Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  Cole was his proof that he had indeed survived the integrationist shuffle, that he had remained human despite what seemed a conspiracy to turn him into stone. She was his proof of the pudding, his milk-chocolate pudding, the small dusky body, the burst of mischievous curls (nappier than his own), the full pouting lips (fuller than his own). Her existence told him he hadn’t wandered quite so far and that his body still held the power to leave its mark.

  He usually treated me with a cheerful disinterest—never hostility or ill will, but with a kind of impatient amusement, as if he were perpetually tapping his foot, waiting for me to finish my sentence so he could get back to more important subjects.

  And strange as it may sound, I had never really been alone with my father. Not that I could remember, anyway. So when I got the chance that fall morning, I felt I was going on a blind date and went toward it jittery, with a mixture of hope and fear.

  It wouldn’t have happened at all if Cole hadn’t gotten sick. It might have been just another outing, me in the backseat, making cat’s cradles with my string; Cole in the front, trying to listen to the radio and my father’s lecture all at once. But that morning Cole claimed to have the flu, and it was too late to stop my father. He was already on his way over.

  My mother stood up in our room, holding the back of her hand to Cole’s forehead.

  Cole sniffled and looked at me through red, watery eyes. “You go, Birdie.” She was being very melodramatic about it, and my mother was buying it hook, line, and sinker. She had already gone out to buy Cole the latest issue of Jet and a box of cherry-flavored Sucrets, which Cole refused to share with me.

  My mother nodded. “Yeah, baby. You go alone with your papa and have a good time.”

  I stared at my feet, then turned to go down to his car.

  When I approached him, he looked up from his book quizzically, and then his eyes roamed behind me for Cole, the real reason he was here.

  “Cole’s not coming. She’s sick,” I told him. I stood beside his open window, hands shoved in my pockets, waiting to see if he’d call the whole thing off.

  He squinted at the house suspiciously. He was always accusing my mother of trying to keep him from us—“us” meaning Cole.

  “Sick with what?”

  “A cold. Mum says she’s got a fever.”

  “Hmmph.”

  Then he looked at me and smiled, a little shyly, I thought.

  “Well, then it’ll just be the two of us, Patrice. Right?” Sometimes, when he was being particularly affectionate, he would call me by my old name. This was a rarity, however. It meant he was making an extra-special effort to connect with me.

  He was quiet as he drove us to the Public Gardens. It was a beautiful day outside, one of those late-fall days in New England when the ground is carpeted with colors, the sky a bright blank blue. My father was listening to the radio, the way he always did, head cocked to the side in thought, mouth turned down in concentration. It was the public radio station, and they were talking about the imprisonment of some radicals in California. I listened vaguely and chewed on my hair.

  “Bird, you see much of that Redbone character around the house?”

  I thought about it. I hadn’t seen Redbone. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t been there. My mother’s friends came over some Sundays for meetings in the basement. Usually, my mother would send us up to our room before they went down into the cavernous, mysterious basement.

  “Nope. I haven’t seen him. He’s weird. I don’t like him.”

  We were at a red light now, and my father was looking at me, seeming to ponder my features with a scientific interest. He ruffled my hair. “Well, you tell me if he comes around. I don’t think your mother knows what she’s gotten herself into. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded, not really sure what he meant, but excited that we had an agreement. I would be his spy.

  He switched the station then, and we listened to music the rest of the way over, singing along to the Stylistics, our voices rising and falling together, cracking at the high notes.

  We wandered around the Public Gardens for a few hours, and though we didn’t talk much, I felt closer to my father than I ever had before. We held hands and went on the swan rides together. There was a man selling T-shirts, and my father bought me one that said “Wet Paint” across the front in raised multicolored letters that dribbled down like real paint. He took a picture of me in my new T-shirt, worn over my long-sleeved one so that the long sleeves billowed out like a pirate’s.

