by Mat Johnson
“I already have an identity, I didn’t think I needed to get one in a new color.” Tal hands me her food, she’s only eaten half of it. I put it in the refrigerator, a machine so old it has a latch handle.
“Look, you’re black. I know it comes as a bit of a shock, but trust me, it’s pretty damn amazing. You’ve inherited a rich cultural tradition—think of it that way. But you’re not white anymore. You never were. Sorry.”
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ for that.” Tal’s already down the hall. “It’s not like I was great at being white either.”
Tal, my daughter, who I keep telling myself is my daughter, takes my tent. I was going to offer it anyway. I gather what appears to be a clean towel and washcloth from one of my father’s empty storage bins, and leave them on the floor outside the tent because the door is zippered. I can hear her moving around in there and I can see the light of her cell phone glowing. And I know she hears me, because the warped wooden floors in this place complain with every footfall.
I check all the doors one more time, make sure they’re not just locked, but properly locked, look out each distorted window for a sign of the ghouls showing back up. But there’s nothing. When I come creaking back to the tent, I expect Tal to say something, to ask a question, to make another comment. Nothing comes. Just the glow. The sounds of clicking digital machinations. I lie down on the wooden floor, another towel for my pillow.
“This is our first night together!” I say after ten minutes, with all the cheer I can muster. Tal doesn’t respond. After a minute, after I’ve given up and closed my eyes, she finally says something back.
“It’s like you think there’s a race war, and you want me to choose sides.”
“Not a war. Maybe…a cold war. And yes, there are sides,” I tell her, because I’m tired. Because I think, just say the blunt thing now, and walk it back from there. “There’s Team White, and there’s Team Black, okay? You probably didn’t even know you were on Team White before, most of Team White’s members never do. They just think they’re ‘normal.’ But if you’re black, and you go with Team White, that makes you a sellout. A traitor. And plus, you’ll never be accepted as a full member if they know the truth about you. It’s all good though. Because there’s Team Black where, okay, you may have to work sometimes to be accepted if you look like us, but you’re membership is clearly stated. In the bylaws.”
“Oh great. Well as long as I have a choice.” I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic because I can’t see her and don’t really know her that well anyway.
5
“WHAT DOES UMOJA even mean? Wasn’t that, like, an R&B group or something?” When Tal first says this, I kick her under the table. This is the universal sign to “shut up,” but she looks over at me surprised and hurt like I just kicked her and I realize: she’s not kidding. She really thinks the school might have been named after an R&B group.
“ ‘Umoja’ is Swahili, a Bantu language from East Africa. It means ‘For there to be an I, there must be a We.’ Or, unity. You can learn about many of the African principles if you’re in attendance here,” Principal Kamau says, and there is no annoyance in his manner. We are lucky to have this meeting so quickly. Tosha called in a favor, and here we are, and if Tal screws this up I have no other options.
“They have a vegan salad bar in their lunchroom,” I tell her, or remind her, because I mentioned it at least twice before we rode over. I want to add, That means your food will come pre-divided, but don’t think she’ll see the humor.
“I thought all the American blacks came from slaves on the west side,” Tal says to him. But then she’s looking at me. Because I’m the one now squeezing her hand under the table to tell her to shut the hell up. I bulge my eyes at her, smile wider.
“You were saying there’s a tour my daughter could go on while we discuss specifics?” I ask the principal, and mercifully he calls in a student to take Tal out of the room before she can open her mouth again. The kid’s Tal’s age, tall, almost as light as she is, but the first thing I notice is the muscular arms poking out of his sleeveless dashiki. He smiles at me and nods with both hands clasped in front of him, as if I’m his sparring partner in a dojo. His locks are long and perfectly pulled to the back of his head, his neckline open, cowrie shells lining his leather choker chain. Clearly bright, confident, he looks to me like a young black warrior, a shining example of what the Umoja Charter School can accomplish. Tal must see something positive about him as well because almost immediately she jumps up with, “Okay, Dad, I’m out of here. Bye!” I catch myself reaching for her, scared of what will come from her mouth unbridled.
