“Sixty years.”
I pointed to a photo of my maternal great-aunt Estelle, my mother’s aunt, who lived healthily till a month shy of her one-hundredth birthday and died only because she decided to stop eating. I had once gone with my mother to visit her aunt, whom she hadn’t seen since the family had moved north when my mother was nine or ten. My grandmother had died before I was born, so I was anxious to meet her sister. I interviewed her and audiotaped our conversation.
“What was it like growing up for you?” I asked her.
Her voice was scratchy with age, but her mind was sharp as a hatpin.
“Well, for the chaps, that’s children, we had to work too,” she told me. “But I went to school.” Lots of Black children, she reminded me, either didn’t go to school at all or had to miss during cotton season so they could work in the fields. “Our mama died when we was young and our father married Geneva. She was so mean to us. Eighty years later, her hurt still visible. When she had her own daughter, she got to have patent-leather shoes, and we had to go barefoot. I’ll never forget that.”
When I asked her questions about picking cotton, she seemed insulted.
“I ain’t picked no cotton. I ain’t that old.” (Although there were people her age and way younger who had.)
“We slept on a mattress made outta straw. We pumped our water. I don’t know what you wanna know. It was just life. We was just livin’ life: church, work, school, cooking, all that. There was a outhouse. I be scared to death to go out there at night, so we’d keep a slop jar by the bed.” She had laughed at the memory of that.
Ford moved on to the pictures of Cliff’s family. Most of them look racially ambiguous. Both of his paternal grandparents were biracial. Cliff’s paternal great-grandparents met in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. He was a Black veteran of the Civil War and she was a German immigrant named Esther Stein. Their daughter Emily was Cliff’s paternal grandmother. His paternal grandfather, the first Clifford, was the only child of a Black woman named Caledonia and an unknown White man. From what we know, she was a fierce woman who had moved with her son to New York from Macon, Georgia.
I looked at Ford’s face and could tell he was confused.
I went on to explain that, long ago, some of these unions between Black women and White men were why Black people had such a range of colors. I thought he was too young to explain that often these “relationships” weren’t consensual.
“So if you were born in slavery and you had a White father, couldn’t he take you out of slavery? If you had a White father like Daddy?”
I laughed, mostly nervous laughter, because until that moment I’d had no idea that Ford thought Cliff was White. He’s light, but I don’t think he looks White.
“Daddy’s not White,” I told him. “Daddy’s parents, Nana and Papa, are Black. Their skin is just very light.” My mother-in-law’s parents were also racially ambiguous. In their wedding picture, my mother-in-law looks like a dark-haired Italian beauty.
By the time I got to explain that part of American history, Ford was drifting away. I saw that he’d decided that he had learned enough for one day.
Our family on Christmas 2003.
About a year after his lesson about slavery and miscegenation, Ford was called the “N” word. It happened on the field in the back of the school he had gone to since he was in a BabyBjörn on my chest. Baldwin had been a student there before him. He had been there so often with her that he was, at age two, included in Baldwin’s Lion King performance during the annual school talent show. In his Halloween lion’s costume, he jumped onto the stage and roared at the end of her song. He’d been officially enrolled since he was five and had felt as comfortable at the Edgemont School as he was at home. He was eleven at this point. In general, he didn’t cry much, but after that word was hurled at him, he became so overcome with emotion that a buddy, a biracial boy named Matthew, put his arm around him and ran him to the nurse.
Is it easier to receive pain if you know it’s coming? Can we gird our kids, toughen them to slights, hurtful comments, bigotry?
The boys who had called Ford this word were his friends. I don’t mean casual, on-the-same-baseball-team friends, I mean part of his main birthday party crew, sleepovers, trips to the beach, and trick-or-treating together kind of friends. He must have felt as if an exposed nerve had been struck. He must have felt betrayed.
When I came home on that February day, Ford was sitting on the paisley chenille couch in the family room, ironically beneath the ancestors’ photo wall. He was playing a game on the iPad. I stood in the entranceway. Something about his slouched posture caught my attention.
