This Is Just My Face

by Gabourey Sidibe

  It was a nice, normal afternoon until the Bureau of Child Welfare picked us up. I was looking forward to coming home from school because I knew we had orange ice cream in the fridge and Chips Ahoy! in the cupboard. I wanted to get a bowl of that ice cream and stick two cookies on top and watch cartoons. This was all I could think about, and even now it’s the strongest memory I have of that day. What I didn’t know was that BCW had stopped by our school earlier in the day. Because my mother taught there and was in the building, she’d been able to cut them off before they pulled us from class; she begged them to pick us up from home instead so that our classmates wouldn’t see.

  I’d just put the ice cream back in the freezer when two agents knocked on the door. Ahmed and I were taken by a black woman with curly hair and another person whose face I can’t pull from my memory. He must’ve been white and male. Ahmed and I were separated and taken to different foster homes. He went to a big family somewhere in Queens with parents who were nice to him (they took him to IHOP). I went to more of an Annie kind of foster home run by a pair of identical twin sisters. They were identically mean and each had a son the same age as I was. There were two other boys there and one teenage girl who refused to talk to anyone. The twins threatened to spank us if we didn’t do what they said. And even though they fed their biological kids hot meals every day and night, the foster kids got only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That’s true abuse. The twins cut my hair and put ribbons in it for picture day at the new school they enrolled me in.

  It was awful. To this day, I don’t know if I was in Brooklyn or Queens. I didn’t know my way home. I didn’t know what I’d said to end up there. I didn’t know where my brother was, or if I’d see him or any of my family ever again.

  Alice was blindsided. Of course she wasn’t abusing either of us. Ibnou had only said that to hurt her. When he called BCW, he imagined they’d remove Alice, that he’d be punishing her. He didn’t expect them to take me and Ahmed. In order to get us back, both Ibnou and Alice had to endure an investigation. Alice left work every day and went straight to the courthouse with every scrap of documentation she could think of that would help to get us back. After we were in foster care for almost three weeks, BCW agents took us home, and only then did we learn what had happened, that Dad had done this to us. After that, I was finished. I was officially over him, and I started my campaign for Mom to get a divorce. But Alice was biding her time. She wanted out of that marriage, but she knew she had to do it in a way that would keep Ahmed and me safe. It was around this time that Alice started giving Ahmed and me safety drills. She told us to kick and scream if Ibnou or a friend of his ever tried to pick us up from school when she hadn’t discussed it with us first. She told us to kick and scream if we were ever with Ibnou and he drove us to the airport without her knowing it. The eighties were so crazy, y’all!

  Now fast-forward a couple of years: Ibnou is asking Alice to write a letter to Tola inviting her to America, and Alice is finally seeing her opportunity approaching.

  The summer after Tola joined us in America, Alice and her Cotton Club band were asked to perform at a festival in Morocco. She wanted to go but knew my dad couldn’t take care of us on his own as he had to work and Ahmed and I were too young to stay by ourselves. So it was decided that Tola would move back into our apartment to take care of us while my mom was gone. There I was, back to sharing my bed with a fully grown woman.

  The night before my mother was scheduled to come home, Ahmed and I did something we used to do a lot back then: we woke up in the middle of the night and met each other in the hallway to discuss the dreams we’d been having or whether or not cartoons were on TV. But that night, the night before Mom came home, I had something else to discuss.

  “Tola’s not in my bed,” I said.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “No. She’s not in the living room, either.”

  I looked past Ahmed to our parents’ room. The door was closed. I knew then that Tola and my father were sleeping together. It was the first time the thought had ever entered my head, but I knew I was right. I knew that Ibnou was super boring and straight up the worst, but the idea that he would cheat on my mom with someone he introduced to us as his cousin had never occurred to me. That was some soap opera shit that didn’t happen to real people. Ahmed, still innocent, had no idea what was going on. It’s not that he’s dumb; he’s just sweet and more willing to let people live their lives. He’s like Mom that way. Me? I’m like Ibnou—suspicious of everyone and personally offended by everything.

