Mixed

by Angela Nissel

  “She dresses white, too,” someone else yelled out.

  “Why don’t you get a new hairstyle? You look like a DeBarge reject!” Tascha said, after I bought her Doritos.

  If I’d known in eighth grade what I know now, I would have said, “Thank you, see you in twenty years, when you’re sitting with your ten kids and your biggest accomplishment was telling someone she talks white.” Maybe I’d have rejoined Dara at her table or at least saddled up with some of the “corny” black kids. I don’t know why I had this relentless drive to please my bullies. Perhaps it was because I was younger than everyone else and my mind wasn’t developed enough not to care what people thought; more likely it was because I was just doing what I could to keep the peace in one part of my life. Between Pam at home and the cool clique in school, all that teasing was wearing me down.

  Pam instructed me that the way out of being teased was to vigorously study her Real Black People lessons.

  “You have to learn to dance, learn to fight, and get some white Reebok high-top sneakers,” Pam instructed me, throwing away my supermarket loafers. The way Pam said it, white high-top Reeboks would be my talisman; once I secured a pair, I’d get the respect of Christina and Tascha. “Whatever you got to do to get your mom to buy them, do it,” Pam said. I knew I had to lie; my mother would rather bring George Bush as a date to her Black Panther reunion than buy name-brand sneakers.

  I told my mother that high-top Reeboks were a Physical Education requirement. “Mr. Greer said I’ll break my ankle if I have the cheap shoes,” I said. My mom eyed me suspiciously, then told me to get in the car. “I have to see these special ankle-protecting sneakers,” she said when we pulled up to Foot Hut, our local Foot Locker knockoff.

  “Fifty dollars? What are these shoes made of, gold?” my mother yelled out to the salesman, dropping the sample shoe like it was burning her hand. “Fifty dollars for sneakers? Do you know what I could do with fifty dollars?” she asked me.

  “Buy me those sneakers so I won’t break my ankles?” I asked, knowing, of course, that wasn’t the right answer.

  “How about I write Mr. Greer a note and tell him that my boss doesn’t pay me Reebok money. I’ll tell him I work in a hospital, so I can get you an ankle cast for free.”

  We left Foot Hut and went down the street to Fayva, where we purchased their version of Reebok high-tops. “They look just like Reeboks,” my mother said. They did, except BALLOONS was stitched into the side where the Reebok logo was on the real high-tops. I knew going to school with fake Reeboks would be worse than going to school with no sneakers at all, so I spent two hours in my room using Wite-Out to carefully cover each letter of BALLOONS. When it dried, I took a thin black marker and stenciled REEBOK on top of the Wite-Out.

  The next day, I proudly stomped my “Reeboks” through seven periods. Look at me—I’m really black! Every move I made was a ballet move; I didn’t turn corners, I pirouetted, raising my calf off the floor and rotating 90 degrees to make sure everyone caught a glimpse of my sneakers. The eighth and final period of the day, I shifted in my seat and jutted my legs out into the aisle so that Fred, a male member of the cool black clique, could have an unobstructed view of my feet.

  “Look at her sneakers!” Fred whispered to Christina when our teacher, Mrs. Bratspir, was stuck on the wall phone, taking a note from the office.

  Christina looked at my feet, and a shotgun blast of laughter burst out of her mouth.

  As handy as Wite-Out is, it isn’t made for large-scale projects like sneaker copyright infringement. When I looked down to see what they were laughing at, I saw that I now had BALLBOKS instead of REEBOKS. Half of my Wite-Out had rubbed off, leaving the first half of the BALLOONS logo to merge with my handwritten BOK. Having Ballboks was even worse than having Balloons: to seventh-graders, any punch line that contained the word ball was deemed twenty times funnier than one without a phallic reference.

  “Ballbok!” Fred sputtered out. He dropped over his desk, shaking it as the laughter overtook his entire body.

  Mrs. Bratspir covered the receiver of the wall phone and turned to Fred, her eyes blazing black. “Are you insane?” she asked.

  “Ballbok!” Fred screamed out and pointed at my shoes.

