This Is Just My Face

by Gabourey Sidibe

  Entertaining came naturally. On the bus or train, my mom would play I Spy with my brother and me or tell us the story “Sleeping Ugly,” a tale she made up about a girl so ugly she fell asleep waiting for a prince to marry her. A lot of times, my mom would spin a fairy tale out of whatever she’d watched on TV after my brother and I had gone to bed. Other passengers would listen in on our stories and laugh along with us. I hated them, because I hate strangers. My mom, on the other hand, smiled right back at them. There was always enough happiness to go around with my mom.

  That’s why her marriage to my dad made no sense to me as a child.

  My dad has always seemed to me the most boring man in the world. He doesn’t laugh, and he smiles less than he laughs. He is a cabdriver. I’ve always thought of that as being as much a description of his personality as his occupation. I remember him being at work all the time. Sometimes he’d drive us to school in the morning, but most times he didn’t. He seemed to hate the sound of his children’s laughter. Sometimes while he was out, my brother and I would be in my parents’ bed with my mom. She’d tickle us and give us rides on her back while she tried to knock us off. We’d be giggling away, and then we’d hear the front door slam, and my mom would say, “Uh-oh. Mr. Man is here.”

  That door slam meant the fun was officially over. Suddenly, my dad would appear in the doorway of the bedroom with his nose turned up. “Giggle, giggle, giggle! All you do is giggle! All the time laughing, God dammy! So loud! I can hear you from the elevator!” Then he’d go to the kitchen to have dinner. By himself. My mom would roll her eyes and quietly imitate him, and I’d laugh again. Loudly. And that’s not a typo, by the way. “God dammy” is the way my dad pronounces the phrase goddamn it. He’s African, so he has an accent. African is another word I use to describe his personality. African, cabdriver, boring.

  My dad wanted us to live in constant fear of him because he saw fear as a sign of respect. But since I didn’t really fear him, I constantly got in trouble for being disrespectful. In part, this was because of my laugh. My laugh has always sounded more like a shrill scream followed by a loud snort than a proper laugh. If people could choose what their laughs sound like, I’d probably go with something that didn’t sound like it lived under a bridge and gave fairy-tale characters the business on their way to Grandmother’s house. My dad hated my laugh and always thought I could change it—that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. He would threaten to glue my lips shut so he wouldn’t have to hear it. Other times he’d threaten to glue my mouth and my butt shut so when I laughed or farted I would explode. That’s really what he said! I know it sounds horrifying, but it’s the funniest thing he’s ever said. (He was best at being unintentionally funny.) I’d pretend to be afraid of him, but as soon as I was alone, I’d laugh my glued-up ass off.

  When I was around six years old, my father and I had a big argument. It started when he mentioned his plan to live with me in his old age. He said that I’d have to take care of him, and cook and clean for him like a good Muslim woman, and on and on—

  Oh, yeah! I was born Muslim. But the year before this conversation, when I was five, I made the conscious decision to stop being one. I’ll be honest: I wanted to eat bacon like my mom and had already had warnings about that cooking and cleaning bullshit, so the choice was easy.

  Now it was time to tell my dad there was no way I was letting him live with me and my future husband and kids. I didn’t even like living with him then. To summarize my side of the fight, I said something to the effect of “Hell NO!”

  Dad and Ahmed This is one of my favorite photos of Ahmed as a baby. I wasn’t born yet so he’s actually pretty happy. I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to that kid. My dad looks like he’s trying really hard not to smile. Dork.

  Courtesy of Gabourey Sidibe

  “When you were a baby,” he answered, “you’d sleep right here on my chest! On this chest! You loved it so much!” He was trying to guilt his way into my future home.

  “That was years ago!” I yelled back. “My husband and I will be too busy for you to live with us! I can’t afford it!”

  In the end, my dad resolved to have more children who would love him more than I did and who would be grateful to have him live with them. I wished him luck then, and I wish him luck now. More than twenty-five years later I still don’t want to live with my dad.

