Mixed: My Life in Black and White (19 page)

“I heard it was mostly white down there and you had to have private insurance,” my new roommate, Kay, said. “They throw the poor niggas up here.”

Besides the all-black population, there were two other big differences from the level I’d come from. On Floor One, almost every patient had visitors and it wasn’t uncommon for them to stay for the entire four hours they were allowed. On Floor Two, only one person had a visitor all day.

In Floor Two groups, when any of the doctors or group leaders tried to talk to the patients, they’d respond either with a shake of the head or with nothing at all. I fell right in line with the doctor-ignoring culture. I didn’t want people to think I was trying to be the cute light-skinned girl making friends with the enemy. My Occupational Therapy leader sighed in frustration, as if we were beyond help.

When I got out of the psych ward and researched black people and depression, I read numerous studies that detailed rampant misdiagnosing of depression as schizophrenia among African Americans. When black people show distrust of the system, as I had, by calling out, “Of course you’re not going to yell at the
white
guy,” they are often labeled delusional. It’s hard enough to navigate the mental health system with the right diagnosis. With the wrong diagnosis and no support from outside sources (whether your lack of visitors stems from keeping your hospitalization secret or because your family is ashamed of you), I have a hard time seeing how anyone could get better.

I didn’t want to be one of those people.

What I wanted to do was get off Floor Two. I knew I couldn’t do that by ignoring the group leaders and doctors, so I started talking. In morning meeting, I talked about how shitty I felt and how much I missed my cats, cringing as the other patients looked at me like I was a traitor. In Occupational Therapy, I answered every question asked. If no one interrupted me, I kept talking, certain that pouring out my soul about the emotions I felt while cutting up Jones New York ads would be my ticket to freedom.

“Your group leader thinks you’re manic,” Dr. Chase informed me. I cut my talking back by half.

Finally, two days later, I was allowed to go back downstairs. The official word as to why I was allowed back was that I was finally “behaving properly,” but two nurses and all the old ladies told me otherwise: Rose and her friends, Mary and Elizabeth, had refused to eat until they brought me back downstairs. Three old ladies went on a hunger strike for me!

“They didn’t have to straitjacket you!” Mary said.

“That was wrong. We’d been telling them for quite a while that Gus is a shit!” Elizabeth added.

I started smiling. Look at these three old white ladies with their own problems sticking up for me. They were widowed, with un-caring children, depression, and dementia, and they were sticking up for me. Maybe these frail white ladies weren’t devils.

Who cares if they are?
I thought. What if I just do what
I
feel like doing and not worry about how people judge me for it?

I grabbed my tray off the rack and sat with my new friends.

It seemed like such a simple thing, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had done anything in front of people without fear of judgment. The uncomplicated act of sitting where I wanted to sit felt so powerful that I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer, grateful for the insanity and those three hungry old white ladies for giving me the kick start I needed.

For All My Dogs in the Hood

Census samples show that mixed marriages are more than twice as common in California— involving roughly one of every ten couples, compared to one of every twenty-five U.S. couples elsewhere—than the rest of the nation. And their rate is climbing in Los Angeles among younger adults.

—“Mixed Unions Changing the Face of
Marriage,”
Los Angeles Times,
April 28,
1998

The temp office interviewer looked at my application. “It
took you six years to graduate?” she asked.

“Yes, I took a few semesters off to save up tuition money,” I said. It was a half-truth, but I’m sure if I’d added “And a few semesters for this pesky depression problem I had,” she’d be screaming “Next in line, please!” faster than I could fill out my W-2 form.

After I stumbled my way through a Microsoft Excel test and cursed myself for majoring in Medical Anthropology, I had my official first job out of college. Starting Monday, I’d be assembling tax returns for the IRS.

My office was a small back room I shared with three other recent college graduates. Like me, they all searched
Monster.com
looking for a better gig when our supervisor left the room. Unlike me, they were all white.

It was only my second job where I was the only nonwhite person. I had gotten fired from the first job, seven years ago. Claire, a white girl I’d become friendly with, had asked me something I considered offensive while we were unpacking a new shipment of clothes.

“Can I ask you something? Exactly how much bigger are black men’s dicks? I’ve always been curious.”

I called her a nasty slut and started slamming the clothes on the racks so hard, customers stared in fear and moved to the other side of the store.

I didn’t talk much to any of my coworkers after that and got a reputation as rude. After the Christmas rush, I received my pink slip.

This time, I was determined to be a team player. I sat with my colleagues at lunch and tried to join in the conversation whenever possible. Usually, it wasn’t possible; I just had no point of reference for the things they talked about. My coworkers went to different bars, liked different music, and watched different television stations. “Did anyone catch
In Living Color
last night?” I’d say, to the sound of crickets chirping.

The third week of work, the lunch topic was our parents.

