Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson Read Free Book Online

word hung in the air as the boys around us, all kids in our class, froze. There couldn’t have been more than twenty boys in the group, but I felt like there were a hundred eyes on me. Boje had thrown the ball hard, but the word hit me harder. Mats picked the ball up and stood protectively in front of me, but the words kept bouncing up and down against the pavement:
    Neger
    Boll
.
    Neger
    Boll
.
    Neger
    Boll
.
    Although it sounded like
nigger
and Boje spewed it with that level of venom,
neger
was the Swedish word for
Negro
. There was even a Swedish cookie called
negerboll
or, in English,
Negro ball
: It was made from cocoa powder, sugar, and oats. But Boje was not calling me a cookie. And he had thrown a basketball at me, which I took as its own kind of loaded symbol. It was the early 1980s, the dawn of the Michael Jordan era, and most Swedes associated that orange ball with dark-skinned men.
    Boje wasn’t done with me yet. “What, does the
neger
not know how to play
negerboll
?”
    Mats looked like he might shove the basketball down the tall, blond boy’s throat.
    “Leave him alone,” Mats growled.
    Later, back at Mats’s house, all my clever, cutting retorts would come at me in a kind of beautiful wave, like the way genius mathematiciansscrawl numbers and letters on chalkboards in movies. But in the moment, the very first time in my life someone called me out as
neger
, I had said nothing. I had spent years growing in the quiet confidence of being Anne Marie and Lennart’s son. I knew that they did not look like me and that I had come from a faraway place called Africa, but it was no more mysterious for me than it was for kids who still believed they had arrived on their parents’ doorstep by stork. When Boje called me a
neger
, when he threw an American basketball at me and tried to hurt me, physically and emotionally, I had to ask myself for the very first time—
was
I different? How was I different? And in the same way that five-year-old Linda had kept vigilant for months on end, the question occurred to me for the very first time—where was home? Was this place it?
    In his
Letters to a Young Poet
, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that the young poet should “live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” I was an eleven-year-old kid in Göteborg and not particularly bookish. I’d never read Rilke at that point, but somehow I came to the same conclusion that I would have to live the questions.
    That night, when I described the incident to my family at the dinner table, my father seemed concerned, but my mother jumped right in with what she thought was a viable solution:
“Kalla honom vit kaka,”
she said. Call him a white cookie.
    I moaned and tried to explain that it would not have the same effect. But my mother, like the mother of bullied children everywhere, could not understand that in middle school there was no such thing as a fair fight.
    For the next three years, Boje hardly let up. Anything spherical could be lobbed at me and turned into a taunt. A little Sambo had long been used to advertise
negerboll
cookies in Sweden and I felt a sense of dread anytime I saw a boy open a package of them at lunch because I knew that the wrapper would soon be coming my way. Mats never hesitated to stand up for me. He wasn’t just defending me as a friend, he was standing up for what was right.
    I later learned that Mats’s parents had anticipated the racial taunts way before my own parents had and had instructed their son not to tolerate anyone picking on me. I wondered then about the boys who stood up for me and the ones who shied away from the fight. How had Team Marcus and Team Boje been formed? Was it boys who were raised right and boys who were not? Was it boys who were scared and boys who were not? The lines were split and it wasn’t about friendship. Inside the
negerboll
coliseum we were all gladiators. Outside of it, almost all of