“How was your day?”
“Good,” he said, taking his eyes off his game only briefly to look at me.
I walked into the room and wedged in beside him on the couch.
“What’d you do at school?”
“Nothing.”
“Anything usual happen?”
“Nope.”
“Well, why do you look like that?”
“Look like what?”
“You look sad.”
“I’m not sad,” he said, almost indignantly, and kept at his game. I sat next to him for a minute longer, hoping he’d offer something but knowing that he wouldn’t.
“Okay,” I said and got up from where I was sitting next to him. “I’m going upstairs.”
My son is seldom talkative, especially when it comes to his feelings. My Baldwin, on the other hand, can dissect a feeling to dust. I would’ve known about her day before she got in the door from school. She would have called me, but it would have also been emotionally telegraphed. We are that in tune. It’s what I had always wanted our relationship to be. It’s what I’d experienced with my mom.
I went upstairs to my bedroom. I sat down on my bed and the phone rang. The caller ID said “Montclair Board” and the phone number was Ford’s elementary school’s. It was his principal, Mrs. Hopper. We exchanged pleasantries and she asked me if Ford had told me what happened at school.
“No, what happened?” I asked, suddenly feeling anxious.
She told me that there had been some name-calling on the field during a soccer game at recess. She kept talking, using the phrase “name-calling” every few words. I have to admit the “N” word didn’t ever enter my mind as one of the possible names. I hate sounding Pollyanna-ish, but it just didn’t. I had drunk the Kool-Aid about our progressive, hip little urban suburb. Enlightened, intelligent people don’t use that word—especially not here. Montclair has always been a home not just for Black and White, but everyone, Asian and Latino and everybody else—two moms, two dads, nesting divorced parents, divorced couple and wife’s boyfriend under one roof. Baldwin has a best friend who is Indian and Russian, who was raised solo by her dad. We’ve also surpassed Minneapolis in having the largest number of interracial marriages. I finally asked the principal what the names were, and when she said the “N” word, my mouth literally dropped. It was open long enough for my mouth to become dry. The word was not just a word to us, despite rappers and fans throwing it around like beads during Mardi Gras. It was like a thousand-pound weight filled with centuries of hate had been hurled at my child, shattering my sweet boy’s innocence.
“I know, I know,” she said in response to my silence. “I’ve lived here twenty-two years and have never heard that word or heard of anyone saying it.”
“You have to tell me the names of the boys who said it.”
She told me without hesitating. She also told me what she had said to the one who admitted he had said it. The other one had denied saying it, and his parents believed him. Ford maintained that he did.
“I have a feeling that there was something else going on, something that happened outside of school,” the principal said.
I shared with her what I knew. Ford had made the “A” baseball team and one of them had not. Ford had not invited that boy to his birthday sleepover a few weeks earlier. At the time, when we were doin
g the guest list and that boy’s name wasn’t on it, I’d asked Ford why, and he’d just said, “He’s annoying.”
While the principal’s news left me feeling as if I’d been hit in the stomach with a fifty-pound kettle bell, I also felt empowered by my mother radar—the thing that had led me to look at my son’s face and know, despite his insistence otherwise, that something bad had happened to him that day.
I got off the phone and went back to where Ford was still playing on his iPad. I needed to be with him and get him to talk about how he was feeling and what had happened.
“Ford, come downstairs with me. I want you to talk to me while I put ice on my sore hip.” We had a sectional in the basement, which would allow for both of us to lie down but not face each other. I knew that boys tended to handle talks better when not looking you directly in face.
I told him that Mrs. Hopper had explained what happened in school.
“What’d she say?”
I recounted our phone call. I asked him if that was accurate.
He said yes.
