Mixed: My Life in Black and White (4 page)

“He’s half black because my mother said he is,” I replied.

We were still at the age where we respected our parents. Whatever they said was law, so Tony had no choice but to accept that I was right until he got home to ask his parents if my mother was wrong.

There were no further questions, so I walked back to my desk, mulatto pride fully intact.

“Good job! I learned a lot,” Sister said, approaching me with her grading pen and giving me my first-ever
A
in public speaking.

As I gathered my papers, Sister leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Now, Knight Rider, that’s the black fellow with all the gold chains and the mohawk, right?”

Zebra Kickball

“Zebras. You see, they’re black, and they’re white. The Black Panthers become the Zebras, and membership will double.”

—Sean Penn (as Samuel Bicke) in
The Assassination of Richard Nixon

“Are you black or white?” Michael, a popular fourth-
grade boy, asked me. We were around the corner from my house preparing to pick teams for a kickball game.

I knew I should have played with the black kids today, I thought as I glanced longingly down the street at the three black girls jumping rope. I wondered if it would be too obvious if I dashed away from the white kids and hopped into their rope.

It seemed the kickball game was on hold until I answered Michael, so I gave the response I’d been trained to give, the sentence that was as much a part of my childhood as knowing my phone number and the proper way to sit when wearing a skirt.

“My mom is black and my dad is white,” I said.

“So you’re a zebra!” Michael said. The kickball group gasped and giggled in amazement, like Michael was a comedic genius for calling someone who’s mixed with black and white a zebra. If he were truly witty, he would have called me a panda or a penguin, I thought.

It was the first time I’d experienced opposition to my mother’s standard-issue empowered-biracial-child answer. The word
just
in her instructions made it seem like a simple thing:
Just
tell them your dad is white and your mom is black;
just
answer honestly and then get back to playing kickball. I needed a sentence on what to do if an angry mob
just
didn’t like that answer.

“Zebra!” another boy shouted, and the virus spread, infecting two more boys until there was only one boy not chanting the word. When that boy realized he was the only silent one, he sputtered out a half-hearted
zebra
under his breath and looked at me apologetically. I understood. No need for both of us to be misfits.

Michelle and Heather, two girls from my class, were laughing at the chant. The five boys, pleased with that bit of attention, decided that playing ring-around-the-zebra was more fun than kickball. “I am
not
a zebra!” I yelled as they circled around me. Unfortunately, no one could hear my great comeback over five male voices, so I expressed my anger by violently kicking their ball toward the sewer and then turned the other way and sprinted home.

Once inside the door, I tried to tell my parents what had happened but only one sound dropped out of my mouth. “Zee-zeezee-eee,” I said to my parents, trying to hold back my tears and talk at the same time.

My parents were actually smiling at me. Later, they admitted they thought I was imitating a deejay scratching a record, like in the rap songs that were beginning to get popular. Finally I spat it out. “Z-zebra! Zebra! They called me a zebra!” As the words flew out, so did my tears.

My mother shot my father a look, snatched me by one arm, and smushed my face into her overly powdered chest. I wheezed and cried while my father paced back and forth.

Once the last tear had flowed from my eye to her Jean Naté– flavored cleavage, my mother and dad went into the kitchen for a Grown Folks Meeting. Usually, when this happened, they’d mumble by the sink about how to punish me for some recent minor back-sassing. The last Grown Folks Meeting resulted in my not being able to watch TV for a week after I mimicked the sexy ways of a television circus trainer. “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” I’d asked our mailman, and then licked my lips. This Grown Folks Meeting, it seemed, someone else was getting punished.

“I’m going to kill those little sons of bitches,” my father said.

“And you’ll go to jail!”

“
They
should be in jail!”

My father came out of the kitchen with my mother trailing him.

“Jack, where are you going?” she asked.

“To tell their parents. I won’t hit anybody,” my father said, grabbing my hand. “Show me where they live.”

“I don’t know where they live,” I said, still swiping teardrops from my cheeks.

“We’ll go to every door until we find them,” my father assured me.

Suddenly, every tear was worth it. We were going door-to-door to kick some racist ass. It would be fun, just like trick-or-treating, except no candy and my father might punch someone in the face.

