Free Open City by Teju Cole

flitting from one subject to another in a Caribbean accent. He was from Barbuda, he said, and was surprised that I’d heard of it.
    Most of these Americans don’t know anyplace, other than what’s right in front of their noses, he said. Anyway, I’m waiting for some friends, and isn’t this a nice place? Oh, you haven’t been here before? I shook my head. He asked where I was from, what I did. He spoke fast, chattily. One of my housemates, once, in Colorado, he said, was a Nigerian. He was called Yemi. Yoruba, I think he was, and I’m really interested in African culture anyway. Are you Yoruba? Kenneth was, by now, starting to wear on me, and I began to wish he would go away. I thought of the cabdriver who had driven me home from the Folk Art Museum—hey, I’m African just like you. Kenneth was making a similar claim.
    I used to live in Littleton, but I was at university in Denver, studying for my associate’s degree, he said. You know Littleton, right? The massacre happened just after I arrived there. Terrible thing. Same thing happened with New York, I got here in July 2001. Crazy, right? Completely crazy, so I don’t know whether to warn thenext city I move to! Anyway, the museum position, you know, it’s all right, something to do for now, it’s nice, but what I really want to do is … Kenneth spoke on, rapid, automatic, but his tawny eyes were immobile. Then it struck me that his eyes were asking a question. A sexual question. I explained to him that I had to meet a friend. I apologized for not having a business card with me, and said something about visiting the museum again soon. I left the restaurant and stepped back out onto South End. It wasn’t far from there to the water, and as I moved toward the waterline, I felt a little sorry for him, and the desperation in his prattle.
    This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night. All was quiet and lights called from the Jersey shore across. A pair of joggers sailed softly toward me, and past me. Along South End, facing the water, there were rows of townhouses, small shops, and a little, round gazebo choked with vines and bushes. Out, ahead of me, in the Hudson, there was just the faintest echo of the old whaling ships, the whales, and the generations of New Yorkers who had come here to the promenade to watch wealth and sorrow flow into the city or simply to see the light play on the water. Each one of those past moments was present now as a trace. From where I stood, the Statue of Liberty was a fluorescent green fleck against the sky, and beyond her sat Ellis Island, the focus of so many myths; but it had been built too late for those early Africans—who weren’t immigrants in any case—and it had beenclosed too soon to mean anything to the later Africans like Kenneth, or the cabdriver, or me.
    Ellis Island was a symbol mostly for European refugees. Blacks, “we blacks,” had known rougher ports of entry: this, I could admit to myself now that my mood was less impatient, was what the cabdriver had meant. This was the acknowledgment he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every “brother” he met. I walked north, along the promenade, listening to the water breathing. Two old men shuffled toward me in shiny tracksuits, deep in conversation with each other. Why did I feel suddenly that they were visiting from the other side of time? I caught their gaze for a moment, but