by Marra B. Gad
Goldie stopped her visits. Louise’s family disappeared from our world. Racism was not welcome. From friends or family.
Chapter Four
IN THE GLORIOUS 1970S, IT WAS QUITE COMMON for sisters to be dressed alike, even if they were not twins. My mother and Bubbie fully embraced that trend, dressing Alisa and me in matching outfits. Almost all of the time. My favorite of the twinning ensembles were the Raggedy Ann dresses, complete with a tiny Raggedy Ann doll tucked into the pocket of each dress. I loved the bright red and the polka dots and the huge white bows that my mother would tie around my ponytails and on the ends of my sister’s braids.
I was terribly jealous of my sister’s braids. Her hair was long, shiny, and smooth. It never seemed to be knotted, as mine often was when we were brushing our hair in the morning. And it hung down her back in long, gorgeous braids, which my mother adorned with bows that matched the dress of the day. My hair, by sharp contrast, was thick, curly, and quite unruly. My mother skillfully managed to form it into ponytails, but it was never the look I coveted. I wanted my hair to look like Alisa’s. Desperately.
My bubbie took a special pleasure in taking me shopping, in dressing me, and in playing with my hair. She had been as unprepared as anyone else for the arrival of her surprise brown granddaughter. But unlike many of her contemporaries, she didn’t bat an eye. She never questioned my parents about why they took me. Instead, as if I were a baby Cleopatra, she bathed me in milk every week to keep my skin soft. She took me to Loehmann’s and asked her favorite saleslady to bring a rack for us, and we didn’t leave until it was filled with clothing. She taught me that a lady never has chipped nail polish, but she always has polish on her nails. She taught me how to cook. She let me stay up late when we had sleepovers, and we watched movies together while I lay in her soft Bubbie arms.
And she fiercely attacked anyone who dared to call her granddaughter a schvartze. Schvartze is the Yiddish equivalent of calling someone a nigger. People often try to say that it’s simply Yiddish for black, but I would argue that is not true. In the 1970s, adoption and race may not have actively been a part of the cultural discourse, but name calling is an age-old game, and schvartze was the first Yiddish word I learned.
Like everyone else in my immediate family, my bubbie did not talk about my brownness. And she never told people I was adopted. When I would ask her why, she always said, “No one really notices! So why tell people?”
We both knew that wasn’t true. At all.
My bubbie loved me, deeply and fiercely. She must have loved me to have taken on the unenviable task of managing my hair drama.
Among the other things unique to my young life was the very special, experimental grade school I attended, Walt Disney Magnet School, the first magnet school in Chicago, opened in 1974. I was a member of one of the very first classes. It targeted gifted students, who were each tested for a minimum IQ level, but pulled the students—like a magnet—from every corner of Chicago. There were no traditional classrooms, grade levels, or grades given. Instead, students were allowed to “go at their own pace” and to retreat to the Communications Arts Center when the academic work had been completed to learn about music, dance, and visual arts. It was, for me, nirvana.
There was another adopted girl in my class at grade school named Lisa. She was black, and a white couple had adopted her when she was born. Lisa had the hair I dreamed of having. Just like my sister’s. Straight, shiny, and in long braids.
“But, Bubbie,” I would cry, “why can Lisa have straight, shiny hair that braids and I can’t?”
Clearly, Lisa and her mother had some secret we did not. So, my mother called her mother and got the scoop on where they went to get help for Lisa’s hair—and my bubbie made an appointment at a South Side beauty shop that specialized in hair straightening.
Then and now, Chicago has been something of a segregated city in that people of ethnic groups tend to live in certain areas. This area of the South Side in 1978 was primarily black, and for my bubbie, for the ladies in the beauty shop, and certainly for me, it was about to become a brave new world.
My bubbie was many things, but a shrinking violet was not one of them.
“Put on your best dress, Marra,” she said. “It’s always important to look your best when you’re going to meet new people.”
