by Mat Johnson
I see the white girl and I think, George couldn’t say no. That’s what I think. He couldn’t say “No” to coffee, then “No” to a beer, then “No” when their legs brushed under the table, then “No” to a kiss, then “No” to her bed, then “Yes” to never being with her again. And now his life is all fucked up. It seemed pretty simple. He didn’t do it to Tosha. He didn’t even do it to this white woman. He did it to himself. The clarity of other people’s lives.
“I bet she has irritable bowel syndrome,” I tell Tosha. “IBS: that’s what they call it. I bet she has to shit every twenty minutes, and then when it comes out it’s scorching stomach fluid and she sits on the toilet making sounds like a howler monkey.”
“Do you think so?” Tosha pulls her binoculars back out of her purse, adjusts the lens. “How can you tell?” I’m about to tell her I was just joking, but then she says, “I can see it. IBS. I can totally see that now.”
I look at Tosha. Her hair is straightened but matted, sealed together on the left side that she surely sleeps on. Tosha considers herself a proud black woman. Proud black women take excellent care of their hair. That’s what they do. I want to go away. I want to go away and let her work this all out and then come back when it’s all fixed and we can casually laugh about it from a distance. But I also want to be a man who doesn’t go away. Not from his friends, family, self.
“I want you to go in there. I want you to go in there, and talk to that bitch, and when she’s not looking, I want you to drop this GPS in her pocketbook. Got it?” She holds it up. It really is small. A third of a finger, small. Peter Parker spider-tracers tiny.
“That’s a bad idea. Tosha, why do I even have to say something like this out loud?” Tosha doesn’t respond because we both know the answer. I have to say this out loud because her husband couldn’t keep his penis in its proper container. “I got a better idea. Let’s call Sirleaf. Just invite him over for lunch, I’ll come too. We can casually figure out what your rights are. He does divorces. He’s done several of his own.”
“Maybe. If I see him at the gym, maybe I’ll ask,” she says quickly, looking away, then turns to me and follows with the more focused “You married a white woman. Let’s talk about that.”
“What?”
“Yeah. What were you thinking?” Tosha asks me.
“I was just thinking, ‘I’m marrying Becks. I’m moving on with my life.’ ”
“ ‘Moving on’? Don’t you mean, running away?”
“No, just moving on.” Past you, I don’t say. “Trust me, I never felt blacker than on the streets of Swansea, Wales.” Or in my own bed with her, I will not say either.
“I’m serious, wasn’t that part of it? You fleeing to Europe and into the arms of a white woman? The abandonment of blackness. Abandoning black women. Did it have to do with your mom?”
“No! Look, people see mixed couples, they project their own issues onto them. Race traitors. Progressive heroes. Whatever. I saw people do this with my parents’ marriage, and with mine. Me being with Becks had nothing to do with my mom, okay? It wasn’t about abandoning black women.” It was about Tosha abandoning me, but I can’t say this. I can’t say this and get out of the car with our friendship fully intact. It’s old, it’s over, it doesn’t matter anymore. And Tosha already knows, I’m sure. She knows the “why” and she knows my hesitation.
“But when you flee, someone’s getting left behind. The mixed thing, the white woman thing, they’re both about leaving black people behind. That’s the cost of your freedom.”
“I’m never going to leave you behind,” I assure her, although I already did once.
“Then we should start seeing each other. I’m basically single now.” Her mode switched, Tosha looks through her binoculars again, target reacquired.
“Right.” The me from a decade ago, he wanted so badly to hear those words. Where is he now? Can I forward his mail?
“No, listen: you and me, we should hook up.” Tosha says this, but she’s not even looking at me. She’s looking through her binoculars again, and what she sees is the source of all her sorrows. It’s amazing that someone can proposition you with no discernible desire. It’s not till I decline that Tosha turns to look at me. “No, really, I’m fine with it. It would serve that fucker right. Just drop off the GPS in the white bitch’s pocketbook first, then we can go do it before I pick up the kids from Girl Scouts.”
