Starfruit

One day beside the starfruit tree, Rasheid discovered a seed. Laying there amongst the stones of the path, it looked as if a brown teardrop had sprouted a tiny human fist. Rasheid stooped to get a better look just as Henry the Eighth waddled out from behind the chicken coop.

Henry the Eighth was the thirty-pound gander who had terrorized Rasheid much of his life. Upon sight of Henry the Eighth, Rasheid’s heart squeezed up tight like a fist and his hands began to shake. He plucked the seed from the ground; also, the stone beside it. Summoning every ounce of bluster available to eight year-old boys, Rasheid turned upon Henry the Eighth.

The stone he’d chosen was one of the many projectiles the boys next door had thrown against the zinc wall of his family’s chicken coop. Over and over again the boys hurled these stones; over and over, the frightened birds squawked and flew. The boys next door were bullies, just like Henry the Eighth. When they caught Rasheid on his way to school, they beat him and tossed his textbooks into the muddy waters of the trench. Which led to a beating, in turn, from his mother.

Henry the Eighth turned his head on its long neck and sized up his opponent with one glinting eye. Rasheid held his ground; also, his breath, the stone pulsing in the grip of his fist. Finally, he took a sudden step towards the bird. The gander flapped his wings once in hesitation, lowered his head, then turned and ran off on silly, high-stepping legs.

Rasheid waited a moment, then smiled. He whipped the stone hard against the wall of the chicken coop, igniting a long crow of protest from the rooster, a long-suffering cackle from the hens. The seed he kept, like a secret.

Marcia was an American girl, with an American name, but her features were strange, her skin was the wrong color, and she had hair in all the wrong places. Those dark, silky strands sprouted luxuriantly from the tops of her toes, her forearms, and worst of all, from her upper lip—leading to her mortification in the form of a freshman-year crush, who’d told her she needed a shave. The darkness of her hair served to emphasize the darkness of her skin, which highlighted in turn the strangeness of her features.

Her mother urged her to wear light colors and avoid the sun. But the real problem, Marcia understood, was her father. Despite his extensively professed modernity, Rasheid would not allow her to sport the Mod fashion of the day—in this way sabotaging whatever slim hope she might have had of passing. Marcia could not talk to him about this; his anger was a rock, always awaiting a clear target. Any disagreement with him, however small, caused her throat to clench up tight like a fist.

Marcia staged her rebellion by degrees. First, by surrounding herself with the color brown, for which she’d been ostracized, despite her American name: brown leather shoes, old brown books, kitchen twine coiled up in brown twist, her mother’s Clairol Number 29, old sepia-toned family photographs, leftover Lipton tea bags and stained tea towels, and her mother’s clandestine Swisher Sweets. Anything brown eventually wound up in Marcia’s bedroom, the illicit ones hidden in the closet. It was the only color she would consent to wear and it drove her mother crazy.

Her father wanted her to become an engineer, so she became an artist, composing vaguely erotic images collaged from the pages of Vogue Magazine and the National Geographic. When he discovered her composites of rainforest primitives sporting mini-skirts and underwear models with the faces of Dian Fossey’s gorillas—culled from the pages of his precious subscription, which he treated as a kind of religious document, delivered in serial—her father exploded, predictably, with rage. He destroyed her collages and locked the stacks of the National Geographic in the closet of his study. He even went so far as to threaten her with an arranged marriage, which was the last thing he wanted. Although she still could not speak in the presence of his anger, Marcia had perfected the art of vacating her gaze.

But then, in her freshman year at Ohio State—the year she’d attended a war protest, declared her major in Fine Art, and even gone so far as to smoke some marijuana in a dorm room, out of an elaborate imported hookah—the clenched fist of her father’s heart finally gave out. He died six months later.

After so many years of pushing against him, Marcia found herself leveled by grief. Without his opinionated bluster, her mother seemed fragile and lost. The two of them sat on the front porch together, smoking openly at home, their freedom resting heavily between them.

Marcia discovered the seed amidst scores of old newspaper clippings, her father’s passport—issued in the year of independence, with the word ‘British’ hastily crossed out, by an official black marker, before the word ‘Guyana’—crudely carved wooden cups that leaked quinine into water, and two decades worth of coupons, copiously clipped. A little brown seed with a bit of a callused protuberance at one end. The seed had tried to sprout at the wrong time, maybe, or in the wrong place. Marcia smoothed it between a thumb and forefinger.

She dropped out of the school that year to marry an engineering major. They bought a house in the suburbs close to her mother, and before a year had passed she was pregnant. Marcia relegated her artwork to a crafting, finding work as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. But over the years, she became increasingly aware of a certain inexplicable longing, for a taste she had never known. A crisp bitterness, a pale yellowgreen. A sweet which is not sweet.

By the time Danny came of age, the idea of America was café au lait, a Benetton ad in primary colors. He was a confident, intensely competitive boy. In high school, he played basketball, edited the school newspaper, and got straight A’s. All the girls loved the darkness of his skin, the exotic mystery of his eyes. When he was eighteen, he was chosen as a National Merit Scholar and was subsequently accepted to his first-choice school. On the day he left home, as a parting gift, his mother gave him a little brown seed, which she said had belonged to his grandfather.

In college, Danny found himself increasingly enraged. Where once he’d been able to walk past street-people, or perhaps drop a few coins in a cup, he found himself now railing against the mental health system, the American VA, and gentrification of low-income neighborhoods. Danny took the school to task on the pay-scale for college janitors and even the sweat-shop labor that produced their official apparel. He held himself to impossibly high standards, and brooked no difference of opinion. He channeled his righteousness into the study of law, which he saw as a means by which to defend the defenseless against the bullies of the world. To those he loved, he had become a kind of bully himself.

Years later, defending Caribbean refugees from deportation, he fell in love a Haitian artist named Marie. She was an elegant black woman who spoke French, received by his grandmother with polite horror. Marie created immense tapestries populated by sequined spirits called loas—in which, like faith healing (despite her education at Le Ecole des Beaux-Arts) she actually claimed to believe. Danny considered this ignorant, backwards and asinine, and he told her so. To which she simply vacated her gaze. Which is why it came as a shock to hiim when Marie informed him one day, quietly but clearly, that if he did not exorcise his anger, she would return to France.

He found it between the pages of a book he’d been reading his freshman year of college. Oddly enough, the seed seemed to have germinated in the damp darkness of those long New England years, and had sprouted in the shape of what appeared to be a tiny human hand, its five finger-roots unfurling. Having spent most of the decade hence in South Florida, where almost anything accustomed to heat took root, he decided to bury the seed in the backyard. In the days to come, he felt increasingly at peace. Marie agreed to stay. The seed, miraculously, grew.

Nine months later, his first child was born. The tree in the backyard by then was lovely and vigorous; it produced, in time, an abundance of starfruit, which can be held between the fingers of a single hand. He hated the sour-sweet yellow fruits it bore, but his dark-eyed daughter found them delicious.