by Wayétu Moore
In one of the houses we rented in Spring, the corner store was at the end of our street, a little over two hundred yards away from our house. I walked there one day with the Blackgirls. Mam was home making us dinner after track practice and I remember she told us we should just stay and wait for the food, but the Blackgirls and I wanted to follow my big sister and her friends. It was track season, it was early spring. The corner store had only about five aisles of goods and a wall cooler that held beer and soft drinks. It was an old store at the corner of a strip mall that included a billiards club, a hardware store, and a day care center. The shelves were organized in a way that put a pack of sunflower seeds right beside a generic brand of deodorant and below eight different assortments of prophylactics. When we entered, one of the Blackgirls was being playfully teased by one of my sister’s friends, whom we met at the store. We were being loud. The cashiers looked at each one of our faces as we passed.
“Hello,” I said.
There were two men behind the counter. They looked similar to one another but one was noticeably older with thick glasses and a bright red face. Neither of them spoke. We roamed the aisles and stopped in front of the candy, where we took our pick of Airheads, Now and Laters, bubble gum, Starbursts, and chocolate bars. I could not decide between Skittles and a Hershey’s bar, so while the others headed to the freezer for their drinks, I stayed in the aisle and stared down at the candy. In my peripheral vision I saw the younger cashier look at me from the end of the aisle. I looked at him and smiled. He nodded toward me and looked past me at my sister and friends. When they finished getting their drinks, they walked to the front of the store and crowded the cashier. The older man began to ring up their things, and I stayed in the aisle looking at the Skittles bag and brown candy bar.
“Which one will you have?” I heard a long drawl at the end of the aisle. I expected that he was still there—after all, we had all been watched at stores before. But it was the first time that someone had spoken to me after watching me as intently as he had. I looked down to make sure that the candy was still in my hands, that I had not mistakenly opened it while daydreaming. The red and brown pack rested in my palms, yet I knew shortly after the man spoke that something was about to go desperately wrong.
“Everything okay?” my sister asked.
“Yeah,” I said and placed the Skittles back on the shelf. We headed to the cashier, where the other girls waited for us. By then the Blackgirls were fidgeting and noticeably disturbed by the store owner’s demeanor.
“Sorry I took so long,” I said. I placed my candy bar on the counter and waited for the older man to ring it up. It was eighty-four cents and I reached into my pocket for three quarters and a dime. I placed the three quarters on the counter and reached for the dime but I could not find it. I checked the other pocket but it was not there.
“What do you need?” my sister asked.
“Nine cents. I thought I had a dime,” I said.
At once the Blackgirls reached into their pockets to help me pay my deficit.
“Ridiculous,” the cashier murmured as we searched. He said curse words, and we huddled together, as if the warmth of our bodies would protect us, steady us in that moment. Wi slammed a quarter onto the counter, making us all jump.
“What’s ridiculous?” she asked.
“Ol’ racist man. Just give us our change so we can go!” my sister’s friend added.
We were all taken aback by her accusation, though we thought the same. We were all afraid. Not as brave as her. “Racist? Who’s racist?” the younger man said from behind. We turned around.
“You’ve been watching us since we walked in,” her friend said, stepping toward him.
“That’s it, then!” the cashier said, throwing the change from my purchase onto the counter, so hard that some pennies were flung onto the floor and landed at our feet. “Get on out of here then! Get out before I call the cops! We don’t want trouble—just get out!”
The man’s face turned more crimson as he shouted. We did not bother picking up the coins. We headed out of the store, embarrassed and humiliated, and Wi stayed behind with her friends in a full-out screaming match with the two owners. I wanted to go home and get Mam. As soon as I closed the door, I heard a loud crash inside the store. I turned around quickly and saw Wi run toward me with tussled hair and tears covering her face.
“Come on!” she yelled, pulling my hand. The younger store owner chased them out of the store waving a broomstick. Run.
“Get out of here!” he yelled as he stomped the concrete on the road back to our house.
