Mixed: My Life in Black and White (14 page)

“What do you want us to offer, Swahili?” she replied.

“Why not?” I responded. She looked at me, wrung her hands, and said she’d look into it.

The Berlin Wall came down and the school decorated the main hall with pictures celebrating its fall. The pictures were still there five months later when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. No one in administration put up anything for him.

“How come you don’t put up anything for Nelson Mandela?” I asked.

The next day, next to FREEDOM FOR EAST GERMANY! someone had stenciled in AND SOUTH AFRICA! I caught Miss Betty writing
Not
really, just Nelson
next to the new addition.

When Christmas rolled around, I knew I had to figure out how to get myself kicked out of Baldwin. I believed my mother’s and brother’s mental health was on the line.

My brother had begged all fall for a collector’s-edition GI Joe figurine, but because my mother had to save up to buy my school books and spring uniform, she couldn’t afford any expensive toys. Under the tree was her GI Joe substitute, a big grab bag full of green plastic military men, the cheap ones that were frozen forever in war poses. My brother broke down sobbing. “You can’t bend them at the waist like GI Joe!” he yelled.

“I thought these
were
GI Joes,” my mother lied. There was no way she thought that a bag labeled AMERICAN HEROES! was the toy he wanted.

“I wanted the GI Joe Scuba Set!” my brother cried. “ You can fill it with real water!” My mother went to the kitchen and came back with a bedpan she’d “borrowed” from her job to wash dishes in.

“You can fill this with real water,” my mother said and then fell asleep under the tree. She had to go to work in a few hours.

“It’s all your fault!” my brother whispered to me. “You and your stupid boyfriends and bad grades made Mom poor!”

He was right. I promised him I’d work harder to get kicked out, and if it didn’t happen by next Christmas, I’d rob one of the rich white girls and buy him a GI Joe set myself.

I started the new year by writing up a list of demands for my school.
If you’re so committed to diversity, we’d have rappers at our next
music series,
I wrote, sure that asking for hip-hop would mean my expulsion.

How was I to know that my ceramics teacher’s husband owned a recording studio? At the next music series, a struggling rapper and her backup dancers entertained the upper school. I waited to cause more disruption until I flirted with one of the dancers and secured him as my date to the tenth-grade dance. After the dance, I started up again. “I refuse to go to yet another anorexia and bulimia seminar because studies show black women don’t have eating disorders,” I told the headmistress. She agreed with me and I got a free period, while the other girls learned to love their bodies. “It makes me sick to my stomach that third-graders are allowed to call the cleaning women by their first names!” Soon after, there was a schoolwide memo that all faculty and staff were to be addressed as Mr. or Ms., unless they requested otherwise. “I want a full scholarship! I demand it as part of my reparations!” That I didn’t get, but my mother didn’t care. “All this work is worth it to get you a good education,” she said, after pulling yet another double shift.

Finally, I knew the only way I would get to leave Baldwin was by convincing my mother I hated it. I caught her when she got her tuition bill for eleventh grade. “They lowered your scholarship!” she exclaimed. “People told me they do that the longer you’re in the school. They know you don’t want to leave once you get there, so they’ve got you hooked!”

“I don’t have to go back,” I said. “I hate it anyway. By the time I get home, I’m too tired. The white kids don’t have to travel two hours!”

“Well, it’s going to be like that all your life. You’ll have to work twice as hard as white people to get to the same place,” she said. “Look, I just don’t think public school is right for you. There are too many distractions.” I knew distractions meant
boys.

“If I get into Girls’ High, can I leave Baldwin?” I asked, grateful that Philadelphia had an all-girls public school. My mother looked again at the tuition bill and gave in.

“Only Girls’ High. I don’t want you around any boys,” my mother said.

A few weeks later, I applied again to a series of public magnet schools, hoping my mother would change her mind about no boys if I got into one of the best schools. Girls’ High was full, but I was accepted by the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, granted I passed a special “creative arts” test.

“I don’t know about this. I said no boys,” my mother said as we walked into the school. When the only boys she saw were a troop of dancers in full makeup demonstrating their ballet skills to prospective parents, she changed her mind. “Yes, this school will do.”