  He bought a newspaper then and lay on the grass while I did cartwheels in circles around him. There were other families and couples scattered around, enjoying the unusually mild temperature and the fallen leaves. I think it was when he gave me a few dollars to buy us hot dogs that I noticed the couple. They were walking a dog—a small gray terrier—and they were older, well-dressed. The woman’s hair was silvery blond. Her companion was a small and dour man wearing a trench coat and holding a cane. They watched me, frowning, as I went up to the hot-dog cart and made my purchase. The man had a fierce scowl, but the woman smiled slightly at me, so I smiled back. I thought maybe my fly was unzipped, but when I looked down, all was in place.

  They continued to watch me as I brought the hot dog to my father, then ran back to the cart to get us napkins, which I had forgotten.

  My father didn’t seem to notice, so I put them out of my mind. After we finished our hot dogs, I lay with my head on his stomach, so that our bodies made a T. I read the funnies there, occasionally reading jokes aloud to him, which he ignored, but which I giggled at anyway.

  When I was done with the funnies, I watched the sky—the shapes of animals made out of clouds. And when I tilted my head slightly to the side, I saw again that strange couple with their gray terrier, pointing at me. I didn’t move, just watched it happen with a lazy interest. They were talking to two men in uniform, the police on their beat, and then the four of them were trudging across the grass in our direction.

  I didn’t move until they were nearly upon us. Then I sat up and nudged my father, who had begun to doze off.

  He opened his eyes just as their shadow fell over him.

  He sat up abruptly, and the two of us scrambled to our feet. My father did what he did when he was nervous: adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat.

  One of the policemen was older, with a beer belly, and creases in his face that made him look angry, even if he wasn’t. The other one was a younger guy, with dark hair and a mustache. He had laughing eyes but was trying to look serious.

  The couple stood off to the distance slightly, petting their dog and whispering.

  “All right, brotherman,” the younger one said to my father with a smirk. “Who’s the little girl?”

  My father looked down at me and laughed slightly. “She’s my daughter. Is there a problem?” His voice shook as he said it, and I could feel his fear from where I stood.

  The older cop looked at me in my Wet Paint shirt over my long-sleeved one. I understood what was going on, even if I couldn’t have explained it at the time, and my skin was tingling all over like the prickle of salt water when you stay in the ocean too long. I stared at the couple and had an urge to go over and kick dirt at them.

  The cops didn’t believe my father. Not even when he showed them a photograph of me and my sister that he kept in his wallet. Not even when he had shown them his identification card, which read, “Deck Lee, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Boston University.” What made it worse was that people around us had begun to notice and had moved closer to see what was happening. They whispered among themselves, eyeing me with concern, and that made me feel ashamed.

  I stood beside my father, and the policeman—the younger one with the mustache—leaned down and touched my hair in a way that made me flinch. He smiled, and said, “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Birdie.”

  “Birdie? That’s a funny name. Now, why don’t you tell me your real name?”

  �
�Birdie Lee.” I said it louder this time.

  “All right, Birdie Lee. How do you know this man?”

  He looked at my father, who was standing with the other cop. My father was staring at me with a tense smile.

  “He’s my father.”

  The cop laughed a little. Then he touched my shoulder and pulled me away from my father and the other cop, so we were leaning into each other. Secretive. He said in a whisper, “You can tell us, kiddie. He can’t hurt you here. You’re safe now. Did the man touch you funny?”

  I felt sick and a little dizzy. I wanted to spit in the cop’s face. But my voice came out quiet, wimpier than I wanted it to. “No, he didn’t. He’s my father” was all I could manage. I wondered what my sister would do. I figured she wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place, and that fact somehow depressed me.

  The cop seemed disappointed by my answer and stood up, shrugging with exasperation at his partner.

  After grilling my father for a few more minutes, they left us alone. But the old couple didn’t leave. They watched us as we gathered up our things, our strewn-about newspapers. As we walked the distance across the grass to our car, I turned to see them still watching us. I raised my middle finger and blew a kiss to the couple on it, the way I had seen the Irish kids do on television. I was about to shout something, too, when my father grabbed my arm roughly, pulling me to his side and quickening his pace. “Cut that shit out” was all he said.

  When we were in the car, my father buckled me into my seat belt. From his expression I could see that he didn’t feel like talking. He played music on the way back. I knew all the words but decided not to sing along. He seemed deep in thought, and before he let me out in front of the house, he smiled at me, crookedly, sadly. “And they wonder why we want to get out of this place. I mean, shit, it’s everywhere I go. Everywhere.” He stared at me for a moment, our eyes locked. Then he added, “Study them, Birdie. And take notes. Always take notes.”

