That was my last trip to Video Tape Library. I never wanted to go back after that. My father asked why I had suddenly lost interest in renting movies. Didn’t I know The Muppet Movie had just been released? I wasn’t sure how to explain my embarrassment to him, and I also felt I had let my parents down. I knew from my mother’s lectures that I was supposed to be proud to be mixed, but the video store cashier had embarrassed me and I preferred to give up my hobby rather than ever feel like that again. I lied to my father and told him that VHS was out and I was interested only in Betamax movies, as that’s the type of VCR the other parents on our block had started buying.
I had to find a new way to quench my craving for the programming that video tapes had previously provided. Because of those tapes, I hadn’t had to suffer through reruns in over a year, and the thought of having to watch a show where I already knew the ending felt like punishment. I decided to explore other channels; to see what else was on when I got home from school.
I flipped the dial to a talk show. Even though I was catching up to the topic in the middle of the program, I quickly gathered that everyone in the studio audience agreed I should never have been born.
You couldn’t turn on Phil Donahue in those days without seeing something about interracial couples. Invariably, the topic turned to What if the couples decided to have sex (the horror!) and gave birth to flawed, confused-race children? While people were generally in agreement that a grown man and woman could marry whomever they wished, the moment would come when a studio audience member would snatch the host’s microphone, almost inhaling it before shouting, “Do you think it’s fair to bring kids into the world who won’t know who they are? What about the kids?” The studio audience would hoot and clap enthusiastically while Donahue smiled at them and said, “And we’ll be back!”
I waited for them to come back. I was certain that when the commercials ended, I would see someone on the show who looked like me. A mixed-race kid, sticking up for all of us, telling everyone how beautiful and special we were.
That person never came out. I started realizing that no one on television looked like me. Not too many people were my mother’s color, but at least she had a few representations—two and a half by my count: Nell Carter, Tootie, and the chunky mammy character from Tom and Jerry (the half point, since they only showed her calves). As stereotypical as they were, at least she had them. I started doubting my mother’s stories about biracial children being beautiful and special. I began to suspect that my brother and I were the only mixed kids alive. I plotted to sneak up on my mother at an unexpected moment to see if she’d break down and confirm my suspicion.
“Mom, where are all the other mixed kids?” I asked while she was watching the news. She didn’t like being interrupted when the Action News Team was on. My mother and her friends watched that newscast like they were being graded on it the next day. They all dressed their children according to the predictions of Dave Roberts, the quirky weatherman. If someone was caught in a hurricane without an umbrella, there was no pity, just admonishment. “Didn’t you listen to Dave last night?”
Dave was king and the female news anchor, Lisa Thomas-Laury, was queen. The adults talked about her reports as though she called the news straight to their phones instead of delivering it to two million Philadelphians simultaneously through the television. “Yeah, Lisa Thomas-Laury said the buses are going on strike,” I heard my mother tell my father. Adult women carefully enunciated all three of Lisa Thomas-Laury’s names, never disrespecting her by referring to her casually as Lisa.
“Lots of people are mixed,” my mother said, looking at the ceiling as if she kept the mixed people’s names written up there. “Like . . . uh . . . Lisa Thomas-Laury.”
“She has green eyes!” I said. “She’s white!”
“Who said mixed and black people can’t have green eyes?” my mother replied. “My father has blue eyes.” She was right; her father did have blue eyes. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized everyone with cataracts had the same cloudy blue eyes.
After that day, I became Lisa Thomas-Laury’s youngest devotee. I would gladly sit through the whole newscast to see the only other mixed person I knew. I summoned the courage to ask my mother to help me mail her a letter. We decided on a postcard, since a prestigious woman like Lisa Thomas-Laury was probably too busy to open mail. I went with a simple greeting. Hi, Mrs. Lisa Thomas-Laury. I’m mixed, too! Write back!
She never wrote back. That could have been because, as I would later find out, she was not mixed and probably had no idea what the hell my postcard meant.
