I told Steele that before I died I wanted to go back to Mozambique and swim with whale sharks. When I was there in 2002, October I believe, I went diving with wild dolphins off the coast of Ponta Malongane. After our boat returned to shore, some people from the group went back out. This time they encountered whale sharks. I’ve always regretted not going back with them; I felt like I missed such an opportunity. Probably that’s not really the one thing I want to do before I die. I just don’t like the feeling of an opportunity lost.
We stopped at this school in the countryside of Mozambique. I observed one of the students in our group calling a little boy at the school that was holding a football he wanted to play with by whistling and clapping his hands. I wondered to myself if he thought the boy was a dog. I wrote in my journal afterwards: “I have a lot of black people in my family tree, most of them are hanging.”
I suppose he didn’t know what language to use to communicate with the little boy. At our camp site, another little boy came up to me. He said: “Do you speak Portuguese?” I said, “No”. He said: “Afrikaans?” I said, “No, I only speak English,” feeling totally embarrassed. I was the only black person in my group and I didn’t speak any African languages. That was very strange for the little boy. He said the average native person spoke seven to eight African languages.
Later in life I studied Kiswahili while I was in Kenya. Steele knew one Swahili word: Twende! It means ‘let’s go.’ I used to say, ‘Twende’ when he was taking long. He would say it back to me when I was taking long. His last two days, we communicated mostly through silence. By that time he was speaking a different language.
Probably before I die what I really want to do is learn how to bring people back from the dead. Not so that I can come back, but so that I can bring other people back. If I brought Steele back, I would ask him to dance with me like we would at our wedding.
We had this running joke about our wedding dance. He didn’t like to dance, and I had never really danced a formal dance. You know you see it on the movies how romantic those dances are. Actually, it’s not just the movies. I went to my girlfriend’s wedding in November and her first dance was pretty romantic; especially because she is so short compared to her husband, but somehow they just fit together like two perfect puzzle pieces.
So one time I asked Steele to let us practice. He said people go to classes before their wedding to learn how to dance. I said I wanted to try now. So we assumed the position, and there must have been some ‘contemporary music’ playing somewhere, dancehall or something, because I started to gyrate my hips in this sort of ‘bump and grind’ motion. He just burst out laughing. He was like what are you doing? That’s not how you formal dance. So every now and then after that he would grab me up and be like, let’s dance, then he would start gyrating and wining on me. We would crack up.
One time he did it seriously. I can’t recall the circumstances leading up to it, but it was at my Acadia apartment. We danced together for about 30-seconds; his right hand on my hips, my left hand on his shoulder and our other hands locked together. There was no music playing, but we just danced. It was such a perfect 30-seconds. I remember thinking, ‘he’s so sweet’. He never did that again, only the bump and grind version.