  The point is, my mom and dad were like night and day. When my dad was at work, the house was filled with laughter; and when my mom was gone, the house was dark and either too cold or too hot. Uncomfortable. I always thought that Bill Withers’s song “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” was about my mother. So how could these two very different people have come together to find enough love to get married and have kids?

  The American Dream!

  My father, Ibnou Sidibe, is from Senegal. His father was a politician who served as mayor of the third largest city in Senegal, Thiès (pronounced chess). Dad was his second son from his second marriage. The oldest son died at two years, leaving my father as the oldest boy, a very important position in a Senegalese family. Dad was sent to school in France to be an architect. Sometime after graduating, he figured he’d move to America. I’ve never asked him why—I always assumed it was to make his fortune, like in some fairy tale with him selling his prized cow for magic beans to grow a beanstalk to make a boat to sail to America. There is no evidence that my dad sailed here in a boat made out of a beanstalk that grew from magic beans that were purchased after the sale of an exceptional cow, but I’ve always preferred that idea. My dad has always been so boring that wherever there’s a blank space in his life story I fill it with whimsy in an attempt to like him more.

  In all probability, he took a plane over. He stayed with family members or friends of family or wherever he could. He even slept in the hallways of hotels and apartment buildings, but I don’t think he did that for too long. He learned English pretty quickly, made friends, got a room, and found a few jobs. In order to stay in this country, though, he needed to find a wife. He let his new friends know of his plan, and through them, Ibnou met Alice. He offered her about $4,000 to marry him so he could get his green card.

  She agreed. My mom says that she cared about him as a person and that that’s why she married him. She says the money wasn’t important.

  My father courted her for a whole year after they got married before she finally fell for him enough to sleep with him. That’s right! My mom is so classy that you have to marry her and then wait a year before she gives you any play. He took her to Africa to his hometown, and that’s when she says she actually fell in love with him and decided that he was her husband for real and that they’d build a life together.

  Before she visited Africa, she thought it was filled with savages with spears in their hands chasing lions. My mom grew up a dark-skinned girl in the most racist part of America: the Deep South. She survived “Whites Only” drinking fountains and the KKK knocking on her door looking for an uncle. Hollywood—Hollywood, where shiny tan white people play Egyptian pharaohs and queens—never told my mom that Cleopatra looked like her. That Cleopatra had dark skin and a round body. But when my mom landed in Senegal, she saw a sea of black people who looked like her. Who looked like her mother and father, like her entire family. And they were beautiful. They were doctors, lawyers, artists, mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers. None of them were savages. None of them were powerless people stolen and enslaved to build a nation that would kill and condemn them. Africa was a mirror to my mother. It was home. It’s easy to fall in love with Africa. It’s easy to fall in love in Africa. I believe that my mother fell in love with Africa, not with Ibnou. (That’s my theory, anyway.) Why else would my mom ignore the two major signs of impending doom that accompanied her green-card-but-I-care-for-you marriage?

  Sign one: My mother and my father’s mother looked like twins. Really! Everyone in my dad’s family looks just like everyone in my mom’s family. Even my dad is identical to my mother�
��s brother, and not in a general “they all look alike” way. As it turns out, my mother’s ancestors, who were stolen from Africa and sold into slavery, were taken from Senegal. A blood test confirmed that Alice’s ancestors are Ibnou’s ancestors. My mother and father have the same bloodline! Isn’t that gross? Furthermore, they were both carriers of the same genetic blood disorder, hemoglobin C disease, which causes an abnormal breakdown of the red blood cells. They were told to not have children together. That was before they fell in love! Before Africa! After Africa, my mother apparently forgot all about the downside of marrying someone whose mother looked just like her.

  Sign two: My dad’s ex-girlfriend. Yes! While they were in my dad’s hometown, my father introduced my mother to his first cousin Tola. He had dated Tola before he left Senegal for school in France. Upon meeting Alice, Tola asked if she could be my mother’s wife-in-law. You see, men in Senegal are allowed to marry multiple women at one time. Polygamy. My grandfather had more than one wife and many children. The wives all lived in separate homes with their children, and my grandfather sort of moved around from home to home, family to family. It’s their culture. This is the life my father was raised to lead, and the life that my grandmother and most Senegalese women were raised to accept.

