After a concert in Bed-Stuy with the Brazilian band I play with, I make my way through a street fair under a leaden, blowsy summer sky, shouldering my open-sided drum.
I put the drum down at the edge of a tent where a woman is selling African-print clothing, a riot of colors fluttering in the wind. I’m susceptible to the bold prints of wax cloth (pagne, ankara; it has many names in different countries), to the inventiveness of the tailoring, and to the grandmothers selling, who fuss and insist any garment looks perfect on me.
I’m in the market for short sleeves today, the kind they call a “camp shirt.” It’s hard to find one that fits; many African tailors don’t work to standard sizes, or mass-produce many shirts with the same print. But I find one just my size. The geometric print might be subtler than I’m looking for, but it’s in the kind of blue that reflects in my eyes and doesn’t make me look too pale.
The Guyanese proprietress glances at it as she tries to wrestle her wares into order. “That looks good,” she says. “I like to have a few shirts like that, where you can’t hear the drums coming up behind you.”
“My drum is right there!”, I stammer out, startled by her nearly-naked appeal to racism.