta-colored and elegantly carved—but on the inside it was falling apart. It was full of mold and rot. With every rainfall the basement flooded. Mice lived in the walls. The roof threatened collapse. To restore it, Seth hired a contractor friend-of-a-friend, and together they labored for over a year, doing what they could themselves and bringing in carpenters, plumbers, and electricians to do what they couldn’t. I met Seth two years later—after the boiler and floors had been replaced, the mice poisoned, the black mold remediated. He was living with two roommates in the building’s first-floor apartment. He was making a modest living, after mortgage payments, utilities, and taxes, from renting out the second and third floors. That income brought relief. Seth is a professional jazz musician—plays the saxophone—and rent payments are far more predictable than gig payments. The renovation, however, had caused him a great deal of emotional and financial stress. His face looks haunted when he talks about it: “The mold,” he says, shaking his head, his eyes wide. “The mold.” Anything that could go wrong, he told me, did. Everything took longer and cost more than expected. But, early in our relationship, whenever Seth said, “I should be getting home,” the way he said home sounded solid and settled. He had saved the building, had poured money, time, and energy into it. Perhaps because of that effort, he could comfortably claim it. He could comfortably call it home.
Or perhaps his ease with the word home had more to do with his roots, with the way in which his home in Brooklyn was still, in a way, a family home. He grew up belonging to a place, knowing that a place belonged to him.
Seth was born and raised in a hundred-year-old log cabin on a hundred-acre farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was a bathtub in the kitchen, an outhouse, a creek, an overalls-clad farmhand named Rex, hills of wildflowers to roll down, woods to build forts in, a vegetable garden, wild strawberries with which to stuff his face. The log cabin has been demolished but Seth’s father converted a barn into a beautiful house with indoor plumbing, and still lives on the farm. When we visit, Seth calls it going home. He loves that Appalachian land, the sweeping expanse of it. The exuberant green. He does not love the racism that is in the groundwater.
Seth is white. His hippie parents did not shy away from talking to him about race, and about how it is used in America: to confer and enforce advantage and disadvantage, to justify violence and pillage. They taught him not to drink from the poisoned water. Racism was one of the reasons he left the home he loved to go to a performing-arts boarding school, rather than attend the local high school. At his middle school, kids used the n-word liberally. Boys in his class talked in excited tones about how the Confederacy would rise again. But the farm and the region that surrounds it are part of who Seth is. When we talk about how we will survive the climate apocalypse—which is often these days, as the Amazon burns and the glaciers melt—the farm is where we hope to seek refuge.
Sometimes, belonging to a place means longing to leave it. Sometimes it means knowing you can always go back. It means feeling a sense of responsibility for cleaning the groundwater. During national elections, Seth knocks on doors in Virginia and North Carolina. He talks to people about the poison of racism in person and on social media. When we stay on the farm, he wears his Black Lives Matter T-shirt to the grocery store. People stare when we hold hands: this tall white man and his petite Black girlfriend. Sometimes home can break your heart.
“Have you ever felt homesick?” Seth asked me recently. We were in Ghana, visiting my father’s extended family, who belong to the Ashanti tribe. Seth loved being in Ghana: the music, the weather, the spicy food, the big laughter. He loved, as I do, the communal living—the way people are in and out of each other’s houses, the eating of meals with our fingers from shared bowls, the way that, all day, relatives stop by to keep company with my grandmother, who is going blind. But he missed Brooklyn. And when he’s in Brooklyn, he sometimes misses the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I had to think hard about his question. “I think so,” I said. “But more for a time than a place. I feel homesick for moments in the past, for my family, the way we were. I feel homesick for people I loved and had to leave behind.”
The word home, out of my mouth, is wobbly and insecure. It always has been.