“Wait!” my mother yelled as we pushed through the screen door. I was afraid she was going to stop our mission, but she wanted only to wipe some of her bosom’s baby powder off my nose. (That’s my mother—how will you get people to stop teasing your daughter if you send her outside looking a mess?) Once she had wiped my face with a dab of saliva, it was time to go racist-boy-hunting.

My father didn’t go door-to-door. Like the new microwave and electronic garage door he’d recently purchased, he was all about efficiency. My father saw Michelle and asked her where the boys lived. She squealed quickly, giving up the addresses of Michael, Teddy, and Jimmy, the three main chanters. My father thanked Michelle, and we stomped up Jimmy’s front steps like his family owed us money.

After we rang the bell, a man and woman cautiously answered the door.

“Can I help you?” the man asked.

“Yes, you can,” my father said. “Your son Jimmy called my daughter a zebra.”

“Oh, God,” Jimmy’s mother said, slapping her palm to her forehead as if Jimmy always got into trouble and his antics were about to give her a nervous breakdown. She turned and shouted, “Jimmeee!” Jimmy came running down the stairs, stopping short of the last step when he saw me and my father.

“Did you call this girl a zebra?” Jimmy’s father asked.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t the only one—”

“I don’t care who else did it. You apologize to her!” his father screamed, veins bulging from his neck.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said, more to the carpet than to me.

“Are you okay with that?” my father asked me.

Are you okay with that?
is one of those questions you shouldn’t ask kids. Kids don’t understand that some questions aren’t meant to be answered truthfully. I didn’t know I was supposed to say,
Yes,
I’m okay with that.

“No,” I said, turning to Jimmy’s father. “Is he going to get a beating?” I asked.

“Angela,” my father said. In retrospect, I think he probably didn’t want anyone to know he still doled out corporal punishment. Because of television news reports on time-outs being preferable to beatings, our family had switched from spankings administered by hand to ones given with a wet washcloth, as a sort of compromise. According to my mother, that method “packed all the sting and none of the marks.”

“Yes, he is most certainly getting a beating,” his mother replied. Jimmy started crying and flew back up the stairs. It’s my only memory of taking pleasure in someone else’s pain. It felt damn good. We could have quit going to houses right then, as far as I was concerned.

At Michael’s house, the front door was open. Through the screen door, I could see Michael and his family eating in the kitchen. Before we could ring the doorbell, a short, thick-necked dog raced to the door and growled at us. Michael’s father came soon after. He squinted at us and frowned.

My father started talking through the screen door. Michael’s father lit a cigarette and drummed his fingers against the door frame, as if he was growing impatient with my father’s interruption of his dinner. I smiled nervously at the dog and he started growling again.

“And your son was one of the boys who called her a zebra,” my father said, ending his complaint.

“Who’s that?” Michael’s mother yelled from the kitchen.

“Nobody,” Michael’s father called back, without taking his eyes off my father. He then took a long puff from his cigarette, leaned past us, and flicked the smoldering butt into the street. Without a word, he shut the door in our faces. My father stared at the door and bit his lip as if contemplating something. After a moment, he turned down the steps to leave. As we hit the street, I smashed the smoldering cigarette with my shoe to make sure the fire was completely out.

We didn’t go to Teddy’s house. Instead, we headed home in silence.
Well, that last house sucked,
I wanted to say, but I wasn’t allowed to use the word
sucked.

My mother was waiting in the living room. “How’d it go?” she asked my father. He sped past her into the kitchen. I followed him.

“One man got really pissed at his son,” my father yelled back to her, removing a small Ex-Lax package from a cabinet. He slammed the cabinet shut and took out some cheese from the refrigerator. He wrapped a chunk of cheese around an Ex-Lax pill. “The last guy was a jerk. And he owns the dog that’s been pooping on our lawn,” my dad continued.

My mother ran into the kitchen and grabbed the cheese from my father’s hand. “Jack, it’s not the dog’s fault. Don’t hurt the dog.”

Dad’s hurting a dog? With cheese? Does he have a cheese pellet gun in the toolshed?

“Dad, what are you doing to his dog?” I cried, worried that my zebra fight was going to result in a doggie death.

“He’s putting something out for the dog to eat that will give him the poops,” my mother said, trying to get me on her side, since I’d brought the battle home in the first place.

