by Mat Johnson
I didn’t. I pull my phone back out, scroll down the page. It now says 2,771 over a long green line.
“Warren. Come on. You’re really going to let those Uncle Toms stay here permanently, in our neighborhood, pumping their Oreo bullshit?”
“That’s not how they are—actually some are sunflowers. They just believe—” It’s a wasted effort, only managing to bulge Tosha’s eyes wider in annoyance the more I talk. She just doesn’t want to hear it. Even more, she can’t hear it: she’s made her decisions on race, on what it is and what it most certainly is not, and all other discussions on the topic she registers as an attack on her reality. “Look, I know it’s hard to be open-minded about this, be there’s no choice: the moment is changing. Black people aren’t used to not having the final say on race in America; it’s uncomfortable.”
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“I’m just saying, you are used to having the moral high ground on black and white issues, so it’s understandably upsetting when another group comes in and redefines who we are. I know it doesn’t just affect mixed people, it affects the whole black dynamic. I get it.”
“What is this ‘you’ bullshit?”
“I’m just saying they’re kooky, but they’re not crazy. They have some valid goals. They’re just trying to change things so they’re better for mixed people.”
“What mixed people? They’re black. If these Oreos are trying to change things so that they’re not really black, how does that help anyone besides themselves? We’ve got black boys being used for target practice by white cops out there, we’ve got a prison system overflowing with victims of white judgment. We have a crisis. Right now. Not in the eighteenth century, not in the civil rights era, but right now. How does them quitting blackness help the Trayvon Martins out there? How does it help the Michael Browns? The Renisha McBrides, and all the black women out there struggling to hold it down? How does running away from blackness not make that worse?”
“That’s a false equivalence. Having people acknowledge all of their ethnic heritage doesn’t mean they’re abandoning social justice.”
“But they’re not just ‘acknowledging.’ They’re trying to challenge the basic fiber of the African American identity. These people, these sellouts you have living up in your house, they’re forming their own exclusive community. That’s not ‘acknowledging,’ that’s a cult. Somebody needs to call out this nonsense. It’s bad enough that you’re messing with that foolishness, but you got your own daughter in that mess.”
“It’s been good for her,” I try, but Tosha isn’t trying to hear me.
“Warren. I love you like a brother, in every sense of the word. But you are lost right now. You got your own daughter worshipping crackheads like they’re miscegenation angels. What kind of crazy Oreo shit is that?”
—
I’m so worked up on the walk through the dark back to Loudin that I’m not even worried about getting jumped. There are things I think of now to say to Tosha—mainly, I am not an Oreo! I am a sunflower! I think this and an older part of me goes, No Negro, you’re a black man. A very pale black man, a very pale, very confused black man, and maybe this has gone too far. Maybe I am lost. I got divorced, and then my dad died, and then Tal came, and crackheads, and then Sunita Habersham, and maybe I got a little lost. The Mulattopians, yes, they are a little cultish. Yes, I can admit that to Tosha. Readily. I don’t like that bit, no, and I am not going to let my daughter be sucked into that part, I would have assured Tosha. The ghost thing too: it’s utter madness and I am not going to stand for it anymore. That video, it’s coming down. Enough. But having conceded those points, I don’t feel I’m “lost” in what is, despite even my own resistance, a minor identity alteration. And it is a little thing, saying “I’m mixed” instead of “I’m black,” yet it’s like the difference between the comfort of wearing shoes that fit as opposed to bearing the blisters of shoes just one size too small. I might have said. It does feel like a relief, an actual relief of pain, just acknowledging—yes I use the word acknowledging—all of who I am, to myself. I would have said to her.
