The Darling by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks [Banks, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Politics, Historical, Contemporary
ISBN: 9782290355053
Publisher: J'Ai Lu
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter III

THE SIGHT OF SO MANY white people rushing to get through passport control and customs at JFK nearly sent me running back to the plane. I had not seen a majority of white people gathered together in one place in nearly ten years. There were some blacks in the crowd, of course, men wearing safari jackets, guayabera shirts, or dashikis, women in long, colorful wraps—my fellow travelers from Africa. Another cluster of weary, well-dressed families whose very foreignness made them look comfortably familiar to me had come off a flight from Delhi. Most of the white people, me included, wore jeans and sneakers and tee shirts, summer travel apparel for European tourists in the States and Americans returning from abroad. Many of them, as did I, wore small, papoose-sized backpacks. They were my people, members of my tribe.

But the whites didn’t look quite human to me. Their faces were all the shades of an English rose garden, from chalk to lemon yellow to pink to scarlet, and their noses and ears were too large for their heads, their hair was lank and hung slackly down and, where it wasn’t held in place by a cap or hat, seemed about to slip off their skulls and fall to the floor. They looked dangerous, so self-assured and knowing, so intent and entitled, as they rushed to stand in neat rows and handed their passports to the uniformed officers waiting in booths like bored ticket takers at an amusement park.

When my turn came, before presenting my passport, I opened and glanced into it, half expecting to see there a photograph of a black woman—someone who did not resemble these white people—and surprised myself with the face of a woman named Dawn Carrington, who did indeed resemble the white people. The officer, a gaunt man in his forties with strands of thinning black hair combed sideways over the top, took the passport and examined the photograph carefully and matched it with my face. He breathed through his mouth as if suffering from a cold. He flipped the blank pages, then paused over the page that had been stamped years earlier, first in Accra and when I came over to Liberia. He cleared a clot of phlegm from his throat and said, “You’ve been away for quite some time.”

“Yes. I was married there,” I said. “To an African.”

“And your husband? Is your husband traveling with you, Mrs…?” he looked again at my photo. “Carrington.”

“No.”

“I see.” He hovered over the information for a second, then pursed his lips as if about to whistle. “So you reside in Liberia, then?”

“Yes. I have… I have children born there.”

“I see. How many?”

“Three. Three sons.”

“I see.” Another long pause. He gazed over the heads of the swelling crowd and into the distance. “How long will you be away from your husband and children, then?”

“I’m not sure. Not long. I’m here to visit my parents,” I quickly added, surprised to hear it said like that, so frankly and easily. Surprised to find myself telling him the truth.

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