Then he stood up and grinned at us. “I don’t want any of you pretending to be blind, you hear? Not color-blind, not blind-blind, just 20/20, you got that?”
Obediently, we all nodded. He smiled and made a “Right-on!” fist at us, and we all made one back. Then he and Georges headed off to play basketball.
Sure enough, as we got old enough to walk to school by ourselves, we started to see things. Not just things like Puerto Rican girls wearing communion dresses. Things like the white proprietor of the corner bakery giving my brother and me free Swedish candy when we stopped by after school, but ordering our friends Jerry and Tremaine, two black kids from our building, to leave if they weren’t going to buy anything.
But mostly what we saw was that, while the adults around us might have been singing “Joy to the World” and reading aloud stories like George Washington Carver: Father of Peanut Butter!, a lot of kids in the neighborhood were simply interested in kicking each other’s ass.
Every day during recess at PS 75, boys in my first grade class tumbled onto the asphalt and pummeled each other mercilessly. Christopher and Ricardo against Barry and Juan. The fights were like dance contests, really. When boys fought, there was a blunt, muscular grace to it, a choreography, a parsing of the air, and as they locked together, other kids encircled them, cheering, clapping, hooting.
Sometimes, Christopher Kleinhaus yelled, “I call ‘Boys against girls!’” Then it was a frenzy of yelling, chasing, and running. When this occurred, my friends Audrey, Sara, and I took refuge in the bathroom until the bell rang. We had a reputation as crybabies and cowards, and saw no reason to contradict this. Some of our other friends fought back, though, especially the black and Hispanic girls. The moment the boys flew at Alissa and Shana, they proclaimed flatly, “Excuse me, but I don’t think so,” then slonked them expertly in the kneecaps. “That’s right. You better run,” they shouted after them gleefully.
Still other times, two older girls fought each other. Then the temperature dropped dangerously. The schoolyard became frozen, suddenly vicious and terrifying. There was no prelude, no sense of decorum, just an instant eruption of violence.
“Excuse me. What did you just say?” one girl would say, stopping dead in the middle of the asphalt.
“You heard what I just said,” another would reply venomously. “What? You deaf?”
“Whoa, that’s it, bitch. I’m gonna fuck you up.”
Then it was if a starting gun had been fired, and they lunged at each other, tearing out each other’s hair in clumps, clawing each other’s faces, clamping on to each other in a mutual, squalling death-choke until some hapless teachers finally managed to pull them apart.
No matter how much liberal gloss the adults tried to put on it, our neighborhood was simply a rough place. A decade before I was born, it had been riddled with Irish and Puerto Rican gangs. Now the gangs had gone, but the sense of foreboding and antagonism remained, crackling in the streets like static electricity.
When Michelle and I walked to Carvel for ice cream, boys and girls we didn’t know hung on the chain link fence of the basketball court and taunted, “Hey. You. Ugly white girl. In the ugly pink coat. Yeah, you.”
Standing on a movie line at the Olympia, Audrey and I heard snickering behind us, then whispering in Spanish, followed by a sharp poke. Turning around, we saw two girls sticking us in the butt with the pointy tips of their umbrellas.
“What?” they glared. “You got a problem?”
Audrey and I consulted each other nervously. We’d been instructed to love everyone and that “violence is not the answer,” but now what were we supposed to do?
“If we yell at them, will they think we’re prejudiced because they’re Puerto Rican and we’re white?” Audrey whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said. But meanwhile, why were the girls picking on us? Since they didn’t know anything about us, except what they could see, were they ganging up on us because we were white?
Some of the older kids in the neighborhood seemed to have no use for us. Their contempt was palpable for the white so-called liberal culture, with its smiley face stickers, its patronizing “famous Negro” storybooks, and its TV jingles that professed to want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony while really selling you a Coke. They knew what I couldn’t possibly have known at that age: that all of us might be low-income at the moment, but that not all of us would be in ten or twenty years’ time, and odds were that they would not be among the ones “movin’ on up.” To them, we white kids weren’t “brothers and sisters” or “amigos” at all.
Being little kids, however, my white friends and I didn’t understand this. All we saw was that some kids seemed to loathe us on sight. We struggled to understand why. What had we done wrong?