We dressed in synagogue finery for our trip to the beauty shop, and even before we walked in the front door, I could see the eyes of the ladies inside staring at us. When we entered, I could hear them whispering. They weren’t really whispering at all.
“Who is that white lady?” said a woman by the sinks. “And why is she with that light-skinned child?” At first, I was confused. Until then, the only voices I’d heard talking about my brownness had been white ones.
“Look at her,” someone else said, “wearing that big, gold, loud Jewish star …” My bubbie always wore her Star of David necklace, and I never thought anything of it.
Bubbie stood tall and took me by the hand, walking us to the receptionist’s counter. “We have an appointment to get my granddaughter’s hair straightened,” Bubbie told the woman.
The entire place smelled like hair relaxer, which at that point was made with lye. And it stank—like an even more twisted version of rotten eggs. I could see ladies in several chairs fanning themselves while their hairdressers applied the thick, white relaxer. I was terrified.
I was silently shown to a chair, and my bubbie stood beside me while my hairdresser took down my ponytails to survey the landscape. Discomfort was palpable on every possible front, but there we all were. And no one was leaving until I had silky braids like Lisa and my sister.
The hairdresser roughly applied the relaxer and told me to sit still and let it work. “It might burn a little,” she said, “but you’ll be all right.”
The intense fire on my scalp started almost immediately, and I felt myself tearing up. Within a few minutes, the burning was so unbearable that I was crying. “Please!” I begged. “My scalp feels like it is on fire! Please. Take it off.” Years later, when I saw Spike Lee’s brilliant biopic Malcolm X, the scene where Denzel Washington sticks his head in a toilet to stop the hideous burn of the relaxer resonated with me. Deeply.
“Your granddaughter is tender headed,” the hairdresser laughed. In truth, I was eight years old, and my mixed-race hair and young scalp should never have had the lye-based relaxer on in the first place. But there we were.
“For God’s sake,” Bubbie said. “She is in pain. Wash it off. Whatever it will be from here, it will be.”
The cool water reduced the burning the moment it hit my head, and when all was said and done, I left the salon with silky, straight hair that would absolutely be put into long, beautiful braids. I also had burns all over my head that eventually became bleeding scabs. I’m sure there are scars. There are certainly emotional ones.
That was the day I learned that, as a mixed-race girl, there were places where my existence was not acceptable to anyone on either side of the color spectrum. At the beauty shop, I wasn’t “really black” or “black enough.” I was not acceptable.
My bubbie would have endured trip after trip back to that horrible shop if it would have made me happy. That’s how she was. She wanted my world to be as beautiful and as normal as possible. She wanted me to be as beautiful as possible, and for the world to see me that way. When I refused to return to the site of my hair trauma, we struggled to find a way to work with my hair. In the end, my bubbie suggested we cut my very dark, tightly curled hair very short.
“Harry Belafonte’s daughter wears her hair this way,” Bubbie said. “She is a model. It will be gorgeous on you, mamaleh.”
And so I agreed, hoping against hope that I would look like the stunning Shari Belafonte. But when I looked in the mirror, all I saw was a girl with a short Afro. And my classmates at both regular and Hebrew school wasted no time in pouncing on me, labeling me “pube head,” a name that would stick well into my college years until
I dared to try relaxing my hair again.
By the time I was twelve, I was already sneak-eating chocolate in an effort to soothe my young soul. Chocolate cake was my most beloved comfort, and it was most often found in my bubbie’s kitchen. I would creep down into her kitchen late at night to steal a piece, hopeful that I would escape the scrutiny of familial eyes; even though they never attacked me for it, my relatives had already noted that I was starting to gain weight. My stomach became soft and full, my hips started to expand, and my breasts were already far larger than those of other girls my age. My young eyes saw only fat. I did not understand that this was simply how my body was having a bat mitzvah—transitioning from girlhood to womanhood—just like the one I was planning with my family.
