“You’re about the ashiest little high-yellow child I’ve ever seen,” Miss Marlo declared. “Go grease your face and legs.”
“Grease my face?” I asked, confused.
“Good Lord.” She sighed and took a jar of Vaseline from her purse, scooped a dollop of the jelly out, and smeared it over every exposed part of my body. When I glanced into the mirror, I looked like I was made of wax. She handed me the pot of greens to carry, and it almost slid out of my hands.
From the outside, the church looked unassuming, a tiny red building in the middle of a beat-up block of stores. Once inside, I was greeted by a hurricane of sequined hats and matching change purses. The smell of our collard greens mixed with the burnt smell of freshly hot-combed hair. Women greeted each other with shouts and hugs, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years.
Is this really a church? I wondered. Where are the stained-glass windows, and how come there are only six rows of pews? Is that podium and microphone supposed to be an altar? How . . . quaint. I questioned my decision to come; I wondered why God would visit such a shabby place when he had huge Catholic churches with air-conditioning to hang out in.
Plus, if I was looking for a group to have my back, these people were hardly the type. My brother and I were the only people in the church not eligible for AARP.
“Where’s the priest?” I asked.
Miss Marlo pointed to a man of about sixty, one of only two men in the room. He was chatting with three women, dressed all in white. “He’s not called a priest, he’s a minister,” Miss Marlo explained. There wasn’t enough time to ask her all my other questions, like, Why were people greeting her as Sister Marlo when she wasn’t a nun? Where were the altar boys? Who are these Sick and Shut-In members and why are they shut in? Did they lose their house keys?
“Jeez-us! Praise his name!” a woman in the front pew called out and walked up to the podium. A parade of women followed her, each walking up to the front of the church to unburden themselves of all the week’s troubles—lost jobs, recent cancer diagnoses, cut-off electricity. When they sat back down, they looked quite a bit lighter, like they had thrown pounds of pain from their shoulders. Testifying, they called it. It seemed different from the testifying my mother was called on to do in family court.
A song began. Miss Marlo’s brown hands shot up toward the white stucco ceiling; she opened and closed them as if she were grabbing for something just beyond her reach.
“Hal-le-lu-jah,” she intoned.
“Praise him!” the woman next to me hollered. The loudness of her voice startled me. I stared at her, trying to prepare myself for the next outburst. The woman closed her eyes and then shot out of her seat. As she stood, her body jerked back and forth as if she were being hit by multiple cattle prods.
In response, I let out an extended scream and pulled my breast-covering shawl over my eyes. Our pew was rocking. The more the backs of her knees hit our bench, the louder I screamed.
Miss Marlo gripped my hand. “Calm down, it’s okay, she just got the Holy Ghost,” she said. That gave me enough courage to pull my shawl down so it only covered my nose and mouth. The entire church was staring at me like, Who’s the screamer in the burka?
My brother, in a daring act of sibling empathy, started crying and tried to crawl over Miss Marlo to get to me. She flattened him with a light karate chop to the back. He fell silent for a few seconds and then let out a freight train of a scream. The church stopped staring at us and turned to the ladies in white. Do something, their looks said. Their screams are drowning out the Holy Ghost!
“Breathe deep, honey,” one of the ladies in white instructed me. As I opened my mouth to take in a big gasp of air, another lady in white popped a peppermint in my mouth.
“You can’t give her those candies!” the first lady admonished. “They’re for Sister Jean, in case she goes into diabetic shock!” The peppermint lady ignored her and started cooling my face with a funeral hand fan.
The service had completely stopped. Miss Marlo hugged my brother, who was slobbering on her shirt. “I’m so sorry,” Miss Marlo whispered to the woman fanning me. “They’ve never been to a black church before.” The woman glanced at Miss Marlo quizzically, put a cold towel on my head, and started singing about “a wretch like me.”
