Mixed: My Life in Black and White (8 page)

They said nothing.

I walked toward my mother and left the Star Girls confused, holding a very hairy jump rope.

“You made some new friends?” my mother asked as I approached, taking my Walkman headphones off her ears.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“What happened to your hair?” my mother asked suspiciously. She turned my head to the side and fingered my fresh forehead welt. “What happened to your face? Where’s your barrette? Which one stole it? Oh, God, I have to get you out of this neighbor—”

“Nobody hit me,” I said, trying to calm her down. “My hair got caught in the rope. I need tinfoil-star hair like those girls to jump double Dutch.”

My mother wrinkled her brow and asked me to repeat myself. I pointed to the girls I’d just been playing with. She cocked her head, trying to analyze if I was lying. She accepted my answer, then looked over at the girls.

My mother exploded into laughter. “Those are called cornrows, darling,” she explained.

“Can you do my hair like that tomorrow?”

“I don’t know how.”

“But didn’t you grow up on this block?”

“No one in our family knows how to cornrow, honey,” my mother said, and this time, I wrinkled my brow at her. How could she have grown up on this block and not know how to cornrow? Shouldn’t everyone on this block know how to do that? Did she not know how to jump double Dutch either? Is that why she had to marry a white man?

My mother handed me the Walkman. I came up with a new strategy: If I couldn’t get cornrows, I would use my radio technology to gain access to friends. The Walkman had just hit the marketplace, and no one else I knew had one. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with a girl with a Walkman?

I excused myself from the steps and ran back over to the three girls, Walkman on, bobbing my head slowly to “Up Where We Belong.”

My plan started working. “Can I listen?” Kim asked, dropping her spinning clothesline, more interested in what was on my head. I put the headphones over her ears.

Kim listened for a few seconds and then snatched the headphones off and held them away from her body like they were transmitting a satanic broadcast. “Who is this?” she asked, my earphones dangling from her fingertips.

“Joe Cocker,” I replied. I remembered the singer’s name because the boys in my class would always say his last name, point to their crotches, and break out into laughter.

“Keisha, listen to this,” she said, putting my headphones on Keisha’s ears. Keisha recoiled as Kim did. She howled, clutched her stomach, and gasped for air. Kim then repeated the scene with Nikki, who topped Keisha’s laugh by jolting her body like thousands of tiny invisible hands were tickling her.

“Why are you listening to this white station? You should be listening to Power Ninety-nine,” Kim said, putting the headphones back on and adjusting the radio dial a few notches. She listened to some music for a few seconds and then handed the Walkman back to me.

“This music is better,” she said, putting the headphones back on my ears.

All three girls looked at me to see if I approved. I did.

“I like this,” I said, not really having enough time to decide if that was true. As the Star Girls looked on, I smiled and tapped my foot, hoping I could catch the beat.

Doo-Doo Head

African-American women each spend two to three times more on hair care and beauty than women of other races, totaling $1.16 billion annually.

—Data from the Hunter-Miller Group,
a market research firm

Living in an all-black neighborhood, I soon learned the
importance of hair and found that most black people categorized mine as
good.
My mother had many descriptive names for my hair, but
good
was not even close to being one of them.

From the time my hair started sprouting, my mother would style my hair the same way every day. She’d sit me between her legs, part my hair down the middle (which took about half an hour in itself), and put each half of my hair into a ponytail holder. She’d then braid both ponytails and hold the end of the finished braid with her thumb and forefinger while opening a plastic barrette with her teeth. Finally, she’d snap the barrette on the end and flatten any flyaway strands with Luster’s Pink Lotion.

Those braids would last from two to three hours. On other kids, braids were the cactus version of hairstyles: very little maintenance and they still looked good. My hair expands like a balloon if there is any humidity. If the kid sitting next to me spills his juice box—poof—the liquid on the floor causes my hair to enlarge. Every single day I’d leave the house with two braids and two barrettes and sometime between the Pledge of Allegiance and the first bathroom break one of my barrettes would pop off, unable to sustain my swelling, expanding hair.

The first time my barrette flew off, Sister Mary let me look for it. The second time, she tolerated the boys’ laughter as they ducked to avoid my airborne barrette. The third time—when my plastic barrette flipped behind the radiator and melted, making the room smell so bad we had to evacuate and have class in the church—she sent a letter home with me, suggesting a safer hairstyle.

After the note, my frugal mother tried to cut my hair according to a do-it-yourself book she borrowed from the library. Pink faces, not much lighter than mine, stared up from the pages. She sectioned off and started chopping into my hair with craft scissors, brushing back beads of sweat and taking deep breaths.

