Mixed

by Angela Nissel

  “Why you look so scared? You don’t have to fight both of us. Just me,” Keyana said.

  As Keyana stepped closer to me, I again looked up at Mary and my mind flashed back to my old school and the boys’ fights. I remembered the one boy who was often teased but never hit: Sean, the mentally disabled/retarded/slow boy.

  “Why you not saying anything?” the sidekick asked, laughing.

  “Bunk youuu,” I replied, slurring my words and elongating my vowels in my best imitation of Sean.

  “What did you say?” Keyana asked.

  “Bunk youuuuu!” I screamed, slumping one side of my body and keeping my mouth open for a few seconds after the words had come out.

  Keyana locked eyes with me and squinted as if she was trying to bring my face back in focus. I put up two limp fists, like a handicapped Rocky.

  “Bunk yoouuuu!” I screamed again.

  “She’s retarded!” the sidekick exclaimed, backing away from me as if retardation were contagious. Keyana walked backward for a few steps, then they both spun around and ran toward Maureen, throwing their hands up in her face.

  “You didn’t tell us she was retarded! That’s messed up!” they yelled. Just as Maureen looked over toward me, the head nun rang the bell, indicating it was time to line up and go inside. I gripped my rosary beads before heading inside. Maureen stared at me for three straight hours until my mother arrived to pick me up.

  The counseling center was a row house in the middle of a regular West Philadelphia block, the only home with white people sitting on the porch. The waiting room was decorated with posters I didn’t understand.

  One poster looked like the universal NO SMOKING sign, except instead of a cigarette with a slash through it there was a wire hanger.

  No hangers? What does that mean? Maybe our counselor hates hanging up clothes.

  Another poster featured two men in a passionate embrace.

  “Mom, why are those guys French-kissing?” I asked.

  “Because . . . because they are good friends,” my mother replied.

  Our counselor called us into her office. She was a middle-aged hippie, the perfect spokeswoman for Birkenstocks and loosefitting skirts. She insisted I call her Sue (instead of Miss Sue like my mother said), and once I was seated on her couch she handed me markers and asked me to draw a picture of my family.

  I drew my mother, brother, and myself and then, off to the side, another version of myself being punched in the face by girls in plaid uniforms.

  “Who are the girls in plaid?” Sue asked.

  I spilled everything, from my hopscotch racial faux pas to my clash with Janine’s play cousin.

  “. . . so I had to act like a ’tard!” I finished. I looked over at my mother and immediately corrected myself. “I mean retarded,” I said, dropping my head to the floor.

  “I had no idea,” my mother said cautiously to Sue, as if making sure there was no additional charge for bringing in a truckload of extra problems.

  “Wow, what a smart girl you were to act retarded!” Sue exclaimed, and turned to my mother. “We’re going to need quite a few more sessions.”

  While driving back to my grandmother’s house, my mother asked what would make the rest of the school year go easier for me.

  “Please come tell Maureen that my dad is white,” I said.

  “Lord, give me strength,” my mother murmured.

  The next day, my mother marched into the schoolyard with me. “That’s Maureen!” I said. My mom yanked me toward her and stood eye to eye with my bully.

  “Angela says that you don’t believe her dad is white.” Maureen opened her mouth to reply, but my mother cut her off. “Her father is just as white as I am black. If you have any other questions you want to ask about her family, you ask me. Got it?” With my mother yelling at her, Maureen shrank before my eyes. She was just an eleven-year-old in a training bra that I had outbullied with the ultimate weapon: an angry, overworked, single black mother.

  Maureen kept her eyes to the ground, looking like she wanted to find a crack in the cement so she could crawl into it and hide. My mother left her and walked over to talk to Miss Shannon. Maureen, in a last-ditch attempt to save face in front of her followers, glanced at my mother and sucked her teeth.

  As I was about to join my mother, Maureen grabbed me by the arm. I blocked my face, prepared for the punch.

  “You got ends,” she said, holding out her end of the rope. Suspiciously, I grabbed the double-Dutch olive branch and started turning. Not five minutes into the game, another classmate, Erica, who had recently taken my spot in the front row by claiming she couldn’t see the board, accused me of being double-handed.