My date was August 21, 1982, and along with the anxiety of the event itself, and my desire to read my Torah portion flawlessly, came the pressure of finding just the right dresses for the occasion. Even with my self-esteem on shaky ground, shopping for my bat mitzvah outfits was the greatest joy of my young life. And Bubbie pulled out all the stops. For Friday night, there was a prairie skirt and white ruffled shirt, which was the absolute height of fashion in 1982. At least ten girls wore the same on my big day. And for the day of, we settled on a pale lavender suit and frilled, dark-purple blouse—and a pair of black Pappagallo pumps with gold trim that I wanted so badly I lied to get them.
A bat mitzvah is typically when a Jewish girl gets her first pair of high heels, and I wanted mine to be spectacular. They were at least a full size too small, and the store didn’t have any in my size. “See, Bubbie,” I said, cramming my feet into them, “they fit perfectly!” Eventually, I convinced her to buy them.
When we got home, I modeled each of my outfits for my family, and my parents and Bubbie told me I was perfect. I was in fashion heaven. I felt beautiful.
A couple of weeks prior to my big day, Nette arrived, and as always, she stayed in Bubbie’s apartment. As Nette had always been something of a fashion goddess to me, I decided to model my outfits for her, hoping I might get her approval. I proudly put on my lavender suit, blouse, and Pappagallo pumps, and I trotted down and knocked on her bedroom door.
Nette opened the door, and without me saying a word, she surveyed me as she did every person she encountered, looking me up and down with her narrow eyes.
I quietly asked, “Do you like my outfit, Aunt Nette?”
She took a breath. “Well, you are far too young to be fat,” she said. “And sloppy. A girl like you should know enough to get herself in hand, because being fat and sloppy is not going to help you in the world. And that hair certainly doesn’t help matters much.”
I was, it should be said, a size twelve junior at the time, and tall, strong, and curvy. (What I wouldn’t give to be that size now!) I did not understand what she meant by a “girl like me.” What I did understand was that, once again, I was being told I was unacceptable. My delicate twelve-year-old self—who was far more beautiful and healthier than I could have ever fathomed at the time—was ugly. And fat. And sloppy. With bad hair. She found every sensitive spot my preteen self had, and she dug in.
My mother and Bubbie, of course, were not around. And so, as had become my way, I shrank into myself. Into the space where I wanted to be invisible. I said nothing. What could I say? I left Nette’s room and went up to my own, took off my beautiful suit, and had a good cry, quietly biding my time until I could find solace in my favorite chocolate-frosted friend.
Later that night, I snuck down to Bubbie’s apartment to rummage for cake and saw that the light was already on. I quietly approached the kitchen, and instead of my bubbie sitting there, I found Nette. In front of her was an enormous piece of chocolate cake. She was eating it with the same sad relish I knew so well. There was no pleasure involved. There was only pain and the hope that the sweetness of each bite would make that pain go away.
We see this moment played out in films and on television over and over again—an emotional woman eating her feelings. There was an entire arc for Miranda on a Sex and the City episode that involved her baking a chocolate cake and proceeding to eat so much of it that she threw the rest away, only to fish it out of the trash and continue eating it.
But that is real for many people. It was certainly real for me. It was also real for Nette.
The next day, I told my mother I’d found Nette seemingly sneak-eating cake the night before. She told me Nette hid chocolate everywhere. She had it in her handbag. In her car. And in various places in her luggage. She would never eat it in front of other people, my mother said, lest there ever be a concern that she would waver from her perfect weight. She, like me, ate it in secret.
I never told my mother what Nette said to me—or that I had been on my way to eat chocolate cake myself when I spotted her. And it wasn’t because I felt that I couldn’t. I wanted to protect my mother from the ugliness I had experienced with Nette, just as she has always tried to do for me with other people. I did not want to be, yet again, the reason why our already small family was made smaller. In the end, of course, we cannot protect ourselves or the ones we love from the unpleasantness that others hold. But we try.
