|
 When I arrived home Thursday night after practice, I knew I wasn't going to sleep much. It had been three days since my return from France - already pretty tired from a scary first semester in a M.A. program - where Meryem and I went to rep Nomadic Massive as back-vocalists for The Narcycist at Les Transmusicales de Rennes (check out the concert on any of his sites) and I hadn't fully recuperated. I set my alarm for 5:00am, knowing that I wanted to give myself an extra half hour of snoozing, but enough time - hopefully - to make it to bus station by 6:30am.
I stayed awake due to anxiety, checking my cellphone every hour, fearing that I would oversleep and miss the bus altogether. I forced myself out of bed by 5:36 and went directly to my perch at the computer, my habitual act every morning, to find emails about late schoolwork, reminders of Maison des Jeunes General Assembly and missing minutes that I as secretary of the board would have, invitations for Hip Hop No Pop presentations, requests, youtube links of all of Troy Dunnit and Lotus' videos, dialogues, messages from friends bitter at my absence from our friendship, as well as booking requests and negotiations, promo packaging issues, interview shout-outs for Nomadic Massive etc.
I rushed out of the house, not really knowing what I stuffed in my bag in terms of stage gear, motivated by an idea that I would find a pair of black leather Chuck Taylors somewhere in Brooklyn before stage time. Meryem and I were going to hold it down as lead vocalists for this Brooklyn gig, so we wanted to look fly. The main male emcees (Lou Piensa, Waahli and Vox Sambou) were between Sao Paolo, familly responsibilities, and youth center directorship. I caught the Parc Avenue bus at 6:50, smiling to myself that I didn't have to pay $10 for a cab, completely unphased by the potential of disaster awaiting me at a horizon not as beautiful as the one I watched reaching the ParcAve and Rachel peak(Uptown - a track on our new album "Nomadic Massive" - playing softly in my imagination's soundtrack). As we trudged down the slope, I dialed Meryem's number to make sure she was even awake, 24hrs prior she was still in France. I knew not to worry about Bird (Jason Blackbird, the trumpeter), he rarely flies outside of the configuration. Meryem was 5mins away from the station and as a true team player, she was going to save the spot in line.
NY is a popular destination any time of the year (nice travel slogan, no?). The line was almost full at 7:10 when I saw the black epulet and brown leather case stoic as usual, no golden curls bouncing around, though. It didn't make sense to Bird nor I that I arrived before Meryem since she was in a car and I was on public transport. By 7:20, an unanswered phone led us to slight panic - well, I panicked, Bird shook his beak. The curls came bouncing past the rest of the morning travellers. When we got to the front of the line, ready to board, my panic returned, when we thought Meryem didn't have her passport. We had quickly decided that she would take the 9am bus, and Bird and I would go ahead. There was a dark cloud looming at that point, but the sun had fully risen, blocking it from our squinting gaze.
Jason bird-napped while Meryem and I girl-talked, relieved that she had found the passport in her luggage. Approaching the border, we listened to the mumbling bus-driver's instructions, pulled out our travel package that D had given to each of us, and stepped off the bus into the line-up.
 There's a huge, framed photo of Obama on the wall at the border. It looks quite awkward pushed over to the far right of the wall, among multi-lingual warning posters. I guess it's supposed to be a warning poster too. Two burly guards slowly approached the counter, anticipating a bald-headed, equally burly black man who looked like life had dealt him very bad cards, standing behind Meryem and I. Before he could get to the counter, and in fact before we did, they pulled him out of the line and brought him to a private room. The signs were all around that things weren't going to go well for us, but we were basking in our privilege to talk out loud about how corrupt police officers are in Cote-des-Neiges, how as community workers its easy to become a defeatist, naively thinking that our Canadian passports always got us in free.
Bird was asked if he had ever had a problem with the police, or had ever been in front of a judge. He was cleared. My officer asked me what I was going to do, and I answered honestly. "I'm going to do a show." He asked me about ever having problems at the border, my number of bags, what was in them, who packed them, what do I do for work, when was I planning to return home. I never had to produce the letter identifying that I was participating in a "non-profit international artistic exchange". I went to sit next to Bird, while Meryem was still with her officer, who bared a younger resemblance to Mr.Burns. The bus started to load up, Meryem was now sitting down again, waiting for a response. Her officer was enquiring with his supervisor about what to do with this criminal musician.
The letter said we were 6 travelling, but where were the others? We answered that two were already in NY, and one was following us later. He didn't understand what it meant to participate in a "non-profit international artistic exchange". The venue, Little Fields, and all of the promo around the world about this event, had advertised a door price of $10, therefore SOMEONE was going to profit, therefore we needed a work visa (of the P or H variety) even for a day, even if we weren't "receiving financial compensation", as the letter indicated. We embarassingly went back on the bus to collect our belongings. The suspicious looking burly Black man, was back in his seat.
They took our passports, and one by one we were fingerprinted and photographed. It was explained to us that this was procedure for anyone denied entry and that whenever we were planning to cross, we had to explain ourselves, and not try to lie, since it would be in the records. It all took about an hour. Mr.Burns didn't have an explanation as to why his colleagues had let Jason and I through. Obama's gaze was probably burning through the back of their heads, and they didn't have a Saudi oil tycoon's photo to protect Meryem.
 Another man was awaiting a decision whether to grant him entry. He had a criminal record and although he was a bald, burly white man, his face told the same story as the Black man at this point snoaring on the bus headed down the I-95. As a tear of joy - really - rolled down his face, he was stunned that he, with a criminal record was granted permission, an apparently arbitrary decision. explained the female officer dealing with his case. In fact she said: "It could have gone either way."That's good democratic policy: Arbitrary decisions? He yelled out to us, as we were being escorted to the van to be taken back to Canada's border: "What? You're not getting through?" I responded: "No, we're musicians."
I was foreshadowing this experience, about 2 years ago when I wrote these 2 bars in my verse on Nou La (it's also on our new record "Nomadic Massive"):
"Late night you making moves undetected, daytime we making moves and we suspected of evil things when it's rhymes we bring not an extraordinary thing, and yo, we talking to you!"
Word,
Iam BlackGirl
|