“You niggers! Get on out of here!” he yelled, though his voice was now faint as it hit the back of our heads. Sobs flew beside me—the running cries of my sister and her friends. The dragons had different mothers here, and we ran. We ran. Again. Niggers, he shouted. An animal, a brute, an ignorant person, an unrighteous person. But we were little girls. Niggers, from a man who probably did not see color. But how could he see color? He did not see us.
His voice faded to a moan. And as we sprinted and the memory of the word flew past us and our heads swayed against the wind, I wanted only to see Mam—to hear that he was wrong, to press my face into her core until the sound of the world wholly stopped, to have her explain this new country to me in a way she never could. Wanted to see beyond the tears but they kept coming down. Wanted to return to the grim fantasies of my daydreams but I could not find them. Could not hear more than my sisters crying. Could not see my home though it was so close. Could not see my Mam though I knew she was there. Legs and stomach hurt from sprinting. Thoughts a blunder and I was finally awake.
ASIDE:
WHEN THE THERAPIST SUGGESTS I BEGIN DATING AGAIN
FOURTEEN
Leo. He’s a photographer. BU. He’s five feet ten. Three pictures all of himself against walls (one brick wall, outside, side profile) holding his camera. One of his hands on his dog. A hound. The dog looks disappointed in him. A picture in Johannesburg or Port-au-Prince or some other Black country where he’s surrounded by a dozen five-year-olds in uniform, just as ashy and carefree as you were at that age, holding up peace signs. He’s smiling with his mouth open.
Left.
Oran. He’s a photographer. NYU. He’s six feet. There’s a picture of him taking a picture. Another in a suit with a press pass, against a Hamptons magazine step-and-repeat. Another on an air mattress with a tiger. His camera is in one hand, a baby’s bottle in the other.
Left.
Vick. He’s a photographer. SVA. He has no height. Nothing expository. He takes pictures with celebrities, and he isn’t smiling in any of them. Not even in the one with Jason Statham. He’s kind of cute, but Left.
Sammy. Sammy has no height or education. Sammy has no profession. Sammy has one blurry photograph of the right side of his face. He’s looking out of a window squinting. Sammy doesn’t want to play games. Sammy is looking for the real deal. Sammy knows people get on here to get laid. Sammy doesn’t want that. He wants to wash your hair. He wants to make love to your mind. He’s sick of vain women, sick of New York. Sammy is a lover. The only lover
Left.
Ivan. Ivan is six feet. Brooklyn College. Ivan has muscles. Ivan likes to party. All of Ivan’s pictures are taken with friends at clubs. Oh, wait, Ivan has one photo alone. Ivan and his muscles and some Oakleys are on a yacht with an opened beer bottle and Ivan left his last fuck on shore. Ivan wants you to know that looks can be deceiving. He’s a teddy bear, he says. Swipe right and
Left.
Neil. He’s five feet eight. Pretty face. Morehouse man. Very straight teeth. Very white teeth. He’s been through some thangs and he wants you to know. He’s over his savage ways. He’s grown now and wants a grown-ass woman to hold him down. Neil is also the real deal. He wants a girl who will be with him through the good and the bad. He wants a lifetime partner. He knows this is just an app.
Left.
Etienne. Etienne is wearing Freddy Krueger gloves in a
bathroom mirror.
Left.
Tremaine. Hates bitches who swipe left and don’t respond to him. He hates games. Tremaine is looking for a real one. He’s ready for his Halle Berry though he looks like a seductive moose.
Left.
Ibn. Oh no, I know Ibn.
LEFT.
Mason. He’s fine, y’all. We have some mutual friends. Mason went to Yale. Mason is five feet eleven. Mason likes Murakami books and Vice News. Mason likes Ta-Nehisi Coates. Mason mentors kids, y’all. He watches Bill Maher. Mason is new to this thing, this online dating thing. Mason is a lawyer. Mason is an MD/MBA. He has very white teeth. He winked at the camera after Tough Mudder. Mason likes button-ups and attended the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic last year. Mason has style.
Left.