  “Erica, get some glasses ’cause you blind!” Maureen screamed. It’s like I really was retarded/mentally disabled/slow Sean, suddenly tight with the class bully. I promised myself I would abuse my Maureen-protected status for as long as I had it.

  “Call me double-handed again and you’ll have to give me a fair one,” I whispered to Erica.

  Once in the classroom, Miss Shannon startled us all with a bold announcement. “We’re going to start religion class a little late. I want to talk about race and differences,” she said.

  Huh? It’s not February, why are we talking about race stuff? Oh, God, my mother must have told her what Maureen did. Please don’t single me out, Miss Shannon. I finally got Maureen to be my friend. Let it drop, lady!

  “What color am I?” Miss Shannon asked the class.

  “White!” the class clown, Rufus, called out without raising his hand. He was very excited to be able to answer a question correctly.

  “Yes. I’m white,” Miss Shannon said. “And what color is Charmaine?” she asked. Charmaine was a light-skinned girl with hazel eyes and more beads in her hair than hair. Every time she moved her head, it sounded like the beginning of a mariachi tune.

  “White!” Rufus called out again, laughing. This time he knew he was wrong, but emboldened by one correct answer, he couldn’t resist going for a quick second dose of attention.

  Charmaine whipped her head around and glared at Rufus. “You white! Your mother white!”

  “Charmaine, be quiet!” Miss Shannon said.

  “I ain’t white!” Charmaine said. She folded her arms across her chest and slid down in her seat.

  Miss Shannon was in over her head. She didn’t know that being called white was a dis. Actually, I’m not sure she knew how to give a lesson on race. For ten minutes, she just called the names of various civil rights activists and musicians and then asked what race the person was. When she finished running down the entire Motown roster (“and what color is Jermaine Jackson?”) she summed up her lesson: “Black and white people can do anything, and they can do it together.”

  Maureen’s hand shot into the air. “Black people can’t do anything! My mother said they can’t be president.”

  Miss Shannon clapped her hands against her cheeks. “Why, Maureen, that’s horrible! Of course a black person could be president,” she said. “Maybe what your mom meant is that we haven’t had a black president yet!”

  “No,” Maureen replied. “My mom said never. She said if it does happen, he’ll be shot the next day. Bam!” Maureen said, pointing a fake gun at Miss Shannon.

  Miss Shannon’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

  Janine raised her hand and broke Miss Shannon’s silence. “I know something else black people can’t be! They can’t be nuns!”

  Miss Shannon’s face lit up. “There are indeed black nuns!” she said, smiling. With murmurs of disbelief moving through the classroom, Miss Shannon took out Field Trip forms from her desk and passed them out. “We’ll just have to go see one, won’t we?”

  As Miss Shannon passed a packet down each row, she caught my eye. If she asks me to get up and say a few words, I’m running out of this room and going home, I thought.

  “Angela,” she said, “make sure everyone in the class gives you a big thank-you. You’re the reason we
get to go on this field trip.”

  With those words, Ms. Shannon transformed me into the most popular girl in class. I was the magic new girl with the white dad and the ability to get them out of school to see black nuns.

  The day of the field trip, Maureen saved a space for me on the school bus. When we hopped off the bus at the entrance to the convent grounds, Maureen shouted, “ ’Scuse me, where’s the black sister?” to the first nun we saw.

  “Maureen!” Miss Shannon exclaimed, embarrassed.

  The nun laughed and led our group to the convent entrance. She told us to wait as she went inside. A few moments later, a black nun popped her head out of an upstairs window like a cuckoo clock bird. She looked a bit irritated, as if someone was always interrupting her prayers to get her to wave at groups of disbelieving schoolchildren.

  “She’s too pretty to be a nun. She could get a man,” Maureen announced to the group. I agreed, even though I’d never thought of nuns joining the convent because they were ugly.

  No one paid attention for the rest of the trip. We were all giggling in excitement at seeing a real live black nun.