With no working knowledge of history, and without the usual host of prejudices to fall back on, we were left to develop our own. And the prejudice we developed was this: we white kids were disliked because we were so hideously un-cool.
When it came right down to it, declared my white friend Andrew, we had to face facts: white people came in dead last in the Hip Pageant. We were the lowest branch of the Cool Tree. We were losers in the Lottery of Soul and Ail-Around General Funkiness.
As he said this, our friends Juan, Steven, and Adam looked down sheepishly. “Aw, c’mon,” said Steven halfheartedly. Steven was black. But why should he apologize? We white kids could see it for ourselves. Every morning, when we all walked down the hill to PS 75 together, we stopped to look in the window of the Ottowa Record Store. There were two albums always on display, set at right angles to each other: The Partridge Family’s Greatest Hits and ABC by the Jackson 5. “Like, doy, who’s better?” said Andrew disgustedly, rolling his eyes.
White dorkiness was glaring and embarrassing. Augh, how we wanted to wriggle away from it! Our black and Hispanic friends seemed all-knowing, almost invincible to us. They were like the superheroes of the neighborhood. They were clearly the best at anything that truly mattered to us kids: Loyalty. Cracking Jokes. Thinking Quickly. Musical Taste. Opening Up a Big Fresh Mouth. Playing Stickball and Basketball. Bravery. Resisting Pompous Authority Figures. Jumping Rope. Beating People Up. Telling It Like It Is. Hairdos.
Compared to them, we white kids were hothouse flowers—pampered, hesitant, gutless children who followed instructions and clung to our mothers. We were callow. We thought nothing of selling each other out for a baseball card or a Zagnut bar (I personally could be persuaded to change seats in the lunch room for a can of 7-Up). By contrast, if I just looked at one of the older Puerto Rican girls on the cafeteria line, her friend would say to me: “Ay, who you lookin’ at, girl? You lookin’ at my friend Diana, here? You better not be.”
With black and Puerto Rican kids, it wasn’t enough just to have the right dolls or an extra package of Devil Dogs. You had to be initiated into their friendships and prove your allegiance. “If you’re really my friend,” Alissa told me in the corridor at school, “then whatever you have to say, you say it to my face or not at all. You’re either straight with me, or you’re not with me. You got that?”
Of course, the great irony was that the black and Hispanic kids in our neighborhood were among the most vulnerable populations in America. Their toughness wasn’t a luxury or a fashion statement. It was a survival kit, plain and simple. But we little white kids were too young and naive to see that. All we saw when we looked at them was their strength and indifference, coupled with style—the fundamental essence of Cool. Black and Hispanic kids gave the impression of having thrown off all the humiliating albatrosses of childhood that the rest of us suffered with: the obedience, the dependence, the frustrating helplessness. Strangely, if they threatened us, it only fueled our desire to become more like them.
Remember, this was pre-MTV. This was long before white suburban kids started going around in baggy jeans with their underwear hanging out, rapping about being gangstas and givin’ a shout-out to their peeps. But already, we fel
t the irresistible tug: any white kid with kinky hair coaxed it into a “Jewfro,” then walked around with a pick stuck in it like a trophy. White teenaged girls started wearing T-shirts reading “Black Is Beautiful.” My friend Amy’s older brother hung out only with “the brothers,” dated only black and Hispanic girls, and spoke Spanish on the basketball court. All of us imitated the clothes, the speech, the walk of our black and Puerto Rican peers. Yo, gimme some skin. Cool man, that’s cool, baby. Hey, blood, quÉ pasa?
All of us, essentially, were now campaigning for that communion dress.
“You know,” my white friend Michelle told me one day while we were sitting on the monkey bars. “Nobody knows this,” she whispered, “but, my mom’s mom was really Puerto Rican”
“Nuh-uh,” I said, seized with equal amounts of jealousy and skepticism.
“Uh-huh,” she nodded.
Michelle herself had hair as light as sunflower oil and eyes the color of a chlorinated pool. If she could be one-quarter Puerto Rican, well then, I decided, I could do even better.