Ian. He’s six feet. NYU. Not much information, but he’s Christian and he quotes Scripture and he’s wearing a Commes des Garçons sweater. He’s cute, he works in finance, which, ugh, but whatever. He has a nice smile. He lives a mile and six-tenths miles away so no long distance. No bathroom selfies, no tigers. Whatever.
Right.
ian messages right away. ian wants you to sit on his face.
three-month interlude
during which time you learn the man you almost married has found someone else. they’re casually dating, a mutual friend tells you while looking at the ceiling, as if describing the contents of a soju cocktail. you want to shake her. this is your life. how? it’s been about seven months, she says. but the last you heard he was broken too. you’re dating, too, she reminds you and good because we won’t be in our twenties for long and so what? you’ve been seeing a therapist and the last you heard he had been writing you a letter and he worked on it every day and he wanted to make sure it was perfect before sending it. the last you heard he was at a party and he was sober. and he was hiding, how the hell? and where? where did she find him hiding?
Tailor. Tailor is six feet. Tailor is in real estate. Tailor lists no school. Tailor likes to read, he likes films, he likes Brooklyn.
Right.
FIFTEEN
Deda texted. I did not immediately answer. It said: “Did you read the article I sent?” I was on my way to meet a boy and I was late again. I had canceled an appointment with the therapist, my second in a row. I changed my clothes more times than I could count and I almost sent a picture of the unremarkable dress to Wi for the boost I so desperately needed, the kind only she could give, with intentional spelling errors only teachers would make, and too many emojis. In high school we did not have cell phones. No picture messages. Back then we got ready at each other’s houses with Brandy and Destiny’s Child blasting in the background. That night, I did not send the picture.
I should not have read the article before the date but I did. In the subway on my way to meet that boy. The article was another one of those institute memos, those think pieces, those essays based on empirical data of the select pool variety. Apparently assortive mating is less and less an option for black women. Our eyelashes not curled at the right angle. We’re prescriptive, wrongly named, we are undesirable again. We are the most likely to be swiped left, they say. We are drowning in our degrees and our solo travels and each other again. Who wrote this?
I met up with him at a dive bar and I hoped he would remember my face before I would have to recall his. I promised this friend a few weeks before that I would stop ignoring men in the street after she sent me an essay about old-fashioned meetings—those “in church” “supermarket” “bumped into each other in the street” impossibilities that were once our religion. So I met this boy, this Johnny Boy, in the street. I never would have done that in my twenties but I have grown. I know better now than not to live. Two weeks later I was at a dive bar, nose in my phone, being corrupted by the contemporary doctrines of my unlovability and the reasons for it.
“Hey,” he said, almost shouting, almost afraid to touch my shoulder. We found a seat in a corner underneath a John Wayne poster, lit from above with a few strings of old Christmas lights, dingy lights of pastel colors that blinked to the rhythm of those songs I had not heard in some time.
“What were you reading?” Johnny Boy asked as if he had known me for years, as if this was not his first time asking me that question. Familiar. Is this how love stories in a woman’s thirties begin? I would not mind.
“Oh just … some essay,” I answered and blushed. And I guess I was too eager to hide my phone, because he prodded. “It’s about … it’s some essay about how difficult it is for black women to find husbands,” I said finally, I think laughing, just as the waitress approached our table, and she feigned a smile, an awkward smile, and glanced at him before rushing through our drink orders. She had heard me. When she left, Johnny Boy was smiling, a nervous smile, but confident. He knew he was handsome. He said: “Those things can be annoying.” My eyes questioned. “How everything is about race now, you know?” he continued, still nervous but unflinching. Neither of us knew what it meant. I felt guilty for finding his ignorance endearing. “I mean, I’ve dated black girls before and it’s been all good. I know other people who date … you know … I just … I don’t see color.”