I think my mother liked having a few hours during the weekend to herself, because she started buying me dresses so I could attend church with Miss Marlo every Sunday. The more I went, the more I became accustomed to Holy Ghost catching; actually, I welcomed it as an entertaining diversion from the three-hour-long church service.
About three months later, my mother announced that staying close to God was becoming a little too expensive. She couldn’t handle having two kids in Catholic school and fulfill Baptist church dress-buying requirements. I was staying in Baptist church, but I was going to a public school.
“You’ll like it. It’s a magnet school for smart kids from all over the city,” my mother said.
Public school? Kids from all over the city? That means all types of religions, I thought. I got excited thinking of opportunities to find a friend with a new religious community I could join.
Public school also meant public transportation—two buses and the subway. It was my first time alone on public transportation, and on the first bus I was too intimidated by the crowd to claw my way off at my stop. I ended up having to walk over a mile back to the second bus stop, where two buses passed me by because I wasn’t standing close enough to the curb. By the time I arrived at the school auditorium, I was bushed. I dragged myself into the assembly room and sat alone near a group of white kids.
There were more kids in the assembly room than I had ever seen in my entire life, and they all seemed to know one another. Some were chasing around; others were doing graffiti on notepads. None looked especially gifted to me.
A chubby white girl clutching a Trapper Keeper entered the auditorium looking just as overwhelmed as I did. She sat next to me and introduced herself. By seventh period, Dara Silberstein was my best friend.
Dara was a transfer from Hebrew school and glad to be in public school. When she talked about how much she hated Hebrew school, I shook my head like I knew what Hebrew school was. I thought being at a school for smart kids meant you had to know everything. I imagined if a teacher overheard me admitting ignorance of Hebrew school, she would call a hall monitor to escort me out through a secret dunce-cap-shaped door.
The second week of my new Best Friendship, I admitted to Dara that I was ignorant of all things Jewish. I explained that, in Catholic school, Jewish culture was next to Darwinism on the “things God really doesn’t want us to talk about” list. Dara invited me to her house to spend the night and go to a synagogue.
I was hooked on Judaism halfway through the service. It combined the best of Catholic church (central air!) and Baptist church (talks of “how far we’d come since slavery”!) and had one important extra: No one passed around a collection plate. I figured the last part would appeal to my financially stressed mother and I’d be rewarded for finding a place to worship and save money simultaneously. I imagined how cute my brother would look in a beanie.
On the way back to Dara’s house, I told her mother my Jewish desires.
Dara gasped and tried to warn me off the kosher path. “You’d have to leave and go to Hebrew school!”
Exactly, Dara. I wanted to go to Hebrew school. There, I planned to mix and mingle with Jewish children my age—my community.
“How cool would it be if you were Jewish!” Dara said, grabbing both of my hands and smiling. Her mother said nothing.
When my mother rang Dara’s bell later that evening, I pounced on her before she stepped into the living room.
“Mom, can we be Jewish? Please?”
“Well, hello to you, too!” my mother said.
“Sorry. Hi, mom. Black people can be Jewish,” I explained. I considered myself an expert on the subject, since I’d seen one black woman at the temple, s
itting in the front row.
“Sing the song,” Dara said, nudging me.
“Ain kaolhain no!” I sang out, doing my best version of the Hebrew chant that I had heard earlier. I remembered the words because the first line sounded like ain’t constipated. To this day, I feel comfortable in any temple, because I still remember that first line.
My mom’s eyebrows raised and her eyes widened; she stared at me as I belted out song after song in broken Hebrew.
“Yes, we’ve had quite a day,” Dara’s mother said. “Is Angela’s father Jewish?” I’ve always wondered if she asked this because of the high percentage of Jewish males who hooked up with black women during the civil rights movement and gave birth to little Lenny Kravitzes.
My mom started choking on her juice. She beat her chest to clear her lungs and announced that it was time to go.