  When Alice came home the next day, I was so happy to have her back that I decided to enjoy the moment and wait on reporting Tola’s disappearance from my room. I didn’t have to wait long. Tola spent the night (again) in my bed (again); after all the celebrating, it was too late for her to go home (I guess). Alice and Ibnou made love (or whatever, GROSS), and they both went to the bathroom afterward to take a shower together (Eeewwwww! Just more GROSS!). Tola walked in on them and had a breakdown. She started crying and yelling at Ibnou in Wolof. Then she ran out of the house. Ibnou explained to Alice that Tola was just shocked. Married people having sex? Weird and gross! I get it, Tola!

  Alice knew what was going on and took advantage of the moment to force the truth. She went after Tola and cornered her in a hallway.

  “Tola, are you sleeping with Ibnou?”

  “No, no! He’s just my cousin,” she lied.

  “Is he your husband?” Alice pressed on.

  “No! No! He’s my cousin! That’s it!”

  Alice thought for a second, and asked about Tola’s baby, Malick, left behind in Africa.

  “Is Malick Ibnou’s bastard son?”

  If you know Muslims, the word bastard is a strong trigger. My entire life, my father told me never to bring home any bastards, that pregnancy out of wedlock was a sin worse than most, and that the shame it would bring would be irreversible and I could never bring him that shame. Calling Tola’s son a bastard was a knife to her pride and dignity.

  “NO! He’s not a bastard! We’re married!” Tola answered.

  Finally. After years of being secretly married to his cousin, fathering her child, and bringing his second wife into the home of his first wife, Ibnou was caught red-handed. He had lied and schemed for as long as he possibly could, but now the truth was out, and he had no choice but to let Alice walk away with me and Ahmed.

  The next day Alice took Ahmed and me shopping for new clothes for the beginning of the school year. I was going into fourth grade. She told us that we were moving out, finally leaving Ibnou and finally getting out of Brooklyn. We packed, and Ibnou didn’t protest at all. What we didn’t know then was that Tola was pregnant again—that Ibnou had a new family coming in right after us. We moved into a bedroom in my aunt Dorothy’s brownstone in Harlem. Three months later Tola gave birth to another son, and they eventually brought Malick to America along with an older daughter of Tola’s from a previous relationship. The five of them were a seemingly happy family. I can’t super tell as all of them were always just sitting around silently watching French news. Eventually, Ibnou married Tola here in America so that she could get her own green card.

  Family Portrait LASERS!!! Weren’t the ’80s the best? Also, how perfect is my mom’s roller set?! And her eyebrows are arched all to be damned! Get into this BLACK QUEEN!

  Courtesy of Gabourey Sidibe

  Ibnou and Alice remained friends no matter what I had to say about it. He’d mistreated us all, hit us whenever he wanted, sent us to foster care, secretly married his cousin, brought her into our home, had a family with her behind our backs, and forced us to move to Harlem into a single bedroom with two twin beds while his new family took our place. Alice’s power to forgive astounded me. She still welcomed my dad into our home, and my dad was always around. He didn’t pay child support because, in addition to Tola, he went on to marry other women in Africa and have child after child.

  Today Ibnou is in his sixties and still hav
ing kids. He has more children than we know of. He’s far from the guy who once threatened to glue my lips shut if I laughed too loud, and I’m not the little girl who could see only African, cabdriver, and boring in him. But our relationship is . . . complicated. I’m still trying to look at my relationship with Ibnou the way Alice does. She always says, “Don’t let anyone else take away your joy. If they don’t want to be with you or around you, let them go. Pick up your shit and keep going. You came into the world by yourself, and the next person’s lungs don’t help you breathe.”

  She’s so smart. Even if she did marry someone whose mother looked exactly like her.

  4

  A Psychic Told Me So

  Gabby, you’re a little bit psychic and a lotta bit psycho.

