"To Embody This Target," by Fresh Voices Finalist Joy Notoma
She was alive. She worked the security desk in DuBois Hall, and we chatted every time I browsed the African American Heritage collection, between classes. The trove in the middle of campus blew my mind, though it shouldn’t have, considering the whole university—the ancient buildings with vaulted ceilings, the lawns with terraced hideaways, the magnolia and poplar trees—had been built and maintained by slaves or aquired through the sale of them. It made sense that some archive of their history would be there. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I also went to see her: bright eyed, ever-decked in sparkly eyeshadow and thick, heavy lashes, even in the dead of winter, when I was lucky just to make it out of my dorm without crust in my eyes.
She greeted me like an old sister-friend:
Hey, queen!
Hi, sis!
Have a beautiful day, beautiful!
I see you!
On days when I ached for a taste of home, our shared playful reverences were sacred morsels, Treats bequeathed from a deity who is only good for the sake of goodness.
A film of guilt stuck to my words when I told her, with casual affectation, that I'd landed an internship in Ghana. Why did I always end up feeling guilty around her? Because we might have been friends if the cookie had crumbled differently, if she weren’t a security guard and I weren’t a student at an Ivy? We were both Black girls with Southern blood in our veins, and I couldn’t resist bending over backwards to pretend we were the same, as if no difference in luck or circumstances existed between us, as if the cards dealt before our births had been printed with the same odds.
She drew a quick, impressed breath. I always wanted to go to Africa.
One day! I said, and smiled.
Yeah. Okay. Maybe. One day. She looked at her nails.
She was away from her desk later that afternoon, during that period of time when campus foot traffic explodes and, in a blink, every corner teems with people. We found ourselves navigating the same bottleneck when a man collided with her. Instead of apologizing he yelled, Fat bitch!
She swirled around to see who had accosted her, and we locked eyes.
Are you OK? I can’t believe that! I hustled toward her.
She picked up her pace as if she hadn’t heard me. I pressed through the crowd but she bobbed and weaved, intent on losing me. With each maneuver, I realized that my witnessing the incident had only made the indignity worse. She didn’t want to commiserate. She wanted me not to have seen, not to know what it is like to move through the world embodying that particular target.
It would be too easy to say that she must have wished our lives were the same. How could I ever surmise what she wanted from those brief conversations where she was behind the desk and I was the privileged student, encouraged to follow my curiosities and live out a fantasy of becoming who I’d always wanted to become, while she was shackled to responsibilities I knew nothing of, responsibilities that demanded a burgundy necktie, stiff blazer, and ill-fitting pants, when she was born to wear diamonds and flowing things, sparkly eyeshadow and thick, heavy lashes?
Later I bought her lunch and delivered it to her desk, but she wasn’t there. I left it without a note, a meager move. I went to Ghana that summer. It rained most days and I spent hours every day in snail's pace traffic. One day, squeezed in a minivan taxi, my hips squished between two women who chatted like they knew each other but turned down my offer to switch seats, I heard her laugh again. I settled into the unease. I imagined her as a street vendor approaching the taxi with a bucket of hard-boiled eggs. Behind my eyes, I saw her face in sisters, friends, aunties, grandmas, in every woman who has loved me in a world oblivious to her glory. Back at campus again that fall I searched for her everywhere, in every corner of campus, in every class I took, in every new hall I entered, but I never found her again, not even in another person. I still have to remind myself that she was there. That I did see her, easy and alive.
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Joy Notoma is a fiction writer and journalist. Her essays and reporting have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, Al Jazeera, CNN, Quartz Africa, Zora Mag and other digital outlets. She lives in Toulouse, France, where she is working on a short story collection that deals with African American women navigating life outside the U.S. This is her first published piece of fiction.