“Jesus, don’t do that. Don’t try to bribe me with sex.” I unbuckle the seat belt, put my hand on the door handle, then stop. “You don’t need to track her. George’s gone. You already know he’s with her. What can be gained by finding out where and when she walks down the street?”
“I’m not crazy, Warren. This isn’t crazy. Crazy is letting your world be destroyed without fighting back,” she tells me, pulling on a baseball cap. After she finds shades in the glove compartment, Tosha puts them on as she leaves the car to do the deed herself.
10
SPIDER IS GOING to teach history. He’s talking lesson plans, target goals, lab days. I can’t get over it. I keep waiting for the freaky little man to call an end to the joke and go back to his roving tattoo parlor, but he’s serious.
“Oh no, man. I did the coursework for the PhD in history, but couldn’t get into the whole, you know, dissertation thing. But I got a master’s in gender studies, philosophy. One in French.”
“Damn, dude! How old are you?” It’s impossible to tell. He has the face of an early teen, but one that’s been weathered by misfortune.
“Only took, like, ten years, give or take. I had a lot of early incarnations before I constructed my current form.”
A kid comes in the room, about ten years old and round with fat he’d better pray burns off him with puberty. After waiting for Spider to sign a form, the boy says, “Thanks, Mr. Bezovski,” and this is the first time I’ve heard Spider’s last name; I’m certain he’s got to be some kind of gypsy. We’ll be team teaching together, all term, which is fine because it means I don’t have to come up with my own lesson plans. I just have to get my students to draw. If I focus on arriving at the appropriate time, I’m pretty sure I can pull this off.
Spider’s course packet sits on the desk. He’s got his feet up there too, and he pushes the bound pages my way with a combination of bare ashy heel and flip-flop sole. There’s a title on the front cover, “Tri-Racial Isolates.”
“We doing chemistry?” I ask him.
“Tri: meaning three. Racial: meaning racial. Isolates: meaning isolated. Tri-racial isolates. It’s the term for historic mixed-race communities in America. Whole communities where people were African and European and Indian too.”
“Dude, that’s every black American community.”
“Yeah, but these mixed groups, they retained all of their cultural identities, because they were isolated. The same one-drop race rule of solely being black didn’t apply. Places like this, they were all over the country.”
“So I just have to get the groups to draw comic books about all this?” I open the packet, fan through the pages. Black-and-white photos head the section headings, each one with a different yet equally odd tribal name. “I’d probably be better at teaching them to draw muscle-bound freaks in capes, but hey, you’re the boss.”
“Oh man, I’m so not the boss. We’re on Lenape land; I’d love to be teaching them about that. Or about the eighteenth-century German mystics that came to this forest after them. We’re right here, standing on history, it’s a shame not to bend down and dig in. But Roslyn commands and I am but a humble servant who depends on her generous health-insurance benefits.”
—
The Brass Ankles was a tribe in South Carolina, formed in the eighteenth century that lasted all the way up into the modern era, in ethnic identification if not actual communal form. A mix of blacks and whites marrying into the Wassamasaw Tribe. Like many of the known tri-racial groups, such as the Jackson Whites of upstate New York, or the Beaver Creek Indians, the group
itself saw the classification it was legally under, “mulatto,” as an invalid attempt by the white government to force them into the black/white binary caste system, and thereby further deny them their rights. This is what the first page says. It is a fascinating story, raising several interesting questions about the nature of identity and the history of our country, none of which will be answered because the group assigned to this project is in fourth grade. They’ll be led by the chubby boy who’d stopped through Spider’s class earlier, a young lad with the unfortunate name of Shields Steele. Actually, it was a heroic moniker, but ill fitting for a slump-shouldered boy who can’t get through his introduction to the class without invading his naval cavity with his index finger.