Nika emailed. “Did you read that piece about the rise of black girl/white boy relationships?” she sent with the link. I was swirling. That’s what they called it. Johnny Boy was different. Johnny Boy from the Midwest, from the West Coast, from New Jersey. He grew on me but people looked at us as we walked hand in hand, as though we were naked, but deformed, and they did not know if they should be offended or feel sorry for us—us, those contrasting colors interlocked. Brooklyn was finicky in that way. It boasts of its progressiveness while at the same time is surprised by it, like an objectively beautiful yet insecure woman. I showed Johnny Boy the article that night and he laughed, as I thought he would. Then he said: You and your friends talk about race a lot. We do? I asked. And he nodded, a concerned nod, one with weight, one asking. Race was everywhere here, the here I called home now, although Johnny Boy avoided those conversations, although he could not see it. So instead we laughed as much as we could, visited botanical gardens while he compared me to flowers, listened to records, went dancing, ate with friends, spoke to Mam and Papa on speaker, took a road trip, grocery shopped, went to the dog park, went shopping for pants for his interview, went shopping for a dress for that date night, went to a Liberian restaurant he had found online in Queens, because he thought I would like it, went to the movies, went to shows, went to the Bronx, went to my accountant one time, but never went there. And progress kept looking, kept staring, kept wondering what it was about him, or about me, that made us flaunt our corruption in that way.
He was left. Far left. It was 2013 or 2014 and he was white and the Blackgirls were dying and the Blackboys were dying. He was angry. He felt guilty and ashamed. He was ambivalent. He touched my face. He kissed me long. He hated what happened to those countries in Africa. What happened to my family—our having to run and hide. He hated what was happening to those cities in the Midwest. Listened when I told him I’d experienced a thing again, at a store or at the office or on the street, and I thought the thing had happened because of my skin. It was because I was black in this kingdom where black was criminal, a stain, a deformity. A thing had happened and it reminded me of the first time—that time when I was a kid and I took too long to get my candy bar and that store owner pushed my sister and called us that word. But that was Texas, he said. But this is New York, he said. It doesn’t matter, it’s everywhere in this country, I said. I’m sorry, he said. I don’t understand some people. We are all the same, he said. Our world would be so much stronger if we stopped seeing color.
So he marched with me. He squeezed my hand throughout Brooklyn. But the weight of those girls and boys dying was heavy on my shoulders, their names made a home on my tongue. I wondered who they were, how many things had happened before the one that finally took their lives. And Johnny Boy and I drifted apart because the heavier the burden on m
y shoulders, the harder I typed into the night, the more New York began to look like Texas began to look like California began to look like Baltimore began to look like Florida. The more Johnny Boy reminded me of his blindness to the thing, of his love for me through the thing. Why didn’t he see me? There were times he held my hand through the night. Those contrasting colors interlocked. Gray eyes in the moonlight. You are special, he said, and I love you, he said, let me love you. And I never said it back. I needed time, I said, I’m just getting over my last relationship. Why do we make the ones who love us wait?
Ashleigh called. She was crying. She wanted to hear my voice. I missed her though I had seen her a week before. My phone was cold and still I pressed it to my ear when I heard her whimper. We were in the news. We were trending again. George Zimmerman was still free. Eric Garner had been choked to death. Michael Brown was an unarmed black boy who was shot six times, at least two in the head, and it had killed him. I know, girl, I eased her. We’ll march and call the congressmen, I said. Write a think piece, I said. Write letters, I said, in this our country. But she told me in these moments she felt worthless. Each one made her feel worthless. Invisible again. Depressed again. Her tears sounded familiar. Like that day in middle school running with the Blackgirls, that cutting music that would replay for the rest of our lives. My friends, these women I hid with during storms, these women I consumed so many of those joyous Brooklyn hours with. And I want to find the words, the poetry, to give her the thanks she deserves for her shoulder. For stirring my ginger tea all those times my voice got lost in that job/man/city. For understanding what it was like to be at that table, to be a young girl just learning how much the world’s opinion of you differed from your loving Mam’s. Those girls helped me. They healed me. She heals me. But another thing had happened and she forgot her power. Another thing happens and she becomes that little girl, running. Racing to safety, to be better than each other, to be better than ourselves, to be seen.