  Mrs. Bratspir hung up the phone and walked slowly toward Fred’s pointing finger. It was the only time in three years of being her student that I ever heard her laugh. She looked at me with pity and amusement, shook her head, and began the lesson on DNA.

  The Ballboks let everyone know that I knew I wasn’t cool and, more important, that I cared. Now I was not only uncool with the popular kids, I was also shunned by the nerds.

  The bullying at school worsened. Tascha would threaten to cut my hair in the cafeteria, Christina would force girls to throw me against my locker while I was trying to open it. Several times I left school with red marks and dents on my face. I couldn’t eat, I had knots of fear in my stomach. Every day, I’d hear a new rumor about when I was going to get my ass kicked. When school let out, I’d either hide until Christina and Tascha left or run as fast as I could to the subway, hopping on it before the girls arrived.

  I felt I had no one to turn to. I had abandoned Dara when both Pam and the cool kids had made fun of our friendship. I tried to go back to her, but it was awkward. She was into boys, so she tried to hook me up, but none of the white guys found me attractive. I played lookout for a short time, while she kissed her boyfriend during recess, but soon that made me feel even lonelier than when I sat by myself.

  I rationalized that I couldn’t tell my teachers; what could they do, walk me to the subway every day? Plus, Christina and Tascha would kill me if they found out I’d told. I decided that Pam, being a Real Black Person, could teach me how to fight. Pam owed me at least a fighting lesson. Besides being her usual mean self, she’d begun lying to people and telling them I was her daughter. According to Pam, having a half-white daughter would up her status with black people.

  While shopping, we ran into a friend she hadn’t seen since junior high.

  “Are these your kids?” her friend asked.

  “Yeah, these are my little brats,” she said, looking at my brother and me, daring us to contradict her.

  “You got with a white man?” her friend asked. Pam smiled and nodded her head up and down. On the spot, she made up a well-detailed lie about her babies’ rich Italian father.

  “Ooh, I can’t wait until she spreads that around! I’m gonna be just like Diana Ross. She ain’t the only bitch can have a white husband,” she explained to me, before we walked to the corner store to buy a night’s worth of marijuana.

  When I asked Pam for boxing lessons, she seemed proud, like a mother bird watching her chick preparing to take a solo flight. She stood up and put her fists against her cheeks. “Protect your face,” she instructed me. “When I fight light-skinned girls, I always go for the face.”

  The next day, Tascha pushed me against my locker, leaving a long scratch on my cheek. I was too afraid to push her back. When Pam saw the scratch, she pronounced me untrainable. “You don’t have the heart,” she said. “That’s your white side.”

  I stuck to my original plan of waiting ten minutes before leaving school. One day, Christina and Tascha decided to wait for me underground. I tensed up as they approached me. Christina ripped my schoolbag from my back and threw it on the train tracks.

  Tascha grabbed my arm and tried to swing me onto the tracks. I grabbed her, and in a violent tango, she ripped my shirt and I grabbed her hair. The other girls cheered Tascha on.

  Several adults were watching. I hoped someone would jump in, but each time I caught someone’s eye, they looked away.

  I slammed my heel down on Tascha’s sneaker. The pain of my cheap plastic heel on her Reeboks caused her to let go of me.

  “What did I ever do to you?” I yelled, panting for air.

  Christina pulled on Tascha’s arm. “Leave her alone. She ain’t worth getting expelled for.”

  I
couldn’t believe the same girls who had almost murdered me were actually worried about their academic careers. Thank God I have gifted school bullies, I thought.

  “Stuck-up yellow bitch,” another member of the crew yelled at me before they all walked to the other end of the platform. When the train arrived, I saw my book bag get blown to pieces. I folded my arms against my chest to cover up the hole in my shirt and got on the train.

  When I arrived home, Pam was mad at me for losing my books. When she had me pick the seeds out of her marijuana bag that night, I saved some to show my mother. I cried as I handed them over later.

  “Those are Pam’s seeds,” I said, and started crying.

  “Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry,” my mother said. “No wonder all of my clothes smell like Black Love incense! I’ll get rid of her, you don’t have to cry.”

