Black Gold of the Sun (22 page)

When I located it I tugged at the doors of the glass cabinet encasing the shelves. They swung open. A basement odour seeped into the room. I pulled out the book. My fingers ran across its embossed lettering:
The Souls of Black Folk
. DuBois had signed it at the front. The blue ink of his signature had faded, but the date was still legible – 1903. It was a first edition.

I started to read.

‘Herein lie buried many things which, if read with patience, may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the twentieth century,' wrote DuBois. I followed his words down the page, losing myself in their rhythm as if it was the first time I'd read them. It was only when I looked up near the end of the first chapter that I realized I wasn't alone any more.

‘We normally ask visitors not to touch the books.'

A museum guide stood in the doorway. He was wearing a name badge and an expression of fierce reproach. I became powerfully aware of a clock's harsh ticking on the wall and the rasp of a fly as it circled the room. A bead of sweat ran down the gully of my back like a ball bearing. The guide pulled the book from my hands and returned it to the shelves. He locked the glass cabinet and stood in front of it with his arms crossed.

‘Please, I must ask you to leave now,' he said.

As I left the room he came to stand in the doorway. I could sense him watching me all the way down the corridor. However embarrassing it was to be caught, I consoled myself with the idea that, at least for a short while, I'd freed DuBois's spirit from the gloom of the museum.

At the back of the house I emerged into a large, well-groomed garden at the far end of which stood an octagonal summerhouse. A light rain had started to fall, and sheltering beneath the summerhouse roof I watched the water whisper into the grass, raising a warm mist into the air.

I was eighteen when I first discovered
The Souls of Black Folk
. I'd just finished my A levels, and feeling grown-up and sophisticated I'd spent the summer watching Russian science-fiction movies at the Scala repertory cinema and going to talks about black art and film theory at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Browsing through the shelves at the ICA bookshop I came across a copy of DuBois's book. I picked it up, flicked through it and put it straight back on the shelves. The language was too rich for my taste. In the places where the ‘yea's and ‘lo's were especially dense, it read like a cast-off from the Old Testament. I bought a copy of Richard Wright's memoir
Black Boy
instead.

Yet
The Souls of Black Folk
kept returning to my thoughts. In the book's opening chapter, DuBois told a story from his childhood. It is a bright morning in his New England
home town of Great Barrington. At the wooden school-house, the eight-year-old DuBois is playing a game with the other children that involves swapping visiting cards. DuBois hands one of his cards to a girl who has recently joined the class. She shakes her head and turns away, refusing it. DuBois stands in the schoolyard trying to understand why she has rejected him. Gradually under-standing dawns. She is white, and he is the only black child at the school. For the first time in his life he has been judged by the colour of his skin.

Like the lowering of a vast veil, wrote DuBois, that moment in the schoolyard was his coming of age. In that instant he understood that the birthright of black people was a ‘double consciousness': an awareness that they stood inside and outside the white world at the same time. To be black in America meant always being a stranger – even in your home town.

When I eventually bought a copy of his book I realized how prophetic DuBois had been. Mannered tone aside,
The Souls of Black Folk
could have been written at the end of the twentieth century instead of its dawn. With his description of double consciousness, DuBois became the first writer to articulate the sensibility of black people born into the white world. He was also the first to argue that, far from being a drawback, our dual gaze was a blessing. It meant that we regarded life with an acuity white people could never muster. We watched for the bigotry cloaked in humour and the hesitations in speech that betrayed
hostility. We used double consciousness to survive, and ultimately thrive, in the white world.

DuBois's words had stayed with me ever since that summer. They'd made sense for me growing up in Britain. They'd even given me a way to deal with the disorientation of returning to Ghana. Now, watching the rain fall into the grass, the book made me think of a conversation I had seven years ago with Kodwo. That was when I realized my brother had grasped the full, DuBoisian strangeness of life in Britain when we were still children.

Kodwo works by night.