For months, I stuck to my Jewish plans. In my mind, I was Jewish. When Jehovah’s Witnesses came to our door, I told them I was Jewish. I asked the lunch ladies if the tater tots were kosher. I used Yiddish terms Dara taught me in general conversations. This did not go over well at Miss Lillian’s beauty salon.
“Mazel tov, shiksas!” I announced when entering the salon.
“What’s with the Jewish thing?” Miss Lillian asked.
“You know the K on their bread stands for KKK, right?” Miss Marlo asked, after I politely refused a sandwich made on non-kosher bread.
“It’s just a phase,” my mother told them.
“No, it’s not! They are my people! They have their own school and their own language. It’s like a club,” I replied.
“Well, for your sake, it’d better be a nice club because being black and Jewish you won’t be able to get into any other ones,” Miss Lillian informed me.
The next weekend, my mother decided to take me to a real club full of people like me, a multiracial group of parents and children entitled Rainbow Connections. (It wasn’t that much of a rainbow; my mother was the only black mother there.)
I played board games with a new mixed friend while my mother sat uncomfortably in the back of the room listening to white women chatting excitedly about the upcoming Kwanzaa holiday.
When we got into the car to leave, my mother thumbed through the introduction brochure. On the cover, there was a cartoon WELCOME BIRACIAL PARENTS! banner with six happy light-brown children standing under it.
“I’m looking for meat-and-potatoes talk and they’re serving up chips and soda,” my mother said, scanning the last page. “If those people think their mixed children aren’t black, they’ve got a rude awakening headed their way.” She tossed the pamphlet into the backseat where, after two weeks of lying abandoned in the hot sun, the brown cartoon children faded to white.
A few weeks later, as she was cleaning out her car, she found the brochure and laughed.
“You know what? You and me, we can be our own club.” She ripped up the faded children and replaced them with a Bible and a piece of kente cloth that sit in her car window to this day.
Fat Pam Is Real Black
“In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you’re black.”
—Colin Powell
My mother won’t come out of pocket for anything unless it meets two conditions: high quality and low price. That’s all fine when you’re searching thrift-store racks for clothes, but a hard combination to find when you’re hiring an overnight babysitter.
Betty, our first sitter, didn’t like how watching two kids put a damper on her social life. Every weekend night, she’d drop my brother off with her cousin and take me out clubbing with her. Thanks to my steady diet of hormone-infused fast-food burgers, all it took was a low-cut top and some bright red lipstick to transform me from twelve to twenty-one.
Unfortunately, one morning my mother noticed the Club Passions VIP stamp on the back of my pubescent hand. She promptly fired Betty and walked me to the beauty salon, to see if anyone needed a babysitting gig.
“Fat Pam can watch her,” a fellow customer, Miss Cheryl, offered.
Miss Cheryl was Fat Pam’s mother. Like everyone else, Miss Cheryl called her daughter by her neighborhood name, so my mother wouldn’t confuse her with Booster Pam, the woman who would steal anything you wanted if you paid her half the item’s retail price.
My mother was sold on Fat Pam; she had a reputation around the beauty shop as a sweet, quiet girl. She wasn’t running the streets like some nineteen-year-olds; she had a steady man she was going to marry when she was done with community college. Fat Pam would also watch us for only $75 a week.
My brother and I soon discovered that Pam was sweet and quiet only after she smoked a bag of weed. Sometimes, she wasn’t even sweet and quiet then. If our upstairs neighbor was making too much noise while Pam was trying to relax in a weed-induced high, she’d make me and my brother chant “You’re fucking up my high!” while hitting the ceiling with brooms and mops. It was the most fun game Fat Pam ever played with us.
When she wasn’t high, she was Mean Pam. She was loud, she cursed like she was raised in a cell block, and she was quick to pick a fight, knowing that no one wanted to take on a three-hundred-pound woman. Mean Pam saw it as her job not only to babysit me but also to use her weight and her mouth to bully me into being a Real Black Person.