  “Please don’t hire any more Real Black People! I hate black people!” I screamed, before running and locking myself in my room.

  I didn’t want to have a mother-daughter mulatto moment like the ones we had after the zebra teasings and the your-dad-isn’twhite scuffles. I didn’t want another race lesson or an analysis of how crazy everyone else was and how special I was. I wanted out of the race game. It seemed every time I learned the rules, someone changed them on me. I was tired of fighting. I wanted to be a purebred.

  I grabbed my seventh-grade yearbook and studied the photos. Unlike my previous schools, there were a few people who had both my complexion and skin color: María, José, Blanca. I went to the mirror armed with two months of junior high Spanish and practiced my new identity.

  “Mixed? No,” I said, a frown on my face. “ Yo soy puertorriqueña!” I said, and smiled.

  Yellow Cab

  With beauty, charm, sweetness of personality, the “correct” color and now an inheritance to boot, my mother had many suitors.

  —Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White

  Dear [insert rapper’s name here]:

  My name is Angela a.k.a. Lady A. I go to a gifted school and I love your rhymes. My dream is to get a recording contract and hear myself on the radio just like you. I have a beef with some girls at school because I’m light-skinned, but like you say in your rap: [insert verse about outdoing the competition], so I ain’t even worried about it. Anyway, if you have time, could you come to my school and give a concert? My contact information is below.

  I sent out at least one hundred of these letters. (God, I needed some friends!) The only time I deviated from that rapper form letter was when I had a massive crush on Cockroach (Theo’s best friend) from The Cosby Show and wrote him a three-page letter complete with stickers. With the rappers, I honestly thought one was going to read my letter, blast into my junior high auditorium, grab the microphone, and be like, “Hey, Christina! Bullying is wack, so step back!” (or something like that).

  Hell, it was 1988, so it could have happened. In ’88 emcees were rapping about all kinds of topics, very few of them gun-related. The most popular song on the air was “Picking Boogers,” where the most offensive verse detailed how the rapper snuck “a little green one” into another rapper’s spaghetti.

  There wasn’t a rap I didn’t know, and that was a huge feat, because even though hip-hop was played for only two hours every night (it was considered street kiddie music, so even the black stations marketed themselves as having “rap-free workdays!”), there were hundreds of rappers. Every time someone came out with a hit song or group idea, someone else would come out with a follow-up. “Roxanne Roxanne” by UTFO had more than a hundred response records. The Fat Boys came out, and soon there was a group called the Skinny Boys. Run-D.M.C. came out with “My Adidas,” and another group came out with “My Fila.” You’d hear a song on the radio and it would sound like the guy from down the block, and it would turn out to be the guy from down the block. If you were a city kid in the eighties, you can understand why I felt I had a good chance of a rapper responding and personalizing an antibully rap for me.

  Still, I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for Biz Markie to show up at my school. I continued taping the rap show every single night, using other songs’ beats to write my own rhymes. I’d use my curling iron as a microphone. I’d imagine all my bullies begging to get into my concert.

  Two weeks into the summer of 1988, my hip-hop addiction gave me answers that no adult had. My bullies hate light-skinned girls because the boys love us!

  Seriously, if you were a light-skinned girl in an all-black community, 1988 was a banner year for high self-esteem. The next time you encounter a thirty-something light-skinned woman with her head in the air, ask her what year her nose got stuck there. After she looks you up and down and inquires about the type of car you’re driving, she’ll undoubtedly reply, “Why, 1988, of course, the year of Light Power.”

  Forget being Puerto Rican, I thought. Because of rap, you’ll finally be popular!

  I made a mix tape of high-yellow hits. It started off with J.J. Fad rapping about being “light-skinned and devastating” and ended with Big Daddy Kane’s declaration of love to women who looked like me.

  MTV Raps premiered that year, and I watched with pride. The majority of the women in the videos had my complexion.

  Dear God, I prayed, thank you for getting me out of the white neighborhood. I may have been ugly to them, but to black people, being light is almost as good as being white! Why didn’t my mother tell me that when I cried about being next to last on the ugly list at Catholic school? Did she hate me, too? I wondered. Probably. Why else would my curfew still be when the streetlights come on? I’m almost grown! I’m thirteen! I wear a bigger bra than she does! She’s probably jealous of that, too.