“Well, do you want to hear a secret that you can’t tell anybody?” I said. Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, I cupped my hands tightly around Michelle’s tiny pink ear, and whispered, “My great-grandfather was black”
A girl in our building named Miriam was the first white girl to actually join one of the neighborhood’s Puerto Rican girl gangs. One day, Miriam was attending St. Hilda’s and St. Hughes in a pleated pinafore and writing book reports on The Red Pony. The next day, she was cutting school, donning platform shoes and a pink lamÉ halter top, calling herself Mira, and beating up white girls on Amsterdam Avenue with her “amigas.” The adults in our building were all horrified—hadn’t Miriam sung “What’s Going On” once at folk mass? Weren’t both her parents Freudian psychoanalysts? We kids, however, were all very impressed.
We also found it sort of funny—not funny ha-ha but funny strange: Miriam’s mother had always encouraged her to play with children of different colors. So now that she was, what was the problem?
The next week, my friend Audrey’s older sister, Rochelle, joined a gang of Puerto Rican girls, too. Instead of going to Hebrew school one afternoon, she plucked out all her eyebrows, painted them back on with liquid eyeliner, then went to smoke cigarettes in full makeup with three girls in the park, who later that day beat up Tara Eisner, one of Rochelle’s Hebrew school classmates, because, Rochelle said, “Like, I didn’t like her face, okay?”
Hoping to catch a glimpse of the new, improved, Hispanic Rochelle, I went out of my way to play at Audrey’s house. My efforts paid off when Rochelle stormed through the door while we were sitting at the kitchen table cutting out Sonny and Cher paper dolls. “Ay. Audrey. Jew see my Marlboros?” Rochelle said.
Since Rochelle couldn’t speak Spanish like a Puerto Rican, she tried to speak English like one, parroting the accent and English-as-a-second-language speech patterns, then punctuating them with ghettoish, serpentine head bobs and finger snaps. This kind of speech was known as “Spanglish,” and lots of white kids in the neighborhood were starting to adopt it. In reality, of course, it was as contrived and offensive as a Frito Bandito cartoon, but we were too dumb to know that.
Flinging her keys down on the kitchen counter, Rochelle dumped the contents of her crotchet shoulder bag out onto the table. She was wearing enormous hoop earrings made from silver wire, and her skintight Danskin blouse looked more like a bathing suit top. Silver bangles jangled along her forearms as she sifted frantically through the contents of her bag. I noticed a tall, cool Puerto Rican boy waiting for her by the entrance to the kitchen. He leaned languidly against the door frame, working a piece of gum slowly around in his mouth, his eyes following Rochelle as she stormed about, pulling open the utility drawers by the sink. He seemed to have all the time in the world.
“So, li-eeke, I told my muth-thuh, like, riiight?” Rochelle said, clearly for her new boyfriend’s benefit and not ours. “Like, I ain’t goin’ to no bat mitzvah class an’ shit no more, riiiight? Li-eeke, fuck Hebrew school, man.”
That evening, when I reported this to my mother, she laughed. “Serves Sheila right,” she said.
Sheila Abromowitz was Rochelle’s mother. She and my mother had had a huge argument the year before, when both of them spent the day volunteering at my kindergarten. That day, all of us kids were supposed to make our own books, which meant, essentially, that we scribble-scrabbled wildly over a bunch of folded-up papers, then tried to invent some story for the mothers to write down.
When my mother got to Gregory Dupree, he pointed to his picture and said, “Okay, please write, ‘This boy ain’t got no shoes.’”
“All right,” smiled my mother. “But Gregory, let’s phrase it correctly. Let’s write ‘This boy doesn’t have any shoes.’”
No sooner did my mother begin to transcribe Gregory’s story in her decorative serif print than Sheila asked if she could have a word with my mother in the hallway.
The door had barely clinked shut behind them when Sheila said, “How dare you alter that boy’s original words?”
“Sheila,” said my mother. “The whole purpose of this is to teach the children grammar.”
“Gregory is expressing himself using his own culturally indigenous, Afro-American speech patterns,” Sheila said acidly. “What you call ‘grammar’ is just a white, cultural conceit.”