Pam’s Real Black Person Rules
Real Black People’s hair should be bone-straight or in a Jeri-Curl, no matter how many chemical burns it takes to get that way.
Real Black People accessorize with gold jewelry. The more jewelry men have, the more you should flirt with them. Women should have big gold hoop earrings to attract the men with the gold jewelry. If you can’t afford real gold, buy some fake earrings from a Chinese vendor and coat them in clear nail polish so they won’t turn green.
Real Black People never, ever listen to white music unless George Michael sings it.
Real Black People should know at least one break-dancing move.
Real Black People know how to fight.
Real Black People wear clean clothes and name-brand sneakers. If your sneakers get scuffed, you should throw them out.
Real Black People do not have white best friends.
“Like, omigod, it’s your friend Dara, like, on the phone,” Pam said, using her best imitation of a white-girl voice.
“Why is a white girl your best friend?” she asked me, after her intense staring forced me to cut my conversation with Dara short.
“Because she is,” I replied. I felt safe giving a flippant response. Pam had already smoked three joints and was floating on a cloud of drug tranquillity.
“You know you’re black, right?” Pam asked me, her tone implying that I didn’t. “If you don’t know now, you’re going to know when I get done with you.”
Pam’s community college was across the street from my school, which meant I had to endure two buses and a subway’s worth of Real Black Person notes.
“Real Black People use laundry tokens instead of subway tokens to pay the bus fare,” Pam said, before pocketing the money my mother had given me and slipping a Laundromat token into the fare box.
“C’mon, let’s go to the back,” Pam called out, once we were on the bus. “Real Black People sit in the back.”
When Pam walked me to school, she took great pains to point out people who were blacker than I was.
“See, she’s a Real Black Person,” Pam said, pointing to Tascha, a girl who sucked her teeth every time she saw me in the hallway. According to Tascha, I was a “light-skinned bitch.” At least, that’s what she called out to me a few times after sucking her teeth.
“Christina don’t like you either,” Tascha informed me, interrupting my walk from Science to Home Economics. “She says you be grittin’ on her too much,” Tascha continued, before she turned away from me and headed down the hall. “You do be grittin’ on people too hard,” she yelled over her shoulder. Of course, all the boys were looking when she said this. When Tascha walk
ed, every male in the building stared, their eyes stuck on her perfect ass until the wavy logo of her Lee jeans back pockets turned the corner.
Christina and Tascha were unlike any girls I’d ever met. They were fourteen going on twenty-four. They went to Planned Parenthood after school and showed off their birth control pills in the cafeteria. They’d complain between classes about how most of the other black students at our school were childish and corny. If it was raining, I knew Tascha and Christina would show up with plastic caps and curlers so not one drop of water would mess up their sexy asymmetrical haircuts. I peered over their shoulders as they compared their Liz Claiborne purses and their gold name earrings and passed notes in their girly bubblescript handwriting. They always dotted their i’s with hearts. So yes, one could say I was grittin’ on Christina and Tascha, but it was with intrigue and admiration, the way you would stare at a celebrity.
“I told you black people don’t like to be stared at. You better watch out, they’re probably going to jump you,” Pam nonchalantly warned me after I asked her to check her Real Black Dictionary and tell me what gritting meant.
The knowledge that I was on the verge of getting my ass kicked only made me stare harder. I figured I had a reason to stare: I had to see if they were gearing up to slaughter me. I refused to get jumped unexpectedly.
I tried to delay the beatdown Pam predicted by becoming Christina and Tascha’s unwanted helper. I’d get in the dessert line at school, even though I didn’t want dessert; I wanted to call out Christina’s name when I hit the head of the line so she could get in front of me. I let Tascha borrow anything of mine she needed: my homework, my allowance, my gloves. Unfortunately, pushing myself on the girls only gave them more time to study me and find new things to hate.
“You talk white,” Christina said, after I let her borrow all my birthday money.
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