I really cannot see what threat communism can pose to the world order, at least not as it has done in England. So much jargon, so much theory. Proletariat, bourgeoisie, hegemony: what do these words mean to the fisherman in Segu? I said this to Thomas afterwards and he replied that the meeting was a necessary part of my political education. All I saw was a gaggle of Englishmen playing revolutionaries. There were some members of the working class present, oil on their hands, straight from some factory job or the other, but for the most part, it seemed to be the bourgeoisie they are trying to destroy. One speaker said Labour is killing the movement with its cheap housing. The proletariat are being lulled into complacency with indoor plumbing and central heating.
It appeared Thomas was trying to politicize my father. I’d never seen the point of politics in Britain. There was no choice, only the same men who had gone to the same schools, pretending to believe in different things. I hoped Francis did not succumb.
It was already noon and I was still in bed with the diary. Francis Aggrey’s writing was not always easy to read. When his tone was angry, his letters shrank into thin black strokes. I spent a quarter of an hour trying to decipher a paragraph.
I got out of bed but did not open the curtains. There was nothing to see in the room. I was hungry but I had no food in the house. There had been a flurry of resistance when the supermarket chain opened at the top of my street, but we all shop there now, grabbing the bargain cuts and combination deals. The store had made us all richer, pushing the value of our houses over two million pounds.
I stepped outside into the cold. I did not like the area much when we moved in. We were on the cusp of the countryside. In spring, when the wind changed direction, you could smell the manure. The street was like a car showroom now. Low, sleek sports cars that never went at full throttle, tethered birds in our suburbia. The neighborhood children didn’t play on the streets anymore. I saw them strapped inside 4x4s but I rarely heard their voices.
I saw my neighbor Katherine by the shop entrance and swerved into the vegetable aisle. Of all my neighbors, she was the only one who came to knock on my door after the ambulance came home with my mother. She brought us food that was too rich for my taste. I did not know how to respond to her kindness. She invited me to her church, but I declined. It was too much to exchange for cream of mushroom.
I had only come for sausages, but I found apples and soup and ice cream in my basket. I had lost weight on a diet of takeaways or nothing. I did not like to eat by myself, hunched over a foil pack with a plastic fork, brittle enough to bite through. I must have appeared eccentric to the young Asian man I gave my twenty-pound note to. I had worn my coat over my pajamas and my hair was uncombed. He was already looking past me to the next customer, preparing his “How are you today?”
I fried two sausages when I got home. Their skins ruptured, hot mince spilling out like lava. I covered them in baked beans. I forgot to buy bread. I fetched Francis Aggrey from upstairs when I was done. He was familiar to me, a friend, almost.
I have been thrown out of my lodgings. Thomas came here the other day and made a racket. He turned up my record player and stomped around until my landlady herself came to knock. I felt chastised when I saw the old lady, not far from my grandmother’s age, woken from sleep to ask us to keep it down. But Thomas shouted at her, “Ma’am, now you have a real complaint for your racist son!”
Reprisal was swift. The son came two days later with a tough behind him. He won’t have any coons insulting his mother. Clear out or they’ll break my bones. I made a meek protest, citing tenancy agreements and contracts. Then he decided to become violent. He pushed me in the chest and so I pushed him back. I have not wrestled with street boys in Segu to have an English midget shove me about. I was ready to fight them both when the useless back-up said, “If you give any trouble, we’ll call the police and get you done for assault.” I have chosen not to test the impartiality of the London police force. I am writing this from Thomas’s flat. As he was the one who began my troubles, I will stay here until I find a new place.
I want to cheer for young Francis. He would have taught me how to fight, how to make a fist and throw a punch. Not like my mother, who raised me to have nice manners no matter the provocation. I was told to shrink from conflict even when it sought you out, even when it thrust its finger in your face and said, “Go back to your fucking country.” Tell them this is your fucking country, Francis Aggrey would have said.
He wrote about living with Thomas, two young men in close quarters. My father was the tidier of the two, the more domestic. Thomas arranged their social affairs, dragging my father to meetings with what he termed the “British left.” Francis was skeptical but he went. He had traveled some distance from the Francis sitting alone in the British Museum, ogled by strangers.