When I was a child my homes were short-term. I lived in six countries on two continents before I turned eighteen: Tanzania, Ghana, England, Ethiopia, Italy, Uganda. We moved every two to four years. My Ghanaian father, who raised me—first as a single parent and then, after he remarried, with my Tanzanian stepmother—worked for the United Nations. My father’s job required us to follow disaster, famine, and war. No sooner did we arrive in a country than we had to prepare to leave it. But, though we did not have constancy, we had safety. We lived in UN compounds and, sometimes, in corporate suites at hotels. My father traveled back and forth to refugee camps. He told my sister and me stories of loss and displacement. Villages burnt to the ground by rebel armies. Children with Kwashiorkor—their bellies distended, their hair thinning. Desperate parents, open palms out-stretched. Ten people from three families crammed together into a single disaster relief tent. Unlike the people to whom my father and his colleagues delivered rice, cooking oil, and salt, my family’s transience was voluntary. It was the life my father chose for us.
“Time to get moving,” he’d say as we locked the door behind us and walked away forever from another temporary home.
My father was born and raised in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti region. He was a good student. His grades and test scores were exceptional enough to earn him a scholarship and a visa to attend university and then graduate school in America. At seventeen he left home with one suitcase, and without a winter coat. Opportunity was dwindling in Ghana at the time. There were military coups, food shortages. After my father left for America, he would only ever return to Ghana as a visitor. In Ohio and Massachusetts, he studied international relations and economics. He met and married my Armenian-American mother. He wrote a dissertation about food aid in Sub-Saharan Africa that launched his career. With my mother, he moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They had me. Because she was born an American citizen, I was too, but giving birth to me in a Tanzanian hospital, without an epidural, was so painful it cost her two teeth. My mother returned to Massachusetts for my sister’s birth. They returned to Tanzania, but my mother didn’t stay long. She left to marry another man when I was two and my sister was one year old. Perhaps she met the man she would leave my father for in Massachusetts. Perhaps not. That story I have never been told. Or, rather, multiple versions have been told to me in bits and pieces.
My father raised my sister and me as residents of the spaces between. Much of our lives were lived between worlds, between cultures, between homes. We were immigrants without a native country. We were multilingual children without a mother tongue. We joke that every language we speak, we have spoken with a foreign accent. I sound mostly American when I speak English now—with the exception of some hard t’s—but it wasn’t always so. My first English words, I am told, were spoken with a blend of my father’s Ghanaian accent and my nanny’s Somali one. Later, I picked up a British accent from an English school I attended in Rome. In Ethiopia and Uganda, where the international schools I attended were staffed by mostly American teachers and attended by many American students, my accent shifted again.
My family’s language was diplomacy. Our culture was intersection. Barriers of language, of culture, of religion, of worldview, my family overcame time and again. We listened carefully. We watched closely. We asked questions. We emulated and impersonated until the words felt natural, the gestures unforced. One day we lived in one country and the next we lived in another. It was pointless to dwell on what we left behind. We had a new life to live, a new place to learn, new people to become.
When I was nine and ten, we lived in Ethiopia. It was 1990 and 1991, during the civil war that would culminate in the toppling of the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam and the splitting of the country into two: a new Ethiopia, the birth of Eritrea.
In Ethiopia my family—my father, my Tanzanian stepmother, my sister, my half-brother, and me—had armed guards at the gate and evacuation strategies at the ready. In the midst of widespread hunger and drought, we had more than enough imported food. We had crates of Pellegrino because the water was cholera-contaminated. We had a generator because of the power cuts. Even as bombs exploded around us, we had satellite television. I was all caught up on Beverly Hills 90210.
In Ethiopia my father taught me about privilege. “These walls,” he said, pointing at the bricks and barbed wire encircling the UN compound where we lived, “are a physical separation. But in terms of our humanity, there is nothing that separates us from the people in the shanty towns or the refugee camps. People build walls and borders out of fear. I don’t want you to think them inevitable. In the end, no matter where we draw the lines, all human beings, all living things, are connected. We all belong everywhere on this small planet. We all belong to each other.” He said some version of this so often that I could not help but believe it.
