Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  One of the peculiarities about my mother was that after a passionate diatribe, she could return to normal within seconds, as if nothing had been said or done. As soon as she finished her outburst, she went to our mirror and fussed with our pre-teen beauty products. She picked up Cole’s black plastic pick and turned it over thoughtfully in her hands. She ran it through her thin hair, staring at herself in the mirror as she did so, with a sad smile. It struck me as odd that my mother hadn’t warned Cole not to go to the park, just me. “There are perverts, crazies, dirty old men, and they want little girls like you.”

  Girls like you.

  When she was gone, Cole looked up from her Jet magazine and watched me from behind her braids, which hung like bars across her face, dividing her features into sections.

  MARIA AND I arrived in Mattapan. Her house sat on a block of twenty identical tract houses with endlessly shuttered windows and garbage-spackled lawns. There were teenage boys sitting on the stoop of the house next to hers, and they waved to her. She blushed, and yelled, “Hey, Darnell!” Then she whispered in my direction, “He’s so cute. He said when I grow up he wants to go out. My brother used to hang with him.”

  As Maria opened the door to her house, a gust of heated air enveloped us. We stepped inside, and it took me a moment to adjust to the darkness. A piquant smell of sweet-and-sour sauce clung to the air.

  Enraged and hysterical voices floated from behind a closed door at the end of the hall. Someone screamed, “You bitch! You’ll never steal him from me!”

  But as I listened closer, I could hear it was just the television. A soap opera.

  Maria turned to me, shy suddenly. “You can just throw your stuff on the floor.”

  I took a minute to simply soak up the most exquisite home I had ever laid eyes on. The pink-and-purple-flower theme was omnipresent. Faux yucca trees sprung from black vases in the corners, and a fruit bowl with wooden apples and pears sat on the coffee table. The back wall was decorated with a velvet painting of two naked and afroed sillouettes—one curvacious and female, the other muscular and male—intertwined in a lovemaking ritual with a backdrop of a bright magenta-and-pink horizon. I wanted to go and touch the painting, trace the bodies with my finger, but held back. The rest of the room’s walls, I could see, were mirrored, and a crystalline chandelier hung over the shimmering mahogany dining room set.

  I breathed, “Your house is so beautiful.”

  Maria scoffed. “You think so? It’s all right.”

  But I could tell she was proud. She went over to the wide-screen television set. “My daddy got this for us last Christmas. It’s like a movie screen, almost.” She whispered, “He works in a TV warehouse and he took it when no one was looking.”

  I thought about my mother. She sometimes took things when nobody was looking. She would slip candy and barrettes into her pocket when we went to Kmart. But she had never taken anything this big. “Where’s your father?”

  “Oh, he lives in New York, but he comes up to see us every year. And that’s my brother, James. He’s in the Army,” she told me, pointing to a picture of a grinning, uniformed boy with hazel eyes and skin the color of my own. “He’s much older than me.”

  “Where’s your mother now?”

  “She’s at work. She’s a nurse at the hospital. She gets home real late tonight. Like past midnight.”

  We spent the afternoon slumped in front of her television set with the stereo booming behind us, the heat and lights on full blast. We gorged ourselves and watched her favorite sitcoms—“Chico and the Man” and “What’s Happening”—in a green glowing silence.

  By six o’clock we were restless and hungry and wandered into the kitchen. Maria’s mother had left spare ribs and potato salad in Tupperware in the refrigerator. Maria threw the ribs in the oven and turned it on high. My mother never cooked red meat. I felt I was being let into a secret world I had been denied for so long, and I tried to hide the giddy feeling bubbling away in my stomach as Maria revealed one small luxury after another.

  Maria had more clothes than I could even imagine. She played the clock radio beside her bed and sang along—knowing all of the words—as she tossed clothes on the bed.

  “This one—this one looks real cute on you,” she said, holding up a purple angora sweater with sparkles in the shape of a unicorn on the front. “And we’re gonna have to do something about your hair. Do you want me to trim it and curl it?”

  The next thing I knew, I was seated on the squishy toilet cushion and Maria was snipping away at my hair. “Just let me even out these split ends,” she had said, but by the time it was over, my hair was a full inch and a half shorter.

  She saw the look on my face. “It looks fine! Don’t worry. I’m not done. It still needs to be curled.”

  She heated up the curling iron and sprayed my newly shorn hair with Queen Helene hairspray till it was wet. Each time she put the curling iron to a lock of my hairspray-soaked head, it let out a hiss and steam emerged. But I assumed she knew what she was doing, and stayed quiet.

  When she was finished, my straight hair was curly. I stared at myself in the fogged mirror, amid the rows of beauty potions, and breathed in the sweet-and-sour spare-rib air of the apartment. The curls Maria had given me softened out my pointed features. As I admired my new look, I imagined myself to be just a girl who lived and had always lived in this splendid pink-and-purple palace where all the furniture matched, a girl whose mother worked late nights as a nurse and whose big brother was in the Army. I imagined my name was not Birdie or Jesse or even Patrice, but Yolanda, and that Maria was one of my many cousins. I imagined myself Cape Verdean.

  Maria’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Birdie, how do I look?”

