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Marie Samuelsson.
    We had arrived in the early 1970s, in what was then a small, working-class Scandinavian city, but my mother wanted to do more than make us Samuelssons: She wanted to embrace black culture however she could. Because Anna’s birth father had been Jamaican, my mother spent what little pocket money she had on Bob Marley records. I can still picture her singing along to Bob as she stirred her spaghetti and peas. When Linda and I showed up, Anne Marie added Miriam Makeba to the mix. Makeba was not exactly Ethiopian—not Ethiopian at all—but African and beautiful all the same. Even now, I can’t hear a song like “Three Little Birds” without thinking of my mother blasting her music, like she blasted her love, out loud.
    I might have looked on my childhood differently if I hadn’t met Mats Carestam. He’s my oldest friend. We met when I was five years old and I realized there was only one kid in the neighborhood who was as good as me at soccer. That was Mats, and I knew, even then, that we were going to either hate each other or become the best of friends.
    We became the best of friends.
    From the beginning, my battles were his battles. Which was great because Mats was a guy who took no shit. It’s not so much that he had a quick temper. It’s more that he was always this big kid who was never afraid to get down in it. No matter how nicely his mother haddressed him before he left the house, within minutes the knees of his pants would be muddy and grass-stained, and he’d be a mess. His shins were always a collage of bruises. Whenever I think of Mats, even today, I picture him wiping the back of his hand across his face and all over his clothes like a kid in a laundry detergent commercial.
    I ate at Mats’s house as often as I ate at my own, and I lived for his mother’s creamy macaroni and cheese. A dish like that was way too modern for my mother. Mats’s mother served store-bought meatballs, which my mother would
never
do. My mother didn’t love to cook, but certain things she would never cut corners on. There was also a generational gap between our families. Mats’s parents were much younger, more on the go, much more contemporary.
    Everything Mats ate, he covered in ketchup. Which was fine with his parents, but always left me slightly bewildered. How could you taste the cheese or the meat or the potatoes when they were drowning in cold red tomato sauce? And Mats would eat fast. He’d make himself a giant plate of mac and cheese, meatballs, pickles, lingonberries, cover the whole thing with ketchup, and wash it down with a pint of milk in about two minutes. Mats didn’t care what you put in front of him as long as there was plenty of it. He was a big kid and he ate not out of greed but because his body was this
machine
that demanded it.
    It helped that my best friend was built like a tank when we started junior high school. I’d long healed from the tuberculosis and the distended belly of poverty was gone, but I was still built like an Ethiopian runner—lean and wiry. In my mind, I was as cool and powerful as any of the American black men we saw on TV, but in the land of Vikings, I stood out as a scrawny little kid.
    O NE DAY AFTER SCHOOL , Mats and I were headed to his house for an afternoon of listening to music, reading soccer magazines, and chowing down on the kind of packaged pastries and soda my mother never had in our house. We’d made it halfway across the school playground when a basketball hit me in the back so hard that I stumbled forward.
    “Hey, Marcus, why don’t you teach us how to play
negerboll
,” a kid named Boje called out.
    It was always a little hard to tell if Boje was honestly mean-spirited or if he’d been drafted to play the part because he was a big, muscular kid, even in the sixth grade, like a nightclub bouncer. In either case, he was the closest we had to a bully at our school and I’d been lucky enough to escape his attention. Until now.
    Negerboll
. The