In Rome we learned Italian. We learned to talk with our hands, and to make the sign of a cross when walking past a cathedral. In Tanzania we learned Swahili, ate ugali with our fingers. In a village on Mount Kilimanjaro, with my stepmother’s mother, I helped bring a calf into the world. I helped to slaughter and skin a goat. In Ghana, with my father’s sisters, I poured libation to my ancestors. I learned to dance with my hips. In Ethiopia, it is a woman’s shoulders that move in dance. With Ethiopian friends of my father’s, we attended an Orthodox Christian church carved into a mountain. As a teenager in Kampala, I learned to take motorcycle taxis, to cling to the waists of the sweaty men who drove them. I drank the strong local liquor, waragi, without wincing.
In so many ways, my formative experiences in the loose, nomadic communities in which I was raised supported the idea that all places and people are connected. My father’s friends and colleagues were from too many countries to list. They worked for UN agencies, embassies, and international businesses and charities. They married people of different nationalities and races. They spoke multiple languages with laid-back fluency. Many, my father included, held multiple passports in addition to a laissez passer, a UN travel document with which we breezed past border patrols and through customs. We sipped cold Coca-Cola in airport lounges. The world was open to us in a way that my father did not allow me to forget it was not open to other people. Wherever we flew, someone—often a local, a friend—would be at the airport to pick us up. They would be excited to show us their homeland, to help us get settled. “Finally,” they would say, slapping my father on the back, “you have come.”
I remember one New Year’s Eve party in Tanzania in the home of a Ghanaian architect and his British wife, a teacher. I must have been around seven. We lived in Italy at the time, but we were in Tanzania for the Christmas holiday to visit my stepmother’s family. The guests that night were Kenyan, Swedish, Cameroonian, Chinese, American, and on. Everyone—adults and children—danced to Trinidadian soca and Ghanaian highlife. The adults were tipsy, the children high on sugar. As we counted down to midnight, we all held hands in a circle and rushed inward and outward to the music. A Guyanese woman—the wife of my father’s colleague—exclaimed, “This is the way the world should always be! Like all of us here tonight!” When she said this, my body tingled with warmth. I felt illuminated and held in a way that far transcended the reality of my clammy hand in the clammy hands of the two adults on either side of me. I wondered if this warmth, this illumination, this embrace, was what home felt like. I had long accepted that home, for me, would not be a street, a neighborhood, a city, or a country. Home would never be a single place. Other people spoke of their home countries, cities, villages—with deep feeling. I wondered, at that New Year’s Eve party, if that feeling was the same as the sudden love I felt for everyone in that dance circle. I loved them though I barely knew most of them. Except for the hosts who were good friends of my father’s, I might never see any of them again, yet I had a strange sensation that I belonged to them, that I would miss them, that I would look back on this moment as something lost, that I would grieve that loss. I shook the feeling off and kept dancing. The song ended and a champagne cork launched into the air. We clapped and yelped and hugged. My father picked me up and whirled me around. When he set me down, the room spun.
On another New Year’s Eve many years later, when I was grown up and tipsy at a party in New York, I was reminded of that night. A friend and I held hands and spun around until we fell, dizzy and laughing, to the ground. As I sat on an Ikea rug, gasping for air, tears sprang from my eyes. My friend asked what was wrong. I asked her if she ever wondered what it would be like if we could feel the Earth’s rotation. Would we be reminded of how small this planet is, and how precarious? Would we feel more acutely the passage of time? Would we cling to it and to each other’s hands just a little harder? Would we know, in our bones, what my father had worked hard to instill in me: that borders between people and places are meant to be moveable?
My father died from a brain tumor when I was thirteen. His ashes are in a columbarium in Rome, where we were living at the time. My stepmother became my guardian. With her and my sister and half-brother, I moved to Uganda. Despite Tanzania being the place of my birth and the home of my stepmother’s family, who became my family, I have not been there for almost twenty years. I have not been to Rome since I was seventeen. I have not been back to Ethiopia since we left. I graduated from high school in Uganda, but I do not visit my friends there. I have been to Ghana several times as an adult, most recently last year for my half-brother’s wedding. He lives there now. My sister and I live in New York. The Americans, my father’s family call us. We are American and also not American, in the same way that we are Ghanaian and also not Ghanaian. Can we claim Italy? Can we claim Tanzania? What does it mean to come from somewhere? What does it mean to claim a place that would not claim us? In some ways, by calling my sister and me the Americans, our relatives are confirming that we cannot claim Ghana, not fully.
