Is You Okay? (17 page)

It was just a coincidence that the next man I dated was an older white guy from church whom I called “PK” because he was a preacher's kid. He reminded me of the character Jethro Bodine from the old TV show
The Beverly Hillbillies.
He was cute and strong and kind of simple. That was okay, though. I couldn't work with
stank
or stupid, but I could work with simple.

My main concern though wasn't whether
I
could make it work, it was whether other people could.

Surprise, surprise, my mom had very strange opinions about black and white for as long as I could remember. For
instance, she hated when I used to dip my chocolate chip cookies in milk.

“Why you gotta dunk those cookies in that white milk!?” she'd say every time she caught me doing it. She said it so often it eventually gave me a complex. In college, I'd turn the lights off in my room and crawl under the covers any time I wanted to have cookies and milk.

One day, when I was really young, we went to an ice cream shop for a treat, and my mom told DeOnzell and me that we could get whatever we wanted. The freezers were full of all these exotic flavors: mocha almond fudge, pralines 'n' cream, strawberry shortcake, mint chip, rainbow sherbet. I went from one end to the other considering each flavor until I finally made a decision.

“I want vanilla,” I said.

“Vanilla! VA-NIL-LA!” she repeated slowly. My mom looked at me like I'd just spit on the grave of Martin Luther King Jr. I didn't know that's why she was upset at the time, however—I thought she was bothered by my manners.

“Sorry, Mom,” I said, then turned to the man behind the counter and asked very respectfully, “May I have vanilla,
please
?”

My mom was beside herself. Of all these flavors, her daughter had to pick vanilla. She and my dad did not endure decades of discrimination and work their behinds off to raise a daughter who ordered
vanilla
! Seeing her frustration, I quickly changed my mind and ordered bubble gum instead, since it had the most colors in it. That made her happy.

I brought this story up to my mom recently and we both laughed about it. I said, “You know, Mom, vanilla actually comes from a bean that is black.”

She didn't miss a beat.

“Yes, and the only way people will eat it is if you slit it open, scrape out its insides, and then whip it with milk and sugar until it's white.”

I wasn't going to argue. God bless that woman.

To my mother's credit, while she certainly was different, she wasn't discriminatory. She was totally fine with my white boyfriend PK. She was happy if I was happy.

And I was. Until the wheels came off, that is.

It started with PK's bathroom habits. We'd go to a restaurant for dinner, have a wonderful meal—even better conversation—and then, when he was finished with his food, he'd go to the bathroom and disappear for twenty, thirty,
forty
minutes. The first time it happened I was worried that he may have gotten himself locked in, or that he had fallen into the toilet and got stuck. Then he'd come out and act like nothing happened.

When we were by ourselves, this weirdness was bad enough, but when we were around other people, well, that's when it got
really
uncomfortable.

A couple weeks into dating, we went over to my friends' house to watch a movie. A bunch of us were hanging out, not doing much of anything, when sure enough, he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. When the door closes, my friends give him the thumbs-up.

“We like him!”

“He's a great conversationalist.”

“He seems to be a couple french fries short of a happy meal, but he's sweet. . . .”

And I'm, like, yes, yes, and yes. . . .

And then thirty minutes go by, then forty, then an hour, then another fifteen minutes, and still he doesn't come out of the bathroom. My friends' opinions turn on a dime.

“We don't like him!”

“What is he doing in there?”

“Does he know how to turn a doorknob?”

When PK finally emerged from his cocoon like a bathroom butterfly, one of my friends got up slyly a couple minutes after and went into the bathroom to do some reconnaissance. She didn't find anything. It didn't smell. The toilet didn't look like it had been flushed, the sink basin wasn't wet, the toilet paper roll was full, the hand towels were dry, nothing was missing from the medicine cabinet.

To this day none of us can figure out what he was doing that whole time in the bathroom—or any time in the bathroom for that matter. Was he praying? Doing drugs? Texting another girl? It was, and it remains, a complete mystery.

Still, I defended him. My list of important character traits in a boyfriend had shrunk so far by this point—he was cute, he had a job, he didn't stink, he had his own place where his family didn't live—I could handle some weird bathroom habits.

