Open City

A couple nights later, a “take back the night” party is taking place below Julius’s apartment when Nadège calls to break up with him. They tried to make their long-distance relationship work—with her in San Francisco and him in New York City—but it didn’t. Julius also thinks about a friend of his who loves jazz music.

The next night, on public transit, Julius dislikes a man with a broken leg asking for money. Then, Julius helps a blind man on the platform, and sees a second blind man coming out of the station. He thinks of the subway as part of the domain of the Yoruba deity Obatala. Julius goes into a bookstore and finds a book about the early Dutch settler Cornelius Van Tienhoven, written by one of his psychiatric patients. The patent is a historian who writes about the history of New York, and Julius recalls a recent session in which she talked about her personal connection to another of her projects—a book about the Delaware and Iroquois tribes.

As he enters the movie theater, Julius thinks about the weather and global warming. He notices that the crowd for the movie, The Last King of Scotland, is diverse. The movie itself makes him upset, and he compares it to The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin, another movie about the same man. He recalls going to an event for med students at the house of a surgeon named Dr. Gupta, who makes racist comments about Africans.

After the movie, Julius compares its heavy content with the heavy content in his patient’s book, making a connection between the sometimes-violent histories of his two homes—Nigeria and New York. On the subway ride home, the children of a couple of tourists make racist remarks about Black people to Julius. Their parents pay no attention to their actions. On his walk home, he decides he wants to get in touch with his maternal grandmother.

One afternoon, Julius walks in the rain and thinks about an academic paper that he worked on with a professor, Dr. Martindale. While walking through Central Park, he thinks about his grandmother, who lived in Germany, and his mother, who moved to Nigeria. His grandmother—or oma, as he calls her—visited his family in Yorubaland when he was a kid. They had some time together in silence, which Julius enjoyed. He was disappointed that he didn’t see her again.

Julius goes into the American Folk Art Museum to get out of the rain for a while. He describes an exhibition of works by John Brewster, a deaf artist. Julius views the portraits alone, in silence. He considers how society seems to romanticize blindness but not deafness. While viewing the exhibition, Julius notes which models are deaf and which are not, and he thinks about what Brewster’s life must have been like. When the guard tells him that it’s closing time, Julius finds that he’s forgotten how to speak.

Outside in the rain, Julius gets a cab, refusing to allow a woman to take it from him. The driver, also from Africa, is offended that Julius doesn’t greet him when he gets in the cab. Julius apologizes and tries to talk to the driver but does not get a response. This angers Julius. The driver stops a few blocks away from Julius’s apartment and refuses to drop him off any closer.

The next day, Julius walks to a poetry reading. Bees remind him of the Yoruban deity, Olodumare: “who sits in the sky like a cloud of bees” (42). He lays on some gravel in the park for a few minutes, then travels the rest of the way to the reading by a Polish poet. The poet talks about persecution and wears glasses which reflect the lights.

A few days later, Julius experiences stress at work and keeps thinking about his patient, M., after heading home. He stays on the subway past his stop and watches the people in dark clothes. When he switches to another train, he notices more people talking and wearing brighter colors.

Julius gets off at the Wall Street station and thinks about its architecture, as this is the first time he’s seen it. He leaves the station and walks around Wall Street itself, noting multiple fitness centers and a painter working on a depiction of the Stock Exchange.

At Trinity Church, Julius considers its past connection to whaling and recalls a passage about whales by the Dutch settler Anthony de Hooges. The earliest Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam witnessed whale beachings in 1598 and came to view whales as a portent. Julius notes that Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, was a parishioner of the church. The church is locked, so Julius walks towards the water.

On his way into a restaurant, he notes the empty space in the skyline where the World Trade Center Towers should be. In the restaurant, he is surprised to encounter the guard from the Folk Art Museum. Julius becomes annoyed with the guard and compares him to the Black cab driver. When Julius feels like the guard is hitting on him, he leaves.

He looks across the bay at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. These landmarks of immigrant arrival, fundamental to New York’s self-image and to that of the US more broadly, stand in contrast with the stockyards where Africans were brought to America as enslaved people. Though both Julius and the cab driver are from Africa and not descended from enslaved people, he thinks about how he, the cab driver, and the museum guard all share the experience of being Black in America, realizing that the tension he experienced with both of them derives from the fact that their shared racial identity should serve as a common ground between them, but they are alienated from one another by class difference. He continues thinking about his patient, who had an extramarital affair with someone who shared his wife’s Turkish nationality. He is troubled by the fraught interconnection between personal identity and racial or national identity. All this reminds Julius of his recent break up, and he briefly thinks about slipping into the Hudson.

After watching some skateboarders, Julius looks at a plaque dedicated to dead police officers behind the World Financial Center. A crowd comes out of the Center, and Julius walks with them to the overpass and onto Vesey Street. He thinks about the diverse things and people who existed before the Twin Towers on the same site, and he experiences a yearning for connection with the past.

The narrator recalls a summer day when he and his ex-girlfriend, Nadège, went on a trip with her church group. He noticed her limp for the first time that day, conjuring a memory of a girl from his childhood who also walked with a limp. The church group, the Welcomers, visits a detention facility in Queens for undocumented immigrants. Julius waits for visiting hours to begin, then listens as a prisoner named Saidu tells his story about leaving Liberia and coming to America. Saidu first asks Julius if he is African.

After Saidu’s mother and sister were killed in the war, he traveled through Gbarnga, Bamako, Tangier, Spain, and Lisbon. In Lisbon, he was able to save enough money to fly to the US. When he arrived at JFK airport, he was immediately detained and sent to this facility. Saidu tells Julius a little about the conditions at the facility. After the trip, Julius repeats Saidu’s story for Nadège, more concerned with demonstrating that he is a good listener than with the man’s plight.

In December, Julius agrees to have his shoes shined in Penn Station. The shoeshiner is an immigrant from Haiti named Pierre. He shares details about his past, including being enslaved in the household of a Mr. and Mrs. Berard, who brought him to New York. Pierre learned about hairdressing from Mrs. Berard, and bought his freedom, and the freedom of his future wife, after her death. They founded a school in St. Vincent de Paul for Black children.

Pierre’s story of enslavement in the present day causes Julius’s sense of historical time to become scrambled. Outside, he feels the cold weather and has a flashback to the Draft Riots, a violent 1863 protest against the Civil War Draft that included racist attacks against Black New Yorkers. He thinks he sees a lynching, but it turns out to be canvas on a construction scaffold.