“I’m sure she will be fine. At Umoja, we teach our young men to be gentlemen, the future leaders of tomorrow.”
“Sir, I’m sorry. I don’t know what Tosha told you about Tal. This is all, y’know, new to her. To me. It’s an odd circumstance. And Tal’s only really known about her identity, her blackness, for a few—”
“Not uncommon at all, brother. Not. At. All. We get a lot of parents through here, they got these kids today, they’re disconnected. Disconnected from the soul. All they know about being black is what they see in music videos. That’s part of why we’re here. To teach. To repair.”
I like what I am hearing. There is a weight, so quickly laid upon me, that I feel magically lifting now. I imagine a life as he keeps talking. I see Tal and I rising together every morning, her donning her dashiki, me cooking her organic free-range eggs as she prepares for school. I see me giving her a ride to the door of this building, a converted Victorian mansion itself, and then returning to my father’s to draw more pages to pay the bills before the great fire and the resulting windfall. At the end of the year, she will graduate and I will burn the house to the ground, using the insurance money for her college tuition. And then maybe I will follow her to whatever city she escapes to, far away from the charred ruins. Maybe to London. Forget Team Black, Team White, just join Team Not From Here again. She’ll bring her friends over to our flat and I’ll be the cheery but slightly aloof cool dad.
“We teach them African history—the real history, not the lies in most history books. In language we offer both Swahili and Igbo.” His head is mahogany, round, shiny. While other people comb their hair, he must spend that same time rubbing his scalp with Muslim oils. “African philosophy, African mathematics, African food. The point is, we remove the toxins of Western decadence and replace it with purity. We make them whole.”
This sounds basically fine. Why not? I’ve had a lot of European toxins in my life—weed vacations to Amsterdam, drunken club-hopping in Ibiza—and it hasn’t worked out that well, has it? I would like to be whole, too. And I am currently trying to remove the European toxin of Becks, so I can sympathize. There is paperwork to do. There are transcripts to be sent over, but from the way Kamau is talking, it sounds like we have a completed agreement. I shake his hand, follow it through all its brotherman finger gyrations, and even though a part of me thinks he just gripped me like that to see if I was truly black, I don’t care. A victory has been won. An education will be received. Blackness will be restored.
When I finally get out, Tal’s not in the waiting room. I hear a rhythm beating, and I go to a window that overlooks the courtyard below. There’s a drum circle, with adults at the center banging away hard enough to make the glass shake under my hands. The students have formed a ring around them and now take turns dancing the circumference one at a time before taking their place again.
I see my daughter instantly amid the class, her skin a blanched beacon, the lightest among them. There is an elegance in the movements of each kid’s cakewalk, evidence that they have done this before, that this is a school ritual. I watch them dance in their uniform of dashikis and khaki pants, and then quickly excuse myself and head for the stairs to pull her out of there. I do this before Tal can mess this up. Before she can dance like a white girl and make a fool of herself on her first day of school.
By the time I get out to the yard, I’ve r
econsidered. My thoughts about my own daughter’s racial identity are prejudiced and false, even though I still believe them. I’m too proud to admit it by pulling her out of there, where other minds might be thinking the same thing, will know exactly why I extracted her. That I’ve created a white girl. So I just stand there, at the outer edge of the crowd, watching. Tal’s talking to that boy, who hovers beside her. They both clap along to the beat as he leans in close enough to whisper in her ear. Seeing her respond to his smile, his flirtation, his perfectly groomed thin baby mustache, my newfound fatherly protectiveness is second to my relief that my daughter may have found motivation to attend the school.
Tal’s turn comes last, and I expect her to demure, to shake her head “No” and let them finish, but she just thunders out the moment the girl next to her prances back. And, in the circle, Tal jumps. Her hands go high as she erupts out of the center, and like a sheet falling lightly on a bed she comes down into a split on the ground. Tal’s legs divided on the asphalt; she is as long there as she is tall. A new fear rises, that she is acting like an uppity high-yellow show-off, but it quiets at the site of Tal’s joy at springing up and giving in to the momentum of her twirl. The drums go louder when she leaps, the crowd claps louder and hoots and there’s a “Go on, girl!” at every peak. When Tal does her final split, back at her spot, the drums crescendo to the finish, where they are met and replaced by applause. I get another new father feeling: pride. But it’s muted by an even larger realization. That is how my daughter looks when she really smiles.