I asked him if he knew that word. He said yes, another punch in the gut.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
He relayed the story as Mrs. Hopper had, except he said two, not one, of the boys had called him the “N” word, and the one who denied uttering the word had been angrily chasing him when he said it. Now, my head was on fire, but I knew I had to remain calm to get the whole story. Mrs. Hopper had already told me that Ford had burst into tears and that Matthew had put his arms around Ford and taken him to the nurse. She also told me that Matthew had come back to the playground afterward and confirmed to every adult in sight what had happened.
I told Ford that that word wasn’t about him, but said more about the people who used it. He nodded his head. I told him that people use that word when they feel bad about themselves, to try to make you feel bad about yourself.
I know that I can sometimes be too nuanced, so I asked him at each turn if he understood what I’d said.
He said he did. Ford is quick to tell me when he doesn’t understand something.
I asked him if he wanted to say anything else.
He said no.
He was fidgeting, so I knew that meant I had to stop, that we were done.
I had called Cliff as soon as I had gotten off the phone with the principal. By the time he arrived home a few hours later, Ford’s mood was lighter. We were at the kitchen table, having dinner. It was just the three of us because Baldwin was at SAT prep. Cliff tried to engage Ford in a conversation about what had happened.
Ford looked at Cliff and flatly said, “I already talked to Mom about this.”
Translation: We’d processed it—“Mom’d” it, as he and his sister call my emotional and psychological excavations—and we could move on now.
That night, the mother of the boy who admitted saying it—let’s call him Mark—called to say that she was sorry.
“I’m mortified and I don’t know what to say,” she began the conversation.
This was someone I had interacted with regularly for years. I could hear the agony in her voice.
“I know, it’s horrible and there is nothing that can be said,” I responded.
We talked about how Ford was doing and about her son. I thanked her for calling and I meant it. I was calm and I believed her when she said that she’d never seen her son so distraught.
The other boy’s parents never called and never responded to the principal’s calls. Several weeks later, I ran into the boy’s dad in the park after walking with my friend Deb. I’d just told Deb the whole story, which by now was about a month old. She and I were in her car and she was about to pull out of her parking space. “Stop,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “That’s the boy and his dad.” They were pulling into the parking space directly in front of us. I got out of the car. The boy looked scared. The dad greeted me warmly, as he always had. I asked him why they’d never responded to the principal’s request that we all meet to talk about what had happened. He fidgeted and looked at me and began a rant: “I’m sick of all the baseball politics in this town and who’s in the country club and who has money and who doesn’t and who lives on the South End, and I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Berkeley, and all my friends were Mexican and Black, and I would never use that word and I know my son didn’t . . .”
I listened as he went on until I didn’t want to anymore. While it was clear he had a lot of strong, hurt feelings around the elitism of travel baseball, I said firmly and calmly, as I air circled my face with my pointer, telegraphing my brown skin, “And what does that have to do with me?”
The Trayvon Martin killing had recently happened, and I pointed out to him that it was much more likely that my son would be randomly shot and killed because of his race, even with his country club membership and higher economic status, than that his son would. “I’m not your problem,” I said, a cold slap to his hysteria.
The conversation moved on to one between compassionate human beings. I said what I needed to say, how hurtful that word is and how much it had disturbed Ford. He maintained that his son didn’t, wouldn’t ever, say it. He said that his son had said that Ford had teased him about not being a good ballplayer and had teased him about his weight. His son not making the “A” team had been a blow, but Ford maintained that he’d never even brought it up and that he’d never teased the boy about his size. They are no longer friends. Ford said he had no interest in talking to either of them again. Shortly after the incident, we saw the boys and Ford looked through them as if they were invisible.
But a year later, I heard Ford on his Xbox headset playing Black Ops. He was saying, “Mark, do it now, do it now.” I walked into the basement game room, which had become Ford’s Xbox room, the place where he would happily live if we let him.
“Is that Mark from Edgemont?”
He looked and me, headphones on, and nodded his head yes.
“You’re talking to him again?”
He actually took off his headphones and looked at me.
“Yeah, we’re cool. He said he was sorry and I said okay.”
And I said, “Okay,” and left him to his game.