  I changed my rap name from Lady A to Big Red, as in Big Red-bone, the nickname boys called light-skinned girls, even though no one knew what it meant. I’d rap I’m light-skinned and devastatin’/ all your men I will be takin’ into my curling iron. I’d pretend I was the only girl member of a rap crew. “She’s light-skinned and devastating,” my imaginary posse would chorus before posing in a b-boy stance as spotlights shone down and lit up my fly melanin-deficient self.

  Being confident that I was in style like Adidas sneakers and Spuds MacKenzie, I was ready to take my new self-esteem show on the road. When I rode the bus in the morning, I now held boys’ gazes instead of acting like I was fascinated by the above-seat ads. Most boys reacted to my attention by smiling and motioning me over with their index fingers. I’d mimic what the older girls did; I’d shake my head no and make the boys come to me.

  Finding out that I was pretty was like being a starving dog and getting locked in a meat factory. I went crazy feeding my appetite. There were approximately 200,000 black boys in Philadelphia between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, and I tried to collect the whole set. I stacked up boyfriends like a cheerleading pyramid. There was Allen with the inverted widow’s peak and the gigantic collection of baseball caps to cover it up. And William, who sometimes smelled like cat but he could draw his ass off and proclaimed his love for me in big graffiti bubble letters on the side of a pizza parlor wall: Will ♥ Big Red.

  Some members of my stable were simply guys that other girls wanted, like the light-skinned boys that favored Al B. Sure!, the popular R and B singer of the day. Some were guys that no one wanted but I took on because, hey, you never know when your book bag might need carrying.

  There was one type of guy that could make me get rid of all of the others: a guy with a car. This was not because I was a mini gold digger (not yet), but because a car guaranteed a way for me to zoom away from danger at the end of the school day. Goodbye, Christina! Goodbye, Tascha! Those girls could say they were going to kick my ass even more for being a ho, but they’d have to say it to the tailpipe. Vrooom! Beep beep!

  I didn’t need to be funny or smart, just tan. Lots of times, boys would compliment my complexion as their opening pickup line. “Y’all light-skinned girls are just so pretty,” so
me would say. I didn’t care that they felt that way for the same reason they wore gold rope chains and Jordan sneakers—because Big Daddy Kane did.

  I became even more secure in my light skin when I discovered the mania was deeper than life imitating hip-hop. Sometimes, one of my boyfriends’ hip-hop-hating mothers would coo out, “I knew he’d bring home a pretty high-yellow girl,” or “Oooh, y’all going to have some pretty light babies!” I’d smile, getting an award for something I had nothing to do with.

  Still, for every mother who loved me before I even opened my mouth, there were older versions of Christina who threw me shade for no reason. Will, a boyfriend I considered serious because we had been seeing each other for almost a whole month (and I only had one other boyfriend besides him), straight up told me that his mom didn’t like light-skinned people, especially women. If he hadn’t told me, I would have figured it out for myself. Every time I went over, she’d grunt out a hello and say nothing else, even if I tried to initiate a conversation with her. Did she know how many fake girlfriends I had to invent to even get out of the house to see her son? I thought I could win her over, even going so far as to plan to get a photo of me and my mother airbrushed on my jean jacket so she could see I came from dark-skinned stock.

  One night, Will and I were driving home from the movies. We had started going to the movies in the suburbs because our regular haunt downtown had become a haven for bootleggers who would get mad at people for laughing (“Shut up, I’m taping, yo!”)

  We were debating whether a family could actually leave their kid home alone when a police cruiser pulled behind us and followed us for more than a mile. My fears shifted from how I was going to hide my hickey from my mother to whether I was going to jail. Since some members of my boy pyramid had bad reputations, Miss Marlo had taken me on a tour of local juvenile halls, hoping to scare me straight. I lounged in the backseat of her car trying to look disinterested while thinking that I could survive in an all-girl gang. At the least, I’d make some tough girlfriends in jail and we’d all go back and kick the asses of everyone who’d put me there.