Back then, I didn’t know my mother would lie to encourage self-love. In my mind, Lisa Thomas-Laury’s lack of response meant she’d received my postcard, read it, and immediately trashed it. During school, I would daydream about the possible ways she had rid herself of my unwanted postcard—I had a full-blown panic attack during religion class after I fantasized about Ms. Thomas-Laury ripping my note up then tossing it under her car’s tires for traction in a snowstorm. Watching her newscasts became painful; I was certain that she was just waiting for the right moment to annouce on air how she felt about my postcard. “That’s some bad weather, Dave. Speaking of bad, I received the most stupid fan letter recently. . . .”
My mother soon realized I was spiraling into a depression whenever the news came on. She knew what she had to do—lie about another celebrity.
“David Hasselhoff is half black and half white,” my mother mentioned casually after I collapsed into a crying spell while watching Lisa Thomas-Laury host the Thanksgiving Parade.
“Look at his skin! It’s as tan as yours. And his hair,” my mother continued. “Isn’t that what your hair looks like when it rains?”
She was right. Michael Knight did have a curly ’fro! However, I still wasn’t ready to risk the rejection of an unanswered fan letter, so I decided instead that my new idol would be the subject of my Black History Month oral presentation.
My new teacher, Sister Danielle, had given our class the assignment of independently researching an important black American to speak about. After sixteen consecutive oral reports on Martin Luther King, Sister Danielle expanded the topic criteria—we could also write about important people who were friends with black Americans.
The last day of February, I fidgeted in my seat as Emma Russell, the most popular girl in fourth grade, gave a stellar black history report on Abraham Lincoln. It was terrifying enough reading in front of the entire class without having to follow the Emancipation Proclamation done as a football cheer.
I took a deep breath before taking my place at the front of the classroom. I paced myself and held my head high as I rattled off two minutes and thirty seconds of David Hasselhoff trivia. Then I hit my last paragraph:
“Like me, David Hasselhoff has a German last name and a black mother.”
Half the class burst into laughter. Rather than wait for them to settle down, I bit back tears and zoomed through the last sentences of my report.
“Knight Rider is a great show. It comes on Channel six at eight P.M. The end.”
Sister Danielle asked if anyone had any questions for me. Tony Aiello, class bully, who was later expelled for breaking into the church and stealing a tape recorder, raised his hand.
“Knight Rider’s not part black!” Tony called out.
“That’s not a question, Tony,” Sister Danielle snapped. “Phrase it as a question.”
“Why would you lie and say Knight Rider is mixed?” Tony asked. His face turned bright purple, and his lips twisted like he wanted to curse me for sullying the sacred name of the premier nighttime television star.
“He’s half black because my mother said he is,” I replied.
We were still at the age where we respected our parents. Whatever they said was law, so Tony had no choice but to accept that I was right until he got home to ask his parents if my mother was wrong.
There were no further questions, so I walked back to my desk, mula
tto pride fully intact.
“Good job! I learned a lot,” Sister said, approaching me with her grading pen and giving me my first-ever A in public speaking.
As I gathered my papers, Sister leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Now, Knight Rider, that’s the black fellow with all the gold chains and the mohawk, right?”
Zebra Kickball
“Zebras. You see, they’re black, and they’re white. The Black Panthers become the Zebras, and membership will double.”
—Sean Penn (as Samuel Bicke) in The Assassination of Richard Nixon
“Are you black or white?” Michael, a popular fourth-grade boy, asked me. We were around the corner from my house preparing to pick teams for a kickball game.
I knew I should have played with the black kids today, I thought as I glanced longingly down the street at the three black girls jumping rope. I wondered if it would be too obvious if I dashed away from the white kids and hopped into their rope.
It seemed the kickball game was on hold until I answered Michael, so I gave the response I’d been trained to give, the sentence that was as much a part of my childhood as knowing my phone number and the proper way to sit when wearing a skirt.