“Gwen, the man slammed the door in our face, and his dog craps in our yard! He’s lucky this is all he’s getting.”

My parents were usually so straight and narrow, my mother especially, that I could have been a Brady kid. I couldn’t watch R-rated movies or wear nail polish like my classmates. Once, when I tried to steal a pack of gum from Rite Aid, my mother caught me and made me apologize to the store manager. He looked embarrassed for me. It got tiring. Whenever I got the rare chance to witness them doing something devious—like the time my brother picked up a toy in a store and my mother, not seeing a price tag on it, exclaimed, “It’s free!” and stuck it in her purse—I tried to make it last as long as I could.

“Will the poops hurt the dog?” I asked.

“No, just Michael’s father’s carpets,” my father replied.

“Mom, we have to do it,” I turned to her. I thought the plan was as full of holes as the cheese, like what if Michael’s father let the dog out before the diarrhea started and the dog got diarrhea in our yard? What if a squirrel ate the Ex-Lax? Is it really revenge if it’s done anonymously? Can we put a note on the dog’s collar saying “Who’s a zebra now?” It might not correlate exactly, but Michael’s family would get the point.

My mother sighed. “Well, I do want that dog to stop pooping in our yard,” she said, giving in. “Can you at least not use the good cheese? We do have some that’s about to expire, you know.” With that, she gave my father her blessing as well as a half-opened package of Velveeta.

My father gave me a fresh Ex-Lax tablet and showed me how to squeeze the cheese tightly around it. We walked hand in hand to our side yard to place it in the grass, our energy recharged. We were getting racial justice the American way, through revenge and the harming of innocent bystanders.

The next morning, I lay in bed, howling and clutching my stomach, trying to convince my mother I had the flu. I was afraid I was going to get beaten up when I got to school. It was bad enough to get someone in trouble with the teacher, but the punishment for getting someone in trouble at home was even worse. God looked out for me that next day, though. There was a new student in my class, someone the boys decided it was even more fun to pick on. My new classmate, Sean, was “slow,” according to Sister Mary. He certainly talked and read more slowly than the other students. He also ran more slowly, so he wasn’t of any use to the boys at recess. Instead of handball, they teased him for the entire thirty minutes.

“Sean, say
fluorescent,
” Michael commanded, his newest bullying game being to order Sean to say complicated words and time how long he took to say them. If Sean took more than four seconds to repeat a word, Michael would yell out, “Sean’s stupid!” On the bus ride home, the girls whispered about Sean. “Sean’s a ’tard!” they said. If they caught someone looking at him, they’d giggle. “You like the ’tard!”

I was so relieved that Sean’s presence prevented any hassle I expected for taking my father to Michael’s door, I ran home and yelled, “Mom! There’s a new ’tard in my class!” Before I could get to the part of how I was grateful for the ’tard because everyone was so busy teasing him they forgot about me, my mother’s face soured and she screamed, “Go to your room and don’t come out until I tell you to!” I had no idea what I’d done wrong.

After an hour, my mother came upstairs and explained that
’tard
was just as hurtful as
zebra.

“The correct word is”—my mother’s face strained—“the correct word is
retarded,
” she said, forcing parental certainty into her voice.

The ironic nature of that moment didn’t occur to me until I was much older. If my mother, a nurse who had definitely come in contact with mentally handicapped/differently-abled/retarded people wasn’t sure of the 1983 politically correct way of referring to such people, how were the well-meaning parents in the formerly all-white neighborhood instructing their children to refer to me? After Jimmy got his beating for calling me a zebra, did his mother struggle through a diversity lesson? “Angela is not a zebra, she’s black and white so the correct word is . . . uh . . .
blite.
”

There was no kickball around 72nd Street for the rest of the week; it seemed like everyone was on punishment for either a
zebra
or
’tard
comment. The only kids outside were Sean and Michael (and his diarrhea dog, who still fertilized our lawn daily). The weird thing is, that week that Michael and Sean were forced to play together, Michael became Sean’s friend and guardian.

A few days after the memory of punishment had worn off, someone pushed Sean during kickball and called him a ’tard.

“He’s not a ’tard!” Michael said, standing nose to nose with the offender until he mumbled an apology.