  Not Alice, though. She let Ibnou know that if he wanted to marry Tola he’d have to divorce her first. Ibnou assured Alice that it was all over between him and Tola, and that he was dedicated to Alice and their new marriage. She believed him. After leaving Africa, Alice took Ibnou to Georgia to meet her family before they went back home to New York City. A year later, they had Ahmed, who was born with hemoglobin C disease. Barely three months after giving birth to my brother, my mother became pregnant with me. There was a three-in-four chance that I would be born with the same blood disorder, but as would become the theme of my life, I beat the odds. Less than three years into their green-card-but-I-care-for-you marriage, Alice and Ibnou had the perfect nuclear family in a three-bedroom apartment with a terrace in one of Brooklyn’s roughest neighborhoods: Bed-Stuy (birthplace of Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z, and me!). And they lived happily ever after. Oh, wait! Not really!

  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that my parents were unhappily married. It wasn’t that they always fought. They did, but it was more than that. The three of us—my mom, Ahmed, and I—seemed to live an entirely different life than my father. He was either gone at work or reading the paper in silence. He was impenetrable. I remember calling his name for minutes, a foot away from him, and him just ignoring me. We weren’t on his radar unless we were being yelled at or made fun of. I was “Fatso” and Ahmed was “Freeda,” a girl’s name that Ibnou called him when he thought my brother was acting like a sissy. When I argued with Ibnou, he hit me, and I cried, and he felt guilty and called me his princess. Sometimes he gave me money. I figured out very early on that he was always nice when I made him feel bad, so I started to cry on cue (this skill came in handy when I became an actor). He often hit us to make the point that we belonged to him, that we were his property, and that he could do with us what he wanted. This was never okay with Alice, and she fussed at him and fought with him to protect us. So he started to hit us only when she wasn’t around.

  I took to speaking in a baby voice in a misguided attempt to appear cuter so I’d be in less trouble. (I was a creep then; I’m a creep now.) My father would say stuff to my mom like “We need to have another baby. She would grow up if we had another baby, and she’d stop talking like that.” My mom would always respond, “I will NEVER have another child with you ever again! You mistreat the kids you have. I’m not having more so you can mistreat them, too.” See? I knew they were unhappily married. I hoped that my mom would leave Ibnou eventually. I couldn’t wait!

  To be clear, I don’t think my dad was intentionally abusive. He was trying to make us better children and therefore better people. More to the point, he was trying to make us into the kind of children he could recognize: quiet children who listened to him without question. He wanted children who were like him, so he raised us the way his father raised him. Ahmed and I were too foreign; we had too much personality.

  My father went back home to Senegal frequently. He’d usually take Ahmed and me with him, but once, when I was around four and Ahmed was five, he and Ahmed went alone. They were gone for more than a month. When they came back, Ahmed told my mom and me about a party our dad had taken him to. It was at a big house, and there were a lot of people there, and they kept giving Dad money. I was pissed I’d missed such a great party with free money, but now I know better: we were listening to my brother describe my dad’s wedding. Yes. Ibnou had gone to Senegal to marry Tola as he’d always promised her he would (and as he always promised my mom he wouldn’t). I’m certain that if Ibnou had taken me instead of Ahmed I would’ve come home and yelled, “Mommy! Daddy married this other lady!” Ahmed was far more innocent; he believed in goodness and hope or whatever. I was born a cynical, suspicious, forty-five-year-old divorcée. I would’ve reported every single thing that I saw at that wedding, and the jig would’ve been up as soon as I was back in America.

  Baby Gabou My parents would send Ahmed and me to Mom’s parents’ house in Georgia during the summer. I wish I could remember those times, but I was too little. I mean, look at that little nose of mine! Can you even, cuz I can’t. I CAN’T EVEN!

