From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun

by Jacqueline Woodson

  Mama exhaled. “So they know.” She leaned back, her arms still folded, and softly hit the back of her head a couple of times against the wall.

  “Everybody knows.”

  “Is that why you’re not leaving the house?” she asked quietly.

  I nodded.

  “You can’t stay inside forever, Mel,” Mama said gently.

  I stretched my hands out, palms up, and studied the tiny lines in them. “They think you’re a freak.”

  Mama sighed. “I don’t care what they think. I want to know what you think.”

  I looked at her. “How come it has to be her?”

  “I love her.”

  “How come you can’t just love a man like everybody else? Even a white man if you had to.”

  “Not everybody else loves men, Melanin Sun. . . .”

  “Like most people,” I said.

  “Because I’m not most people.”

  “Do you hate me, EC?”

  Mama shook her head. “Of course not, M. You’re the closest person in the world to me.”

  “But you don’t like men.”

  “I never said I didn’t like them. I’m just not romantically attracted to them.”

  “But what about my father?”

  “I was young.”

  “And what about the other guys you dated?”

  “You hated all of them.” Mama smiled.

  “But weren’t you attracted to any of them?”

  Mama thought for a moment. “Yeah. Some, I guess. But it’s nothing like what I feel for Kristin.”

  “Is it ’cause she’s white?”

  Mama looked at me. “No and yes, sometimes. It’s complicated.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” I scowled. EC was so . . . so . . . stupid.

  “I like the contrast of us, the differences between us—and I like the way we’ve found our way to each other across color lines. Kristin’s amazing to me. I like her—everything about her, and her whiteness is a part of her,” Mama said. “Does that make sense?”

  “No!”

  “I didn’t think it would. Look, honey, this may sound lame, but I’d like to ask you for a favor. The next time Kristin is here, I want you to try to get to know her. See us together as people. I’m still EC. She’s Kristin. That’s all I’m asking of you.”

  I started to say something, but Mama cut me off.

  “Just try, Melanin Sun. I need you to do that. Can you?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Can you just do it for me, M?”

  I shook my head.

  Mama thought a moment. “Who am I, Mel?”

  “EC,” I mumbled.

  “No. Who am I?”

  “Mama.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I have to,” I said.

  “No you don’t. You don’t have to do anything. Do you love me?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you not hate me for one day? Can you love me like you used to for a day, Mel?”

  “I do love you. I just hate Kristin.”

  “But you don’t know her.”

  “I hate the idea of her, Mama. You know what I mean. Why does she have to be with you? I wish she was dead. I wish she wasn’t ever born.”

  Mama frowned. “Well, I don’t.” She shrugged.

  “You hate me, don’t you?”

  Mama put her hand on her hip. “What makes you think I can’t love both of you?”

  “ ’Cause she’s white and I’m black. ’Cause she’s a lady and I’m not! Don’t be stupid. You know why.”

  Mama sighed. “Just see her as human, Mel. Just walk into one day without being so mad at me.”

  “And how do I have to walk out of it?”

  Mama lifted her hands. “However you walk out of it.”

  “What kind of day?”

  “Breakfast, maybe a trip to the beach or a picnic in Prospect Park. Dinner out somewhere.”

  “And if I walk away hating her as much as I do right now, will you stop seeing her?”

  Mama shook her head. “No, but I won’t bring her here anymore.”

  I thought of Ralph and Sean. I thought of Angie. “Deal,” I said.

  “Deal,” Mama repeated. “Now, since this may be the last time we sit down together as friends, can I have my last meal with you?”

  Reluctantly, I smiled and closed my notebook. “Yeah,” I said. “For old time’s sake.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  When I thought I had finally gotten him and Sean out of my head, Ralph called. I was so surprised to hear his voice on the other end asking about my mother, I stuttered when I told him that she was at the library, studying. Then everything came right back and I felt myself getting mad all over again.

  “For who?” Ralph nosed, as though it hadn’t been almost two weeks since we’d last spoken.

  “For herself. What did you call for?”

  “For what?” Ralph said, ignoring my question.

  “What are you calling for?” I asked again. He had deserted me. Had left me hanging after all of these years of being homeboys. And now he thought he could just call up and say hey.

  There was a pause. After a moment, Ralph said, “I was wondering what you were up to, that’s all.”

  “Nothing.”

  More silence. I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear while I doodled on a pad Mama had mounted on the wall beside the phone.

  “You want to hang later, maybe watch a movie?”

  I looked behind me at the clock above the kitchen window. It was a little after four. “I was watching TV.” The television was still on in the living room with its volume turned all the way down.

  “Oh.”

  “How’s Sean?”

  “His eye is still pretty messed up, but he’s okay, I guess.”

  “That’s good.”

  “What you watching?”

  “Maybe gonna watch the game.”

  “Yeah,” Ralph said, as though I had asked him a question.

  “Sean say anything else about my mother?”

  “Nah. He didn’t really have nothing else to say. His mom said he had to stay away from you, though.”