“We have to find a Russian Jew!” she’d scream in frustration, throwing the scissors down. Apparently, one of her coworkers told her that Jewish people, especially ones from Russia, have a grade of hair like mine.

Finally, after hours of parting and cutting, being unable to find a salon in the yellow pages with a “We specialize in Russian-Jewish hair!” ad, she surveyed my head and sighed. “I guess this is all right.”

It was not all right. I looked as if she’d bent me over the sink, thrown my hair into the garbage disposal, and powered it on. Without my Catholic school uniform, I looked homeless. I had an AfroCurlMushroom; it was shaped like a chef ’s hat, with random pieces very blunt cut and some long pieces in the back.

After sleeping on it, my mother decided to keep me home from school the next day and call in some hair troops. “They’ll arrest me if I send you out looking like that,” she said. She wasn’t far off. (Many years later my brother’s wife told me that her white mother would try to style her hair using a thin-tooth comb made for fine hair. Desiree would squeal like a pig as the comb snagged its way down her tight curls. The neighbors, hearing Desiree’s screams, assumed that her white mother was abusing her and called the authorities. Several combs later, Social Services showed up on the doorstep. They wrote it up as just another case of white mother, black child, and let Desiree remain in her custody.)

Luckily, no one called the cops when my mother Grace Jones’d my hair, but no one, even salons in the best part of the city, could offer a solution to fix it either. Even after it grew back in, when she took me around from hairdresser to hairdresser, no one wanted to touch my hair. Instead, they offered suggestions.

“Take her to the Puerto Rican neighborhood, they have crazy hair like hers,” the local hairdresser said.

“I
think
I can work with her texture, but I’d have to charge you five times my rate because it’s going to take all day,” a high-class stylist said.

The last place my mother tried was the Hair Cuttery, figuring it would be discrimination if they refused to do my hair. Apparently, it’s not, so long as they are polite about it. After the all-white staff corrected their initial looks of shock, the only available stylist looked closely at my scalp and declared that I had the most hair follicles she had ever seen. “I’m so sorry. Try a shop that does relaxers,” she said, handing me a Blow Pop and walking us to the door.

After the double-Dutch incident on 56th Street, my mother decided to give in and pay someone to cornrow my hair. Actually, a young neighborhood woman, Crystal, embarrassed her into doing it. “Your daughter looks a mess. If I braid it, you won’t have to deal with it for a month. Just rub a Q-Tip on the scalp with some shampoo, and you’re good to go,” Crystal said, offering her best sales pitch. My mother made an appointment and Crystal was set to braid my hair in our bedroom the next day.

Once upstairs, when Crystal took her tools and hair grease out, my mother tried to haggle over the price. Crystal noticed the VCR my mother had taken from our old house. My mother asked Crystal if she wanted the VCR instead of the money. They bartered for a while and finally the destiny of my hair was handed over along with a VCR and two Amos and Andy tapes. I thought that was outrageous, but to my mother, the VCR was worth nothing and control over my hair was priceless.

“Oh, girl, you have a lot of hair!” Crystal said as I sat on the floor between her legs. She started putting razor-thin parts in my hair with a comb and then twisted my scalp into tiny knots. After four hours, Crystal said her arms were hurting and called in her sister to help finish. My grandmother, who never visited the third floor, preferring to yell through the vents when she needed to reach us, came up to watch the progress and the two young girls in her house. She flipped when she saw both of them with their hands in my hair.

“No, don’t let two people braid your hair at once. Y’all know that’s not right. Too many cooks in the pot!” she screamed, looking at me like I had “666” on my scalp. Crystal’s sister, now chastised, sat on the bed and let Crystal finish. I wondered if I was now under a spell or if my hair would suddenly turn “bad.”

If I was cursed by the two cooks in my hair, it was worth it, because Crystal left me with a head full of tiny braids lying flat across my head. Each braid was capped off with wooden beads held in place by small pieces of aluminum foil. Being downgraded to living without AC became bearable. I could face the hot days that had crept up on us by sitting in front of my grandmother’s fan with the cool air hitting the exposed areas of my scalp.

Unfortunately, my hair joy was short-lived because no one bothered to tell me the rules of life with braids. Certainly I had noticed that the black girls kept their heads bobbing above water in the city swimming pool, but they all seemed to do it, not just the black girls with braids. I had no idea that a different hairstyle meant that I should follow the “head above water” rule, so I did what I’d always done as soon as the lifeguard blew the whistle: I dove into the pool cannonball style, getting an automatic wedgie along with a head full of water.