  Courtesy of Gabourey Sidibe

  But the fact is, Ahmed was there—not me—so for the time being, nothing much changed. Until two years later, when my mom was out of town on a trip, and my dad came home to our apartment with a baby.

  “This is your brother Malick,” he said to us.

  The baby was about a year old. Dad handed him to me.

  “You’re not a baby anymore,” he very clearly said to me. “You can’t talk like a baby anymore. This is a baby. You’re a big girl now. No more, okay!?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I said, sounding more like a baby than I ever had. (I would decide when the game was over, not him.)

  I loved the shit out of that baby, but I didn’t believe he was my brother. Africans are always calling strangers their sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles. It doesn’t mean that you’re actually related.

  “Where’d this baby come from?” I asked.

  “The airport,” Ibnou answered.

  “Where was he before the airport? Who made this baby?”

  “I did,” he answered.

  “For real? You made this baby? With who? Are we keeping this baby forever? Where’s this baby gonna sleep? Who’s gonna teach this baby English? Does Mommy know this baby? Can we afford this baby?”

  Ibnou recanted. “This is just your cousin. This is my brother’s baby. He’s just visiting! He’s going back tonight! This is not my baby. You are just like your mammy!” He was always telling me that I was like my mom. He pronounced it mammy. Adorable.

  I stopped asking questions and went back to trying to force that baby to love me. Later that night, Ibnou took the baby back to the airport to go home with Tola. I didn’t meet her. Yet.

  When Alice came home from her trip, I yelled, “Mommy! Daddy brought a baby here! He said it’s my brother! Daddy has a baby!” She assumed the same thing I assumed: Africans are always claiming everyone’s family when they really aren’t.

  Two years later, Tola came to live with us. All I knew was that she was Dad’s cousin and the mother of baby Malick who’d come to America for a day. But this time she came alone and Malick stayed in Africa. How did it happen that Tola came to live with us? Well, Ibnou had convinced Alice to write a letter to Tola inviting her. By this point, Ibnou had been granted U.S. citizenship, but because Tola wasn’t an American citizen, a natural-born American (Alice) had to issue the invitation. Ibnou had convinced Alice to help a sister of his come to America the same way, so this was nothing new and didn’t seem suspicious. It may seem suspicious to you because you’re hearing the story all at once. In real time, though, Ibnou’s con took yea
rs to pull off.

  So Tola was finally in America, and like when Ibnou’s sister came to America and stayed with us (another story for another time), I had to share my room and my bed. This was awful for me because I was, and still am, a solitary creature. I hate strangers, as I’ve said, and I hate houseguests. Ibnou once told me that every time anyone came over to our house, I’d incessantly ask when that person was leaving. I believe it. Even now, whenever a friend comes over to my apartment, I count down the minutes until they’re gone so I can finally take my pants off. (Adulthood is all about waiting to take your pants off.)

  Anyway, Tola stayed with us for three or four months. Alice was super welcoming and even took Tola to buy her first winter coat. Tola cooked and cleaned, but in my opinion she wasn’t particularly interesting. She was just another boring African in our house I couldn’t wait to get rid of. She was another Ibnou.

  Ibnou eventually found his cousin/secret wife an apartment about a ten-minute walk away from ours. That’s when he stopped coming home at night. One morning, on the way to school, Alice went over to Tola’s new apartment unannounced. Ibnou was there, and Alice saw his clothes on the side of Tola’s bed. He swore that he was just talking to her and then got too tired to come home so he slept there—that they were just sleeping, that’s all. Alice said okay and left.

  At this point you’re probably thinking, Girl! Just leave him!! That’s what I’m thinking while writing this. That’s what I was thinking—and most likely saying—back then, too.

  But that’s because there are things that I didn’t consider. Like the fact that two years before, when Ahmed was seven and I was six, Ibnou and Alice got into an argument, and in order to punish her, he called the Bureau of Child Welfare and accused her of abusing Ahmed and me.