As an adult, when I have said home, I have usually meant the place where my belongings are stored, where I have a bed. All those places have been in New York City: Brooklyn, Harlem, Chinatown. At eighteen I moved here for college and stayed. The move was made easy by my American passport. Watching the news these days—children raised here from a young age being denied citizenship, families torn apart because the parents were born somewhere else—I often think about the absurdity of legislating belonging, of codifying home. Am I—who didn’t live here until I was eighteen, whose American citizen mother was a near stranger to me until I was in my twenties—more American than my friend Jessy, who traveled here with her family at age three? These days she lives under the constant threat of deportation.
Mostly I have felt neutral about my New York homes, but from a few I was desperate to cut and run. There was one Kensington apartment in which mushrooms grew in the cracks between floorboards. In my nightmares, the same kind of mushrooms sprouted from my skin. One night a large chunk of ceiling fell onto my pillow. I was unharmed because I’d spent the night in the much nicer apartment of the man I was seeing at the time. The hole leaked brown water. In order to avoid being splashed in my sleep, I had to move my bed so that it was just a few inches from the door. I had to squeeze my way in and out of the room.
The landlord did nothing about the mushrooms, and took his time doing anything about the fallen ceiling. I couldn’t afford to move, and I couldn’t afford to fight the landlord. I had two jobs, one as a cocktail waitress, the other at a nonprofit, and the long hours left me with little fight. In a feat of self-deception, I blamed my landlord for how I kept going back to the man I was seeing. He was also sleeping with at least one other waitress at the club where I worked, and I knew it. He got in drunken fist fights with cab drivers, claiming they had cheated him out of change. He regularly referred to himself in the third person: Toby needs another drink. What is this shit? Toby doesn’t drink cheap whiskey. That cab driver thought he could cheat Toby; thought Toby was some drunk asshole. Toby is not a drunk asshole. Toby was, in fact, a drunk asshole. But his wealthy parents paid his rent, and for a weekly cleaning service. His apartment smelled like ironing, pot, and palo santo. Nothing grew out of the cracks in his floor. Between his high-thread count sheets, I slept well. As soon as I saved enough money to move out of my Kensington apartment, though, I started avoiding his eyes at work, and stopped taking his calls.
“What, you don’t want Toby anymore?” he asked.
“I’ve moved on,” I said.
“It’s a dick move not saying anything, making me ask you,” he said.
Toby was right. From places, from people, I had learned to make quick clean cuts. This was in large part a survival mechanism. It could also be a real dick move.
When I met Seth, I had lived in New York for almost two decades. In that time, I acquired little furniture, all of it cheap. Mostly I lived among other people’s things: boyfriends’ sheets, roommates’ silverware and appliances. Usually I left most of what I owned on the street when I moved to a new place. In some apartments, my bed was borrowed from the person from whom I was subletting. Other times my bed was a pull-out futon. After one bad breakup, I spent a month on my friend Jenna’s leather couch.
I lived for a time in a Brooklyn neighborhood that used to be called Italian Williamsburg. Gentrification has made it less working-class Italian and more trust fund and techie hipster, but there is still a small community of Italian-speaking elders. When I lived there, I enjoyed startling those elders—in the butcher shop, in the bakery—with my Italian fluency. The look on their faces was often one of pleasant shock: How does this Black woman speak Italian with a Roman accent? That look reminded me that belonging cannot always be earned through effort, though effort is often appreciated.