“Oh you think so?” said my mother. She set her hands on her hips, then took aim. “Well let me tell you what I think is a white, cultural conceit: a white woman holding a black child to a standard of English that she’d never allow her own children to use.”
My mother turned around and twisted open the door. “The day that Harvard University accepts students who express themselves exclusively in ‘indigenous Afro-American speech patterns,’ you let me know, Sheila. Until then, I’m teaching Gregory the kind of ‘cultural conceits’ that’ll actually give him some power in this world.”
“Sheila Abromowitz ought to be slow-roasted on an open spit,” my mother fumed to me on the way home from school. “Indigenous Afro-American speech patterns. What a load of racist, liberal bullshit. It’s just an excuse, you know, to keep black children disenfranchised.”
I nodded in agreement. I had no idea what “disenfranchised” was, but my mother sounded exactly right to me. Just a few weeks before, my brother and I had come up with our own language. We called it “Farty Fartese,” and it essentially mimicked Pig Latin, except that it inserted the word “fart” between the word and the “ay” sound. I-fart-hay. Ow-fart-hay are-fart-ay ou-fart-yay? As soon as my mother heard it, she said, “Okay, that’s enough. I don’t want to hear that annoying and stupid talk in this house, again. Understood?”
It seemed to me that if John and I couldn’t use our own special language, Gregory Dupree shouldn’t get to use his either. Besides, Gregory and I had a huge crush on each other. I wanted him to go to Harvard—whatever that was—and do the best and win at everything because we’d agreed to get married as soon as we both turned seven.
Now, Sheila Abromowitz’s eldest daughter appeared to have adopted the indigenous cultural speech patterns of a bunch of delinquent Puerto Rican girls.
“Ah, yes,” smiled my mother. “Payback is sweet.”
However, she didn’t seem to think it was nearly so sweet later that night at dinner, when I was dawdling over my carrots, and she pointed to my plate. Getting John and me to eat anything resembling a vegetable was a major source of contention in our household, and the level of difficulty had only increased over time.
At first, my parents had tried employing the artificial, suspicious enthusiasm of gum surgeons, game show hosts, and incompetent clowns: “Hey, kids, let’s all eat three forkfuls of yummy broccoli on the count of three. Mmmm. Isn’t this FUN?”
When this eventually proved useless, they tried out-and-out bribery: “Eat three pieces of celery and I’ll pay you a quarter,” my father said wearily.
Now they’d simply resorted to bullying. “Finish your carrots,” my mother ordered. “Now.”
Looking down at the congealing, lurid carrot wheels I’d succeeded in pushing around my dinner plate for the past half-hour, I suddenly thought of Miriam, Rochelle, and their amigas.
“Li-eeke, I don’t dink so, all riiiight,” I said in my best possible Spanglish.
“Excuse me?” said my mother, setting down her fork.
“What? Jew deaf?” I said. “Like, I ain’t gonna be eatin’ no carrots an’ shit, riiiight?” I repeated, this time making a little turkey bob with my head.
My brother slid off his seat down under the table, and my father removed his glasses and began massaging the bridge of his nose.
“Oh. Are we back to being Puerto Rican again?” said my mother.
“Das riiiight,” I said proudly.
“Well then.” She dropped her napkin crisply down onto her plate. “In that case, let me put it to you this way. Open up a big, fresh mouth to me like that ever again, and I’ll slap you so hard you’ll be prying your teeth out of the floorboards. Is that clear, amiga?”
My eyes filled up wetly and I nodded.
“Bueno,” said my mother.
I had to give her credit. None of the kids in the neighborhood had anything on my mother.
Jerome, my friend Annie’s older brother, soon put the kibosh on another one of my ideas.
“Black and Puerto Rican kids don’t beat us up because we’re un-cool, Susie,” he told me. “They beat us up as historical payback.”
Even though Jerome was probably all of fifteen, I considered him a grown-up because he had a beard. Whenever I went to Annie’s house, Jerome was skulking around the kitchen in his suede vest, eating organic yogurt and complaining about the Nixon administration. As Annie and I played checkers or Candyland in her bedroom, we’d hear Jerome yelling at the television, “Henry, you goddamn fascist!”
Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 6