  “Still, that don’t mean a black person can be president,” Maureen said, as we boarded the bus to ride home. “A nun I can understand, because nobody shoots nuns.” Before she boarded the bus, she pointed an imaginary gun at the convent window.

  “We have a surprise for you!” Sue said, clasping her hands together.

  It was our fifth visit, and I was starting to tire of the counseling center. I didn’t see the point. My problem was solved, Maureen was my friend. Plus, I felt like I was always letting Sue down. She’d give my mother and me homework assignments, but we could never get around to completing them. Two visits ago, she’d told my mother to take me to the park to show me how to turn double Dutch. That was a train wreck. It was impossible for my mother to turn the ropes with me and keep an eye on my brother. He tried to chase some geese and almost fell into the Schuylkill River. When my mother ran to save him, she slipped on goose droppings and twisted her ankle. “That’s enough jump rope,” she said, while I helped her limp to the car. She was in so much pain, I had to help hold the steering wheel steady while she drove home.

  I also hated the way Sue always tried to pull “feelings” out of me. Every session she’d ask, “How does it feel to be mixed? Do you feel like you have to choose sides? Is it confusing?”

  Who cares about feelings when you’re popular? I thought. I wasn’t confused at all, I just wanted people not to tease me. The more I insisted that I wasn’t confused, the more Sue pressed me on it. “But I see the squiggly marks you drew around your head,” she said, holding up my latest drawing.

  Even when I told her the squiggly marks weren’t symbolism, they were my version of cornrows, she prodded for feelings.

  “Are you ready for the surprise?” Sue asked.

  I nodded.

  “The surprise is you’re moving back to your old neighborhood so you can go back to your old school!” Sue exclaimed. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Great,” I lied.

  I didn’t tell Maureen I was leaving until the last day of school. My mother came to pick me up, the backseat of her car filled with boxes. Maureen hugged me like I was her daughter.

  “Will we hang out over the summer?” Maureen asked.

  “No, I won’t see you this summer. I have to go back to my white school. It’s better than this school,” I said, just for the sake of being mean and making her feel as bad as she’d once made me feel. Of course now, in my paranoid old age, I’m afraid that telling her my white school was better than her school may have scarred her for life, made her hate white people, half-white people, or, more likely, herself. Whenever a black person is rude to me for no reason, I suck it up, figuring it’s my Maureen karma.

  “I’d tell you where it is, but I can’t give directions to black people,” I said, pronouncing the word black as if it were a disease.

  I turned around to walk to the car. My mother was standing right over me, looking like she was trying to decide whether it would be easier to choke me with my uniform collar or bite my head off.

  “If black people can’t go to our old neighborhood, you’d better find somebody else to drive you.” My mother planted herself down on the nuns’ favorite bench and crossed her legs. “How are you, Maureen?” she asked, smiling at her.

  “Mom, I—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” my mother said. “I don’t know who told you that you were better than anyone else because you have a white dad, but let me tell you, you’re just as black as me,” she said. “One drop of black blood makes you black, young lady.” And she left me with Maureen. Maureen looked shaken. It was the only time I’d ever seen her speechless.

  “I’m sorry, Maureen,” I said, and tried to give her a weak apology hug. She shoved me away.

  When I got in the car, my mother turned up the radio, her sign that she didn’t want to hear anything I had to say. To add to the punishment, she drove up and down almost every West Philadelphia street that day, as if what I’d said to Maureen was correct and her blackness kept her from knowing the directions back to Southwest Philly. I’d call out frustratedly, “Mom, you’re supposed to turn here,” and she’d slap her forehead.

  “I’m so glad I have you in the car, I’d be so lost!” my mother said twenty times in ten minutes.

  A half tank of gas later, the sight of a cop riding her bumper startled her into ceasing the role of Lost Black Driver. Since my father still held title to the car, we were driving on expired tags. We avoided interactions with cops like we were a drug mule family.

  “Angie, crawl in the backseat and wave to the cop,” my mother said.

  I hesitated.

  “Wave to the cop. If he pulls up and sees that you look part white, he’ll understand why the car is registered to a Nissel. I can’t afford a ticket,” she said.