Turns out Redbones are an actual group, and not just a word brothers yell out of car windows at light-skinned women. It’s the name for a cluster of mixed-race Afro-Indian-Europeans living between the Sabine River in western Louisiana and East Texas. Unlike the Creoles, also from Louisiana, the Redbones are not exclusively French in their European ancestry, and reflect more of a mix of white cultures. The student group choosing to explore the Redbone experience is headed by a woman as tall as I am, yet clearly no more than fourteen years in age. Her voice is changing, clanging between high and low like a bicycle failing to shift gears. She screams, “Ho, Redbones, ho!” and her much smaller compatriots slap her outstretched hands. Spider explains to the girl, a miss Jackie McDuffy, that the word Redbone was also a slur, from the mistaken notion that the people were so light, you could see their blood flowing under their skin. “That’s stupid. Blood is blue under the skin,” Jackie informs Spider. Another child, the one who does the best job of standing even close to reaching Jackie’s armpit, leans in pointing to Spider’s face and yells, “You got served!”
I’ve just remembered I hate children. Only becoming a father to my own could have caused that amnesia. That fact is so clear now, no longer hidden in my mind. I told Becks this several times, every time she announced the alarm of her biological clock. And I just agreed to spend three hours a day, four days a week, with several of them. Before I can digest this fully, I am hit in the face with the Melungeons. The ethnicity itself is no bother—one of the largest and vaguest clusters of mulattoes, stretching from Virginia out beyond into the Appalachians—but because of the complexity of this tribe it will be given to the oldest teens so that each may decipher an element of their story in comic-book form. Teenagers are difficult, and I have no desire to take more of them into my daily life, but even that is not what disturbs me. It’s that leading their group is Kimet. The one who also led us here to Mélange. Kimet, Principal Kamau’s child. He waves. He waits for recognition. He realizes when I just stand in front of the class staring at him and his silly brass dreadlocks, that I know who he is exactly. He’s a spy. He’s been sent to monitor the race traitors, to report back to his father. Or to the NAACP. Eventually, there’ll be trials. That makes sense for only as long as it takes to think it, then my paranoia recedes. It’s just a teenage boy again.
After class, I go to his desk as he’s packing. “Kimet. How did you manage to—”
“My mom got custody,” he says before I can finish even the first sentence of my inquiry. His response is preprepared and packaged tight enough to compel me to avoid his baggage. “I’m really excited about the class, sir. I really dig your work. I read the comic. The landscape pencils you did of Germantown Avenue are amazing. The depth of perspective with the telephone poles—I got to learn how to do that. I’m hyped to work with you.”
He’s an exemplary young man, this Kimet. Passionate. Well spoken. Great eye for detail. I’m so impressed with that I don’t remember those pencils are not in print. Or online. Unless he attended a gallery show on King’s Road in Swansea six years ago, the only place he could have seen those illustrations was in my father’s house.
—
I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it. I don’t trust teenage males, particularly around teenage females, but still Kimet’s not the focus of my increasing anger.
I arrive at the tent while they’re still dancing. Sunita Habersham flips through the air, hugging her torso, chin tucked, those legs up and kicking and then landing down again, her thighs shaking along the way. On the final twirl, Sun collapses to a kneel, holds the pose for three seconds, then looks up at Tal and walks away as if this is so simple. It turns out it is for Tal. My daughter does the same move, but her thin legs go even higher. Her turns even quicker, the final collapse even more of a contrast. Sun says, “Good, now faster,” clicks the outdated iPod back to the beginning, walks across the parquet floor laid out over the grass. They line up shoulder to shoulder, staring at the long row of standing mirrors.
Through the speakers the recorded sound of Fela’s band orders and Sunita Habersham leaps as demanded. Tal jumps in six beats after, the action repeating in a round, Sun opening the air so that Tal can jump right into it. They mirror. They are reflections, with the difference in age manifest as the variations in energy and experience. In both, there is grace. They look like mother and daughter, out there. There is a real connection. I want that connection. I’m jealous of Sunita, already.
Next to my daughter, it’s obvious Sun is a woman, not a girl, which is the difference between a realization and possibility. She sees me staring before I can stop myself. She sees me looking back as I stand there, arms folded, all okay and not at all weird because that’s my girl she’s dancing with. Sunita smiles and even gives a polite wave before stopping the music with the clicker in her hand.