The day after the “N” word incident, we made our almost daily stop at Dunkin’ Donuts on our way to school. That morning, the green icing on the donuts signaled St. Patrick’s Day. We got our stuff, an apple fritter for him, a small light coffee, light sugar for me (yes, I sometimes let him have a donut for breakfast; he’s the second child).
In the car, I said, “You know why there’s St. Patrick’s Day?”
“Nope,” he said between bites, devouring his apple fritter.
“Well, when the Irish came here, nobody liked them, and they were called names. St. Patrick’s Day was created to make them feel better about themselves and have pride in their ethnicity.”
I saw him through my rearview mirror, looking up now. I had his attention. He considered what I was saying, hunched his shoulders with an uh-huh, and went back to his glazed treat.
“You know there’s a horrible name for every racial and ethnic group?”
“No,” he said in a whisper from the backseat.
I told him the slurs for every group that I knew: Jews, Mexicans, Italians, Puerto Ricans. “Now you’ve heard them,” I said, “don’t you ever, ever use them.”
14
The Trouble with Miss Ann
A YEAR before her and my father’s fiftieth wedding anniversary in August 2003, my mom told me that she wanted to celebrate it by having a wedding—a genuine wedding with a white wedding gown, bridesmaids with color-coordinated taffeta gowns, flower girls, and a ring bearer.
I couldn’t believe what my mother was saying and actually thought she was really just talking. I should’ve known better. As the months passed and she started going to places like David’s Bridal and reception halls, I tried to talk her out of her plan.
“Mom, it’s too much.”
“Wha
ddya mean, too much? It’s not going to cost that much. I have the money.”
“I’m not just talking about the money. It takes a lot of energy to plan a wedding and . . .”
“I’m doin it, Neal.”
I thought the idea ridiculous and came close to saying so, but I knew better. I had to either get on board or get out of her way. I’d had no idea, until she told me, that she’d always wanted to have an actual wedding. When she and my dad had originally gotten married, she’d worn a black wool sheath with small gold designs on it. They went to city hall. Seeing her now in full wedding-planner mode, I felt a little sad for her, but that changed to admiration (as usual) as she went about getting what she’d always wanted, no matter what I or anybody else thought about it, no matter that it was fifty years later.
The day came. My mother wore a white bridal gown with a headpiece. I was the matron of honor. Her bridesmaids were her remaining sisters, Aunt Marion and Aunt Grace; Wendy, mother of Kamal, Duane’s first child; and Keisha, mother of two of Duane’s younger children, Sumayyah and Amir. We all wore light blue, short-sleeved gowns. My brother Larry’s granddaughter Jasmine was a flower girl, along with Baldwin and Sumayyah; Amir and Ford were ring bearers. Larry walked Mom down the aisle. Marc was the best man, and Cliff and Kamal were the groomsmen. The ceremony was at Mount Teman A.M.E., the church my grandmother had joined when she’d moved her family from the South to Elizabeth, New Jersey. The reception was at a hall in nearby Roselle.
My mother beamed like a first-time bride, and Daddy, upon entering the reception from the wedding with my mom, raised his arm and announced: “This is the happiest day of my life.”
When I thought about it later, I realized that long marriages like my parents’ are filled with complex feelings. You fight and you love, you push each other to the very end of human patience, and somehow you stick in out for fifty years as my parents had, and you live for the moments of grace.
In some ways my own marriage to Cliff mimicked the stock market. We’d had high-flying years when we were groovin’ on the same page, and we’d had years when we didn’t get along, and I’d wanted to bolt. Thankfully, Cliff has always been the steady one. Of course, I knew that my life as a wife and mother wouldn’t look anything like my mom’s, but I never actually pictured what it would look like, other than that I would be a working mom. Never in my most extreme dreams did I picture myself making dinner, organizing playdates, carpooling, and supervising homework full-time. During those years, I kept thinking I’d get back to writing; I just needed to get my kids settled first. Month after month, that’s what I told myself.
Welcome to My Breakdown Page 11