“I saw you looking at that young Negro boy with that perfect heinie of his,” Tess said on the drive home.
I giggled in the passenger seat next to her.
“Oh my God, Tess. He’s so—”
“Sexy! Right? More sexy than he’s got any damn business being.”
“I loved watching him dance,” I said, swooning.
“That’s Kevin Davis,” Tess said, passing along her in-the-know gossip gleefully.
“How do you even know his name?” I asked.
“It’s a small town, Rebecca.”
* * *
The next time at the Speakeasy, I spotted Kevin immediately standing in line with a white girl, posing arm in arm like the pictures you see of celebrity couples in People or Us Weekly. She casually tilted her head back and surveyed the rest of us, as if we were all waiting to see her. She looked like Ella and all the popular girls from Kearsarge, preppy and rich and pretty.
“That’s that bitch Susie, from Oyster River,” I heard a black girl say to another black girl, both standing in front of me on line. “She thinks she’s better than everyone else, but she a hoe like the rest of them white hoes on Kevin’s jock.”
“Girl,” the friend said. “You know he is fine, though.”
* * *
“Of course her name is Susie,” Tess said, at the kitchen table when we got home that night. We’d left early after seeing Kevin with Susie, who was clearly his girlfriend. They hadn’t left each other’s side for the three songs we’d stayed for.
“And you know damn well he’s dating her because she’s white.”
“It just sucks,” I said, feeling melodramatic.
“And you know he just loves how it looks to be on her arm,” Tess said authoritatively. “Your birth father was the same way—loved to be paraded around by white women, like some handsome black buck.”
I had no idea how to respond to this.
“So Kevin can prove to the other young Negro boys that he can get a white girl, and Susie can use him to make it seem like she’s not a prude, which she almost definitely is. She looks so uptight, doesn’t she? Repressed. Like, Susie has most definitely never been laid,” Tess continued.
“I guess. But girl,” I said, “he is fine, though.”
Tess suddenly looked at me quizzically.
“What?” I said.
“Since when did you start saying ‘girl’ and ‘fine’?”
“I’ve heard you say both of those words!” I said, defensively.
“It sounds disingenuous when you say it,” Tess said, getting up from the table. “I’m going to bed. See you in the morning. Remember I have to leave early for work tomorrow, so you’ll have the boys until Miguel can come to get them.”
I started to pick up on a bizarre pattern, where not only did Tess give herself permission to imitate her idea of blackness, but she also undermined my expressions of being black.
* * *
Despite my initial disappointment over the revelation of Susie, I went back to the Speakeasy again the next week. It was the last under-twenties night before school started back up, and that night, Kevin showed up alone, without Susie. I’d come alone, too. Tess had agreed to drop me off and meet up with a friend at a bar nearby until it was time to pick me up. I’d learned a few of the mainstream moves to faster music, to funky songs like Midnight Star’s “Freak-A-Zoid” and “No Parking on the Dance Floor,” but still mostly waited it out for the slower songs, when I was often asked to dance by a different black boy, whose weight and smell and skin I could sink myself into.
“All This Love” by DeBarge came on, and I saw Kevin, shoulders balanced, with a restrained swagger, walking directly toward me where I was standing off to the side of the dance floor. I thought I might die. He held his hand out to me and led me onto the floor, where spinning spots of light set a romantic stage. I was basking in his amazing scent, melon and soap and butter. I rested my cheek against his chest and wrapped my arms around his firm, narrow waist.
He pulled me in and whispered, “I been seeing you here.” As if he hadn’t shown up with his girlfriend the week before. As if he didn’t have a girlfriend at all. Maybe they broke up, I hoped.
We danced together for the rest of the night, with him holding me, his hands spread across my lower back like a net I could fall into. Time disappeared until a tall, stunning black girl interrupted us and told him it was time to go.
“Ma is here, come on,” she said, and then turned to me. “Hey, sis, I’m Jazmine.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Rebecca.”
“Come on, Kevin, we gotta go.”
Kevin nodded at his sister and then looked down at me, deep into my eyes. He was a boy of few words, which made him even more mysterious, appealing, and dreamy.
“See you around,” he said, softly, and walked off in the direction his sister had gone.
* * *
How would I see him around? School was starting back up soon, and I’d get to Portsmouth less than I did in the summertime. We hadn’t exchanged numbers—he didn’t ask for mine, and I was too nervous to ask for his. But he’d said “See you around” like he meant it, before disappearing into the crowd. And I believed him.
Twenty
I’d never flown in an airplane before, and Connor, in the seat next to me, laughed as I flipped out over the smooth clip of the metal safety buckles, the efficiency of tray tables, and the thick in-flight magazine in the seat pocket in front of me. I turned the knobs over my head and pushed the window shade up and down like a four-year-old. I squealed during takeoff, and asked if the complimentary peanuts were free.
We were on our way to a weeklong politics program called Close Up, which offered high school students from all over the country the opportunity to use Washington, DC, as a classroom as a way to learn about how the government works. It cost a lot of money to go, but I qualified and was selected for a scholarship. Connor and I were among the small group attending from Kearsarge, but we didn’t know the names of the other high schools that students were coming from until we arrived at the check-in center, which was packed with students standing abuzz in groups and different lines, carrying backpacks and holding folders of information, wearing lanyard ID badges around their necks.