Swimming back to the surface, I noticed that the water was extra sparkly around my head. The foil had rocketed off my hair when I hit the water and was now floating in the water near my face.

Underwater, a boy swam by me then blasted to the surface with a face full of snot. He pointed at me and screamed, “Ewww, she doodooed in the water!” I looked down and saw my wooden beads in an almost perfect pile under my feet.

“She doodooed! Look, y’all, she doodooed!” the boy called out, leading a swimming tour around my legs. The lifeguard stared at me in disgust and yelled to another lifeguard, “We got a pooper!”

I knew what was coming. If they cleared the pool out and people thought it was because I had an underwater bowel movement, I would never be able to show my face at the pool again. “It’s just my beads!” I yelled out, holding up the one braid that still had a rack of beaks on it.

With this revelation, the boys started diving under me to retrieve my beads, not to give them back to me but to the cutest girls, who of course could not dive for their own beads because they couldn’t get their hair wet. The pretty girls with the perfect hair bobbed above the water like beautiful lily pads as I tried to dive and reclaim some of the beads I’d waited so long for.

Only getting two beads back, I crawled out of the pool and walked home. My mother screamed when she saw my hair. She’d lost a VCR and two tapes, and my hair was worse than when we’d started. She had to cut out the remaining beads; the curls and the wetness had strangled them.

We sat up all night as she washed my hair and tried to pull it straight back into her original two-braid style. That style lasted a record four hours the next day, which my mother took as a sign from God that we should just leave my hair alone.

Patron Saint of White Fathers

Martin of Porres is the only known biracial patron saint. He is also known as Martin of Charity and the Saint of the Broom (for his devotion to his work, no matter how menial).

—
Catholic-Forum.com
(
www.catholic-forum.com/
saints/saintm02.htm
)

“Aren’t you excited to go to your new school?” my mother
said, dragging me out of bed by one arm.

I clutched the headboard. “Please don’t make me go, I have a fever,” I wailed.

“There’s going to be a fever on your butt if you don’t get in the shower,” my mother replied. I still wouldn’t budge. I preferred a spanking over going to a new school.

I had no idea what this new school would be like, but I wanted to go back to my old one, where I knew my place in the pecking order. Being biracial, two years younger than the other students in my grade, and non-Catholic, I knew I was stuck as a Middle: not cool enough for the popular kids but not dorky enough that they constantly picked on me to maintain their popularity. It was comfortable, almost like being invisible.

“Young lady, you will go to school and get an education. That’s the one thing a man can’t take away from you when he declares bankruptcy and every single thing is in both names,” my mother said, clenching her teeth.

Like separate bedrooms and cable television, my mother’s flowery “you’re beautiful and everyone will love you” speeches were a thing of our two-parent-home past. A conversation getting dressed for school now could easily devolve into a conversation about the benefit of separate checking accounts.

I got up. My mother had laid out the same school uniform I’d worn to St. Irenaeus. As I put on the familiar navy-blue tunic, I was grateful that at least one thing was staying the same.

If you want to guarantee a horrible time at a party, show up wearing the wrong dress. When my new teacher, Miss Shannon, escorted me into her fourth-grade classroom and had my new classmates introduce themselves, no one looked me in the face. Instead, they said their names to my solid-blue uniform. Everyone looked offended by me, as if I’d worn a Cinderella costume to their grandmother’s funeral.

At recess, the girls gathered around me like moths to light. As they stood around me, each girl tried to shout out her questions a little louder than the next, like a schoolyard press conference.
Why
are you wearing that uniform? Did the store sell you the wrong uniform? Are
you going to wear that uniform tomorrow? Did you keep the receipt so you
can return that wrong uniform?

I answered the questions as fast as I could. I was happy for some attention, even if it was to how weirdly I was dressed. Suddenly, the circle parted and Maureen, a girl I recognized from the back of my new classroom, approached me.

If Martians had landed in that fourth-grade class and asked to be taken to the leader, everyone would have pointed to Maureen. She was as tall as Miss Shannon, and everyone treated her with the same reverence. Maureen looked like a woman squeezed into a child’s uniform, someone my mother might work with or my father might have dated. While everyone else sported braids, Maureen’s hair was straight, like a model in a Dark and Lovely ad. She stood over me and blocked out the sun. “Can you jump double Dutch?” Maureen asked, shifting her jaw.

“I’m not very good,” I answered.

Without further ado, Maureen walked away, taking the press conference with her.