I come in the front pedestrian gate, still mentally reciting my rebuttal, and there’s no one there. There should be someone at the gate at all times, it’s locked but only six feet tall. Anyone can climb it; I climb it, because I can’t see which key to use in the dark. Also, where are the lights? This, this is a representation of the Mulattopians’, specifically the Oreos’, basic detachment from reality. There should be fog lights here, or something. Usually, all the lights from the caravans are enough to keep the place lit up, populated. But now it’s dark. There are no lights on inside the property. Not from the trailers, not from the string of bulbs they placed up between their makeshift alleys. It’s completely engulfed in shadow, aside from patches from the streetlights off Germantown Avenue. No one is here. I head toward the house. I know something is wrong when I see all the people crowding out of my father’s house onto the porch. There’re about thirty of them. It’s a whole damn party. I did not invite them here. I did not give Tal permission to invite them all here. It’s nearly midnight, but here they are pouring out onto the steps. Looking in the windows. Listening at the open door. They don’t pay me mind until I stomp right through them. Until I yell, “Tal!”
They start parting then. They start giving me room to reach her. The house is even more full of them. The whole camp. It’s here. All of them. Faces I recognize but don’t care because my daughter is in so much trouble right now.
“Tal!”
The crumbling mansion is packed. In the hallway, on the stairs, into the dining room, all facing the living room. Chop it up, chop it up now.
“Tal!” A few people point into the living room. They seem scared. They are scared. They are scared of me.
Tal sits on the couch. To her side, sitting up on the couch’s back, rests Roslyn, who has a hand on my daughter’s shoulder. On the other side is Sun, who looks more concerned than anyone in here, but not scared. Concerned for me.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask my daughter. Nobody else here matters more. Nobody else in the world.
“Stop embarrassing me.”
“Why is everyone in my house?” It comes out lighter, slightly deflated. But only slightly.
“I saw them,” Roslyn says. She’s smiling. She’s excited. Everyone is excited, smiling too. Everyone but Sun. Sun stares at me, monitoring. Looking across the room at my eyes, Sunita Habersham mouths Stop. But nothing here is ending. Roslyn says louder, “I saw them too. I finally saw them.”
“She saw them,” a few other voices reiterate.
“In the front top window of the house. I had my doubts. I admit it,” Roslyn says to me and the rest of the room, with an emphasis on the latter. “But I saw them. The First Couple. It’s all true,” Roslyn continues. Heads nod around me. Quick words say the affirmative.
“I had a séance and they actually showed up. How cool is that, Pops?” Tal asks, holds out a hand to the air for a high five. When I don’t step forward and smack it, Kimet gets off the floor and does it for me.
A cult. Tosha is right about this part. About them. This has officially passed into madness. Later, I’m sure, I will tell this story at dinner parties, and to new friends. And when they ask, “Were they really that bad?” I will tell them this story. I will leave no detail out, either. How they all sat on the floor Indian-style, around Roslyn, who sat on the couch above them. How they lit Pottery Barn candles trying to pretend at mysticism. How sage burned in the air, misting around behind the older woman. How Afro Celt Sound System played in the background, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other ethnic hybrid hot hits were cued behind it. And I’ll add this part: what One Drop, standing behind the couch, says to me with two hands on Sunita Habersham’s shoulders, massaging them absently the whole time he’s talking.
“Hey man, your daughter, she’s a spiritual seer, Holmes. You don’t know this, but she’s a powerful woman.”
“Get your hippie half-breed asses the fuck out my father’s house and away from my daughter before I kick the Uncle Tom out the lot of you!”
Roslyn doesn’t bother to frown. Everyone else is still as well. They just stare at me. Even Sun freezes, for a moment. But only a moment. When the air stops vibrating, when the biggest sound is the weight of my breathing, then she gets up and walks by.
“Don’t,” she says. No extra verb. Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. Don’t screw me. Don’t kiss me. Don’t bother explaining yourself. It’s all in there. And then Sun’s past me. Into the hall. Out the door. Down the steps. We all hear her feet go, boom, da boom, boom. Still, it’s motionless inside. Tal looks like she is about to cry, but other than that, frozen. Roslyn has dropped most of her smile, but the sides of her lips still tilt the edges of her mouth.