  “Oh. I don’t care.” But I did care. It hurt. It hurt worse than anything.

  “EC still . . . ?”

  “Yeah . . . Kristin.”

  “Oh,” Ralphael said. “It’s no big deal, you know. Like what goes on with your mother doesn’t have to do with anybody else, right?”

  “Yeah, I know. I mean . . . thanks.” I swallowed and bit my bottom lip. “Everybody knows, right?”

  “Probably. You know how this block is.”

  We didn’t say anything for a moment. Then Ralph laughed. “You know what my moms said?”

  “What?”

  “She said she saw EC day before yesterday and she looked happier than anything. Mama said she should go out and find herself a woman if that’s what it’s all about.”

  I laughed.

  “But not everybody’s saying stuff like that.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Me either.”

  “What else you hear?”

  “Nothing . . .” Ralph was hesitant.

  “You lie.”

  “Mrs. Shirley said . . .”

  “What, Ralph?”

  “She said someone should call the authorities on EC and take you out of that house ’cause . . . she’s . . . she said your mother’s . . . unfit.”

  “Unfit for what?” I asked. My voice got high suddenly. What the hell was she talking about?

  “To be your mother.”

  “Oh, she’s full of it. Anyway, I wouldn’t let anybody take me anyplace. She’s still my mom. Mrs. Shirley should take her fat behind out of that window and do something with her own life.”

  “Mrs. Shirley’s stupid,” I heard Ralph say, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I was thinking about Mama and tomorrow when we were supposed to spend the day with Kristin. What if they came for me before then? Wh
at if the authorities came tonight and slipped me away from here and made new rules?

  “Mel,” Ralph was saying, “I don’t care what people say. If anything, they should come take Mrs. Shirley away for spending the whole day in the window instead of looking after her own kids.”

  “They wouldn’t, though,” I said.

  Ralph sniffed. “I got a cold from all that rain, and Mama’s not letting me hear the end of it.” He went into a coughing spasm. When he spoke again, his voice was broken up, like there was something stuck in the back of his throat. “If you want to hang sometimes, give me a call. We only got a little time before school starts, anyway. Might as well use it up.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We might as well.”

  SEAN

  It ends like this between us, without apology—like a fatal sickness in the night, like fire sweeping through, like the last blank page at the end of a book, as if the story had never been.

  Maybe when we get older, people will forget this all and ask me, “Whatever happened to your homeboy Sean?” and I’ll have to say I don’t know because I don’t, and I probably never will. So it ends like this.

  Chapter Eighteen

  No one came in the night to take me away. Mama woke me early the next morning—so early the sky was just beginning to break with the first rays of daylight. I thought maybe she was losing her mind to be shaking me awake at the crack of dawn.

  The apartment was cool and bathed in a pretty purplish light. Someone was in the kitchen banging pots around. On my way to the bathroom, I peeked in and saw Kristin there, dressed in a pair of Mama’s shorts and a T-shirt, turning down the flame underneath the teakettle.

  Last night, Mama had come in alone. But later on, I thought I dreamed that the bell rang and Mama called I’ll throw the keys down. I hate that fake reality that sometimes exists between sleep and wake. It obscures things. Once, right after Mama told me about her and Kristin, I had a dream that I was living in a house in Connecticut with a man Mama had just married. I woke up waiting for this guy to wake me up to take me shopping and I must have sat on the edge of my bed for a good half hour waiting for him to walk into my room.

  “Morning, Melanin Sun,” Kristin said, too brightly for this hour. Too brightly for anything. But today was the day and after it was all over I wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore, so I mumbled something that might have passed for good morning.

  “So you’re not a morning person, huh?” Kristin lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She was still smiling. There was something about her—a mellow something. It put me off a bit.

  As I stepped out of the shower, I could hear Mama singing softly in the kitchen O happy day . . . When Jesus washed. When He washed. He washed my sins away.

  “I made toast and eggs scrambled hard like EC said you like them,” Kristin said, putting a plate down in front of me. “And grits.” She smiled. I guess Mama had been giving her some soul food lessons. I looked over at Mama sitting across from me, wondering what she was getting from Kristin in return. Kristin brought two more plates to the table and sat in the seat between us.

  The grits were lumpy but I ate them anyway, stirring my eggs into them and scooping it all up with my toast.

  Kristin picked at her food, doing that eating-everything-separately thing again. She spread a tiny bit of jelly on her toast and took a small bite.

  “So,” she said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Anybody want to hear a joke?”

  I chewed silently, without looking up.

  Mama must have nodded, because she continued. “A piece of string walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘We don’t serve string . . . ’ ”

  “Frayed knot,” I said.

  “Guess you heard it already, huh?”

  I looked at Kristin. She looked a little tired and for a moment, I was sorry I had cut in on her joke. “About a hundred years ago.”

  “Funny.” Kristin smiled. “You don’t look that old.”

  Mama laughed. Kristin had caught me off guard, so I smiled and stuffed a chunk of toast in my mouth. This part is easy, I thought. We three here in the house with no one around wasn’t hard at all.