My stomach dropped when I saw Kevin and Jazmine across the room, standing under a sign that read Portsmouth High School. I remembered Kevin’s words—“See you around”—from a few weeks before at the Speakeasy, and immediately thought it was fate, that it was meant to be. How could he have known? I knew that he went to Portsmouth High School, because another girl I was sort of friendly with at the Speakeasy told me, but he almost certainly didn’t know where I went to high school, not least of all because I generally lied about my background to the black boys I met at the Speakeasy. It had just been easier to say I lived in Portsmouth with my single white mother, and went away to private school in another part of New Hampshire for the rest of the year. That accounted both for my light skin and the funny way I talked.
I didn’t say anything to Kevin at check-in, but I managed to make eye contact with him, and we smiled; he gave me a suave nod. Jazmine saw me, too, and smiled knowingly. Connor saw the silent exchange between me and Kevin, but wasn’t feeling quite as charitable about it as Jazmine.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Just this guy from Portsmouth,” I said.
“Oh. Portsmouth,” Connor replied. “Where you live your double life.”
* * *
I thought I’d done a pretty good job at keeping the two worlds separate, out of necessity and for the sake of my sanity, but it was true that I would come back from visits in Portsmouth with a different sensibility, a sureness that rejected the social landscape at Kearsarge. It lasted only a few days before I was then wrested back into the provincial etiquette of daily popularity contests, dismissed and quietly denigrated at the whim of my white peers. On the one hand, Portsmouth and Tess bolstered my confidence, despite Tess’s uneven atten
tion and often bruising comments. But when I was at the pace that she set for us, it felt like being high.
* * *
In the hallway at the hotel in DC, I ran into Jazmine and her girls outside their room, the ajar door allowing a glimpse of their open suitcases with hot-pink tops and strappy sandals, hair products and bunched-up satin bonnets spread out on their beds.
“Hey, girl,” said Jazmine, statuesque and slender, curvy in all the right places. “Rebecca, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, trying to stay cool, hyperconscious of how my voice would probably come out sounding white to her.
“Where’s your room at?”
“End of, ah, the hallway,” I said. “With the rest of, y’know, the white people in my school.” I hadn’t planned to say that, but I had started to think about being surrounded by so many white people on the day-to-day.
Jazmine laughed. “Nah,” she said. “We can’t let you go out like that, sis. You should stay with us in our room. Go get your stuff and come through.”
I tried to pretend that this open embrace by black girls didn’t feel like the best thing that had ever happened to me.
“Yo,” she said before I turned to go get my stuff. “You know there’s a talent show the last night? You should perform with us.”
“I’d love that,” I said, before changing up my tone. “I mean, that’d be real cool, yeah. I’ll go get my stuff.”
* * *
Moving into Jazmine’s room with her girls felt like moving out of my brain and into my body. The first full day of the program, we all sat together for lunch in a huge dining hall, where Jazmine and I compared schedules to see which classes and tours and events we would be at together, deciding to blow off the ones that didn’t coincide. Once or twice I caught Connor looking at me from the table where he was sitting with other Kearsarge students before quickly turning away.
The second day, Jazmine and I were in a group with other black students in front of the Jefferson Memorial while a tour guide told us when it was built, and how Thomas Jefferson was a founding figure of the Democratic Party, and why he was so important, most of which we only pretended to listen to. Kevin was there, too, but had so far kept his distance, and I didn’t press it, choosing to focus more on my budding friendship with Jazmine.
“Yo,” said Desmond, another student from Portsmouth High. “Didn’t Thomas Jefferson have slaves, though?”
“Everyone had slaves, you knucklehead,” Jazmine said.
“Ain’t that some shit.” Desmond shook his head. “And who you callin’ a knucklehead, Jazmine?”
“You, knucklehead!” Jazmine said, and they both fell out laughing.
“That ain’t right,” Desmond said, shaking his head, still laughing. “Yo, Kev, come get your little sis! She playing too much!” Desmond spoke loudly enough for Kevin to hear from where he was standing a few feet away. Kevin shook his head, and made an expression like Desmond was really just full-on wasting his time. I looked back and forth between them, laughing along with everyone else now, before pausing on Kevin, who gestured for me to come over. I tried not to run.
As the group moved toward the next monument, Kevin grabbed for my hand and didn’t let go for the rest of the day. I was in heaven.
* * *
“Girl, she don’t even like black people,” Jazmine said when I asked her about Susie that night in our hotel room.
“Why is she dating Kevin then? But also, why is he dating her?”
“ ’Cause he thinks she’s smart, and he likes smart girls. That’s probably why he likes you.”
“You think he likes me?”
“The hell you think he was holding your hand all day, fool!”
The other girls, their straightened hair tucked under bonnets for the night, were brushing their teeth, applying face cream, and riffling through their suitcases in the background, a swirling hive of black-girl movement, humming and sacred, while Jazmine and I sat on her bed and talked.