  Usually he kissed me on the top of my head before he said good-bye, but this time he just touched my forehead with the back of his hand, as if he were checking for a fever. His own hand was cold, and he pulled it away quickly, as if the touch had burned him.

  the body of luce rivera

  I learned the art of changing at Nkrumah, a skill that would later become second nature to me. Maybe I was always good at it. Maybe it was a skill I had inherited from my mother, or my father, or my aunt Dot, or my Nana, the way some people inherit a talent for music or art or mathematics. Even before Nkrumah, Cole and I had gotten a thrill out of changing—spending our days dressed in old costumes, pretending to be queens of our make-believe nation. But only at Nkrumah did it become more than a game. There I learned how to do it for real—how to become someone else, how to erase the person I was before.

  Cole had already done it. Changed. It had started with the Jergen’s lotion, then with her hair, and before I knew it she was one of the more popular girls at the school. She still carried a book wherever she went, but now she was wearing lipstick, talking about boys as she tried to pull me along behind her. I knew I had to make more of an effort to blend in or I would lose her for good.

  I started wearing my hair in a tight braid to mask its texture. I had my ears pierced and convinced my mother to buy me a pair of gold hoops like the other girls at school wore. My father was usually scornful of frivolous spending, but he must have sensed some serious desperation when I pleaded with him to buy me new clothes. On one weekend shopping spree at Tello’s, with my sister shouting orders to me, I bought a pair of Sergio Valente jeans, a pink vest, a jean jacket with sparkles on the collar, and spanking-white Nike sneakers.

  I stood many nights in front of the bathroom mirror, practicing how to say “nigger” the way the kids in school did it, dropping the “er” so that it became not a slur, but a term of endearment: nigga.

  It took a while, but sometime late that fall at Nkrumah, my work paid off. A smell of burning wafted in the cool autumn air, and mounds of dead leaves were neatly piled on street corners like enormous fallen birds’ nests. I had been sitting on the pavement during recess, tugging at my shoelace, when I felt myself being watched. I looked up to see Maria, the afternoon sunlight hitting her from behind, turning her into a gold-spangled silhouette. Her hair was now in braids, with multicolored ribbons woven throughout, and they fluttered in the breeze. Like most of the kids in the school, she wore all ironed and matching clothes. Today she wore black Jordache jeans and a bright-yellow sweater that brought out her reddish undertones. I had been chewing the ends of my hair, and now it hung damp around my face.

  Finally Maria spoke. “So, you black?”

  I nodded, slowly, as if unsure of it myself.

  She sat down beside me and smiled almost wistfully. “I got a brother just like you. We’re Cape Verdean.”

  I didn’t know if that was black or white, or something else altogether.

  I also wasn’t sure whether she was playing another prank on me, so I decided to stay silent.

  She pointed across the playground. “See that boy over there in the red sweater? Ali Parkman. He wants to go with you. At least that’s what Cherise says. Anyway, I’m goin’ out with his best friend, Ronald, so if you go out with him, you can be in the club.”

  “What club?”

  “The Brown Sugars,” she said matter-of-factly. “For girls that already got boyfriends. Cherise is in it. Maleka used to be in it, before Michael started going out with Cathy instead. The twins, Carol and Diana, are in it too.”

  I stared at the boy—Ali. He was the same one who had thrown a spitball at me my first day of school. What you doin’ in this school? You white? Those were the words he had spoken. He was skinny and brown-skinned and all I knew of him was that he loved to draw spaceships and that his father was my father’s friend Ronnie, the one from Dot’s party.

  Maria blurted, “So, you want to go with him, or not? I need an answer by this afternoon. Otherwise, he’s gonna ask Marcia instead.”

  “I guess so” was my weak reply.

  So it was official. Ali Parkman and I were going steady, “talking,” as the kids in the school called it. It didn’t mean much—we both were shy around each other. He would smile and wave at me in the hallway and sometimes pull my braid, but that was as close as touching got.

