The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (17 page)

This is why I propose that black women and Asian men join forces in love, marriage, and procreation. Educated black women, what better intellectual match for you than an Asian man? And I’m not talking about Filipinos; they’re like the blacks of Asians. I’m talking Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, et cetera. According to a 2010 census, Koreans are more inclined to marry black than any other Asian group. So black women, after college, maybe it’s a good idea to settle in Los Angeles or anywhere else where Koreatown is a hotspot. Asian men, your women are ditching you at an
alarming rate; won’t you consider black women? Especially YOU, Chinese men—there is an abundance of you, and you’re not all going to get Chinese women . . . so why not cross over to the black side? Have you all seen how adorable Blasian babies are? Get with the program.

Musical Ambitions & Failures

T
he smell of Black & Milds evokes a nostalgia for the hoodrat childhood of which I was robbed. If a CD had a “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” label, I was forbidden from enjoying it, which meant I was excluded from the vending machine conversations in middle school. While my thirteen-year-old girlfriends whispered about Lil Kim’s racy
Hardcore
album and the No Limit Soldiers’ music takeover, I was relegated to the role of “silent listener.” On a rare occasion, I could at least contribute to conversations about music videos, except for those found only on that pay-per-video channel, The Box. Those too eluded me as, you guessed it, the cable at my house didn’t carry The Box, so I had to catch it at my grandparents’ house.

My affinity for my generation’s music almost never was. While I have always been an R&B fiend, I used to have my nose up in the air when it came to rap music. Perhaps I was subliminally influenced by my judgmental grandfather, who associated rap music with danger and death. To his credit, he was no doubt influenced by N.W.A.’s
takeover of Los Angeles. As an avid watcher of the five, six, and seven o’clock news (he’d be asleep by eight and awake by four a.m.), I’m sure the images of the gang violence in L.A. contributed to his distaste of and fear for what “that music” would do to his teenage grandsons. That fear rubbed off on my mother, which is part of the reason she insisted we pack up all our bags and leave for Senegal, which we did when I was four years old.

While the change of environment ensured that my brothers would never be in the crossfire of the notorious Bloods and Crips, it also put a huge delay on our access to American music. All I ever remember listening to in the late eighties was Michael Jackson, Senegalese music, the songs of Disney movie soundtracks, and “Take My Breath Away” from
Top Gun
(which I watched over and over again as a child).

After our stint in Africa, we moved back to the States, to Maryland, and it was the likes of Boyz II Men, Jade, Jodeci, SWV, and other R&B music that dominated the blissful nineties. My mom had an issue with the overt sexuality presented in some of the song lyrics, but I was too young to understand what they meant anyway. To this day, I still have no idea what my friends in elementary school were listening to back then, as I never had conversations about music with any of them. I was one of only a few black girls in the class and I had a naïve, childish perception that “black” music was for black people and “white” music was for white people, so it never occurred to me to talk about music with my friends. My mother, on the other hand, must have been having musical conversations with my friends’ parents, because I don’t know where else the idea for piano lessons could have come from. My best friend in elementary school, Lisa—a Jewish girl who invited me to her family’s house for my very first Passover—took piano lessons. My mother, who’d
always wanted to play the piano, thought it would be a great idea to place my younger brother and me in lessons as well. Besides, my great-grandmother’s oak grand piano was just sitting in our living room, collecting dust (and random stickers, much to my mother’s annoyance. “Who keeps putting stickers on the piano?!”). It was time to not only elevate her kids but also put the piano to use.

I was momentarily excited about the idea of playing the piano, if for no other reason than that my friend Lisa was doing it. My mother took us to a chic retail piano store in the Montgomery Mall—because all the piano greats took lessons in suburban malls—where we were taken to the back rooms of a piano retailer to meet Mr. Forbes, a heavy, happy spectacle-wearing man who, as I recall, looked like a young, curly-haired Philip Seymour Hoffman. He was my first real introduction to the piano, and his positive demeanor combined with a general optimism made me want to do well. He would instruct me for thirty minutes, after which I’d go next door to browse Sam Goody’s music, while waiting for my brother to finish his session.