“Get out of here!” I follow with. Still that doesn’t work. Nobody moves. I close my eyes, to listen for it. To listen for movement.
What I finally hear is, “It’s okay. My father needs alone time.”
I stand there. I don’t open my eyes again. I don’t want to see them. I don’t open my eyes till the last footfall moving past me has grown silent.
I can breathe normally now. I am myself once more. The rage has escaped me. I have returned to normal. The house has returned to normal. Almost normal. When I do open my eyes, the overhead lights are back on. The candles are blown out. The music has been silenced.
Tal is gone.
Roslyn is not. She sits right where she did before. Staring at me. Smiling.
“You didn’t see anything,” I tell her. I know this. I know this even though I’ve seen things.
Roslyn keeps smiling, but doesn’t bother looking at me. Slowly she rises.
“They might believe you, but I can see what you’re doing, that’s what I see,” I say into her silence. Roslyn reaches for her purse at the couch’s end, brushes something off of it, then puts it on her shoulder. When she doesn’t respond I say, “You’re turning this into a cult.”
“It’s not a cult. It’s a karass. A people linked by a higher purpose,” she says lightly as she walks by me to the door.
“That’s the kind of shit people in a cult say,” I get out, but Roslyn doesn’t look back, my sound just another creak in the room.
20
SUNITA HABERSHAM IS NOT taking my calls. Her line rings, I see her face on my phone, and then the only voice I get is the one recorded for the entire world. Tosha won’t talk to me either, but this I barely notice, because Sunita Habersham is not taking my calls or responding to my texts and I feel the loss like one leg is gone and I have to struggle every moment not to fall over. I don’t leave my father’s house. I don’t go out. I don’t go to see her. I know she’s there. I know Tal is with her. Tal contacts me, after The Explosion, with a text that says, I’m staying with Sun now. Followed immediately with another text that says, Cuz UR an asshole. Tal, I miss, but she’s my teenage daughter and teenagers are supposed go through a period where they hate their parents and so basically this puts us right on schedule. As long as the cult doesn’t steal her, that door will reopen. The door to the life of Tosha Evans, that will reopen as well, we’ve been friends too long to not be now just because of mulattoes. There’s another door I keep thinking about. The one to Sun’s trailer. It’s a little aluminum door, with white metal siding on the outside. If I don’t get that door open again, eventually it will rust shut on me forever.
Everyone else in Mulattopia, they’re cordial. Very tolerant. Polite. The guy who still owns the land to this place? He should be tolerated. No one stands before the house and denounces me. I am never cursed back out. No one will look directly at me as I walk around my own property either, but they don’t make faces or other visible displays of disapproval.
I’m not mad at them, for this genteel shunning. I can feel my own shame, at the way I chose to express myself. My anger, having been given full vent, is largely exhausted. This primal emotion has been replaced with another: loneliness. The major cause of this is Tal and Sun not speaking to me, but I’m surprised to find that this is not the entire cause.
Yes, I believe this has become a cult. But it was a cult in which I was a member. Part of the allure of all of this, even as I’ve struggled against it, has been the seductive feeling of my own group inclusion. I still move through these people, but I feel disconnected from them now. I feel the absence of a kinship I took for granted. The only thing worse than a cult is a cult that won’t have you as a member.
It does get better, slowly. A week later, I do garner a few uncommitted head nods when I make direct eye contact. One of One Drop’s crew even follows with, “You feeling better since The Explosion?” I don’t go out as much, but when I do, when I leave for the store or interact with the parents and others as I teach the remainder of my class, several others make a point to discuss the night with me as well. They use the term The Explosion in a way that conveys that the events have been discussed in detail and a title for this historical moment has been formally approved. The Explosion. Very dramatic. According to them, The Explosion was perfectly normal. Something many at the camp have gone through. A part of the process. A necessary phase in the creation of a new worldview.
My favorite of these discussions comes at the gate. As I struggle to keep the bike upright in first gear, freshly bought groceries filling my saddlebags, One Drop steps right out in front of me.
