Redefining Realness (10 page)

I didn’t approach Alan because I was scared he’d find out the truth and Keisha would be dismissed as a fraud. She was no longer imaginary to me; she was the most authentic thing about me. I don’t know if Alan knew that the girl with the plum barrette and purple sweater pretending to be fourteen, pretending she was woman enough, was Keisha. I avoided his calls by deepening my voice when I answered the phone. I said Keisha wasn’t there, like I had done for Makayla just months before. Alan eventually stopped calling, and I became bored of being a girl on the phone.

•  •  •

“Ooohhh, I couldn’t stand your little ass,” Dad recently admitted with a chuckle while we spoke on the phone. I could almost see him shrugging as he laughed about it.

In my late twenties, I began having these raw, revelatory conversations with my father, the kind a person can have only when they accept the faults, flaws, and fierceness of the people who happened to wrong them when trying to do right. Dad never used a filter in his conversations with me, regardless of my age. He never dumbed down his message or softened his language. “You know your dad,” he’d say
after what some would take as a controversial statement, such as admitting that he couldn’t stand me.

In my half-remembered, wounded memories, my private soap operas involving Dad, I was the victim: the helpless child who had to follow him wherever his heart and dick said we were going; the one who had to hide who I was and listen to lectures on why I shouldn’t play so much with girls; the one who was forced to play “Smear the Queer” with Chad and his roughhousing pals.

“Aww, baby, you almost made it all the way. Remember?” Dad said, taking us back to that courtyard with the patchwork of grass and brown dirt.

I see myself at eleven, all limp wrists and swaying hips, running around with my cousin Mechelle, Auntie Wee Wee’s only child, as Chad, all dirt and scraped knees, sprinted with the boys at Auntie Linda Gail’s. The tangy taste of Now and Laters in supersize pickles and chili-topped bags of Fritos filled those Saturdays, the same ones Auntie Linda Gail, Uncle Bernard, and Dad enjoyed with weed and beer. They were an inseparable trio who loved to party and shit-talk. A sober Auntie Wee Wee was there, too, high on the company of her siblings.

Chad was the Queer in Smear the Queer, a childhood game of tag in which whoever carried the object (in this case the football) was “it” and would need to be tackled. “Sheeit, that’s my boy!” Dad, with a bottle of Colt 45 in his hand, cheered from the stairwell overlooking the courtyard.

I watched from the sidelines, half interested in the game as Mechelle showed off the sassy moves and anthems she’d learned at cheer practice. Chad was quick, but he couldn’t outrun his crowd of pursuers, who tackled him in the “safe zone.” I watched him stand up, brush the dirt off his shirt, and walk away with such humble swagger.
The next thing I knew, Dad was beside me, pulling me by the T-shirt and throwing me into the crowd with Chad and his friends. I could smell the beer on his breath even though he didn’t say a word to me. “You didn’t want to play,” he later reflected. “But I didn’t know any better.”

Chad handed me the football because, as the new kid, I was being initiated as the Queer. “Do you even know how to play?” one of the boys said, laughing.

“He does!” Chad defended before whispering to me, “Okay, you’re it, so you get a five-second head start. Make sure you run as fast as you can to the safe zone. You get there, you can’t be tackled. If you can’t make it there, throw the ball to me, and I’ll take the tackle.”

I placed the ball securely under my arm and ran as fast as I could. When the five seconds were up, ten dingy and ashy boys were on my tail. I heard Chad screaming, “Go! Go! Go!” and Mechelle’s clapping and cheering. Then, just as I was approaching the safe zone, the collar of my T-shirt squeezed tightly around my neck and a pair of hands wrapped around my waist. My knees hit the gravel first, stinging, as my mouth tasted grit. I was on the ground with three boys screaming, “Yeah! We got him!”

“Are you okay?” Chad said, offering his hand to lift me up.

I nodded, taking his hand and then walking into Auntie Linda Gail’s apartment. The smell of burned hair and weed enveloped me. I heard Dad’s applause behind me. “Man, you almost made it,” he said, satisfied.

My knees stung badly and I wanted to wash my mouth out. I could feel bits of dirt between my teeth. “You okay, baby?” Auntie Wee Wee asked as I entered the bathroom.

