Beg Me by Lisa Lawrence Page A

dinner.”

    As luck would have it, the bookshop was dead in the evening. So much for my American debut. Fine by me, because I was hungry by then. But the amount of food they put on my plate at the restaurant could have fed three Teresas. Never say they give you too-small portions in America.
    Afterward we strolled the wide boulevard, and I listened to the unusual rhythms of the street. New York is American and yet it isn’t, a bohemian city–state and Wall Street Sodom that’s apart, just like London is a separate place from England in its own ways.
    “What’s it like over there?” Oliver asked. “For us?”
    “You’ve never been?”
    He shook his head. “Most I’ve seen is Heathrow Airport for a connecting flight.”
    I didn’t know what to tell him. “It’s…different. It’s not as homogenized. There are fewer of us, and we’re certainly more invisible.”
    “What do you mean homogenized? You think black British—”
    “I’m not crazy about that term,” I cut in.
    He was mildly incredulous, smiling at me with that slight gap in his two front teeth. “You don’t think of yourself as black?”
    “I’m African, not black,” I said. “And I’m only British due to an accident of geography. Look, we don’t have to talk about this.”
    “Hey, I’m interested. I’m not offended.”
    I don’t know why I kept the apologetic tone in my voice. Maybe it was because I already liked him. “I just don’t particularly like what’s passing itself off in the mainstream as
black
culture over here, or if you like, African-American culture. Fifty Cent and a slew of other forgettable rappers, shit movies where everybody’s a criminal or appallingly stupid and stereotyped, people talking with this slang that perpetuates the wrong ideas, the stupid wide-sloppy-pants thing, none of this speaks to me—”
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he laughed. “That brush you’ve got is pretty wide.”
    “You think I’m being unfair?”
    His head tilted side to side, and I discovered this was his gesture for turning things over. “No. No, you’re not. I get frustrated with it myself plenty of times.”
    “It’s more American than anything black,” I argued. “It’s so bloody insular! It’s like you people forget there’s more than just
this
culture here. I see people back home trying to emulate the silliness they see in movies and videos.”
    “Well, don’t say ‘you people’—”
    “No, you’re right, sorry.”
    “Like I said,” he continued, “I get frustrated myself. When I was in school, I had a few kids actually come up to me and say, ‘Wha’s wrong wit’ you, man, why don’t you talk black?’ Or some shit like that. And I’d have to laugh. They’d get pissed, and I’d say, ‘Look, pal, you want to come home and meet my mama? You want to hear what a real black person sounds like?’”
    “What did you mean?”
    “My parents are Nigerian,” he answered. “Well, my mom is; my dad’s dead. My last name is Anyanike, remember? My mama would slap me upside the head if she heard me talking in anything so illiterate as that.”
    My parents.
The words echoed in my head.
My parents are Nigerian,
that’s how he’d put it—not
I’m
Nigerian-American or something. Odd. “So what does that make you?”
    He didn’t hesitate. “American. I was born over there, but I was brought here nine months after.”
    “So…you think of yourself as American?”
    We intrigued each other. “You don’t think of yourself as British?” he asked.
    “Yes and no. They don’t make it easy for us, believe me.”
    “Wow.”
    We stopped and stared at each other a moment across this cultural divide, smiling together in recognition at what separated us and what united us. Then we began walking again.
    “So what do you do for a living?” he asked me.
    “What?” I laughed. “I can’t be a glamorous children’s author?”
    “Yeah, right! If you were J. K. Rowling, baby, you wouldn’t be coming into my sad