 |
| Artwork by Lorna Simpson; source: more.com |
(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)--I first knew there was such a thing as blue mascara
because of Aunty Chinwe. She came to visit my mother one Saturday, her braids
held sleekly at her neck, her caftan’s silver embroidery gleaming and her
lashes the bright color of a crayon. Against her dark skin, they were striking.
“Aunty, your lashes are blue!” I said.
I was 11.
“Yes, my dear. It’s blue mascara,” she told me with a
smile. She was always smiling, eyes crinkled, teeth very white.
I liked most of my mother’s friends—funny women, kind
women, brilliant women, and there was the one soft-spoken man—but only to Aunty
Chinwe would I say something like that. Aunty, your lashes are blue!
She had an air of endless tolerance, of magnanimous
grace; she turned every room she entered into a soft space free of the thorny
possibility of consequences. With children, her manner was that of an adult
just about to hand out lavishly wrapped gifts, not for a birthday or Christmas
but simply because children deserved gifts.
I sneaked into the parlor whenever she visited, and sat
in a corner, and eavesdropped on her conversations with my mother. Because she
drank Fanta elegantly from a glass, I eschewed bottles and began to drink my
Coke from a glass. I loved simply to look at her: petite, graciously fleshy,
with a dark-dark complexion that made people think she was from Ghana or Gambia
or somewhere not Nigeria where beautiful women had indigo skin. At her clinic
she gave injections with the gentlest touch.