I nodded, avoiding eye contact with her. I knew if I looked at her, she would say something sweet, something that I needed to hear, something that would allow me to let those tears drop from
my stinging eyes. This would only upset Dad, whom I was acutely aware had a complex about my sensitivity. It would squash his sense of pride and accomplishment. Dad proved to his drinking buddies and our family that his son could take a hit like any good ole boy. All I had to do to assuage his insecurities about my femininity was to hurt myself.

My femininity was heavily policed because it was seen as inferior to masculinity. My father, though he didn’t have the words, couldn’t understand why I would
choose
to be feminine when masculinity was privileged. What I had to negotiate at a young age was embracing who I was while rejecting whom others thought I should be.

“I knew you were different. But I just didn’t know no different,” Dad said during one of our conversations. “We butted heads, but I knew Janet. Damn, I knew my baby was different. I could see it in you all the time, and your dad didn’t understand. I didn’t want to see it. But you just like me, the only one of my kids that’s just like me.”

Like my father, I grew confident in my choice to be true to myself, despite what anyone thought, despite the fear of what was to come. I knew that if I chose to make myself happy, to live in the pursuit of me and my dreams, that I would be free. That was how my father lived. Sure, he brought pain to people—my mother, my brother, all of my half siblings—but at the end of the day, he took responsibility for his own happiness.

“Your dad is a selfish bastard,” he once told me. “I always do me every day. And if you like it, then we cool, and if you don’t, see ya.”

I can’t remember if Dad told me this when I was six or twenty-six or both.

“Hey, remember the time you burnt that cake?” he asked, chanting the song through the phone. “Ooohh, you were so mad at me, man.”

Y
ou got pretty hair,” Jamie said, staring at my wet curls with red-tinted eyes. “Can I touch it?”

I ducked underwater in response, swiftly swimming away from his compliment as my hair did its own floating, ethereal choreography in the blue that surrounded me. I swam with my hair loosely tied, my shirt on, and my eyes wide open, never wanting to miss a moment or someone’s foot kicking my way. I sought refuge underwater because I didn’t know how to receive a compliment from a boy I liked. Down below, I touched the bottom of the eight-foot-deep pool, hoping to find comfort in the clear blue vision of the water.

It was spring break 1994, and “Whatta Man” was the only song I was determined to memorize before I had to return to school at the close of the week. The Dallas sun had made me three shades darker, and my week at Auntie Wee Wee’s apartment had introduced me to Jamie, my latest crush. He lived in the building adjacent to Auntie Wee Wee and Mechelle. Jamie was a year older than I was, with a
nearly shaved head of dark brown fuzz and matching thick eyebrows. His skin was smooth and all the more golden from the sun.

Swimming to the edge of the pool, I unwound my purple scrunchie and let my drenched curls drop over my shoulders. Wet and full, my hair glistened while soaking up the heat. Jamie placed his golden hands against my black hair. My heart raced as I sat shin-deep in water. Though kids were splashing around us and screaming “Marco! Polo!” I felt as if Jamie and I were all alone, the hot cement under our butts. His eyes twinkled under the reflective light of the moving water. I wanted to kiss him and ask him to be my boyfriend, but I knew that would be taking it too far.

“The food’s ready,” Mechelle called from just outside the gate. “We gotta go.”

She had stopped swimming on day three of our break, weary of dodging the splashes from the pool. “They too wild,” she complained during her final swim, adamant not to get her fresh just-permed edges wet. I told Jamie I’d be back outside after dinner as I pulled my hair back with both palms, tying it with my scrunchie. My tank top and shorts stuck to my skin as I walked over to Mechelle, who pursed her lips at me.

“Pinkie-swear you won’t tell your mom,” I told her as we made our way up the stairs to her apartment. It was probably the fourth time I’d made her promise not to blow my cover. She finally relaxed her pursed lips, smacking them in defeat as her pinkie met mine. I knew she thought the Keisha game had gone on too long, but I also knew she’d keep my secret because I was her favorite cousin, and she was mine.

Keisha was more real to me than I was to myself. There was no doubt when I was in the moment as Keisha. She was fully me, the me I knew myself to be in those quiet instances when all I had to do was merely be. But I was certain the falsity of Keisha, no matter how real
she felt to me, would result in a whipping or something worse. The boundaries of gender, I was taught, were unmovable, like the glistening white rocks that surrounded Grandma’s crawfish ponds. Keisha proved, though, that self-determination—proclaiming who you were to others—wielded the power to lift those rocks toward a more honest place.