Later that day, I found myself thinking that perhaps Nette and I had more in common than either one of us might have wanted to believe. I know what caused me to eat in secret. I wondered what caused Nette to do the same. I wondered if, perhaps, she wanted to be invisible too.
Chapter Five
I REALLY DO BELIEVE WE ARE ALL MORE ALIKE THAN we are different. But I have always felt different. Been seen as different. Been called out, for better and certainly for worse, as different.
Being othered makes you extremely aware of the culture of sameness that, to me, is all around. It is the voice that dictates who is beautiful. What is fashionable. Who is important. Who can be successful.
From the time I was a young girl through my forties, I used to pray I would wake up the next morning somehow less different—a little more the same, a little less conspicuous. And yes, oftentimes that prayer included praying that I would wake up and be white, that I would look just like the other Ashkenazi Jewish girls who populated the world around me. These were the girls whom the culture of sameness deemed beautiful. Acceptable. Desirable.
I knew their families did not live with the high-powered microscope constantly pointed at them that did mine. I knew that, while they certainly had problems of their own, their problems were not like mine or my family’s. We were different in every way. It was as if we lived in a fishbowl.
Our society has been damaged by the poison of racism and hate, and eventually, living under endless scrutiny warped the lens with which I viewed myself. My sense of self and beauty became tainted by these perceived differences. It has taken the whole of my lifetime to undo the damage. For me, the microscope under which I was constantly viewed wasn’t limited to examining my skin color or my being adopted—or even to my being mixed race, adopted, and Jewish. It examined my whole being, and certainly my body.
I am quite the opposite of Nette, with her eighty-nine-pound, sub-five-foot frame and delicate features. While her lips were so tiny that she overlined them with lip liner, my lips are full. Her eyes were small and sharp, and my eyes are large and round. Nette’s nose was also tiny, perhaps from surgery, while my nose is strongly shaped. I have ample breasts. Thick thighs. And, thankfully, even at forty-eight, I have a firm, round backside.
We were opposite expressions of the same human coin.
From the moment I started to develop at around age ten, I have always been built this way. And, much like the unwanted attention the color of my skin brought, my shape brought with it another kind of unwanted attention, mostly from men.
I wanted to be seen the way I saw Nette being seen. People stopped her to tell her how chic and stylish she was. They called her graceful. Elegant. She walked into a room and seemed to command it—at least to my young eyes.
The way people reacted to me was clearly different. And the way men
began to react to me, even at the tender age of ten, was also different.
“She is so exotic looking,” I would hear men say. Exotic. Because of my darker skin and curvy young figure. Exotic. When I was at an age that I could not—and should not—understand what that meant to men.
Far beyond what is considered “normal” unwanted attention—catcalling, rude comments, leering—I attracted the attention of a man at our synagogue who considered himself a poet. He was a member of our community and was well known to be generous with the children in the religious school. He gave gifts to entire classes of students when they graduated from Hebrew school. Tie pins for the boys and Star of David necklaces for the girls.
This man, a single man who never seemed to attend services with anyone else, was a published poet. And, although I was not yet graduating, he began to give me gifts. He gave me copies of his books of poetry. “You are so beautiful,” he would tell me, “so exotic. You are the reason why men write poetry, which is what I do. I write poetry for a living.”
Did I mention that I was ten years old?
His poems were all about women. I knew they were romantic. But even my limited child’s mind knew there was an element of sexuality in them. I thought it was odd, and so I always told my parents when this man would approach me.
“Daddy, that man at Temple gave me this book.” I always gave those books to my parents.
“Thank you for telling us, sweetie. Try to stay away from him. And always tell us if he tries to be alone with you. Always tell us,” my father would say.
“I will, Daddy. I promise.” And I took that promise wholly to heart. I never questioned why my father wanted to keep tabs on this man. I simply knew from my father’s face that this was not something to be questioned. Fortunately, I was never alone when attending services, so it was not difficult to keep my promise.