  After breakfast, I played a video game while Mama and Kristin went about fixing a picnic lunch. Kristin had suggested we go to Prospect Park, but Mama said she felt more like lying near some water, so we decided on Jones Beach. They were talking easily now. Kristin had a strange laugh, like a cough almost, that rumbled from the back of her throat.

  “I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” Kristin said, heading toward Mama’s room.

  “Bottom drawer, right side,” Mama yelled from the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, heading back into the kitchen, Kristin stopped at the foot of my bed and kicked it.

  “You hate me?” she asked, smiling.

  I shrugged, keeping my eyes on the game. “I don’t know you.”

  She kicked the bed a few more times until I looked at her like she was losing her mind. Maybe she was crazy.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked. She had her hands in the pockets of her shorts, and the way she stood—kind of like a gangly white boy—made me want to smile. I had never met a lady, besides Mama, who was so . . . so relaxed. I felt the side of my mouth turning up. She stood the way I was always trying to stand, sort of cool and calm and collected. I could almost picture her saying, “No problem.”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you anything.”

  I could see the outline of Mama’s blue bathing suit underneath Kristin’s T-shirt. She had small breasts. Her legs were long and kind of tanned. Nice legs, I guess. If you like that. I wondered if Mama had touched them and how.

  “How long you been,” I stuttered, “you know?”

  “Gay?” She smiled and the dimple on her cheek appeared. “G-a-y. You can say it. It’s not a four-letter word.”

  I looked away from her, embarrassed. The way she talked made me think of somebody younger, someone familiar . . .

  “Gay,” I said.

  “Forever,” she said, pulling her pale hair up off her shoulders into a ponytail that she twisted into a bun. When she moved her hand, it fell again, sweeping across her shoulder.

  “What’s forever?” I asked, growing annoyed.

  Kristin shrugged and sat down on the edge of my bed. “As long as I can remember.”

  “You never had a boyfriend?”

  She smiled again, but this time got a faraway look. “A couple. But they were, you know . . .” She looked at me a moment and smirked. “No, I guess you don’t know.”

  I shook my head.

  “They weren’t my type.”

  “And Mama’s your type?”

  Kristin nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Well, she’s smart and kind and beautiful and driven . . .” She eyed me. “You can’t see it, huh?”

  “How come you two can’t just be friends?” I asked, going back to my game.

  “Because we like each other more than that.”

  “More than what?”

  “More than friends,” Kristin said, as though I should know that already.

  “What’s the big difference?”

  Kristin and I looked at each other. She scooted back on the bed until she was sitting right next to me, our backs against the wall. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around her legs. Mama! That’s who she reminded me of. The old EC. The one who was fun and playful and laughed a lot. The one who moved like she had been born walking. Kristin moved like that. And talked and laughed a bit like that.

  “Okay,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

  I thought for a moment and told her it was Ralphael.

  “Do you like going to the movies with him?”

  I nodded.

  “And spending time with him?”

  I nodded again, not knowing what she was getting at.

  “Okay. Now, would you like to kiss Ralphael?”

  “No!”

&n
bsp; She threw her hands up. “That’s the difference.”

  “But you’re not supposed to want to do that.”

  “Who says?” Kristin asked.

  “It’s gross.”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “I’m not a big fan of kissing guys either.”

  I blinked. Put my game on pause. “Kissing guys really grosses you out?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say it doesn’t . . . appeal to me,” she said.

  I thought about it for a moment. “It grosses EC out, too?”

  Kristin shrugged. “I can’t speak for her.”

  Mama came in with the picnic basket slung on her arm.

  “Sandwiches, chips, potato salad, cookies. Anything I forgot?”

  “It really grosses you out, Ma? Why?” I asked.

  Mama looked puzzled. Kristin was trying not to smile.

  “Mel has a question for you, EC.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  At Jones Beach, Kristin led us to the area that was mostly gay. It was strange seeing so many of them all coupled up in one place, but it made it feel less weird to be there with Ma and Kristin. If Sean and Ralph had been with me, they probably would have lost it. We passed a group of people that Kristin knew and she stopped and introduced us. I eyed a black man sitting between his white boyfriend’s legs. When he looked over at me and smiled, I turned back to Kristin’s friends, all white except for one girl who looked a little bit older than me. Later, Kristin told me the girl was the adopted daughter of one of the couples. There were a bunch of little kids running around back and forth between Kristin’s friends and the water. I didn’t know so many gay people had kids. A part of me wanted to go back and talk to the girl, ask her if it was as weird for her as it was for me. But another part of me had no desire to be with other gay people. Next thing, I’d have a whole world of them hanging out at my house or something.We moved down the beach and settled on our blanket about two hundred feet away from Kristin’s friends.

  “We could’ve sat with them,” EC said, peeling off her T-shirt and shorts. The roll of fat that she had been worried about was long gone. She pulled a pair of sunglasses from her bag, slid them on, and lay back on the blanket.

  Kristin gazed out at the water. “Nah,” she said. “I wanted quality time.”