  —Jussie Smollett

  OH! I TOTALLY FORGOT to tell you that Tola was a psychic! At least that’s how she made her living. When Mom, Ahmed, and I moved out of our Brooklyn apartment and Tola moved in with Dad, Ahmed’s old room became her office. When I say office, I’m being generous. It was still mostly Ahmed’s bedroom, with his bed still in it. Tola would have her clients come into his room, and she’d sit on the floor while they sat on the bed or across from her on the floor. She had a satchel of cowry shells, and she apparently was able to read them in order to tell the future. When I was a kid, I believed this without question. I thought we all did, so I never bothered asking if she really was psychic or not. I didn’t think people could fake something like that. Aww! I was so young and innocent!

  In the early days after they broke up, my parents made an attempt at shared custody. Ahmed and I would go back to Brooklyn on Friday after school and return to our aunt Dorothy’s house in Harlem on Monday after school. All weekend long, I’d be in our old apartment with its new furniture, new smells, new stepmother, new baby brother. The apartment I’d grown up in didn’t seem familiar without Mom in it. Without my family in it. There were a few pictures on a shelf of Ahmed and me, but they seemed out of place. We looked like two American children in the home of an African family. Dad and Tola spoke to each other in Wolof. I knew only a little Wolof from visiting Senegal and could not really understand what they were talking about. The only American voices around were mine and Ahmed’s, and neither seemed to count. We were the foreigners now. When Tola had her second son, my brother Abdul, teaching me to be a “good Muslim woman and mother” started being important again for Dad. So I had to help Tola with the newborn while Dad was driving a cab around New York City. That was fine by me. I loved Abdul and didn’t want to miss a second of watching him be a baby. Even though I was by then only nine years old, it was my job to tend to Abdul while Tola had customers.

  Africans from lots of different countries came to see Tola for insight into their futures. People from Senegal like her and Dad, people from Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, everywhere! For me, it was like a rainbow of all different shades and cultures of black and brown. Once while I was there, African Americans came! It was a Sunday. I remember because the two older black women had come straight from church dressed to the nines in church clothes. One wore all yellow with a white hat. The other woman wore all white with a black-and-white hat. I loved them. I was so excited to see another American in that apartment. It was as if I’d been lost in another country where I didn’t speak the language but then turned a corner and saw a McDonald’s and knew I’d be okay. When the church ladies arrived, Tola was with another customer so they sat in the living room with me while I watched The Kids in the Hall on Comedy Central and overfed Abdul. I was usually pretty quiet with the Africans who came for a reading. I liked speaking to them just enough to hear their accents and dialects, but then I usually returned to whatever TV show I was watching at the time, so conversation was minimal. Not on African American Day! I asked those ladies intrusive question after intrusive question. I asked why they wanted a reading, how they’d heard of Tola, and where their church was. They asked if Abdul was my child or my brother. Rude. They commented that my English was really good. I thanked them and told them that I had been practicing since I was around a year old. They seemed impressed but only because they didn’t realize I was being sarcastic. I loved those black ladies. Not only did they remind me of Mom and what our apartment used to feel like, but they helped me realize that Tola could be a psychic for all kinds of people. Somehow I had assumed she could only do readings for African people—that she was talking to African spirits who told her the secret futures of other African people. Remember, I was nine years old. But now it occurred to me that if she could do a reading for these black ladies maybe she could tell me what my future would be too!

  One summer night after I had turned ten, I asked her to tell me my future. She laughed like I was cute and said yes. She got her cowry shells, and we sat on the floor in the living room while Dad watched French news on TV. (I swear to God he is always watching French news. He must really worry about what goes on there.) By now, Abdul was walking, but I was holding him hostage in my lap because I couldn’t feel him loving me if he wasn’t in my arms. Tola asked me what I wanted to know. What I really wanted to know was if I was ever going to have a boyfriend. I wanted to know if Thomas who lived in the building had a crush on me the way I had a crush on him. I wanted to know if I was going to get my period soon. But Dad was five feet away on the couch, so those questions seemed inappropriate to ask. Instead, I giggled and rolled my eyes. “I don’t know! The future! I just want to know . . . like the future and stuff.” She picked up her shells and shook them in her hand a few times and then dropped a few in a bowl she’d placed on the floor between us. She picked those shells up again, shook them again, and threw them into the bowl once more.