Mechelle and Auntie Wee Wee’s apartment was the only quiet place I remember in Dallas. It wasn’t filled with gossip or cluttered by the noise of children running around. My aunt, willowy and sweet, created this home for mother and daughter. There were bursts of purple and green throughout their apartment, resembling a ripe eggplant at a farmer’s market.

I admit that I was envious of Mechelle’s life, which probably fueled my snap decision to introduce myself as Keisha to her friends. I didn’t consult Mechelle. She followed my lead. I longed to wear her barrettes, to shake her pom-poms, to bask in a boy’s attention, to call Auntie Wee Wee Mom. Mechelle had a room of her own, a sacred space that I wouldn’t have well until adulthood. Her room was occupied by Barbies, a Lite-Brite, an Etch A Sketch, coloring books to fit any mood, and videotapes of
Free Willy
,
Aladdin
, and my favorite,
Beauty and the Beast.
I wore that tape out to the point where the ballroom scene played through a layer of permanent static. I see Belle clearly now, spinning on that dance floor in her golden gown as everyone looked on. I yearned to grow to be as beautifully bookish as Belle.

The usual vanilla scent of the apartment was dominated by a fishy odor. It was pungent and alluring to me, the kind of aroma that hit notes of a home I longed for. Auntie Wee Wee crumbled Ritz crackers between her hands, topping her tuna casserole, which she made because it was my favorite. Tuna reminded me of Mom; I could see her reading a book, just like Belle, and spreading tuna over crackers, white crumbs collecting on her lap. Like Mom, Auntie Wee Wee
had a calm presence, one that made me feel safe to be just as I was. She acknowledged my tenderness in big and small ways without reprimand or rehabilitation. I’ll never forget the time she took me to Kmart and bought me a sleeping bag for my sleepovers. In the aisle, she asked me to pick out the one I wanted. Skipping my eyes over the burgundy, the blue, and the green bags, I pointed at a lavender sleeping bag that called loudly after me. It
had
to be mine. My aunt didn’t bat a mascaraed lash as we carried it to the checkout.

Full of tuna and fresh out of the shower, I went back outside alone to the playground, just as the sun was retiring for the day. I found Jamie, at one with the gray-blue sky, swinging, the soles of his Jordan-clad feet parallel to the gravel I stood on. The little follicles on my forearms rose as I joined him up there. My hair flirted with the wind, and in the air with Jamie, I felt like the only girl in the world. Soon we settled down, lazily swaying from side to side in our adjacent swings. He leaned in toward me and fingered a ringlet with his right hand. Soon my coarse curls struggled to make their way between his golden fingers. It was the first time someone had admired me. My hair, the only mark of my girlhood, was being touched in a way I had never been before.

Sunday soon came, marking the end of my springtime retreat. Keisha would remain here as I returned to life as Charles. I was mourning her end as I gathered my stuff in Mechelle’s room. Dad sat in the living room watching TV with Auntie Wee Wee, waiting to take me home. Then I heard an unexpected sound: Jamie’s voice. “Are Keisha and Mechelle here?” he asked from the front door.

“Hold on, baby,” Auntie Wee Wee said. “Mechelle?” she called toward the back.

I hadn’t planned on saying good-bye; I thought we’d just pick up the relationship over the phone. Mechelle looked at me and clucked her tongue as she crossed the threshold of her bedroom.

“Hey. Where’s your cousin?” Jamie asked Mechelle.

“Let’s go outside,” she said, hurrying out of the house.

“Uh-uh, little girl. Don’t you leave this house. You got company,” Auntie said.

“Where’s Keisha?” Jamie asked again.

Mechelle just shrugged.

“Who’s Keisha?” Auntie asked, pressing Mechelle for answers.

Mechelle was only in the fourth grade and had probably never lied to her mom. She didn’t know what to say, so she began crying. That was when Dad shifted his gaze from the TV to the door. My heart beating rapidly and my fingers interlocked and twisted, I walked out of Mechelle’s room. My hair was tied in a ponytail, low at the back of my neck, as Jamie smiled.

“Hey, Keisha,” he said, making Dad stand from the couch.

I didn’t get to say good-bye to Jamie and explain to him who I was. I didn’t have the words as an eleven-year-old to explain who I was to anyone beyond myself. All I knew was that Keisha was real to me, and under the glare of my father, I feared for her survival. Dad wrote Keisha off as some bad joke I was playing, one that had gone on way too long, one that he ensured I wouldn’t play again. He talked nonstop on our way to Denise’s house, his words packing the car.