“Before you come home, we have to talk,” I tell my daughter as I walk over to her, and Tal just nods, busy rubbing her neck down with a towel. She rubs her hairy armpits down next, which is disgusting and the smell of them hits me and the thought that maybe I’m supposed to remind her daily to take a shower.
“You’re already talking, Pops.”
“You had Kimet in our house? When I wasn’t there? Without permission?”
“He stopped by,” she says, not even bothering to be defensive. “We just hung out, watched Netflix. Is that a big deal to you?”
“Yes! You can’t have boys over when I’m not there. You can’t—”
“Get pregnant?” Tal says, finishing my sentence with something I would never say out loud. “Is that what you think your job is? To break the cycle, or something?”
“My job is to take care of you. To make sure you get to adulthood intact.” And then, when she flinches at the last word, I add, “I mean unharmed. Prepared. Ready for the rest of your life.”
My daughter answers with silence. She wipes her face now, then holds the towel there, so I can’t see her.
“No more secrets.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“I talked to Irv. He said you ran away. I know he didn’t kick you out. And I don’t care.” Still nothing. Tal just rubs down her arms, drops the towel on the floor like a toddler, and starts untying her sneakers. I lightly steer her chin up with my fingers, face her directly. “I’m glad you came, but I don’t want you lying to me. No more lies.”
“Irv would say that, you know? Irv doesn’t remember one day to the next what’s happening. He’s a drunk.” Tal’s shoving her clothes into her gym bag. Hard, like if she pushes them down far enough she can shut me up.
“He’s your grandfather. And he loves you. He wants us to come to his house for Shabbat tomorrow, so we can all talk about it then.”
“Fine. But then I’m going to need a new outfit. I need, ‘go back to your grandfather’s and show that dad who was absent for seventeen years is doing a decent job’ new clothes. And that means I need some bread. Cash money, homeslice,” Tal says humorlessly and puts out her hand. I just stare at it.
“Tal, nobody talks like that anymore. I don’t know what those Oreos are telling you, but I’m pretty sure no one has ever really talked like that.” It’s meant
to lighten the mood, but I see Tal drop her façade of indifference, look off blinking until she regroups herself.
“How am I supposed to know that?”
“You’re not, honey. That’s why I’m telling you.” To end the moment, I pull out my wallet, put money into her hand. Tal walks off toward the parking lot counting it.
“Does she play any other instruments besides you?” Sunita asks.
“Her grandfather’s Shabbat. She needs some clothes to look nice.” And then immediately I think of all the luggage Tal has, still sitting partially unpacked, in my father’s house.
“Whatever you say.” Sun waves me off before walking toward the door of the tent.
“How do you do it?” I ask her. The vagueness of the question gets Sun to turn around.
“Do what?” she asks, clearly bracing herself for some pedestrian pickup line to follow.
“The mixed thing. Just, in general. Even saying I’m mixed, instead of black, makes me feel uncomfortable. Even thinking it, sometimes. I saw you stand in front of a whole room, a hostile room, of black folks, and declare you were mixed. How do you do that?”
“So you think there’s, like, a big secret.”
“If there was, would you tell me?” She laughs at that, and it’s enough to get her to walk back over close enough to lean in and whisper to me.
“Okay, here’s the secret. It’s not really a secret, but I’ll frame it to you as one. The same people who despise you for identifying as mixed? Those are the same people who, when you do identify as black, despise you for not being black enough. And there’s nothing you can actually do to be black enough, for them. Because it’s not really how you act that they despise. It’s you. Your very existence.” She leans back, raises her eyebrows in mock astonishment.
“That’s the secret.” I believe her. I don’t know if those two types are the same person or if that’s an oversimplification, but I don’t care. I believe her, because I believe in her, because she believes in herself. That’s the kind of confidence Tal needs. This is the kind of woman Tal needs in her life. Not just at school, but at home, actually in her life. A strong maternal figure, something I can never be for her.