No Place Safe (22 page)

Even though the list of things I hated about my school seemed to grow daily, I couldn’t deny there were some things about it I’d come to like, things I’d never experienced if I’d gone to school in my neighborhood. They were small things, but still changed some of my perceptions: an appreciation of music I’d never bothered to listen to because it was supposed to hold no interest for me, the realization that rich white people had problems too, although they didn’t always look like mine.

Some of this discovery frightened me, made me wonder if I hadn’t crossed over as some friends had suggested I might. As a direct result of going to the school in the suburbs—at least this is what I blamed it on because I could find no other reason that made any sense—I found myself with a crush on a white boy. When I started going to the school, Ma would say in a teasing way that made it clear she wasn’t playing around,
Don’t come home with a white boy. There’s nothing but trouble and heartache in that.
I was told by older women in my family that white men were blue-eyed devils, and didn’t mean me anything but harm in the end, no matter what sweet things they said. As a young girl, I didn’t pick up on the conviction they used in giving me this advice, a nuance I later decided must have come from some first-hand experience, some first-hand hurt. Ma warned me about the white boys’ underhanded ways, collectively, even though we’d once had a white woman as a roommate before Ma was a cop, a friend of my aunt’s who needed a place to stay for a few months and ended up becoming Ma’s friend, too. When I reminded her of this, Ma said that was different—she was a woman.

That must explain why I played it safe and had my first crush on a white boy I had no chance of ever meeting, although I gave it a good try. The guinea pig for my cross-cultural adventure was Jimmy Baio from
Soap
, a TV show I loved, which I also blamed on the influence of my white friends. Before knowing them, I’d never have considered watching a TV show about rich white people with a black butler and ridiculous problems that black folks didn’t have time for because we were busy just trying to get by. But I gave
Soap
a try because even though
Good Times
was one of my favorite shows (finally, a show about
us,
I thought when it first aired), I had to admit if only to myself that sometimes it was just depressing. Sometimes it’s enough knowing in real life that your family is just one paycheck between having a warm bed, lights on, phone working, and food on the table and not having those things. Sometimes it’s too much watching another family going through the same worry on TV.

I’d read that Jimmy Baio was staying in a hotel downtown. Sitting in my health class, I imagined him inviting me to dinner in a fancy restaurant that Ma could never afford. My fantasy had me pointing out which buildings made up the Atlanta skyline since I knew downtown like it was my second neighborhood. He’d take me up on my offer to show him the city the next day. He’d be happy to join me in my first-time skipping of school. He’d help me explain it all to Ma when the school called to say I’d cut class. I’d ask him if I was his first black girlfriend.

I made up some illness to get me out of my last two classes, and took an earlier bus downtown. My plan was to stake out the hotel lobby and wait for him to walk by. What I’d do then I wasn’t sure. When I visited the hotel that time with Ma, I didn’t feel out of place. I never felt out of place anywhere with Ma because she could make it seem like we owned wherever we were, were born simply to be there, no matter how inhospitable. Walking around the hotel lobby alone, I felt like I was being watched.
What’s she doing here?,
I imagined the front desk clerks wondering. When I walked past the concierge desk, I was glad I’d learned the word in my French class, in the chapter where the American girl takes a trip to Paris. Speaking a little French made me feel less like an intruder.

When I finally settled on a leather sofa with a view of both the front doors and the elevators, I made a big production of taking off my coat. I wanted the concierge and the front desk clerks to see my plaid, private-school skirt. I hoped the distance blurred the cheapness of my jacket, but gave them a good view of the fancy crest on the pocket. Yes, I was a fifteen-year-old black girl sitting in a fancy hotel lobby where the only other black folks I saw were opening the front doors and pushing luggage around on carts, but I belonged here. See my uniform? Here is the proof that for at least eight hours a day, we travel in the same circle.

I studied the elevator doors, not only looking for Jimmy Baio but also hoping it would provide an explanation for my presence, that I was waiting to meet a friend, someone with no concept of time and who was willing to make me wait for hours. Each time the doors opened, I hoped I appeared expectant to the hotel staff, because I was. There was a shift change during my wait, for which I was grateful. For all the second shift knew, I’d arrived in the lobby just minutes before they had.

To pass the time during my elevator watch, I imagined what my life would be like with Jimmy Baio. When we went to fancy places like this, no one would question whether I belonged. Shopping trips to Lenox Square would end with me buying more than a pair of socks. When he introduced me to his parents, they’d say “Oh Jimmy, she’s so
articulate,
” and I’d have to pretend I took it as a compliment and not an insult. In time, I’d get used to the incongruity of pale white skin against warm brown when we held hands. But I wouldn’t have to worry about him being caught by the killer.

At school, I’d become instantly popular. The whole time the other popular kids smiled in my face, they’d be asking themselves why Jimmy Baio chose me. The girls would toss their corn silk hair and smile at him, then at me, and wonder what he saw in me with my kinky hair. Some of the racist kids would probably be thinking
nigger-lover
while asking him for his autograph. When he left my side to talk to a group of boys (only briefly because he couldn’t stand to be away from me for too long), one might ask him what it’s like to be with a black girl, because they’d heard how easy we were, how wild in bed, and
is it true?
The minute Jimmy told me that it wasn’t going to work out, him living in Hollywood and me in Atlanta, the popular kids would forget about me. I’d go back to being part of the group no one invited to parties, and I’d be even more of a mystery to them than before.

