Chocolate Croissants & Black Boy Joy
Buses are overrated anyway
Mulmul is a bakery in Addis that my family frequents; it is the highlight of my children’s after-school life. It is actually a chain of bakeries in Addis, but I hesitate to use the word ‘chain’ because it’s so much more of a ‘mom and pop shop’ than anything I’ve experienced in the States. After I pick my children up from school, they always insist that we stop by Mulmul to buy baked goods. Their personal favorites are the chocolate croissants.
I love Mulmul’s smell of freshly baked bread: they have everything, really. French baguettes, challah, oat loaves, barley loaves, cakes, cookies, croissants, muffins, vegan banana muffins, you name it. They’ve got it. I love the quaint little store’s neighborhood vibe. And I especially love all the women who excitedly welcome my kids, particularly my 4-year old son, who coyly smiles his way into whatever he wants. Whenever we stop by the store, the slew of employees gather, smile, and enthusiastically greet my kiddos. At this point, they just pull out chocolate croissants and get it ready to go as soon as they see my 5 and 4 year old kiddos at the door. And as if the friendliness emanating from this sweet establishment wasn’t enough, my kids also get to observe more noteworthy acts of affection on the scenic 20-minute drive home.
With powdered sugar sprinkled on their cheeks, my kids excitedly eat the croissants in the car and often look out the windows to see boys from a local school in the blue and gray uniforms hitching rides. We’ve gotten accustomed to seeing a group of 15-20 rowdy boys walking together in smaller sub-groups: some holding hands and talking, some laughing, others pretend-fighting. They often try to hitch a ride from us since our car is big and they often mistake it for a taxi van. When the boys do manage to score a ride, it’s not uncommon to see the entire pack hopping atop a single car. Yes, 20-kids on top of one car or van. We often witness the vehicle tilting and struggling to get up any remotely hilly areas on the road.
I try to imagine this situation in good ‘ol America; it could very well be catastrophic for so many reasons. First, you’ve got vehicle capacity laws that would prevent the hitchhiking component. Next, toxic Black male masculinity in the States has made it socially unacceptable for heterosexual Black male teenagers to hold hands. Moreover, rowdy large groups of Black boys walking in well-to-do neighborhoods, trying to hitch a ride? Yeah, that would not end well. And yet, here, it’s an everyday occurrence that we’ve gotten used to and quite frankly, it makes us smile and muse at the beauty of it all.
Witnessing Black boy joy and the free-nature of these young men gives me hope for my son and for countless others. It teaches me –a woman well into her thirties– that genuine platonic love between Black men can be expressed physically; that people can be really kind and unassuming by taking on a group of rowdy adolescent men they don’t know in their cars; that kindness really does radiate and pulse through the veins of everyday people in this country from the women at Mulmul who sell baked goods filled with love, to the boys who hold each other extra tight so no one from their pack gets injured during their bumpy rides home from school.