“Yo man, I just want to say, it ain’t nothing to be ashamed of. We all been through it, it’s part of the awakening, you know?”
“Thanks, One Drop.” I like saying his name to him. It’s so goddamn ridiculous and the joke seems to hover a yard in front of his face, just out of his reach. He hangs that way before my face now, my front wheel between his legs. The bike stalls; he doesn’t notice. I flip up the visor on my helmet to add to the message that I want to get by him, but he doesn’t read social cues. It’s another language in which he’s illiterate.
“For real, Holmes. It’s a struggle, this mixed identity thing. I fought it too. Just like you, yo. Even more, bro, even more. Because my blackness, right, it’s my essence? It’s in me. You know what I’m saying?” One Drop tells me as he bangs his chest. So that’s where it is. Because it certainly isn’t outside him. “I didn’t mean nothing, the other night. It’s just, I saw the First Couple, and my mind was kinda blown. I’m just glad you’re down with the cause, bro. You ever want to talk about it, sunflower to sunflower, I’m here, yo.”
Into all this, Spider’s truck returns from its extended scouting mission around two in the afternoon, but I don’t go outside in daylight. I stay here, in the damned house. I go out at dark. I go out when I can walk fast and be largely unseen. I want to go immediately, so I can talk to him before the rest turn me into the villain, and I actually get as far as the door, but I don’t. They’ll all know what I’m up to. It will just make it worse.
It takes Spider ten hours to respond to my text, my simple, Hey, when you get settled, come up to the house and hang. And when he does, Spider’s message is just Come down, man.
Spider sits on his trailer’s steps, playing his accordion again, managing to keep the song going as he talks.
“What happened while I was gone? Everybody looks like they saw a ghost!”
He’s been waiting all day to say this line, and from the way he laughs it met expectations. He’s gotten better. On the accordion, in just a few weeks’ time. The
notes don’t come between labored pauses.
“How was Creole country? Must have been nice to have a paid vacation.” I’m not sure that Roslyn funded his trip until he says, “I know, right? It was sweet! I guess things are going well here, but even so, I’m definitely headed back. Already got a gig, too. No matter what, we should take a road trip. Just you and me. Dude out. You need a break.”
“I think I already broke.”
“Shut up. You lost your shit. I’ve lost my shit, found it, and lost it again a dozen times. And this whole mixed thing, it’s like racial sacrilege. Especially for the sunflowers.” He leans forward, lowers his voice. “For the Oreos, I think it’s a little easier, because they got a bit of that white entitlement in them, and they think they’re allowed to do whatever they want.” Leaning back, he returns to full voice. “Or that just might be my vestigial prejudice talking.”
I take a seat next to him, and a beer when he hands one over. We drink. Then I drink, and he plays the accordion some more. A sad song. “O, bonsoir Moreau,” he sings to me, and some other lyrics I don’t have the language to understand. I shoot the beer down before he finishes, grab another from his cooler. I am going to get drunk now. Since Tal’s gone.
“You want to find your shit?” Spider asks me, a six-pack in.
—
We are at Sunita Habersham’s trailer. It’s not that late, it’s only just after midnight, but the shades are drawn. Still, you can see the lights are on. It even comes through the doorjamb. Spider decides to go in on his own, have me wait outside, which is fine considering the delicacy of the situation.
He’s in there long enough for me to doubt he’s coming back out. I think, They’ve won him over, he’s gone to the other side, back to the feminine, away from me. But the door opens.
“What?” Tal asks me. Not even Hello. Not even, I missed you. “Spider says you have an eighteenth birthday present for me. I don’t believe him. I don’t believe you anymore.” Her last sentence, I don’t believe. She can barely say it. I grab Tal into a hug, and she’s not expecting it, almost falls over. I hold her steady and whisper, “I love you and will always love you and you can always trust that,” and don’t let go till she nods. And then I step back, and continue the previously scheduled performance.