“My mother would drive through a hurricane to save fifteen cents,” Danielle said, picking at the Band-Aids she wore on the tips of her fingers to protect her from 1040EZ paper cuts.

“My mother, too!” I said, excited at a conversation I could finally participate in. “Her favorite store was the House of Bargains. It was in a really scary neighborhood where people were burning down black people’s houses. Once, this kid called me a nigger but my mother said to his mother, ‘How you going to call someone a nigger when you’re shopping in the House of Bargains?’ Puhlease.” I laughed, doing the best imitation of my mother’s voice.

When I looked at my coworkers’ faces, I felt like slinking out the back door. No one laughed with me, not even the sympathy laugh that bombing comedians get. Everyone sat shifting in their seats, trying to adjust to the uncomfortable cloud of silence now hanging over our cafeteria table. Danielle finally broke the silence, and my coworkers’ comments came tumbling out like dominoes.

“Oh, my God! It’s like you grew up in the sixties!”

“Angela, I had no idea. I am so sorry!”

Hey, I wanted to say, didn’t someone else just talk about their father passing out in a drunken stupor night after night? No one apologized for that! I felt so stupid; I was only trying to bond with my all-white coworkers instead of being stereotyped as the black girl who kept to herself. Now I was afraid that people thought I was trying to get sympathy by pulling out some dusty House of Bargains race card.

Of course, after I knew how they felt,
I
had to spend the next twenty minutes telling them it was all right. “Don’t feel bad, Jake! You weren’t the one who teased me! . . . No, Danielle, I know black women age more slowly than white women, but I’m only twenty-three. It wasn’t the sixties.”

Rebecca, a coworker from Missouri, asked for a list of books to read on “the black experience.” Of course, I was glad she was trying to learn. God bless her. But my job wasn’t to teach, it was to staple tax returns. I wasn’t going to be her Black World tour guide when the African American museum was right down the street from our office. Plus, if she started asking about racial shit that got me emotional, I might lose my job again. I had already slipped up by telling everyone the House of Bargains story. I’d have to go back to being the black woman worker who kept to herself. Better cold than angry, I thought, as Rebecca asked again for a list of black experience books.

“Which black experience?” I asked, as in, Do you want to read about Clarence Thomas or Tupac?

“Just, you know, the regular one,” she replied.

I forced myself to take a deep breath. How does a grown woman educated for sixteen years in private schools not know one book on the black experience (regular or irregular version) and have the same job I do? I studied European history for years. I told her I’d look into it for her and excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I exploded.

My white coworkers’ mortified reactions to the House of Bargains story surprised me. Did they truly think the nation had a funeral for racism when the COLORED signs came down off the water fountains? How could people still be saying
nigger
when Martin Luther King has a holiday, for crying out loud? Which congress-man can we write to, Angela? In the stall alone, I thought maybe I was being too hard on them. Maybe no one said
nigger
in their hoods in the eighties.

I was eager to get home. In the spirit of keeping it real, I had my first postcollege apartment in the hood. I wasn’t going to be one of those black people who took their degrees and moved out to all-white neighborhoods in the suburbs.

After one month living there, I was definitely keeping it real— real terrified. My next-door neighbors had started a nightly ritual of shooting out streetlights from their roof. Afraid of getting a bullet in the brain, I started sleeping on the floor.

Instead of rushing home to get away from the white people, I was begging to hang out with them after work.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to go to a grunge concert,” I lied to Danielle.

After weeks of hanging out listening to music I hated, only to come home to sleep near the litter box, I decided to make a major change. I was leaving Philly.

For a single black (somewhat) professional, Philly started to feel like a small town. There were only one or two black professional–friendly hangouts and, like every other major city, half as many professional black men as black women. After a year of happy hours, I went into the bar and realized I’d dated every man there.

I guess Philly also seemed like a small town because I’d been part of all of it, from the acute level of the psych ward to the most expensive private school. It all had been adding up to way too many intimate encounters for me. There’s only so many times you can walk out of your new temp tax-return job with your business suit and your white colleagues and be greeted by name by the homeless guy. “Bitch, don’t act new,” he said. “You know you were up in the hospital with me.”

“I
worked
in the hospital with you,” I’d lie, hoping my colleagues couldn’t see my lip quivering.

My girlfriends were moving safe distances away like Jersey and Washington, DC, I wanted to go to California. My psychiatrist said I seemed to have seasonal affective disorder. I wanted some sun.

“It’s dangerous out in LA,” a black secretary at my job warned me.

“The cops whip black people’s behinds for jaywalking,” my grandmother said.

Without fail, every black person would warn me not to wear red or blue once my plane touched down at LAX. “There’s no light-skinned or dark-skinned out there, just red and blue,” my girlfriend said.

Sounded good to me.

“Are you sure you want to give up that job with benefits?” my mother asked me. “People would kill to have a temp job that covers two dentist visits a year.”