  “But I’m not part white. You just said I’m all black.”

  “Please, Angela, just wave!” I obeyed and crawled into the backseat, waving and smiling like I was on a parade float. The cop drove off.

  I stayed in the backseat, wondering if being half white was some kind of hidden superpower, one you only pulled out in times of danger. When was I supposed to hide it? With black schoolgirls? What happened if the wrong person found out? How come one drop of white blood doesn’t make you white? Who made these rules, anyway, and why couldn’t I get a copy of them?

  “Mom, I want to see Sue,” I announced. I was certain Sue would be proud of me. I finally had the confused feelings she’d been searching for.

  My God Complex

  “Tonight, the Academy is honoring both my people with Fiddler on the Roof and Shaft.”

  —Sammy Davis, Jr., black entertainer who converted to Judaism

  “Why do you still go to that white church?” Miss Marlo, a frequent visitor to the beauty shop, asked my mother.

  “Because the service is short. The priest has you in and out of there in forty-five minutes flat. Sometimes it’s only a half-hour service if there’s a game on that afternoon,” my mother replied. “Plus, I don’t have to buy dress clothes. You can wear jeans to that church!”

  Every corner of Miss Lillian’s basement salon responded with shouts of disbelief.

  “She ain’t lying,” Miss Lillian chimed in. “Them people going to church look like they about to go camping.”

  “Well, that’s just rude,” Miss Marlo said, shaking her head. She was a diehard Southern Baptist and seemed more married to Jesus than any of my nuns. “If you can’t dress up for the Lord, who can you dress up for?”

  “God doesn’t care what you wear,” my mother said. “Plus, a lot of times, people in black churches aren’t dressing for God. They’re dressing for each other.”

  “Didn’t you grow up in a black Baptist church?” Miss Marlo asked, the tone of her voice whispering Heathen, sinner, sellout. “Your kids need to come to my church. They need a place
with community.”

  My ears perked up. Did she say that Baptists had community? Why, I should go to Miss Marlo’s church, declare my allegiance to Baptists, and get welcomed into this community. Why concentrate on racial acceptance when I can have a club where everyone has my back regardless of color as long as I worship their God? Besides, racial wars are so passé, so sixties. Holy wars are all the rage.

  “Mom, I’d like to go to Miss Marlo’s church,” I chimed in.

  “See, she don’t even like your church,” Miss Marlo said, folding her arms across her chest.

  “Fine, she can go to your church,” my mother said to Miss Marlo. “As long as I don’t have to buy her a new dress. Shoot, I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul as it is.”

  Attending Eagle Rock Baptist Church required more clothing, hair, and makeup preparation than going to a transvestite prom.

  Saturday night, Miss Marlo thumbed through my closet until she found the only church-suitable dress, a frilly yellow Easter getup from 1985 B.C. (Before Cleavage). When I modeled it, my eleven-year-old breasts almost burst out of the thin cotton. Miss Marlo quickly threw her shawl over them like she was trying to smother a fire.

  After the shawl/Easter dress outfit was deemed acceptable, I ironed it and changed into my nightclothes, and Miss Marlo began braiding my hair. It took two hours, as Miss Marlo took several pauses to pluck her eyebrows and tend to the collard greens she was cooking to take to church. When she finished my hair, she asked where my mother kept her hair wraps. I didn’t know what a hair wrap was.

  “It’s like a bonnet to keep your hair from getting messed up.” Miss Marlo sighed. I could tell by her tone that she would have been annoyed if she had to get up and look for it, so I brought her back the closest thing I could find: my swimming cap.

  She shook her head from side to side and laughed a little. “I guess that’ll do. Your head might get kinda hot, though.” Miss Marlo placed the swim cap over my braids and secured it with the chin strap.

  I woke up early Sunday morning and showered (with my swim cap on, of course). Miss Marlo inspected my washing work. She licked her finger and then rubbed the corners of my eyes. It was bad enough when my mother cleaned my face like that, but it seemed doubly disgusting when done by a nonrelated hand.