The deal breaker came shortly after this when he took me for lunch one day to a restaurant called Souplantation. I'd never heard of Souplantation before this moment. If you've never heard of Souplantation, either, it's a chain restaurant that serves,
duh,
soup. When we pulled up in front of it, I looked at PK like he was crazy. Does he really think I'm stepping one foot inside a restaurant with “plantation” in its name?

You probably think that sounds crazy, and I understand especially if you're on the younger side, but you have to realize where I come from, with a mother who has opinions on black-white relations that go all the way down to the level of dessert, that there was no way I was going to cross her when it came to
lunch!

Do you want to know who I bet
wouldn't
be surprised by my reaction? SOUPLANTATION! Because in the South, that company doesn't call its restaurants “Souplantation,” it calls them “Sweet Tomatoes.”

It's not uncommon for a franchise to have different names depending on where you are in the country. Like Biggie and Tupac, there's an East Coast / West Coast thing. Carl's Jr. in California is Hardee's in Florida. Best Foods mayonnaise is Hellman's (that's what we used on Patrice). Dreyer's ice cream is Edy's. The difference between all those companies, though,
is that
only one of them uses a different name to avoid making a whole lot of African Americans really upset
.

This was my first experience dating anyone outside my race, so I knew we'd bump into cultural differences eventually. I just never expected it to involve a piping hot bowl of Yankee Clipper clam chowder. As a black woman from the South, I had a serious problem with this, but PK didn't understand. I mean he “got it,” the way you understand that racism is bad, but he didn't really
get it
the way you do when you try to understand how someone else might feel. This was the simple part of PK finally biting me in the rump, and I couldn't work with it after all.

What was it going to take to find a good guy? I didn't
need
a man in my life—I never have, and you don't either, by the way—but I wanted a partner to share my journey with.

It felt like God was punishing me—for not being a good wife, for getting divorced, for not keeping my hands inside the ride at all times when Jacqui and I were Rogue and Storm, who knows? All I know is that this string of guys would have tested even the most trusting person's faith in humanity.

A couple months after I broke up with PK, I flew back to Orlando to get away from everything and to help my mom pass out flyers for Congresswoman Corrine Brown (the representative of Florida's Fifth Congressional District) at the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Eatonville, Florida. It's a weeklong event, which is too much flyering for any sane person, so I came in on the second or third day to meet up with my mom and help her out. I walk into her house and she's getting all dressed up—way too dressed up to stand out in the Florida heat passing out flyers.

“Mom, are you going to the festival?”

“Oh no, I can't go to the festival today. I've got to go to my prayer meeting.”

Mom should have used air quotes when she said “prayer meeting” because all that meant was that she was going to play cards with a bunch of little old ladies from church.

“I came to visit you and spend time with you, now you're going to play cards and I'm stuck passing out flyers by myself?” I was so annoyed. Is everyone going to make promises to me and not deliver? Is everything going to seem one way, but be another?

“No, baby, you won't be by yourself,” Mom said, like she knew what would make me feel better. “You're going with Ms.
Sanders. Her daughter works for Congresswoman Brown. You can take her car.”

Ms. Sanders is a very loud, brassy, say-what's-on-my-mind-because-I'm-old-enough-to-get-away-with-anything kind of person. She also used to be the lunch lady at Jones High School when my father was a student there and would always give him extra food because she could tell he was hungry. For the wake after his funeral, she even brought his favorite meal—Mexican meat pie. Of course I would happily drive her to the festival, even if I would less happily pass out flyers by myself.

So there I am at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival, and it's hot, and there's no place to sit down, and I'm trying to get the attention of people who are more interested in looking for deals on shea butter. It couldn't get any worse if I was at a drive-through window architecture conference inside a Souplantation that smelled like pee and onion farts!

I walk around a little while longer and I come across this ring of bricks that looks like it was created to cover up an old well. People had started to sit on it while they ate food from the refreshment tents, and there was one spot left, so I took it. It was no La-Z-Boy recliner, but it was the most comfortable I'd been in hours. I said to myself,
You know what, I'm just gonna pass out my flyers from here,
and that's what I did. I
didn't get up until I ran out of flyers and had to go back to the congresswoman's tent where they had extras.