As our lessons with Mr. Forbes progressed, and I moved from Book One to Book Two of instruction, I also received a raise in my allowance from one dollar to two dollars a week. With my newly earned disposable income, I bought my very first tape single, Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down.” I had owned a few tapes prior, most notably the soundtrack to Robert Townsend’s
Meteor Man
and Raven-Symoné’s first rap single, “That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of” (which I later found out was produced by the brilliant Missy Elliott). Both of those tapes were picked out by me, but bought by my Tantie Rae. Brandy’s single marked the first time I bought music with my own money, asserting my own fourth-grade independence. While my mother dropped us off for an hour at the mall every week, hoping that we’d learn the classics and develop skills to give us sig
nificant advantages as young black kids, she inadvertently granted me unsupervised musical autonomy, which I relished.

When Mr. Forbes moved away, much to my sadness, piano lessons were no longer exciting. Lisa’s parents found another teacher and my mom found Ms. Wu, an older, hard-core, no-nonsense teacher whose highest compliment was “pwetty good, pwetty good.” She got frustrated
so
easily! Because I work better with positive reinforcement, my desire to please her wasn’t as high, and my mother had to force us to practice more than ever. This led to multiple crying sessions at the piano.

With tears and snot dripping on the keyboard, I distinctly remember yelling out, “
I DON’T EVEN WANT TO DO THIS, MOM!
”

And her, with unsympathetic eyes rolling infinitely, yelling back, “
DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE WISH THEY COULD PLAY THE PIANO?! YOU WILL THANK ME WHEN YOU GET OLDER!
”

I would get confirmations from my older brothers, who’d come back to town, impressed with our piano skills, feeling robbed of their own opportunities for piano lessons as kids. This satisfaction of having something they didn’t would temporarily compel me to practice. But I was more motivated by our impending move to Los Angeles, which fueled my hopes that piano lessons would be in the days of Maryland past.

As luck would have it, our Los Angeles move placed us right across the street from a piano instructor: Ms. Harvey literally lived twelve footsteps away from our house. Now, there were no excuses as to why we couldn’t go to lessons. No convincing my mother that she was too tired to take us. Nope. As my mother could now see the house of instruction from her living room window, she actually enforced mandatory daily practice sessions, using our manual oven timer to make sure we were moving our fingers for at least thirty
minutes. It was all the more painful because we practiced in the extra cold or ridiculously hot living room also known as the “good” room, though the air didn’t properly circulate. Piano practice interrupted television time, phone time, and even homework time.

“But Mom, I’m doing homework!”

“Do it after. It’s only thirty minutes.”

Thirty minutes felt like hours. Often, instead of sitting down and practicing my assigned song, I would listen for my mother’s retreating footsteps, sneak to the kitchen, and turn the manual timer counterclockwise, deducting ten or fifteen minutes of practice time. The timer’s buzz would signal a personal victory only if my mother wasn’t listening. Sometimes, despite my committing to the allotted practice time, she would insist that I take more time.

“I didn’t hear you playing the whole time. Do fifteen more minutes.”

Maybe I was so hesitant to invest time because part of me knew that practicing didn’t matter with Ms. Harvey. For one thing, Ms. Harvey was in her mid-eighties, at best. Secondly, while she demonstrated masterful skill on the piano (she once played at Carnegie Hall), her house smelled like dried pee, and she had to tend to her thirty-five-year-old daughter who had Down syndrome between hour-long sessions (that were supposed to be thirty minutes). Finally, Ms. Harvey suffered from Alzheimer’s. Do you know what that means? That means that I played the same two Chopin songs for two years.

No matter how many times I complained to my mother about this, she remained sternly amused. “You’re still learning. Just get really good at the songs you’re learning, and now and then slip her a new song.” But Ms. Harvey didn’t want to play any of my songs. I slipped her the
Soul Food
soundtrack music book that I begged my
mother to buy, so that I could impress my friends with my knowledge of pop music. But, nope. “Too secular.” I slipped her “People Make the World Go Round,” which I knew about only because Ice Cube and the Westside Connection remade it as “Gangstas Make the World Go Round.” Turns out I underestimated the depth of her oldness, because even that song didn’t qualify as an “oldie” in her book. Ms. Harvey was all about the classics, which I would learn to respect later in life but hated in my years as a middle schooler.

Eventually, I resigned myself to the fact that my mother wasn’t going to let up on the piano-playing thing. So I tried to teach myself popular, familiarly hip tunes on the piano. If I could get the party jumping with “secular” tunes then, in my mind, I was guaranteed a ticket into the cool crowd.