Most of my classmates watched Maureen’s double-Dutch game from the sidelines. They hung on the wall of the school with their bodies posed nonchalantly, but their eyes begged for a chance to get a jump. A few girls gave up and headed to the chalk hopscotch board. I followed them. Janine, a girl with about the same complexion as mine, was about to throw the stone. I shuffled over and put my mouth close to her ear.

“Is your dad or your mom white?” I whispered. I was certain Janine was mixed because on the rare occasion I saw a woman with full lips, thick black hair, and a very light complexion in our old neighborhood, I’d ask my mother, “Is she mixed?” to which my mother would always reply yes. Spot the Mixed Woman was one of my favorite childhood games.

I thought I had the whole biracial thing figured out. People with my complexion—Lisa Thomas-Laury, David Hasselhoff, Janine, my younger brother—were mixed, and when I spotted enough of them I’d gather them up so we could hang out in our own group like black and white people did.

Janine’s eyes narrowed into angry slits. “Is
who
white?” she asked.

I repeated the question in a lower tone to hint at the secrecy of my biracial unity plan. In response, Janine puffed her cheeks out like a blowfish, slammed the hopscotch rock down, and stomped away. Their hopscotch game halted, the other players stared at me.

“What’s her problem?” I asked, flipping my hair back in feigned coolness.

“You’re about to get your butt kicked,” one girl offered. She pointed behind me. I turned and saw Janine talking to Maureen. Maureen’s mouth dropped along with her rope. Instantly, she started walking toward me, a crew of girls bringing up the rear, like some Catholic production of
West Side Story.

Maureen stood directly in front of me. Her face was so close to mine that if I’d stuck out my tongue I could have licked her nose.

I closed my eyes.
I am going to die. I’m going to die right here in the
schoolyard.

“Did you call my friend white?” Maureen asked. Behind her, the all-girl ass-kicking squad shifted nervously on their feet. One girl cracked her knuckles.

“No. I asked her if she was
half
white.”

“Why would you ask her that?”

“Because my dad is white.”

Maureen flicked her hand dismissively. “You’re buggin’,” she said, and turned to the girls, laughing. The group, seeing their leader laugh, knew what to do. They fell over one another, cackling and clutching their chests as if their lungs were about to burst. “She’s buggin’!” several girls called out, echoing Maureen.

“Ladies! Ladies! This is a schoolyard, not a zoo!” Miss Shannon yelled from the other side of the yard. Chastised, the girls lowered their volume. I wanted them to laugh again. Laughing people can’t throw punches.

“Your dad ain’t white!” Maureen said.

“Yeah, your dad ain’t white,” another girl yelled.

“He better not be white!” someone called out. “I drank behind you at the water fountain, and I don’t drink after white people!”

“If your dad was white, you’d be rich like Arnold and Willis and could afford the right uniform!” someone observed astutely.

“True, true, they always have nice clothes on
Diff’rent Strokes,
” someone else yelled.

I knew, no matter how much I wanted to cry, I couldn’t let them see that they had hurt me. I didn’t know I could probably have ended it right there by falling in line behind Maureen and agreeing with the reality she had chosen to give me. If Maureen wanted to rearrange my family tree, I was supposed to stand there and catch the branches as she sawed them off.

I thought Maureen was just pretending not to believe me so she’d have an excuse to whip my behind. I didn’t know that ten-year-olds who lived in West Philly didn’t come in contact with too many white men. There were no white male teachers at the school. No white male students. White men were read about, prayed to, and watched on television. They weren’t people you hung out with. They certainly weren’t your fathers.

“If your dad is white, bring him in to school!” Maureen yelled.

“Yeah, bring him to school!” the backup fighters sang out.

I pictured how smoothly school life would go if that were possible. On the next show-and-tell day, Miss Shannon would say, “Thanks, Jahiem, for bringing in your Hot Wheels Mechanic Garage. Next, Angela will present her Caucasian Father.”
Ooh, can I
play with him?
the whole class would shout.

“I can’t bring him in because I don’t live with him anymore!” I screamed.

Maureen’s eyes rolled back in her head and she stuck an open palm in my face.
Yes, sure. How convenient that you had a white dad and
you can’t bring him in because you don’t live with him anymore.

Dana, a thin girl with a thick country accent, waved her arms in the air. She had an urgent announcement that might settle this inquisition. “Wait, wait, wait, y’all!” She stepped between Maureen and myself. “Is your dad white-
white
like Miss Shannon or white like light-skinned?”

“He’s like Miss Shannon, except a little whiter,” I said.

That was it. I had blown my last chance to color my dad. Dana threw her skinny arms in the air in a sign of surrender and walked back over to the double-Dutch ropes.