At home, people would change the way they talked around Jimmy and me. They’d start talking “proper English” the way some blacks folks will do instinctively around white people because they already think we’re illiterate, and why give them any more reason? I’d have to stop calling Keds tennis shoes “White Girls,” which is what all my friends called them even though we wore them, too. At Thanksgiving dinner, I’d have to explain to him that chitlins are pig intestines, but they’re so tasty, especially when sprinkled with a little hot sauce. When some crazy news story came on TV about people in England jumping off bridges while attached to a bungee cord, or a parachute failing to open when someone jumped from an airplane, we’d have to stop saying, “Only white people.”

Because they didn’t watch
Soap
, I’d have to tell my friends who Jimmy was, that he was a celebrity. They wouldn’t be impressed until I explained he was the cousin of the boy who played Chachi on
Happy Days
; even then, only mildly so. I imagined trying to join a pickup basketball game with Jimmy in tow. To be polite, David, my friend with the basketball hoop in his yard, might choose him for his team, but would wonder what I was doing with a white boy. Since I was going to that fancy private school, was I no longer interested in black boys? One of my girlfriends would ask me how rich he was. He must be rich, or why else bother with him? Another would ask what we talk about: “Do you have anything in common?” Cassandra would say, “I knew this was going to happen.” Ma would say, “Nothing but trouble in that.”

I hung out in that lobby for hours, not noticing I’d missed the last bus from downtown to my house. When I finally gave up on ever meeting Jimmy Baio, it was dark, cold, and I didn’t have cab fare. I probably never even considered a cab then, having never been in one and certain I’d never seen one go down my street. All I could think to do was run like crazy to the Task Force and hope Ma was working late like always. The nine or ten blocks gave me time to make up some lie about why I missed my bus. I don’t much remember the lie or Ma’s reaction, or even the disappointment of missing Jimmy Baio. Even though it was just a fantasy, I realized dating him would have been too much work. Trying to manage him within my two worlds likely would have brought nothing but trouble and misery, just as I’d been warned.

Most things about my home life I didn’t share with school friends, including the dead boy found on my street, even though dreams of him still kept me up an hour or more each night. I wasn’t proud of the reason I’d never told, but it didn’t keep me from thinking it just the same. Though I never expected it to really happen, I always left open the possibility that I’d one day introduce my school friends to my other life, when I got to know them well enough to bring my two lives together, if only for a short time. But I knew that they’d never leave the comfort of the suburbs to come hang out with me on a street where nine-year-old boys were dropped over bridge railings like nothing, even if I was dating Jimmy Baio.

*

When I told my friends at work I wasn’t going to a historically black college because the business world was white and there was no sense in putting off that fact for four years, they said I’d turned.  I never believed this for a second, but just being suspected of it hurt. First, my friends made comments about how my speech had changed, how I “talked white.” No, I talk right, was my response and all the rational conversation I had with myself about it didn’t keep what they said from hurting. Now my goals were being questioned, the future I’d planned for myself didn’t sit right with the folks who, at the end of the day, were the people I came home to.

This is what I was thinking about while I sat in a lit class taught by a man I had some sort of perverse attraction to even though I was certain he was a racist. Maybe it wasn’t so much an attraction as a mission to make him see his ignorance, that whatever grievance he had against me was misplaced. I worked on being an attentive student, tried to get the best grades, as if I had to prove something to him. Now he was talking about significant American writers and poets. Suddenly I didn’t appreciate the fact that he didn’t include a single black writer on the list—no mention of Baldwin, Wright, or Hurston, writers I’d learned about at my old school. As usual, we were insignificant at this school, and whatever it was I thought attractive about him had faded away. Right in the middle of his sentence, I stuck my arm in the air and began talking before he could acknowledge me.

“Don’t you think we should include some black writers in the discussion? They made a lot of contributions to American literature.” Even I wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from because it surely wasn’t something I’d say, definitely not in the middle of a classroom where mine was the only dark face.

“Say what?” I wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard what I’d said or if he’d heard but like me, didn’t believe I’d said it right in the middle of his lecture.

“I was just thinking we should cover more than just the white writers. Maybe we should cover Richard Wright or Langston Hughes.” I was saying the words, but with each syllable, I could feel my resolve leaving me, though I never knew where it had come from in the first place. I looked around at the class for the first time and saw that they were looking at me the same way they did that first day I arrived on campus to buy my books.
Where did she come from?
It was clear that no one in the room wanted to discuss black writers any more than the teacher did, and that before my little episode, they’d been counting the minutes before they were released from the last class of the day. And as strange as my behavior was, it still didn’t hold more interest than whatever plans they had for Friday night and the weekend beyond.

When the bell rang, they all rushed from the room, leaving me there staring at the teacher. I still wasn’t sure why I hadn’t followed the herd, but I guessed it could be the voices of my friends from work still playing in my head.
That’s some fucked-up thinking.

“Don’t you have another class to get to, Kim?” He’d dismissed me long before the bell had rung, long before the class had even started. Dismissed me and all the people and effort that helped me to reach that moment in his classroom.

“All I was suggesting is that maybe we can include
all
the significant writers. They’re a part of American lit too.”

“I teach the class according to the lesson plans, not the students’ wishes.”

I felt lonely and separated from everything that made me certain there was a place for me.

“Apparently, it’s only one student’s wish.”

I left before he, or I, could say anything else.

*

The next day, I got a ride home from school because Ma had to meet with the principal about the demerits he’d given me for disrupting a classroom. Father had brought in my teacher for backup, which he probably didn’t realize he truly needed until he met Ma.

I was already in the office, had already been given a sermon by Father, when Ma arrived. The first thing Father seemed to notice about her was the gun on her hip. Ma was used to this, and always tried to put people at ease, so the first thing she said was, “I’m a cop.”

“Oh, we weren’t aware. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Once,” Ma said, shaking his hand, “when we first came here to check out the school.”

“I guess you haven’t been here since then.”