“Ay y’all, look what Jo-Issa can play on the piano!” they’d exclaim as they all gathered around me, Crip Walking and grinding on the piano as I effortlessly prodded the keys and bounced to my own tunes. Piano dancing always looks cool, and it was also a way to mask what I couldn’t do, dance. Who cares that you can’t dance when you can make music on the piano!

That never happened. I never got good enough to play multiple songs at will. Not even when, after Ms. Harvey passed, we got a new piano teacher, Mr. Wreath. I was in high school and Mr. Wreath was cool, energetic, fun, and gay. He never brought up his sexuality, but he didn’t have to. He always talked about going to dance at the Hollywood casino and about getting his “groove on” to his “jams” with “people.” He had a texturized S-curl and loved playing Gospel music. My gaydar wasn’t too keen in high school, but Mr. Wreath was my first positive ID (I would get confirmation years later). He was always excited to teach me the music I wanted to learn. With him, I finally learned Boyz II Men’s “A Song for Momma” off the
Soul Food
soundtrack. I learned Gospel chords and melodious arpeggios and . . . that’s about it. Because what my siblings and I loved most about Mr. Wreath was how easy he was to sidetrack. That man loved to talk. Sometimes we distracted him from noticing that we hadn’t practiced that week by asking him questions, the answers to which he’d drag on and on about until our time was up. My mom started to catch on and asked us if Mr. Wreath’s talking was getting in the way of our learning time. She didn’t want to feel like she was wasting her money. Oblivious to the money she was, in fact, wasting on this man, we’d innocently and deceitfully praise his teaching methods. “He’s so much better than Ms. Harvey.”

We’d gotten so good at distracting Mr. Wreath that by the time we approached our first recital, we weren’t ready. At all. My mother sat back and watched as we were the only kids who flubbed and fumbled notes, pausing throughout our respective performances to figure out which keys to play. The only thing more embarrassing was that months later, Mr. Wreath dropped us as clients. He regretfully informed my mother that he was adding more clients to his roster and had to focus on the ones that were taking piano seriously.
Ouch
.

My embarrassment was short-lived, because my mom
finally
stopped pressing us to play and came to the conclusion that forcing us wasn’t going to actually make us “good.” Thankfully, my mother’s years of piano investment wouldn’t completely go to waste, as my younger brother, Lamine, would grow up to produce music, becoming better at the piano than I could ever have hoped to be.

I’ve always had my own musical ambitions. During the summer before seventh grade, I decided to form a rap group. I was learning how to make web pages, via Geocities and similar DIY home-page designers, and I wanted to use these pages to market my group. I
mentioned to my best friend, Ashley, and her friend, London, a beautiful, ridiculously nice fourteen-year-old who’d just moved next door to her, that we should start a group and that I’d make our web pages. They were initially both bored by the idea until I asserted that it would be a great way to meet guys. With a laugh and a shrug, they decided to give it a shot. I designed our website, wrote a song verse for our first single, and even came up with our official group name: Star 69. The perfect combination of star power, pop culture, and sexual innuendo. I was a genius. Unfortunately, though, my group mates weren’t very serious about their rap ambitions. The internet didn’t appeal to them as a viable means of hip-hop fame and fortune, and so the group faded away.

By the time I left public school to enroll in Brentwood Middle School, I found my dad’s stash of blank tapes. I started to record my favorite songs off the radio and discovered OHHLA.com, also known as the Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive. Whereas explicit words were bleeped from the radio, I read and learned them online. I still didn’t really understand what they meant, but it was a step in the right direction. While I thought I was finally on par with my peers, some of my friends in the black clique I had befriended started getting into CDs and CD players. I desperately wanted to be a part of the conversation. That year for my Christmas wish list, I made sure to include a list of multiple CDs. I listed Ma$e’s
Harlem World
, Janet Jackson’s
The Velvet Rope
, Timbaland & Magoo’s
Welcome to Our World
, Missy Elliott’s
Supa Dupa Fly
, Boyz II Men’s
Evolution
, and the new LSG (Levert Sweat Gill) album, because I vividly remember Keith Sweat’s “Nobody” playing during the summer we moved to Los Angeles. His popularity could get me social points. Later I would realize that he was popular only in a certain young-mom demographic. Christmas morning I found three CDs: the ones by Boyz II Men, Janet,
and LSG. Santa Claus had apparently decided that the CDs with “Parental Advisory” labels were naughty. (Though through several listens, I found that Janet Jackson was
pret-ty
naughty.)