of myself as unusual, or even particularly Mediterranean. In Estonia, I was a coffee-flavored ice cream scoop in a sundae of vanilla. I pitied anyone who was chocolate. If someone like me could scare Estonian children, I imagined that the sight of an actual black person might cause trams to collide or construction workers to slip from the tops of Tallinn’s unfinished skyscrapers.
And I knew that even if I mastered the Estonian language, ate sült every night, and taped a blue-black-and-white flag to my window, my looks would always betray my origin. But it wasn’t just looks or language that kept me apart. There were other ways to sort out who was an Estonian and who was not.
I met Helina at a train station on Long Island, New York, the month before. She arrived with her teenage sister Maarja and two rolling suitcases. It struck me immediately how different they were from the other disembarking train passengers. They were both blonde and thin and quiet, polite and tidy. No shirt was wrinkled and no hair was out of place. I played one of my favorite bossa nova songs in the car. By the end of it, my soul swirled with emotion. But the sisters were unmoved. Epp’s cousins didn’t speak, they murmured.
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