I’ve known since I was a child that, despite how I learned to code-switch, my family would be identifiable as outsiders. In Ethiopia and Tanzania, people sometimes assumed I was a local until I spoke. In Italy, my skin color set me apart. Wherever I went, I was asked where I was from. The more my family moved, the more difficult it became to answer the question. If I said I was Ghanaian, I would have to admit that I spoke only a few words of Twi. It did not feel truthful to say I was Armenian or American. Sometimes, I said nowhere, really. Other times, I laughed and said everywhere. As an adult, I still give these non-answers. When asked to expand, I say that I moved around a lot, that I have lived all over the world. Some people ask me if it was a difficult way to grow up. Others tell me I am so lucky to have seen so much at such a young age, to have traveled.
I do feel lucky, in so many ways. But growing up in the spaces between, as I did, means that I am at the same time deeply connected to and profoundly disconnected from the places where I lived. I grieve the loss of my temporary homes and I grieve for the ways they were never mine in the first place. My family did not talk about that grief. We did not discuss the ways in which our lifestyle caused us to accumulate losses. I did not tell my father about how those losses congealed in my gut, hardened and became heavy. Every home we made, I saw emptied: of furniture, of memories, of feeling. In the end, after the movers left with crates of our things, all that was left were cobwebs and dust. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Friends and neighbors came around to say goodbye, and in those days, before the internet, most of those goodbyes were permanent.
There were other griefs that my family did not discuss. We rarely discussed the fact of my mother’s absence. I did not tell my father that I often dreamt of my mother, or that I spent hours imagining what her home in America looked like. I imagined a house encircled by rose bushes, a backyard with a tire swing, a bedroom furnished with a bed, a desk, and a rocking chair. In my mind, I painted the walls of that bedroom yellow. That bedroom was mine. In it, my mother sat in the rocking chair and read to me. Sometimes I tried to draw pictures of the yellow bedroom on paper, but I couldn’t make it look three-dimensional. I couldn’t make it look real. That failure made my throat tighten, so I crumpled the drawings and threw them in the garbage. Instead, I drew my father, my sister, and me holding hands. When my father married my stepmother, I added her. When my half-brother was born, I drew him in too. Behind us, I drew generic houses: boxes with four windows and one door. I never bothered coloring the houses in. We didn’t own houses. They didn’t inspire a feeling of belonging in me. When I wanted to comfort myself, to feel belonging, I drew bodies. I drew people holding hands.
In some ways my mother was also raised in a space between. Her grandparents on both sides—my great-grandparents—escaped genocide in Turkey and were granted asylum in Massachusetts during the time between 1915 and 1917, when 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed. My paternal great-grandmother survived by walking on foot across the Syrian desert with her four children. Her husband had left Turkey years earlier, after escaping from the gallows for the crime of climbing a flagpole to replace an Ottoman flag with an Armenian one. He had made his way to Marseille, France, and then to America. He planned to bring his family over once he was settled, but the genocide came first. For years he did not know if his family had survived. Eventually they were reunited, thanks to an advertisement placed in an Armenian language paper. My great-grandparents made a life in America. They worked in a rubber factory and opened a grocery store. In America, my paternal great-grandmother gave birth to a fifth child, my grandfather. His Armenian name, Garabed, means forerunner. His American name is Charles.
My mother’s grandparents lived among other Armenian refugees in Watertown, Massachusetts, home to the third-largest Armenian population in America. My mother grew up hearing stories of deportation orders, death marches, and starvation. When her grandparents told those stories, my mother has said, they’d seem startled by their own survival. Their eyes would dart from left to right. They never stopped grieving. Their hometown of Marash became, in their stories, a lost paradise.
To this day the Turkish government denies that the genocide ever happened. It insists that the deaths and deportations of Armenians were the result of the onset of World War I. Despite the fact that the Armenians had neither police nor military forces, Turkey claims that the Armenians were a threat, that they fought in the War on the side of Russia. It threatens to cut diplomatic relations with any country that moves toward acknowledging the genocide. For this reason, America has yet to acknowledge what happened to my mother’s family. To America—from the Cold War to the War on Terror—Turkey has long been an important (though often unreliable) ally in a region where allies are few. Since the world rewrote my great-grandparents’ story, forgot how they were expelled from their home, they remembered with fervor. Their consciousness was split between past and future, between here and there. They raised their children in that space between, and their children raised their own children there, too.