“She shouldn’t be jumping up,” Principal Kamau says, walking beside me and handing me the application papers.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, a mix of regret and confusion.
“That was a good start, but she shouldn’t be jumping up so much. We’ll teach her. Jumping up, that’s the European mind-set, you see?”
“Yeah? I’ve seen African dancers jumping before,” I say, because I can’t help myself, because that’s my daughter. And I know I’ve seen African dancers jumping before.
“Sure, but not, not like that.” The principal shakes the bitter taste of the memory out. “See, the European mind-set, it’s about distancing oneself from the planet, so their dancing is all about trying to jump away from it. It’s arrogance, really. It says, ‘I’m better than mother earth, I fly off of you because you’re beneath me.’ The African aesthetic is connected to the soil, see? So less of that flapping around like a pigeon. The dance moves down, to the source, because it has humility. It loves the mother earth.”
“I totally love the mother earth. I only eat organic.” Tal stands before us. She’s with the boy. It only occurs to me now that she found the lightest-skinned guy out here to make her new friend.
“Don’t worry, brother.” Kamau slaps my back, ignoring her, nods a smile at her before heading inside. “You take care of the paperwork, we’ll take care of the cure.”
“A cure? What the hell is his problem? I’m not sick; I’m classically trained. Why are blacks so sensitive?” Tal is intentionally loud for everyone to hear. Kamau stops at the building’s door. He looks at me. I’m responsible.
“What? I didn’t say ‘the blacks’ this time. Oh, am I supposed to say ‘African American’ now?”
“There’s no such thing as ‘classical,’ ” I can hear myself snapping at her, loud enough for people to listen. “That’s just the way white people say ‘European.’ It’s subtle white supremacy. Don’t use it anymore.” I look over. My statement relieves some of Kamau’s facial pressure. Still, the door slams a little when it closes.
“Oh hell no. I’m not going here. Dad. That guy is so crazy, he’s racist against jumping.”
“That’s not what he—look, you’ve been to the Jewish school, right? Your whole life. So are you going to tell me you can’t do an eight-month stint learning about who else you are? Is that it?” I can hear my voice rising. The kids around us are now running through their recess, screaming louder, so I’m covered.
“Not going to happen,” Tal repeats, leaning in and hitting the words harder so they find purchase.
—
Out front of the school, I can’t even speak to her. I can’t even look at her. Instead, I get the engine on the bike revving while Tal stands by playing with her phone. The boy she discovered, he’s standing there too. I won’t even look at him. Handing Tal her helmet, I scoot forward enough for her to climb behind me. Tal takes it, but puts it on the ground and just stands there, now talking to the boy. He gives her a note, his phone number I’m sure.
Lovely. I am fully prepared to just stare back, to wait her out until she realizes that I am the one driving in every sense of the word. But Tal’s a teenager, and I remember teenagers are feral creatures, hormone-mad and erratic as wild colts, and after a good thirty seconds I cave and say, “You’ve made your point. Your complaint has been registered with the Ministry of Displeasure. Now, you’re going to say goodbye and get on the bike so we can go home.”
“You should try the biracial school,” the boy says to me. He’s nodding like this makes so much sense. He’s smiling as if I know what he’s talking about.
“Who are you?” I demand. It’s easier being annoyed at him, this strange kid. Less morally complicated. He’s got brass rings around the tips of his locks, and I’ve never seen that before but I instantly judge him for it. Clearly, he wants to sleep with my daughter.
Clearly, I am supposed to want to strike him for this. This is all very new but I’m pretty sure I have that part right.
