The Seeds to Set Me Free
Every childhood is strange. Every childhood is a foreign country. In my case, I mean that literally: I spent three of the first six years of my life in a West African village, living with the Mandinko, as my father conducted his doctoral research. His explanation of the village's tragedy came in simple, horrifying terms: "There are stories the Mandinko tell. These same stories were told by slaves in the American south. That's one way we know that the Mandinko were among the first people to be captured and sent across the ocean." At night, tucked under mosquito netting in our mud hut, I pictured beautiful stories lodged in the mouths and minds of my people, taken from our home against their will.
The summer I turned sixteen, I was given a choice: I could play Miranda, or I could play Caliban. I'd been back in America for ten years. I was at camp, they were casting The Tempest, and I was in love. With Shakespeare, yes, but also with the counselor directing the play. Summer glistened. He sought me out in the unmown grass and presented the choice: the ingénue—my namesake—or the monster. It thrilled me to believe my crush thought that I—all gawky, 90 pounds of me—was beautiful enough to play the female lead. But I recognized, with great disappointment, what I must do.
Miranda is limited. Practically all she has is her beauty, save a gape-mouthed awe at the world. Caliban is ugly, funny and mean. He has tried to rape Miranda. But Shakespeare endows him with the most beautiful language of the entire play. I knew, even as a teenager, that Shakespeare had done that on purpose, hidden something astonishing inside something seemingly abhorrent. I chose Caliban.
That same year, on a reservation in rural Montana, I thought I saw a baby die. It began when she was accidentally locked in a Buick, while her mother, and her mother's friends, and my best friend and I, partied in the wilderness. My best friend and I were visitors from Oregon. We were trying to set up an exchange program between our mostly white, mostly rich suburban private school, and a Catholic K-8 school serving Native American kids—the same kids with whom we'd built a bonfire and were drinking beer.
In the velvet Montana night, we tried in vain to break the car window, as the baby slept and the young mother cried. My best friend and I decided to run for help. When we finally returned with an adult, we were met with a terrifying sight. The car holding the baby was on fire. The blaze lit up the world—outlining tree branches, delineating our features. There was nothing we could do but watch. The Buick was reduced to a piece of twisted metal. I felt sick. Then, just like that, the young mother was walking toward us, and in her arms she held her baby: "We got her out. Before." The baby was alive.
When people ask me whether Set Me Free is based on my life, I tell them no. But every element of this essay—living among an ancient people who are simultaneously my own and not my own; having a wise, thoughtful father; playing Caliban at sixteen; being an adolescent at the mercy of a blinding, terrible blaze; and so much more—is at the very heart of Set Me Free. I am a writer because only when I am writing do I feel truly at home, truly myself. Here, I am outside characters, creating worlds for them, and inside characters, imagining what it is to be in those worlds. On my thirtieth birthday, my mother gave me a silver bracelet I had worn as a child in Senegal. One my friends teased archly, "Well, you had a magical little childhood, didn't you?" Every childhood is strange. Mine makes me write.