My mother was born and raised in America, but exile was inside of her. Her whole life she has longed for a home she never knew. She dreams of that home in a language she speaks only haltingly. I think that longing is in part why she fell in love with my father. She wanted to leave Massachusetts, to see the world beyond Watertown, and beyond the space between. She wanted to see the world beyond the version of Marash that she visited in her dreams. He was from a faraway place. His work took my mother to Tanzania, where I was born, but she did not stay. The man she left us for was from Somalia; with him, she moved to Mogadishu, continuing her search. The home-like places she made with him, first in Mogadishu and then in Sedona, Arizona, would not last either. After having three children, they would divorce. My mother would remarry, this time to a man from California. It would be many years before she’d accept that the place she was looking for—the home her grandparents fled, the home in her dreams—no longer existed. In some ways, it never had. Eventually she moved back to Massachusetts, as close to Watertown as she could get. In the years she’d been gone, she’d been priced out of her hometown.
To me, my mother seems both terrified of loss and insistent on it. She left my sister and me, but when we were children and we’d visit her for a month in the summers, she’d weep when it was time to put us on an airplane back to our father. She’d hold me too tight, until I could hardly breathe. Perhaps she believed, consciously or not, that if she gave people and places up willingly, they could not be taken away. For a long time, I too held that belief. It is a belief that led me to make many dick moves.
By the time I met Seth I was aware that, against loss, against grief, making quick clean cuts is ineffective inoculation. When I turned thirty, I made a commitment to homemaking. This didn’t mean choosing one place to belong to; that would have been impossible. It meant allowing my tangled roots to tangle with the roots of others. It meant being more present, more connected to wherever I was. It meant learning to stay with the people I loved, even when I was afraid I might lose them.
There was a bar down the street from my Williamsburg apartment that hosted a jazz jam session from seven to ten on Sundays. I went there often to eat a salad, drink wine, read a book, and listen to the music. I liked that this bar was a place where neighbors got to know each other, became friendly, even became friends. The night we met, Seth was subbing for the regular saxophonist, who was also the host. Being the host meant that Seth was in charge of inviting musicians to sign in, calling them up when it was their turn, introducing tunes and sets, and reminding people to tip the musicians and the bartender.
“Are you a musician? Do you want to sit in?” Seth asked me as I made my way to the bathroom. Later, he would admit this was a line. He knew I wasn’t a musician, or at least that I wasn’t a jazz musician. Brooklyn jazz musicians mostly know each other or of each other. They save each other’s phone numbers by first name, last name, and instrument, for when they have to text around to secure band members for a last-minute gig. They play sessions in each other’s apartments. They see each other at concerts and birthday parties. They are a community.
The bar was golden-lit. Ice clattered against glass. Cocktails were shaken. The smell of grilled cheese sandwiches wafted from the small kitchen. The window behind the musicians was steamed. It was March but winter was steadfast. There was a cold rain. When I walked into the bar, I had stopped shivering. People around me hugged and laughed and leaned in to hear each other. Some of them, I knew a little from being a regular. We smiled at each other. Between sets, Seth came over to introduce himself. He asked where I was from and I said, everywhere. He seemed to accept this answer, to like it. I don’t remember what else we talked about. I remember that I was glad for his company. I remember deciding to stay until the music stopped.
A ballad was played. I don’t remember what it was called. The story, in the music, was one of loss, of mourning. But in the playing of it, there was fellowship. There was community—the promise of being heard, supported, accompanied. Solo, Seth’s horn wailed. Then, beneath it, the drums and the bass answered softly. We’re here, they said. We’re here. The music, the wine, the warmth, the golden light, the fellowship filled me. Jazz was my father’s music. If I closed my eyes, I could transport myself to his study. It didn’t matter which study, in which house, in which country. The important thing was that my father was there—alive. Miles Davis on the record player. My father reading to me. Both of us in pajamas. I could smell his dusty books. I could smell him—soap, Old Spice deodorant, minty mouthwash, home.