I passed the entrance exam by writing about my orange hockey-stick incident and transferred to Creative and Performing Arts in the middle of eleventh grade. “If there is one behavior incident, you go back to the suburbs,” my mother warned me. I made the honor roll on my first try and graduated with only one minor incident, which I never told my mother about. (I was punched in the face by a crackhead when Boyz II Men filmed their first music video outside our school. I was standing in the way while she was trying to steal a part of the set.) I graduated with a letter of acceptance from the University of Pennsylvania. Somehow, it didn’t strike me as odd that I’d done all that work to escape one white private school and there I was going right back to another.

Nation of Islam Lite

In an unusual research project conducted in 1968, anthropologist Melville Herskovits measured the lightness of skin and width of facial features in Blacks of two different socioeconomic groups. . . . The well-to-do men were found to have generally lighter skin color, and their noses were an average of 3.8 millimeters narrower than those of men in the poorer segment of the research group. Similarily, the average lip thickness in the well-to-do group was 1 millimeter less than the thickness found in the other group.

—Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall,
The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (
detailing the only kind of
study I wouldn’t have signed up for in college,
no matter how much it paid
)

“You are so blessed. You got into one of the top schools in
the country, and you can’t go to church and thank God for that?” my mother said, shaking her head.

“I’m sorry, I have to work,” I replied. I did have to work, because I had signed up to work every Sunday so I could get out of going to church. The Christian God was for white folks. So was that school I’d been accepted into and I had debated not even attending. My new boyfriend and I had plans to open up a nonprofit school for black children. After some thought, we decided that since so many black people worship the white man’s educational degrees, my having a degree from an Ivy League school could help us convince more black parents to enroll their children.

Mah (short for Madani; he’d chosen the name for himself out of a book of Muslim baby names) was the love of my seventeen-year-old life. He was an intelligent hoodlum, the type of man we suddenly righteous black girls dream about. Mah had no problem punching someone in the face, but he also found time to go to museums with me and draw white people into debates on whether or not Egyptians were black (“Look in the artifacts case! That’s a pick! Since when do white people use picks?”). The more white people he offended, the prouder I was.

Mah and I met on the subway. I was reading
The Autobiography
of Malcolm X.
I wanted to read the book before Spike Lee’s version hit theaters.

“It’s so nice to see a sister dressed righteously and reading,” Mah said, leaning over me. My outfit wasn’t put together with righteousness in mind. I was a size 18, and the plus-size stores didn’t stock too many skin-baring outfits. If I was a size 6, I’d have had half my ass hanging out.

My size didn’t matter to Mah. During our first date, he told me that my mind was more important than my body. “White men want those skinny girls because they want to keep them small and controllable like children,” Mah said. “I want a woman who can think for herself.”

On our second date, we went to a black bookstore where he read to me from
How to Eat to Live
by Elijah Muhammad. I listened attentively and made plans to throw away all my mother’s meat when I got home. We picked a new name for me from the same book he’d gotten his from. I left my given name at the bookstore register and left with Talibah—translation:
seeker of knowledge.

“It’s the perfect name for you,” Mah said. “Even though you’re light, your search for truth makes you blacker than most of the dark-skinned girls out here.” Men, if you want to hook a biracial girl looking for acceptance from the black community, use that line. I was in bed with him the same night.

My mother hated Mah.

“I know that boy’s mom didn’t name him no Mahami Salami,” she said, intentionally butchering his name. “I’m going to call him what his mother named him.”

“Mom, please,” I pleaded. She could at least respect the man I thought of as my husband-to-be, even if she insisted on still calling me by my slave name.

“Angela isn’t a slave name. I gave you that name. And your last name isn’t a slave name either. The Nissels came over here after slavery.”

I had to admit she was right about the Nissel. Still, Talibah Nissel didn’t sound very black, so I began to add an extra
l
to the end. Nis-
sell,
I’d tell people. “It’s a Creole name.”

