My Madiba Moment - Part 15

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I don't quite recall how the Ticker-Tape Parade in the Canyon-of-Heroes ended, but I vividly remember chancing upon several old good friends and acquaintances from City College, including the Trinidad-and-Tobago (Trinbago) woman that I had been having a great crush on for some two, or so, years then. Drupati Lachall was her name; and she belonged to that between-betwixt group of Trinidadians called "Dogla" or "Dogra," depending on which Caribbean country the speaker was from or the kind of dialect s/he spoke, I had been told.

Drupati had enrolled into CCNY's nursing program a year after me. But her true passion seemed to be in journalism, particularly photo-journalism, and that was how we had met. She had taken to writing and taking pictures for one of the campus newspapers. She also seemed to be quite a quick study and had almost immediately learned how to both take pictures and print them the deadly old way, with cancer-causing chemicals. But she did not seem to be a tad-bit worried about the great risk to which she was putting her life. Once or twice, we had even spoken about the dangers involved. And her simple and mild response had been as follows,"Kwame, you know, as long as you are very careful and you follow safety instructions to the letter, there is absolutely nothing to worry about."

Drupati would also invite me to the dark-room to witness how "it all came together," as she would so cheerfully and delightfully put it. But I never once took her up on her several invitations. In asmuch as I was deeply smitten by her, even madly in love with her, I also knew exactly where to draw the line when my very life seemed to be at stake. There was something at once uncannily magnetic and magical about Drupati that I couldn't quite place a handle on, as it were, that strongly drew me towards her. She could not be strictly described as pretty in the routinely vulgar manner of average New Yorkers. Which is not to imply that she wasn't prepossessing in her own way, because she definitely was. But her daintiness seemed to be more behaviorally oriented than being purely physical. She looked matronly and extremely patient.

Once or twice, I had remarked about her big, strong and sturdy-looking neck and joked that, like me, she must have grown up carrying a lot of things on her pate. I had hawked salt and brobbey, a cocoyam variety, on the streets and alleyways of Akyem-Asiakwa, as well as regularly ferried firewood and cleared brushes on farms. I had also carried plantain and cassava peels on my head, as feed for the sheep and goats my grandparents kept in a pen in our backyard. Felling trees and splitting up firewood had also blistered and callused the palms of my two hands.

When we met just before the Ticker-Tape Parade, across the street from City Hall, I bear-hugged and squeezed Drupati so hard and tightly that I had been afraid I might break a bone or two of her body. Very likely my own bones, of course. Drupati had gone to City Hall to take pictures of the globally celebrated couple and to write an article or two for the newsletter-like third CCNY-campus paper that she had recently helped to found and whose editor she currently was. I forget the name of the paper right now, but I remember that it came out less frequently than either The Campus or The Paper, and was housed in a room across the lobby in the east-wing of the North Academic Center (NAC), the humongous ultra-modern edifice that housed most of the liberal arts and social science departments. All the campus newspapers were located on the first floor of the six-story NAC building, as this flagship facade on the plaza was popularly known.

In asmuch as we seemed to be mutually fixated on each other romantically, it was all-too-obvious that our relationship would never be conjugally cemented. As a woman in her late twenties, almost exactly my own age, and of working class background, Drupati seemed to be quite in a bit of hurry to settle down and create a family with that proverbial prince charming. Alas, having just graduated from CCNY with a bachelor's degree in English, Communications and African-American Studies, summa-cum-laude, and having logged in a humongous 180 (yes, one-hundred-and-eighty) academic credits, a record for any City College first-degree graduate, and I am strongly inclined to suspect the same for the entire 21-campus City University of New York system, I was iron-clad bound for graduate school, precisely the doctoral program in Global African Studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into which I had already been accepted. (I had previously turned down Howard University, Washington, D.C., because Howard divisively maintained separate African and African-American Studies programs).

In brief, the last burden, no matter how delectably romantic, that I wanted to be saddled with, at the time, was a wife and a family. Besides, I had yet to fully establish my economic independence from my parents. But what also considerably got me a bit more nervous was the fact that Drupati, I learned through a mutual friend, was on either a student or visitor's visa. What this meant, of course, was that I couldn't be surefire certain that her part of the romantic equation was wholly untainted by the urgent need to securing a permanent foothold here in these United States through the expedient use of a conjugal plank.

And to be frank with the dear reader, I wouldn't have cared a dime one way or another; except that this was America, where the conjugal maze could be treacherously destructive once things began to go awry. That would be the last time that Drupati and I saw of each other. She had quite a different name at school, which I cannot presently recall, for I, characteristically, preferred to call her by what I dubbed as her "authentic domestic 'West-Indian' name," Drupati Lachall. She must, by all means, be successfully practicing nursing somewhere. Or maybe even journalism, her passion. Who knows? Wherever she may be, I heartily and fondly wish her well!

When I got home, to the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper-Manhattan, it was nearly 11 p.m. I haggardly slumped into a couch and clicked the remote onto one of the then-three major network television stations to watch a neatly packaged summary of the days hectic activities with my dad. Perhaps it was ABC-TV, New York City's Channel 7 "Eyewitness News" station. As dog-tired as I was, I still literally felt positioned on the cusp of the globe. I couldn't have been more elated, even euphoric. For, afterall, hadn't I just actively and fully participated in this surrealistically grand unfolding of history?

On the news, we would learn that the city had racked up an overtime security-detail tab in excess of $2 million, which had promptly been picked up by the United States' Department of State or Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in many non-Western nations. And then an adult white South African couple zoomed into the crosshairs of the news-camera lenses and were promptly introduced by the African-American reporter as a brother and his sister. They had shipped out of the sinister clutches of the odious apartheid regime, when life ratcheted up to near-unbearable levels; and so the viewer could poignantly imagine what abjectly nightmarish conditions the bulk of indigenous South Africans had been going through. And had, indeed, been enduring during the protracted decade-and-half that these two white South African adult siblings had been abroad.

Then the camera zoomed even more closely and intensely onto the face of the woman, who had a toddler beside her. And then a solemn, almost wan look of utmost concern flushed over her face, when asked by the reporter what words of advice she had for the globally renowned and longest-serving prison graduate. "Mister Mandela, please take good care of your health. We gonna need you for a long time to come." Very prophetic words, indeed, aren't they?

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 26, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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