“My mom is black and my dad is white,” I said.
“So you’re a zebra!” Michael said. The kickball group gasped and giggled in amazement, like Michael was a comedic genius for calling someone who’s mixed with black and white a zebra. If he were truly witty, he would have called me a panda or a penguin, I thought.
It was the first time I’d experienced opposition to my mother’s standard-issue empowered-biracial-child answer. The word just in her instructions made it seem like a simple thing: Just tell them your dad is white and your mom is black; just answer honestly and then get back to playing kickball. I needed a sentence on what to do if an angry mob just didn’t like that answer.
“Zebra!” another boy shouted, and the virus spread, infecting two more boys until there was only one boy not chanting the word. When that boy realized he was the only silent one, he sputtered out a half-hearted zebra under his breath and looked at me apologetically. I understood. No need for both of us to be misfits.
Michelle and Heather, two girls from my class, were laughing at the chant. The five boys, pleased with that bit of attention, decided that playing ring-around-the-zebra was more fun than kickball. “I am not a zebra!” I yelled as they circled around me. Unfortunately, no one could hear my great comeback over five male voices, so I expressed my anger by violently kicking their ball toward the sewer and then turned the other way and sprinted home.
Once inside the door, I tried to tell my parents what had happened but only one sound dropped out of my mouth. “Zee-zeezee-eee,” I said to my parents, trying to hold back my tears and talk at the same time.
My parents were actually smiling at me. Later, they admitted they thought I was imitating a deejay scratching a record, like in the rap songs that were beginning to get popular. Finally I spat it out. “Z-zebra! Zebra! They called me a zebra!” As the words flew out, so did my tears.
My mother shot my father a look, snatched me by one arm, and smushed my face into her overly powdered chest. I wheezed and cried while my father paced back and forth.
Once the last tear had flowed from my eye to her Jean Naté– flavored cleavage, my mother and dad went into the kitchen for a Grown Folks Meeting. Usually, when this happened, they’d mumble by the sink about how to punish me for some recent minor back-sassing. The last Grown Folks Meeting resulted in my not being able to watch TV for a week after I mimicked the sexy ways of a television circus trainer. “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” I’d asked our mailman, and then licked my lips. This Grown Folks Meeting, it seemed, someone else was getting punished.
“I’m going to kill those little sons of bitches,” my father said.
“And you’ll go to jail!”
“They should be in jail!”
My father came out of the kitchen with my mother trailing him.
“Jack, where are you going?” she asked.
“To tell their parents. I won’t hit anybody,” my father said, grabbing my hand. “Show me where they live.”
“I don’t know where they live,” I said, still swiping teardrops from my cheeks.
“We’ll go to every door until we find them,” my father assured me.
Suddenly, every tear was worth it. We were going door-to-door to kick some racist ass. It would be fun, just like trick-or-treating, except no candy and my father might punch someone in the face.
“Wait!” my mother yelled as we pushed through the screen door. I was afraid she was going to stop our mission, but she wanted only to wipe some of her bosom’s baby powder off my nose. (That’s my mother—how will you get people to stop teasing your daughter if you send her outside looking a mess?) Once she had wiped my face with a dab of saliva, it was time to go racist-boy-hunting.
My father didn’t go door-to-door. Like the new microwave and electronic garage door he’d recently purchased, he was all about efficiency. My father saw Michelle and asked her where the boys lived. She squealed quickly, giving up the addresses of Michael, Teddy, and Jimmy, the three main chanters. My father thanked Michelle, and we stomped up Jimmy’s front steps like his family owed us money.
After we rang the bell, a man and woman cautiously answered the door.
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
“Yes, you can,” my father said. “Your son Jimmy called my daughter a zebra.”
“Oh, God,” Jimmy’s mother said, slapping her palm to her forehead as if Jimmy always got into trouble and his antics were about to give her a nervous breakdown. She turned and shouted, “Jimmeee!” Jimmy came running down the stairs, stopping short of the last step when he saw me and my father.
