Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (17 page)

Once the word got out, everyone started whispering about the fight, which left Jean sick with dread. Virginia was the kind of girl who could really do damage. She kept a jar of Vaseline in her locker, and when she fought, she would smear it over her face to keep from being scratched by her opponent. But what choice did my sister have? Wouldn’t running away or telling only make things worse?

Our father was not what you’d call a race man. The vocabulary of social justice didn’t fit naturally in his mouth. Growing up when
and where he did, he wasn’t blind to the subtle or glaring evidence of racial prejudice, but as far as he was concerned, the antidote was excellence, plain and simple: showing the world we were just as good, as smart, as adept, as brave, as
necessary
as anyone else. If the image we blacks projected got too nuanced, became threatening, began to make aggressive demands, then the message of excellence was lost, and he believed we went back to being the problem. When black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos brought the symbolism of racial protest to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, my father disapproved. Whenever that image of them with their black gloves and fists in the air flashed on the TV screen (I’d seen it over and over, even though it happened four years before I was born), my father would shake his head. Even if he didn’t say the word, he thought they were
jokers
for discrediting themselves in the world’s eyes. They’d won, hadn’t they? Wasn’t their victory statement enough? But no, they had to go and get
militant
, another word that sometimes fell out of his mouth like an epithet.

In the wake of the 1970s, that decade when a lot of black families had opted to give their children Swahili names, to live to the extent possible within a bubble of race pride and consciousness, we were different. We lived in suburban Northern California. My siblings and I were used to moving through a sea of white faces every day. We turned on the television and saw few examples of blacks and felt a certain relief when they were poised rather than clownish. We told ourselves that we didn’t need foreign-sounding names or African garb to know that we were black; we needed only look in the mirror. And day, after day our mother and father were working to ensure that the person each of us saw there was prepared, kempt, and confident. Beyond this, we were encouraged simply to succeed: “You have to be twice as good as they are at
everything you do,” where the
they
in question was whites. The less frequently heard corollary to this was: “Sometimes we can be harder on one another than they are on us.”

Still, I’d seen my dad put a white man in his place for offering an uninvited “soul brother” shake. It was like watching the end of an arm-wrestling match as my father wordlessly redirected the other man’s grasp into a conventional handshake, the undeniable message being,
You don’t know me like that
.

But what happens when a line gets drawn between us and ourselves? I try to imagine how Jean felt that year in junior high, trapped by the need to be
twice as good
, opening her mouth and knowing what Virginia and her friends would say. Perhaps Jean—and anyone like her—did constitute a threat. Perhaps she seemed to stand as proof of what the world must have been telling Virginia:
You must change
. Perhaps Jean’s every word reached Virginia like a telegram from some inescapable future:
Renounce yourself. Agree that you’re worth nothing. Learn how to talk, act, think white—or watch everything you’ve ever wanted in life get handed to someone who does
. Fighting words.

On the day of their big fight, Jean tried to make her peace with the task at hand. When the dismissal bell rang at three o’clock, she stood putting her books in her locker, collecting her wits. Then, like some preposterous deus ex machina, someone ran into the hall shouting “Fight! Fight!” about a much bigger brawl that had just broken out on campus. Suddenly, the entire school, including Virginia, was running out the doors, hungry for a glimpse of the action. For Jean, this was nothing short of a miracle. It was like being preempted by breaking news in prime time: a posse of boys was duking it out in back of the school. Everyone ran to catch a glimpse before things got broken up. My sweet sister walked home unmolested. Virginia never said a thing to her again.

Over and over, our parents told us the best stand we could take was to be our best, do the best. Nothing was too hard, nothing insurmountable. But was it wrong to wonder if we might also have been turning our backs on something vital in embracing such a task? Were we announcing to the world with our can-do attitude that we were willing to bear the burden of convincing whites not to judge blacks too quickly? Were we buying into the fallacy that racial prejudice is based on logic, reason, anything other than fear and lies? Or were we proving quietly, stealthily, that race is not what others—white and black alike—were content in understanding it to be?

“Don’t you wish you were white?”

The sun came in through the eyelet curtains in my bedroom window. She didn’t know it, but she meant,
Is it hard being black?
Even as a child I understood that the awareness that comes from living in a white world is complicated. I didn’t know the girl terribly well, but I had an idea of what she felt, or wondered, or thought without realizing she thought it. My mind had learned to see both ways at once; hers had not yet come up against the need for such acrobatics. Did I wish I were white? No. I was quite sure I didn’t. But sometimes I was made uncomfortable by my own ability to empathize so easily with whites, to submit to their scrutiny, to go out of my way to prove I—and, by extension,
we
—didn’t pose a threat. It would have been nice sometimes to forget how such thinking felt.

Once I’d told my family the story, after the silence of it sinking in had passed, someone remembered a joke:

A man who has worked hard all his life never to sin, never to think bad thoughts, never to take the Lord’s name in vain, dies one night in his sleep. He wakes up in Heaven, in his own beautiful mansion right across the street from where God Himself lives.

On his first night in Heaven, the man lies awake staring at the ceiling. Slowly, he begins to make out the sounds of a distant party: music pumping, people hooting and hollering, police sirens approaching. He puts on his robe and goes across the street to God’s house to ask what is going on.

Greeting him, God explains, “Oh, that must just be all the folks down in Hell.”

“So Hell is real,” the man remarks to himself. Then, “May I see it?” he asks God.

God is not surprised by the request. Nothing surprises God. In the twinkling of an eye, He transports the man to Hell, where he sees a twelve-piece band and half-naked women and drunk men getting down on the dance floor. The man lingers there a moment before God transports him back up to Heaven.