“You’re a liar,” Janine announced, and looked up at Maureen like she was expecting a pat on the head and a biscuit for bringing a person of such low morality to her leader’s attention.

Maureen punched her fist into her palm. “If you don’t bring your dad to school, you have to give me a fair one!”

“Yeah, a fair one!” the girls chimed in.

“How was your first day of school, honey?” my mother asked. We were watching
Wheel of Fortune
with my grandmother. A black woman had just landed on Bankrupt.

My grandmother moaned. “Awww, shoot. This game is racist. How come Bankrupt is the only black space on the wheel?”

“Mom, I don’t really like that school. The teacher said I can’t come back if I don’t have the right uniform,” I lied, figuring if I couldn’t produce a white dad, I had a better chance of surviving if I dressed according to regulation.

“Angela, I am not buying a uniform just for one month of school,” my mother replied. “Please promise me that when you have a job you won’t spend money on anything except things that are absolutely necessary, because if your husband doesn’t pay child support you’ll be stuck.”

“White people love Vanna White. She got a body like a colored woman,” my grandmother mumbled.

“Please, Mom. I don’t want people to tease me,” I begged.

“Did someone say something about your uniform? Because if they did, they can buy you a new uniform or they can take their little butts over to your dad’s house and tell
him
you need a new uniform.”

My grandmother shifted in her seat. “Can y’all quiet down? The colored gal is about to solve the puzzle.”

I excused myself and I went upstairs to search for a photo of my father.
I’ll show that to Maureen and everything will be cool,
I thought.

Of course, I didn’t stop to think that when women leave their husbands, the last thing on the “to pack” list are photos of him. I tore the third-floor bedroom up: I rummaged through dressers, I crawled under the bed, I dumped out shoeboxes full of receipts.

An hour later, I was bathed in sweat and exhausted. Frustrated and desperate, I picked up my mother’s purse, hoping to find a wallet-size of their days as a happy couple. My mother must have had a handbag motion detector installed, because as soon as the last penny fell from the bottom of her purse, she appeared in the doorway.

“Are you stealing from me?” my mom said, grabbing her purse and sweeping the contents back into it. “Did you know that in China they cut your fingers off for stealing?”

I started crying. Maureen was going to kill me, and this would be the last day I’d ever see my mother. “I was just looking for a photo of Daddy,” I said, tears dripping on the collar of my uniform.

My mom’s eyes filled with water. “Awww, honey,” she said, mistakenly assuming that I was exhibiting signs of Broken Home Syndrome.

The next morning, the Yellow Pages was on the bed, opened up to CHILD PSYCHIATRISTS.

“I’m picking you up early today. You’re going to talk to a counselor,” she said, giving me another look of pity to add to all the ones I’d received the previous day when Maureen announced that she was giving me a “fair one.” I was unsure of what a counselor was, but I didn’t care if my mother had said I was going to a dentist who didn’t use anesthetic. I was leaving school early, which meant less time to spend hiding in the school basement (my plan B to escape a fight).

Still, I had to get through a half day. When I got to the schoolyard, I saw Maureen fake-boxing with two sixth-graders. Her face perked up when she spotted me trying to tiptoe toward the safety of Miss Shannon. Maureen pointed to me, and the two sixth-graders jogged toward me and blocked my path.

“I’m Keyana. Janine, the girl you called white, is my play cousin,” the taller girl said. I thought it odd but weirdly polite that she would introduce herself before fighting.

“You can’t come to a new school and bust on somebody, then lie about your dad and not get a fair one,” Keyana’s friend added. She paused and looked at me expectantly, as if I had one last chance to say something to change her mind.

All I could do was ball my fists up and concentrate on holding back my tears. Keyana started slicking her hair into a ponytail. Her friend unfastened her gold hoop earrings and pinned them to her uniform collar.

I looked up to the church roof. I tried to will the Virgin Mary statue into toppling off the building and knocking the girls over like bowling pins. Of course, the Virgin was not going to be my accomplice in a homicide; she’d rather stand there with pigeons on her head.

“Why you look so scared? You don’t have to fight both of us. Just me,” Keyana said.

As Keyana stepped closer to me, I again looked up at Mary and my mind flashed back to my old school and the boys’ fights. I remembered the one boy who was often teased but never hit: Sean, the mentally disabled/retarded/slow boy.

“Why you not saying anything?” the sidekick asked, laughing.

“Bunk youuu,” I replied, slurring my words and elongating my vowels in my best imitation of Sean.

“What did you say?” Keyana asked.

“Bunk youuuuu!” I screamed, slumping one side of my body and keeping my mouth open for a few seconds after the words had come out.