“Did you call this girl a zebra?” Jimmy’s father asked.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t the only one—”
“I don’t care who else did it. You apologize to her!” his father screamed, veins bulging from his neck.
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said, more to the carpet than to me.
“Are you okay with that?” my father asked me.
Are you okay with that? is one of those questions you shouldn’t ask kids. Kids don’t understand that some questions aren’t meant to be answered truthfully. I didn’t know I was supposed to say, Yes, I’m okay with that.
“No,” I said, turning to Jimmy’s father. “Is he going to get a beating?” I asked.
“Angela,” my father said. In retrospect, I think he probably didn’t want anyone to know he still doled out corporal punishment. Because of television news reports on time-outs being preferable to beatings, our family had switched from spankings administered by hand to ones given with a wet washcloth, as a sort of compromise. According to my mother, that method “packed all the sting and none of the marks.”
“Yes, he is most certainly getting a beating,” his mother replied. Jimmy started crying and flew back up the stairs. It’s my only memory of taking pleasure in someone else’s pain. It felt damn good. We could have quit going to houses right then, as far as I was concerned.
At Michael’s house, the front door was open. Through the screen door, I could see Michael and his family eating in the kitchen. Before we could ring the doorbell, a short, thick-necked dog raced to the door and growled at us. Michael’s father came soon after. He squinted at us and frowned.
My father started talking through the screen door. Michael’s father lit a cigarette and drummed his fingers against the door frame, as if he was growing impatient with my father’s interruption of his dinner. I smiled nervously at the dog and he started growling again.
“And your son was one of the boys who called her a zebra,” my father said, ending his complaint.
“Who’s that?” Michael’s mother yelled from the kitchen.
“Nobody,” Michael’s father called back, without taking his eyes off my father. He then took a long puff from his cigaret
te, leaned past us, and flicked the smoldering butt into the street. Without a word, he shut the door in our faces. My father stared at the door and bit his lip as if contemplating something. After a moment, he turned down the steps to leave. As we hit the street, I smashed the smoldering cigarette with my shoe to make sure the fire was completely out.
We didn’t go to Teddy’s house. Instead, we headed home in silence. Well, that last house sucked, I wanted to say, but I wasn’t allowed to use the word sucked.
My mother was waiting in the living room. “How’d it go?” she asked my father. He sped past her into the kitchen. I followed him.
“One man got really pissed at his son,” my father yelled back to her, removing a small Ex-Lax package from a cabinet. He slammed the cabinet shut and took out some cheese from the refrigerator. He wrapped a chunk of cheese around an Ex-Lax pill. “The last guy was a jerk. And he owns the dog that’s been pooping on our lawn,” my dad continued.
My mother ran into the kitchen and grabbed the cheese from my father’s hand. “Jack, it’s not the dog’s fault. Don’t hurt the dog.”
Dad’s hurting a dog? With cheese? Does he have a cheese pellet gun in the toolshed?
“Dad, what are you doing to his dog?” I cried, worried that my zebra fight was going to result in a doggie death.
“He’s putting something out for the dog to eat that will give him the poops,” my mother said, trying to get me on her side, since I’d brought the battle home in the first place.
“Gwen, the man slammed the door in our face, and his dog craps in our yard! He’s lucky this is all he’s getting.”
My parents were usually so straight and narrow, my mother especially, that I could have been a Brady kid. I couldn’t watch R-rated movies or wear nail polish like my classmates. Once, when I tried to steal a pack of gum from Rite Aid, my mother caught me and made me apologize to the store manager. He looked embarrassed for me. It got tiring. Whenever I got the rare chance to witness them doing something devious—like the time my brother picked up a toy in a store and my mother, not seeing a price tag on it, exclaimed, “It’s free!” and stuck it in her purse—I tried to make it last as long as I could.
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