By the time I started Penn, I was living pork-free and had cut the perm out of my hair. I was determined to be the blackest freshman there. I moved into the W.E.B. DuBois House, a dorm dedicated to the study of African American culture. Most white students seemed afraid of that dorm, so it was like I was going to a miniature black college inside a white school.

DuBois was one of Penn’s many Living Learning Residence Halls. In addition to DuBois House, there was a modern language dorm for students who wanted to live like Parisians and a health residence for future doctors and nurses. DuBois, however, was the only residence hall that white students seemed to have issues with. Though it was open to people of all races, the campus newspaper often carried op-ed pieces about how divisive it was. White students often referred to it derisively as Da Boyz House.

Soon after I had unpacked my bags in DuBois, the campus newspaper ran a front-page photo of a homeless black man lying on the sidewalk with the caption
West Philadelphian.
I wrote a complaint letter to the editor. “My mother was raised in West Philadelphia! How insensitive, considering that the majority of the housekeeping staff who clean up vomit after your white frat-boy parties are West Philadelphians!” It wasn’t published.

Soon after that photo, every corner of campus I went to, I’d hear white students complaining about being forced to go to school in West Philadelphia, “the scary ghetto.” I’d hear this in front of the cafeteria workers who’d been working and living in the scary ghetto their whole lives. I overheard a girl on the Safety Van (the Penn van that transported students door to door so they wouldn’t get robbed in the scary ghetto) telling a student how she’d just had a “spectacular interview” at Goldman Sachs in New York. “I hope I get it so I can move out of these slums.” The van’s driver, an older black man, shot an angry glance at her through the rearview mirror and then rubbed his hand over his entire face, as if he were adjusting his features to keep his composure. I had an image of my grandfather talking about his last job as a train porter. How he drove two hours to work and kept a tense smile on his face as white passengers looked down on him.

I decided to get off at the same stop as the Goldman Sachs interviewee did and gently scare the crap out of her. I followed her up the front stairs to her building, as if I lived in the same apartment complex. When her key was in the door, I tapped her on the shoulder. She gasped, as if prepared for me to rob her.

“All black people aren’t trying to rob you, honey,” I said, laughing. “I just heard you talking about your interview at Goldman Sachs. My father works in human resources there,” I lied. “He grew up in West Philly—these slums, as you call them. I got your name off the van sign-in list, and I’m calling him first thing tomorrow.” She reached for her rape whistle. I ran around the corner.

As freshman year rolled on, the already frequent derogatory newspaper columns about West Philadelphians and DuBois House seemed to increase tenfold. Instead of my dorm being a lively, happy safe haven for black students, it was as if someone had poured dust over it and painted it gray. Few people smiled when they walked through the doors. Students congregated around the front desk and complained about how much they hated Penn to Miss Lisa, the older receptionist, who looked after us like we were her children.

“Can you believe someone had the nerve to tell me I was only here because of affirmative action?” someone asked. “I got all A’s in high school!”

“Why do we have to integrate with
them
? Why can’t they walk their plates over to our table?” my roommate grumbled while she was brushing her hair. She’d just read the latest editorial accusing black students of being racist because they chose to eat together in the dining hall.

Finally, unable to limit their anger to complaints inside the safety of DuBois, a group of black students woke up at 5 A.M. and grabbed all the free school papers from every campus drop-off point and tossed them into a recycling bin. I watched as the students came back to the dorm refreshed, crying and laughing, finally releasing the hurt they felt after reading those articles every day. By evening, the incident had made national news.

To outsiders, it seemed as if every student in DuBois supported the mass disposal of the campus papers. In reality, it caused a small group of us to splinter off and separate ourselves from the paper tossers. Not because we thought throwing away free papers was stealing (as some news stations put it), but because we felt their efforts were too pacifist, too old-school-protest, too Negro-spiritual singing and hoping the white people would recognize the error of their actions and change.

“Mah, can you believe these backroads Negroes?” I said while we walked to a meeting of my new anti-paper-tosser group. Though Mah didn’t attend Penn, he was welcomed. To turn away a brother because he didn’t have higher education would have been too elitist for my activist friends.