Hunched over the screen of his Apple computer he writes into the early hours of the morning about music, architecture, cinema or whatever else he's curious about at the time. As a consequence, the best time to visit him at home is after midnight, when he will definitely be at his desk surrounded by a pile of books. Seven years ago he was living in a basement flat in Kensington. I'd been visiting friends nearby. On the way home I knocked on his door. It was 1.15 a.m. He didn't seem surprised to see me, even though I hadn't told him I was coming.

A single lamp illuminated his living room, revealing rows of drum 'n' bass records and stacks of paperback books heaped on the carpet. It struck me that Kodwo had transplanted the tone of our old bedroom to a new location,
and I felt a familiar mixture of admiration and resentment as I sat on the sofa.

He brought in some mugs of instant coffee and we talked about the Alice Coltrane record on his stereo. Like most times we met there was a wariness to our conversation. We could talk easily enough about music or books, but since leaving Kingsbury neither of us had mentioned the coup or the years we spent squabbling in its aftermath. The effort of not doing so lent a brittleness to our conversation. It was as if we were both afraid that even mentioning the past would return us physically to the confines of our old bedroom.

Kodwo was a freelance journalist and earlier that year, at twenty-nine, he'd signed a contract to write a book. This was not welcome news. I'd always imagined my-self as an author. The fact Kodwo had got there first felt like further proof that I'd never escape his shadow. For months I'd kept my distance from him until curiosity got the better of me and I'd come banging on his door in the night-time.

‘So what's the book about?' I said, when there didn't seem anything left to discuss about Alice Coltrane.

Kodwo blew some of the steam off his coffee mug.

‘Music and science fiction. What else is there?'

The book was called
More Brilliant than the Sun
. It was an exploration of a concept he called ‘Black Atlantic Futurism' – a modernist impulse uniting an otherwise disparate set of black musicians, from the cosmic jazz of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra in America to Lee ‘Scratch' Perry's
dub reggae in Jamaica and the drum 'n' bass of British acts such as 4 Hero and A Guy Called Gerald.

‘That sounds great,' I said without much enthusiasm. I wanted to be pleased for him, but suddenly I felt exhausted.

I remembered how Kodwo and I had played football together in the garden when we were kids. I could tell if he was angry or excited or sad from the force and accuracy with which he kicked the ball. I'd thought then that I'd always be able to make out the shape of his hopes or secret desires. Even as adults we'd still sometimes run into each other wearing identical clothes as if our thoughts had followed the same pattern that morning. I'd taken that connection for granted once. But the past had come between us to such an extent that I wasn't sure what we had in common any more. We could carry on talking about music for ever, but that wouldn't stop the silence continuing to grow between us.

‘Kodwo,' I said.

‘What?'

‘I…I…' I couldn't find the words to say how I'd looked up to him as a kid; how tired I was of being jealous of him as an adult; how much I wanted us to be friends.

‘Nothing.'

I sipped some lukewarm coffee.

The Alice Coltrane record ran to a stop. The stereo made a humming noise. From the kitchen I heard a tap dripping into the sink.

‘It's two o'clock. I should be going.'

Kodwo was swirling the last of the coffee in his mug. He didn't seem to hear me. Or perhaps he had something on his mind, too.

I'm tempted to describe what happened at that moment as a return of our childhood telepathy. No doubt the truth is less grand, though. He would probably have said what he did irrespective of what I was thinking. Even so it was still a surprise to hear.

If I'd felt isolated and afraid through our bedroom years, so, it transpired, had Kodwo.

‘This book I'm writing, it's about us – you, me and Esi,' he said. ‘It's going to be dedicated to the New Mutants – you remember them; they were the junior X-Men. That was us. The New Mutants are the outcasts. They don't fit in because they're too thoughtful for their own good. They don't have the street smartness society expects from its black kids.