My entire family lives in the Philly area, and moving across country with only a bunch of savings and a need for change seemed irrational to my mother.

“And you’re not moving for love?” my mother asked, remembering when I was in high school and would have moved to Mars if a boy told me he loved me. I assured her that I was definitely not moving for love. If I had half the sex life now that I had in high school, I would definitely be staying in Philly, I thought. The best romance I’d had recently was with a self-tortured artist who lived 120 miles away in Maryland. I’d drive four hours just to sit on his twin bed, rub his back, and convince him that stress wasn’t enough to rupture his colon, but even if it did, I’d push him and his colostomy bag wherever he needed to go. His mom would come in and tell him his underwear was washed and ask did he want his favorite food for dinner. He was twenty-six. Thank God he broke my heart.

My mother gave up questioning my motives until the day she drove me to Goodwill to donate almost every piece of clothing I owned. I still had six months before my planned move, but I was slowly getting rid of everything. I wanted to move to California with no baggage, mental or physical.

“Angela, I have to say, if it’s the crazy homeless man outside your office who’s making you do this, there are other ways of dealing with him,” she said, and went on to tell me how I could get him involuntarily committed, just like the police had done to me. “I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t tell you that I think moving to Los Angeles alone is foolish.”

“Mom, Jesus did a lot of things people believed to be foolish,” I said, and immediately wished I could suck the words back into my mouth. My mother knew I still didn’t love Jesus as much as she did, even though, out of respect, I’d ceased calling him “the Christian God the white man uses to control you.”

I didn’t want to tell my mother the real reason and start dredging up the past. Talking about all the mistakes I’d made in this city, including the latest one, moving to the hood, trying to make a difference. The only difference I’d made so far was asking my landlord to install a deadbolt.

I didn’t feel like explaining to her that I was trying to make up for all the time I’d wasted hating white people in college. I remember that during my first semester a Black History professor told me that many black nationalists go through a “hating white people phase.” In response, I laughed out loud. A phase?
Please.
At the time, I thought that hate, much like teal, was a great color on me. I could never see giving it up.

Nevertheless, there comes a time in every hater’s life when the antidepressants kick in and she sees that hate hasn’t done a damn thing for her, nor has it prodded her to do anything for anyone else. I wasn’t even that good at hating. At least the KKK has marches; all I did was go to the tanning salon and watch a bunch of taped lectures.

I was ashamed. I had learned a lot more in Nation of Islam Lite than why white people were worthy of my hate. I had also become aware of how much better I had it than the majority of black people. Sometime during my senior year I promised myself that when I graduated and got a job, I’d move into the hood and start planning that Black History school I used to talk about with Mah.

So, I’d done it. I’d moved smack dab into the middle of the hood. And just like my plan to move to Los Angeles, some black people thought I was crazy. My ex-boyfriend’s mother, a black Washington, DC, socialite, told me over dinner that I didn’t owe black people a damn thing. The harshness of her response jarred me. Flustered, I squeaked back, “Well, people helped me out, and I just want to do the same thing.” She huffed, refilled her champagne flute, and sat in silence for the rest of the dinner, like she wasn’t wasting her words on an Ivy League dunce who wanted to squander her life by living in the ghetto.

If I told my mother the truth about what finally pushed me to buy the plane tickets to LA, that my teenage next-door neighbor had recently threatened to kill me, she’d swear we could solve this by having a sit-down with his mother. Unfortunately, Gene carried guns. His mother probably did, too.

The only time I heard Gene’s mother talk to him was when she yelled about how bad he was at selling weed. At least twice a week, she’d scream that if he couldn’t do better at selling weed, maybe he should think about getting his dumb ass back into school. I could hear their conversations because only a small alley separated our ground-floor apartments, and neither of us had air-conditioning so our windows were always open, trying to catch a hot South Philly breeze. You could hear everything. Sometimes, I even heard his shower running.

Two months earlier, Gene had bought his sister Janet a pit bull puppy for her thirteenth birthday. I watched their backyard party from my window. When Gene held up the energetic puppy, he was the hit of the party. After blowing out her candles, Janet kissed her puppy and announced, “By the time I’m fourteen, I’m gonna have made so much money fighting this li’l motherfucker!”

Oh, my goodness, I thought. She’s the same lost teenager that I was. Next time I see her outside, I’m going to tell her that young women don’t need to fight puppies to be beautiful.

Two weeks passed and I hadn’t talked to her. It was nearing April 15 and I was stapling tax returns from 8 A.M. until midnight every weekday. On weekends, I made excuses about why I couldn’t talk to her:
I need
me
time,
or
I haven’t seen my mother in a while.
Truth is, I was scared of Janet. I was scared she could whup my ass like she was Christina and Tascha’s protégée and that her brother would back her up with one of his new pistols.

At that point, the puppy pretty much lived alone in the backyard. My apartment building was longer than Gene’s, so my bedroom was right next to the yard.