I silently dubbed our group of eight Nation of Islam Lite, since one student, Terrell, who used to be in the Nation of Islam, would bring VCR tapes of ministers’ lectures. We’d watch them on Friday nights while the majority of DuBois students were out partying at the only black frat house on campus.

“They are so
Negro
to be out drinking.” Terrell sighed. “Don’t they know that one day a white man is going to realize that all the black students are in one place and tear-gas the house?”

“That’s the quickest way to kill black people: Invite them to a party and then drop a missile on the house,” Mah concurred, pressing PLAY on the VCR.

“Ooh, ‘The Goddamn White Man’!” a sister in a head wrap cooed. “That’s my favorite tape!”

“The Goddamn White Man” was a lecture given by a minister about all the destruction caused by—well, the goddamn white man. It made sense to me. White people were always trying to blame black people for violence, when in reality they were the ones doing all the dirt. God knows I had been reading about their wars and their enslavement of brown people forever. Every nation they touched was left ravaged. Even my ex-boyfriend, who got caught stealing cars, was doing it on commission from white-owned auto body shops for parts.

“Yeah! How come when
they
riot, it’s called a party?” a girl about my complexion screamed as the tape played. “The Boston Tea Party wasn’t a party! That was a damn looting riot!”

“Show me one good white person,” the minister on the tape implored. I couldn’t think of one. Not my relatives, not my non-child-support-paying dad, and certainly no one so far at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sometimes, we’d have speakers at our group. I was floored by a white guy who believed that white people were prone to violence because they were from colder climates. “White people are from climates where nothing grows. After thousands of years of fighting, only the strongest, most violent whites have survived,” he explained. He even suggested that white people were the missing link that anthropologists had been searching for. “They call black people monkeys and chimps, but have you ever seen the skin of a chimp? It’s white! Their hair is straight, just like white people’s!” I was so excited after that speaker. “If a white person is saying that about his own people, it has to be true,” I said, not realizing that— by that reasoning—if a middle-class person in the Boonies said poor blacks were just niggas, that had to be true, too.

My love for the white speaker was my first major argument within the group. Malik, whose father was in the Black Panther Party and had discovered wiretaps in the organization’s phone, told me it was a sign I still had a slave mentality if I believed someone just because he was white. He was right. Why was it easier to believe something because a white guy said it? We’d been hearing tape after tape of black people saying basically the same thing about white people. I apologized.

We learned about CoIntelPro, the Tuskeegee experiment, and hormones in meat. I became paranoid and cautious, though more so in front of group members than in private. I proclaimed myself a vegan but would sneak off and eat Twix bars by the case, even though they were on the “banned food list” because they had gelatin in them. (“That’s a pork-based product, queen,” Terrell said.)

I’d bend the rules more blatantly when it came to money. The rule of “Trust no white person, especially those in medicine and government,” isn’t an easy task if you’re broke. Anytime a campus-sponsored medical study came up that paid more than twenty-five dollars, I’d be the first one on the sign-up sheet. I eased my guilty conscience by never giving answers I judged would make the black race look bad. On a survey of campus sexual activity, I checked VIRGIN. When asked how many hours a day I spent studying, I filled in the SIX HOURS OR MORE bubble, the maximum time.

One day I checked the psychology board and found a study that specifically wanted freshmen and was paying four hundred dollars. I could buy a lot of leather Africa pendants and meatless burgers with that, I thought.

There was a pretest to see who qualified for the study. I couldn’t figure out what types of people they were looking for from the tone of the questions, so I just answered truthfully.

How was my adjustment to college life coming? I checked off D: NOT SO WELL.

How had I been feeling the past couple weeks? D: NOT SO WELL.

A week later, there was a message on my voice mail from the Psychology Department. They wanted me to come in right away. I got excited and started spending the four hundred dollars in my head, I’d never had that much money at one time. I wondered if I’d get cash or a check. If it was a check, I’d take it to the bank and ask for one hundred-dollar bill and three hundred ones, so the wad would look really thick. I’d save half and spend half. Forget the Africa pendants, I’d get Mah some of that herb Goldenseal he needed to flush the marijuana out of his system before he applied for a job with the Philadelphia Gas Department; then
he
could buy
me
pendants.