‘When I was younger I always felt too vulnerable. So I looked to books and records for clues as to how to behave. All the things I was into back then – the Roger Dean record sleeves, the
Dune
trilogy – they weren't just an escape. They gave me the tools to make my way through the real world. I was looking for things that affirmed my sense of alienation.

‘That's why I went around school in the Dr Who scarf. Dr Who was a time-travelling eccentric alien who came to earth and bamboozled everybody. He was cryptic. He knew a lot of stuff, but he wasn't going to give it to you straight.'

‘But I thought you were the one who had everything figured out,' I said. ‘You were Reed Richards.'

Kodwo shrugged.

‘Maybe. But very early on I had a feeling that we weren't like other young black kids. We hardly knew any for a start. And I was quite frightened of West Indian kids. They seemed tougher and more confident. Like they came from another world. One of my most painful memories is going to a rugby match and them hating Kingsbury High kids for being white and middle-class. They chased us out of their school. I felt really humiliated by what these black kids might think of me – did they see me as an honorary white kid? That was bad enough. But I had an even worse feeling. They knew me for what I was and they didn't like that either. It felt like I was being singled out for being shy and awkward instead of macho.

‘You, me and Esi, we were a minority in a minority. I tried to turn that into an elitism. I always felt everybody around me was stupid. That's partly arrogance, but it seemed legitimate given the world insisted young black men were thugs. I tried to be proud of being intelligent. I felt other people's amazement that we existed. It was like being at ninety degrees to the rest of England.'

‘It seemed like there was a lot to run from.'

‘The fact that that included each other pains me, although it seems inevitable now. It wasn't that we fell out. It was more like drifting apart. Little by little we pulled away from each other. We didn't have a vocabulary for all the things we were going through. For being teenage,
staying up late, staying out, discovering girls, discovering the outside world. We shared a room and eventually that wasn't enough to hold us together.'

‘Have you ever thought about going back to Ghana? Sometimes I wonder if we'd be more at home there.'

He rolled his eyes.

‘That's not the point. I'm not interested in trying to reclaim some idea of the past. Africa's not this idyllic place. It's a mistake to assume that you can go back to some kind of motherland. That doesn't exist. The only thing is to create a place of your own where you feel at home.'

Kodwo examined the bottom of his mug. A car pulled away outside with a squeal of tyres. I looked at my brother's face in the lamplight. How much did I really know about him? I'd imagined I could see into his head but until now I'd never seen past its surface.

If I still believed in science fiction I would have said that we were one person living two separate existences, each of us carrying an indelible sadness through life in the mistaken belief that we were alone in the world. I wanted to get up and hug him so that, for a moment at least, we really could become one.

There was another way to reach him, however.

‘Tell me more about the book,' I said.

Black Atlantic Futurism began in 1955, said Kodwo. That was the year Sun Ra announced he was born on Saturn.

Born in 1914 as Herman Poole Blount, Ra played piano
in the nightclubs and strip joints of Alabama, before declaring at the age of forty-one that, as Sun Ra, his true home was among the stars. Bald-headed and draped in golden robes, he described himself as the captain of an interstellar vessel on a mission of enlightenment. He had lifted off from Saturn and arrived in ancient Egypt, home of the most advanced scientific knowledge in the world at the time. From Egypt he'd travelled to the twentieth century, only to discover that the black origins of civilization had been erased by white people. Western history was a lie, said Ra. In its place, he would build his own mythology in which African science had continued to thrive and black people came to sail the cosmos.

‘See, here's the thing,' said Kodwo. ‘What if Sun Ra wasn't making it all up? Supposing everything he said was true? What's so strange about the idea of a black man from Saturn? It's not that odd, really. Not if you think that the entire history of black people in the west can be described as a case of abduction by aliens.'

Black people were kidnapped from Africa and transported across a vast distance inside a strange vessel. When they arrived in the New World, they were put to work under white overlords. Families were separated. Country-men forbidden to speak their own language. Under law they were not even regarded as human beings.