“Lord,” he says, “I don’t understand. I served you faithfully my whole life on earth, but now, while I’m lying here bored to death in Heaven, all those sinners are having the time of their lives down in Hell. What’s going on?”

God looks at the man for a moment without speaking. (It was at this point that whoever was telling the joke would purse his lips and cock an eyebrow, embodying a version of God we’d quickly recognize as black.) “You think I’ma book a big band for just
two
people?”

The joke could have been about anything. What was important was our laughter—our ability to laugh, to shake free our minds from everything else that defied such ready resolution.

I don’t think we ever truly forgot about whites, even when we were alone among ourselves in the thick of family. I doubt any blacks do. There’s always a place in the mind that feels different, distinct; not worse off or envious but simply aware of an extra
thing that living in a world that loathes and fears us has necessitated we develop. Perhaps that thing is the counterbalance to the history of loss I often tried to block out with silence: a riotous upswing that, quickly, painlessly, allows the mind to unravel from all the knowing and wondering it has been taught to do; a simple tickle of recognition capable of catching us up in a feeling—no matter how very fleeting—of hysterical joy.

A NECESSARY RITE

O
ne day during the summer, a box arrived containing what resembled a miniature flying saucer. My father removed it from its packaging and held it up for me to look at. “It’s an incubator,” he told me triumphantly. “We’re going to see how eggs hatch into birds.” When he said the word
birds
, the
r
made an open-throated windy sound, as if it had taken flight, refusing to be tame. His movements were lively and crisp as he unfolded the instruction sheet and spread it on the table. “It’ll be an experiment.” At
experiment
, he rolled over the
r
like something solid, an object to be held up to the light and examined.

“Of course, we won’t keep them,” he’d explained that afternoon, driving back from the farm supply and feed store where we’d purchased quail eggs. “Once they’re old enough to survive on their own, we’ll set them free.” Indeed, in the encyclopedia entry he sent me to reference, the bobwhite quail did resemble the dun-colored finches that nested in our trees and hopped along scouring the lawn for worms—the ones that scattered like buckshot whenever any of us set foot in the yard.

It was the kind of proposition I was used to. When my brother Michael had brought home ducklings one Easter, we’d kept them until they grew to be full-sized and dirty white. We’d even set up a kiddie pool filled with fresh water for them to bathe and preen in, though they seemed to require more grooming than that. They
stank. They soiled the patio. Every five or six days, Mom would give them a good shower with the garden hose. Eventually, our dog learned to help her round them up. By the following Easter, we’d surrendered them to the duck pond by the public library, where we hoped they’d take to life in the suburban wild. The next animal endeavor had been a warren of Dutch rabbits, the offspring of two “brothers” I’d been given for Christmas when I was eight. (I wonder now if the store assured everyone that the rabbits they sold in pairs were brothers.) My father built a hutch with a private sleeping den and a pen I could easily reach into. Each time a new litter was born, my father would sequester the mother and the baby bunnies. “Otherwise,” he’d told me matter-of-factly, “the male might eat the young.” Our attempts at animal rearing always eventually gave way to disillusionment. When the rabbits stopped feeling like pets, we passed them on to a family for whom they seemed to offer a more worthwhile promise. Still, my father was always game for one more experiment, one more run-in with the contradictions—science vs. mystery, order vs. chaos—that never ceased to captivate him.

The incubator sat on a shelf in my room. There was a clear Christmas tree bulb that fit into the device to provide the requisite heat. The instruction booklet said I was also to rotate the eggs three times a day, just like the mother quail would have done. Beyond that, my father assured me, nature would do the rest.

It was summer vacation, a time of few distractions. There were books I was supposed to be reading before the start of fifth grade, but even that took only a small portion of each day to complete. I was invited to a birthday party for a friend from school, a girl named Amber, who all year had captivated me with the stories of
Giselle, Coppélla
, and
Swan Lake
. Together, Amber and I would
scour the school library for all the books and records having to do with ballet. Her mother was an ex-ballerina and taught at a local dance studio where Amber and all her sisters took classes. Amber loved to dream of herself laced into the costumes and transformed into a queen or sylph. I’d taken ballet classes, too, as a little girl. I’d even been praised for my ability, but I’d decided rather abruptly to quit after my teacher one afternoon chided me, “Ballerinas don’t eat peanut butter sandwiches!” After a lapse of five years, I found myself newly eager to get to the place all the ballet books promised to take me: to a world of glamour and magical transformations but also of drama, strife, and loss. Ballet: that rarefied form with its religion of beauty and grace. The slender, strong bodies, almost always white. A world so remote, so inaccessible, that I felt inconspicuous hiding my thoughts there, projecting my own nascent desire for emphatic feelings upon it. Is this what any little girl is doing when she first learns to swoon over fairy princesses? Is it an instinct she is responding to, an involuntary urge to be swept up in the torrent of romantic feeling, when a little girl prays that the prince in the story will be the right kind of prince and will drop down to one knee and ask for the maiden’s hand? I’d pore over a photograph—the dancer beautiful, bereft, her very body pushed beyond the limits of the bearable—and feel perfectly undetectable in rehearsing my fantasy of what my own future might feel like:
One day I will house a tremendous heartache. One day I will reel with a singular ecstasy
. No one was the wiser. No one, myself included, knew that the ballet bodies were merely targets upon which to project appetites I didn’t yet know that I housed: for passion or love, perhaps even for physical desire, which the starved, sinewy bodies must have told me looked like hunger itself.