A year into our relationship, Seth and I decided to move in together. We would take over the third-floor apartment in the Bed Stuy brownstone. The men I hired to help me move my things from my Williamsburg apartment, to carry Seth’s minimal stuff up from the first floor, joked that we would need a lot more than what we had to fill the new space.
“We’re starting fresh,” I said.
That first month of living together, we walked around with a measuring tape, pencils, and paper. We found a couch and a credenza on Craigslist. We googled rugs. We discovered that wealthy people who redecorate regularly often sell their artwork and plants for cheap as long as you’re willing to go pick them up. We hung family photos: his, mine. On the fridge, with a magnet, I put up a Polaroid of us at a wedding. Making a home like this—from scratch—was new to both of us. Seth had never cared to make his apartment on the first floor that comfortable. He treated it largely like a crash pad. He slept on a mattress on the floor. Now we bought two new sheet sets, and two new pillows. We fell asleep to Miles Davis.
Our apartment has three bedrooms, big bright windows in every room, skylights, and roof access. When it rains, the patter on the skylights sounds almost like the patter on the tin roof in the house I lived in as a child in Ethiopia. When the sun rises, pink and orange bursts in the living room. For my birthday Seth put up wall-to-wall bookshelves in the room that is now my office. From loving that room, from loving Seth, from this thoughtful birthday gift, from the feeling of being home, I cried.
There is still much about the brownstone that needs fixing: the boiler, the big cracks in the front steps, the kitchen floor. The baby pink tiles in the bathroom remind us of Pepto Bismol. When the ceiling in my office leaked, rather than annoyance, I felt sadness. I also felt a sense of responsibility. I wanted to help fix the ceiling, the roof. “Maybe,” I told Seth, “we’ll want to move—next year or the year after or in ten years, but for now, I want this home to belong to me in the way it belongs to you and your father and brother. I want to be a part of it.” After much discussion between Seth and I, and between Seth and his family, we agreed that I would make an investment in the house, that I would become a partner, a part-owner.
Seth and I have lived together for two years now. In Bed Stuy I look and sound, for the most part, like the locals: Black, American. But the neighborhood is gentrifying. When new people move onto our block, more often than not, they look like Seth. We know that we are part of this shift. I am Black and I am American, but in this community, I am a newcomer. My presence is part of the force that is raising rents, evicting people, and displacing families. Seth and I talk about our privileges, about our responsibilities not just to fix our own roof, but to be good neighbors to the people who have welcomed us into their community, their home. We support local Black-owned businesses, sign petitions, join protests. I work for an organization that aims to close racial income and wealth gaps, including by supporting Black homeowners in neighborhoods like ours. But we could—we should—be doing more. Walls and borders, as my father said, are not inevitable, but sometimes, even when they are invisible, they can feel impenetrable. On the news, our leaders argue for closed borders and higher walls. They deny people asylum. They put my neighbors behind bars. Figuratively in some American towns and cities, and literally in others, the groundwater is poisoned. If I want to make America—to make Bed Stuy—my home, I must bear some responsibility for that poisoning. I will have to make sacrifices, will have to work to ensure my communities’ survival.
When I pass neighbors I have gotten to know, with whom I am committed to earning a deeper connection, I ask, “You good?”
“Good,” they say back. “You good?”
“Aight,” I say.
“Aight.”
Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. She was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and raised in Italy, Ethiopia, England, Ghana, and Uganda. Her first book, Aftershocks: A Memoir, was selected as one of 13 new books to watch for in January 2021 by the New York Times, one of the best books to read in 2021 by Vogue, one of the 10 new books you should read in January 2021 by Time, one of BookExpo America’s buzziest books of the year, and one of Oprah.com’s 55 most anticipated books of 2021, among other honors.
Nadia is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay chapbook, So Devilish a Fire won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s the Lily, Orion, the Literary Review, The Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bon Appétit, Epiphany and others.