“I’m Kimet,” he says, like that is supposed to answer any of my questions. “There’s another school. Another new charter school. It’s themed for mixed kids. You guys could try there, too. They’re enrolling.”
“Listen to him, Pops. Mixed kids. I’m mixed, right? I qualify. You want me to do the whole race education thing, then let’s try that one. If that doesn’t work, we can move on to Chinatown or whatever. Maybe I can pass for Korean. But I’m not going here. That man said I flap around like a pigeon.”
“Tal, there are mixed kids here, and that doesn’t mean anything. Mixed people are just a kind of black people anyway. You wouldn’t be the only mixed kid here, I’m sure.”
“I’m mixed,” Kimet says.
“See?” I say, pointing at him, relieved.
“But if I could, I’d go there too,” Young Mr. Kimet keeps going. I look at him. I try to muster the “look,” the look that dads do when they want you to become silent or face some vague threat, but I have no training. When he starts talking again I interrupt him.
“Yeah? If it’s so great, why don’t you go there?”
“Because my dad won’t let me. He’s the principal here. My dad’s Kamau.” Tal finally gets on the bike, but tries to hand me a paper.
“Not unless you agree to take me by here first,” she says, holding up the address. Atop it says, Mélange Center. I see these words and they’re familiar and I assume it’s from my distant past before I connect it to my recent one. Below it lists what street and such, but by the time I look at that all I see is the biracial militant and destiny or at least an opportunity to feign fate. I don’t believe in fate, but I don’t believe in ignoring fate when it disregards subtlety.
—
We ride to Mélange. Partly because Tal is insisting on it. And partly because I’m a lonely man who saw a person he keeps thinking about and wants to know why. Every time my motor idles, I yell to Tal all about “mixed” people. They are black people who hate being black, and the only reason they don’t try to be white is that whites folks won’t have them. That’s one red light. They are color-struck brown-bag-clubbers, from the days when you had to be lighter than a brown bag to be admitted. That’s at a stop sign. And African Americans have always been racially mixed, most of us are also of Native American and European ancestry. Even the name, African American instead of African, implies this. But that’s not good enough for them. They just want to be special. They’re self-hating N
egroes, Oreos who will do anything to distance themselves from their race. That’s while filling up the gas. Tal yells “Okay” every time I finish a sentence, yells even when the motor’s off. She even repeats my words back to me, stripped of nuance or any attempt at understanding.
When we get to the address it seems like none of this might matter anyway. Her little phone says Wolcott Drive but the digits don’t match up. It’s an odd number and there are no odd numbers on this side of the street, just trees. We’re by the park, Valley Green. “Nothing,” I say and she just pinches my back and tells me to keep driving. I go up and down the street. I go on the other end of the road where there are a few stately homes, and show her they are on the even-numbered side, to prove my point. I’m disappointed, too, for my own reasons.
Maybe that woman was going to save me.
“The Umoja School won’t be that bad,” I say.
“Everyone kept staring at me,” Tal says.
“It’ll be a good learning experience,” I say.
“They were all wondering, ‘What the hell’s the white girl doing here?’ ” Tal says.
“They’ll get used to you. You’ll get used to it. I have,” I tell her. I haven’t. Tal’s silent. “Come on, let’s go shopping, my treat. I’ll buy you your dashiki.”
“Oh my God, please. Please keep looking,” Tal says, but I can hear that even she knows the truth, that there is nothing out here. And that’s the truth; there’s nothing out there. The Umoja School will be okay. She’ll go. I’ll make her go, or I’ll kick her out. At least I’ll threaten to, and since Irv already did, maybe she won’t call my bluff. I give one more pass to show her it’s hopeless, drive all the way down to where the street dead ends. Nothing here but fourteen hundred acres of part of the largest urban woods in America. I point to the trees, tell her if it were here, we’d see it, then kick the gear down from neutral when Tal says, “There!”
A sign. It’s handmade, painted. It says, THE MÉLANGE CENTER FOR MULTIRACIAL LIFE. It looks like the worst hippie art project of 1972. But Tal is already off the bike, climbing up the deer path through the woods.