“She looks like a total snob,” I said.
“Oh, girl, she’s a bitch. I hate her,” Jazmine said. “I wish Kevin would just break up with her already, because she plays with his emotions, you know? Like one day she calls and is pushing all up on him, then she don’t answer his calls the next day.”
“That sounds really—” I started.
“White?” one of the other girls chimed in from the bathroom. “Girl, you know her parents ain’t trying to let her date no black boy.”
“But she stay sweatin’ him, because the Poppin’ Express be hot right now,” another girl said.
“I’d rather he was with you,” Jazmine said. “And I’m gonna tell him tomorrow.”
“I really like him,” I said, hoping my admission might further encourage her to tell Kevin he should break up with Susie and be with me.
* * *
For the rest of the week, Kevin and I acted like a couple. We held hands most of the time, and he kept his arm around me while we sat together for the final dinner at a tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. But the next day, the last day of the program, he seemed to avoid me.
“He’s just buggin’ out,” Jazmine assured me. “Wait till he sees you tonight.”
We’d rehearsed all week for the talent show performance—a dance and lip-sync routine to “In My House” by the Mary Jane Girls. Jazmine had picked the song and done most of the choreography, based largely on the Soul Train video for the song, but allowed for me to chime in, given my six years of experience with the Rowland School of Dance, which I’d shared with my new girlfriends who thought it was “dope.”
Jazmine, as the lead, wore a white blazer and pants, just like Mary Jane Girls’ lead singer Joanne “JoJo” McDuffie did in the video that I’d seen on BET at Tess’s. We didn’t get BET in Warner. The rest of us, the backup girls, wore different brightly colored tops and tight skirts (I borrowed both from Jazmine), sparkly pink lip gloss, fierce black eyeliner and long-lash mascara, and big gold earrings, which again I had to borrow from Jazmine, having only brought along my thin silver hoops, the same style and make that Tess wore and which she allowed me to wear in tribute.
I was nervous, not because I didn’t know the routine or the words, but because I knew that Kevin would be watching.
“Sing right to him, girl,” Jazmine said before we went out on stage to perform.
The music came on through the speakers at the far side of the stage just behind the curtain, and we did our thing under a giant fake disco ball suspended from the ceiling. Jazmine was out in front with her long arms waving, enticing the audience as she did the snake, her body an S in white, while the girls and I stayed in rhythm, stepping to the left, to the right, leaning back and bending forward. It was more fun than I’d maybe had in my entire life, and the audience went wild as we took our bow together.
At the dance after the show, Kevin held me close and said, in his seductively subdued way, “You were real cute up there.”
“Thanks,” I said, snuggling into his chest and his smell.
“When you coming back to Portsmouth?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, but soon I hope.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Kevin said, taking my chin in his hand before bending down to kiss me.
* * *
Connor sat in the seat in front of me on the plane back home. I kicked the seat a few times to try to get his attention, but he ignored me, and didn’t say goodbye at the airport when we arrived back in Boston, or offer me a ride back home. He’d driven his own car and given me a ride to the airport at the start of the trip, but now he wouldn’t even look at me.
In between classes at school our first day back, I stopped him. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Nothing,” Connor said curtly. “I have to get to class.”
“Wait, seriously, what’s going on?” I pressed.
“I didn’t realize you liked that guy so much. Do you even know him?”
I responded, channeling Jazmine, “Man, you buggin’.”
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Connor looked at me incredulously. “Oh, what? You’re black now? Just because you dance with some black dude? Whatever.”
That was the thing. I was black now. But I’d always been black; it’s just that no one around me ever really saw me.
Twenty-One
Tess had just two pictures of my birth father, whose name I learned was Joe Banks. She gave them to me when I finally worked up the nerve to ask her, not long after I started going to the Speakeasy, spending time with black boys who had black fathers.
The week I’d spent in DC had emboldened me to lay claim to a biological parent, a lineage, and a history that would allow me to keep the joy I felt with Jazmine and Kevin and the other black kids as my own. But I needed to see it in my birth father’s face and skin and posture, to take his image and existence out from the filter of Tess’s subterfuge. The photos would allow me to piece together my own distillation of who my father was, and who he might be now.
* * *
Tess laid them out on the kitchen table, and I touched the worn edges as if they were velvet and not the creased, yellowing paper of pictures taken from another time. They appeared both vintage and modern, simultaneously relics and urgent pieces of evidence.
“They’re yours to keep,” Tess said.
I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
One photo, in black and white, featured Tess and Joe in a wooded area, at a bit of a distance. Joe is in profile, leaning up against a tree, tall and narrow-looking with chiseled cheekbones, extending a thin branch of some sort to Tess, whose hand is reaching out to receive it. He’s wearing a light-colored safari-style jacket and fitted pants hemmed at the ankle, wearing loafers, dark sunglasses and a short, tight afro. Tess, in jeans and white sneakers, has on a hooded windbreaker, her shoulder-length hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, and her mouth is ajar, as if she’s saying something to Joe.
Surviving the White Gaze Page 10