  And with my new boyfriend came privileges. Soon Maria, Cherise, Cathy, and I were a clique. A new boyfriend had catapulted me into the world of the freshest girls in the school. Now that I had been knighted black by Maria, and pretty by Ali, the rest of the school saw me in a new light. But I never lost the anxiety, a gnawing in my bowels, a fear that at any moment I would be told it was all a big joke.

  Maria and I spent our free time in the girls’ room, combing each other’s hair, talking about boys we liked and girls we didn’t. Cole was glad, I could tell, to see I had some friends besides her. We still spent time together on the weekends. My mother wouldn’t let me go out without her, so I would trail along after her to the roller-skating rink, where we would whiz around in circles to disco beats, or hunch over video games at a downtown arcade. In the Brown Sugars clique, we each had nicknames. Maria was “Roxy.” Cathy was “Baby Curl.” I was “Le Chic.”

  My mother, who was in a neighborhood women’s consciousness-raising group, noticed the changes in Cole and me. She came into our attic after dinner one night and found us smearing our faces with her makeup in front of the big mirror. She rarely wore it anymore, but kept it in the back of a dresser drawer, rotting, some evidence of her old self. Cole had rubbed kohl liner on her eyes so that she looked Asian. I had taken the same pencil to make a beauty mark over my lip. My mother watched us for a moment at the door, her arms crossed and an expression of fierce disgust on her face. She came and stood over us, her looming form casting a gigantic shadow.

  “You girls are turning into little tarts before my eyes. This is the end, you realize.”

  “The end of what, Mum?” I said, puttin
g on some bright magenta lipstick so that it went outside the edges of my lips.

  “The end of freedom,” she said, grabbing the lipstick out of my hand and putting it in her shirt pocket.

  Whenever Jane or Linda came over, she would talk in a loud, disapproving voice about us. “Look at my daughters,” she’d tell them, a cigarette dangling from her lips, a beer tucked between her thighs. “All they think about is how they look. It’s revolting.”

  Cole and I ignored her. There was no way I was going back to the never-never land of my old self—scraggly hair, dirty knees, and a tomboy’s swaggering gait. But I did feel different—more conscious of my body as a toy, and of the ways I could use it to disappear into the world around me.

  One Friday, when the trees were just skeletons and Boston hung frozen in a perpetual gray light, I went to Mattapan to spend the night at Maria’s house. We left school together that afternoon, catching the 52 bus at the corner. I felt a thrill of urban adventure as I dropped my change into the slot and followed Maria to the back of the bus. Without my mother’s and Cole’s eyes on me, I felt that anything could happen. I stared at the faces of the bus riders, all various shades of brown, and tried to mimic their bored, exhausted expressions. Beside me, Maria sang softly to herself, off-key, Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” and I listened, staring out the window as we rolled past Franklin Park.

  A girl my age had disappeared there a month earlier—and three weeks later her body had been found violated and dead, crumpled in the shadows of the pudding stone near where she had been lost in the first place, as if in some macabre “return to sender” trick. Her name was Luce Rivera, and her picture had been all over the news that month—a photograph of her smiling in her Catholic-school uniform, looking unsuspecting and utterly pure, the way photographs of the recently murdered often do. It was my mother who first pointed out that she looked a little like me. Then Cole noticed it, then the kids at school, who teased me, saying I was the ghost of Luce Rivera come back to seek revenge. The night they found Luce Rivera’s body, my mother came into Cole’s and my room in the attic. I was curled over my homework, while Cole lay stretched out on the floor, reading a magazine. My mother wiped her tears and announced to us that the police had recovered “Luce’s torn and violated body” and that the search had finally ended. She stood silently by the half-moon window, looking out onto the street for a moment, then turned around rather violently. She came to me and squeezed me to her, so that I couldn’t breathe. Then, as quickly as she had grabbed me, she pushed me away, held me at a distance, and stroked the hair out of my face. She hissed, spraying me with spittle, “Don’t ever go into Franklin Park alone. You hear me, Bird? You be careful in Roxbury. Don’t talk to anyone except your school friends. You understand? There are perverts, crazies, dirty old men, and they want little girls like you.”