Too Long

Raymond was overjoyed. It was the quiet kind of happiness, the kind thrived best when it was contained within one's self, a little self-sustaining ball of bliss. As his plane touched down, he gazed out at the endless sands surrounding the black strip of runway; the skin of the world with a lash across its back.
He gently nudged his sleeping wife awake. The two were visiting the wife's parents in Tanzania. She had graduated from her prepatory school with highest honors in math and science, and it was for this reason that her teachers had reccomended that she apply for college in the United States. Her parents fortunately had the financial means to send her to an excellent public college on the Eastern coast, so that she could be as close as possible.
The heat was soft on Raymond's skin as he stepped from the aircraft, gently easing down each of his goosebumps that dotted his skin like a fabric pattern. His wife ran to her parents, hugging them both deeply as they each kissed her cheek, now wet with tears. It had been years; it had been too long.
The village the wife's parents lived in was quite untouched by the modern world, and it was a two-hour ride from the airport to the village. The purity of it all struck Raymond as they entered the wooden threshold of the parent's home. He felt clean, stripped down to his bear essentials...
As he walked through the village market, with its pungent smell of fruit, soft noise of sand crunching underfoot, and the Tanzanian language floating through the air, its intonations like the beat of drums, Rayomond realized that he had never felt so at home. "This is where my people came from" he thought to himself. Raymond had, however, been brought up in a suburb of Chicago.
Passing by a fruit stand, Raymond saw a white man arguing with the shopkeeper. His loud hawaiian shirt broadcasted his tourist title almost as loudly as he was yelling at the blindsighted seller of fruit. Raymond decided to intervene.
"What's goin' on here?" Raymond demanded, looking down into the squat figure of the white complainer.
"This man sold me some rotten fruit, and I want my money back."
"Give this po' guy a break! I cain't believe you'd give this guy trouble when y'could buy his who' stand with one a yo' American bills."
The man, obviously not in the mood for an argument he could lose, licked his lips and walked away, dropping the mangoes at his feet. Raymond nodded to the shopkeeper. "Don' let people like that trouble ya. They shouldn' be here anyways." The shopkeeper smiled uneasily in response, and in frangmented English replied "I thank you, mister."
"Ain't no thing. Us niggaz gotta stick t'gether anyways, right?" Raymond smiled, and walked away, quite happy of the help he had provided.
That night, the shopkeeper closed up his stand, took the remaining produce, and carried it home in a sack slung over his bony shoulder. He arrived and unloaded the various exotic fruits on his family's wooden table creating a centerpiece saturated in color, as if a pastel set had vomited in the center of the dining room.
As his mother and father were slicing the peeling the bananas, the boy asked the question that had been on his mind all day.
"Mother, Father, what does "nigga" mean? Because apparently I am one."