  “I see a big future for you,” she finally said.

  “Am I gonna be a therapist!?” I excitedly asked.

  Tola didn’t understand what I had asked so she ignored it, and said, “You gonna be famous.”

  Whoa! I didn’t see that coming at all. Sure, I had wanted to be a comedian when I was a little younger, but I’d given up on that dream when I was eight. I’d also never envisioned being famous that way. I had mostly wanted to be a comedian so I could go to nightclubs and travel.

  “As a girl comic?” I asked.

  Again, Tola didn’t understand my question, but she said, “No. I don’t know. But famous, yes!”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but you gonna be famous,” she reassured me.

  This wasn’t adding up. By now, Mom was no longer a paraprofessional schoolteacher and was instead a prominent subway performer. (Hold on, I’ll tell you about this a little later.) She was making lots of fans down there, and Ahmed and I were sure that one day she’d be discovered, and then she’d be famous and on the radio, and we’d be rich, and Dad and his new stupid family, Tola included, would be sorry for making us move away and turning our old apartment into Little Senegal, and then Mom would adopt Abdul. Then we’d be happy. That was the plan. I thought that’s what Tola would see. I wasn’t sure how she’d come up with me being famous.

  “Are you sure?”

  She picked up the shells, shook them, and threw them in the bowl again.

  “Yes. You gonna be famous like Oprah.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mean my mom’s gonna be famous?” Tola looked down at the shells without picking them up again. She looked like she was really seeing something in those shells. Like she was watching something that she didn’t completely understand.

  “Your mom . . . little bit. You. You are famous. Your mom is famous because you are famous.” Well, shit. I wasn’t sure why she saw me being more famous, but it seemed great to me! Great and suspicious.

  “What else?” I asked, eager for more.

  “You get skinny.” Now this was really starting to sound good.

  “Word! Dad! I’m gonna get skinny!” I excitedly shared the news with him. He laughed one of his rare laughs.

  “You gonna have twins when you grow up,” Tola said. “Two b
abies. Girl.”

  Now she was getting out of hand. I let Abdul crawl out of my lap far away from me and my womb. I mean . . . it was possible. My maternal grandmother was a twin, I knew, so maybe they ran in my family. But twins sounded expensive. One baby was fun, but I didn’t know how I would afford two whole babies at one time.

  “Will I be rich?” I asked.

  “Mmhmm,” she answered.

  “Oh, good. That’s good.” Stupid question. I was going to be famous. Of course I’d be rich, too! Duh! If Tola knew I’d be famous and rich, then clearly she was the greatest psychic in the world. And I was about to be skinny, too? No wonder every African in the city traveled to Bed-Stuy to see her. Bitch was spitting out straight facts!

  “So, I’m gonna have a husband?” I asked. As if Dad would ever allow me to have kids out of wedlock.

  “Of course,” Tola answered. “Your husband is a good Muslim man.” My face fell. If looks could kill, Tola would’ve been long gone. As an adult, I’ve known many great dudes who happen to be Muslim. But when I was a child, marrying a Muslim meant marrying my father. That was something I knew by the age of five I wasn’t going to do.

  “You’re gonna be a good Muslim wife to a good African Muslim man,” Tola continued. That’s when I realized that she wasn’t really psychic. She couldn’t have been. I wasn’t capable of being a “good Muslim wife” any more than Mom was able to be when she was married to Dad.

  I told Mom about my reading, and we laughed about it together. Twins? Fame? Me, a “good Muslim wife”? I figured that being able to laugh about it afterward was probably why people went to psychics anyway. Three years later, Tola gave birth to twins. Two girls. That was all the confirmation I needed: Tola might be psychic, but her sight wasn’t straight.