  I turned to see her standing in the door of the bathroom. She was transformed as well. She wore her mother’s lipstick—Revlon’s Toast of New York—and matching eye shadow. She had on skintight Jordache jeans over a burgundy leotard that clung to her body.

  She leaned in close to me. I could smell the bubble gum on her breath as she fluffed my hair one more time, with an approving wink at her creation.

  We spent the rest of the evening eating—soda, popcorn, hot wings—from Maria’s endlessly stocked kitchen, watching TV, and listening to music. We gossiped about the other kids from school, and I felt she was accepting me into that bond of “best friend.” Cathy was falling out of her favor, and I knew I needed to act right then if I wanted to replace her. At one point she brought me into her mother’s room, which had a water bed, and the two of us lay on the sloshing mattress, looking up at ourselves in the smoked-mirror ceiling, singing along to the radio. The tint of the ceiling mirror darkened me, and with my newfound curls, I found that if I pouted my lips and squinted to blur my vision in just the right way, my face transformed into something resembling Cole’s. Maria and I lay there for more than an hour, talking about our mutual love for Diana Ross, how we both hoped to marry Billy Dee Williams, and what we wanted to be when we grew up. She wanted to be an airline stewardess; I wanted to be a veterinarian. I asked her endless questions about her family—what her mother looked like, whom she dated, when her parents broke up, how her parents had met. I savored each detail and made a secret promise to myself that I would live in a house like this when I grew up and be just like Maria’s mother, who I imagined looked like Marilyn McCoo. We lost track of time, lying side by side on the water bed, speaking to our mirror images that hovered above us like guardian angels.

  Before going to bed, we took a bubble bath together using a concoction made from all of her mother’s bath products that lined the edge of the tub. I studied Maria’s nude body while we undressed in the reeking, steaming bathroom. She had small perfectly shaped nipples like Hershey’s Kisses. I hugged myself and shivered, waiting to step in, as she swished the water with her hand to test the temperature.

  We sat together in the tub for a long time, until our fingertips were ridged and prunelike and the water around us had turned lukewarm. It ha
d begun to rain outside, softly, and Maria, on her knees behind me, washed my hair, seemingly fascinated by its limp consistency. I had wanted to leave the curls in, but she promised she’d redo them in the morning. She lathered my scalp, telling me what she would do if she had straight hair. I told her I wanted her hair, which she had carefully covered in a shower cap so as not to get it wet.

  She asked me if I liked Ali. I crinkled my nose. “He’s nice and all, but he’s so young. You know, he’s still just a child,” I said, repeating something I had heard Cole say once about a boy.

  We got out of the bath after it became too cold, and dried ourselves in fluffy pink towels. Maria chattered about Darnell, the older boy next door, and I looked out of the corner of my eye at the soft brown slope of her body. I felt ashamed for looking, and hid my face in the wet tangle of my hair.

  I lay awake late into the night, listening to the dramatic beeps and yells on the streets outside, pretending that my mother worked the late shift and my daddy stole TVs.

  SINCE THE INCIDENT at the Public Gardens, my father hadn’t had much to say to me. He went back to ignoring me the way he always had. He didn’t come around often anymore. When he did, he would plague Cole with his theories. Our visits to his house had become like drill camp for Cole, as my father seemed more and more anxious that she understand something before it was too late.

  During our visits to his place, I was fairly content to be left in front of a television sitcom or reading a comic book in the guest room, my bare feet moving listlessly along his wall. But often I put down my book or turned off the sound on the television and listened in on them, and his message, spoken to some other body, reached me in this oblique way. Some of his ideas I was familiar with, had heard in school, about the Diaspora and the genocidal tendencies of the white man.

  Others were new to me—like his theory about America’s “love affair with castrated, blind, and crippled black boys,” or his notion of how white people find their power in invisibility, while the rest of us remain bodies for them to study and watch.

  “Try pointing out to a white boy that he’s white, and he’ll wince, because you’ve looked at him, and they don’t like to be looked at,” my father told Cole one afternoon.

  Sometimes, at the Nkrumah School, I found myself repeating some of my father’s ideas in class to an amused and surprised Professor Abdul, who blinked at me and said, “Very astute, Birdie.”

  Cole was interested in his theories only some of the time. She was beginning to notice boys and often seemed restless while he was talking to her. But my father didn’t seem to care that she often looked away with an expression of deep ennui when he spoke. He spoke through her, above her, around her, but still to her, as she continued to be the exclusive object of his lessons, leaving me to absorb his platitudes only through osmosis.

  One day she sat beside him in the front seat of his car. She no longer sat with me in the back, or played with Sasha dolls, for that matter. She was getting too old. James Brown pleaded from the radio, Pleeeeeze, and I sat on the hump in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward, trying to join their conversation. My father pointed to an interracial couple standing on the corner. The woman was dumpy, heavy-set, with stringy brown hair and a baby strapped to her body. The man was lanky and ashy, with an afro at half-mast.

  My father laughed a little and said, nudging Cole, gesturing toward the couple: “What’s wrong with that picture?”

  My sister shrugged, blowing on her nails, which were still wet with polish. She didn’t seem to remember the right answer—or perhaps didn’t care—but I did and, throwing my hand in the air like Arnold Horshack, piped in from the backseat, “Diluting the race!”

  My father snorted in place of a laugh, glancing at me in the rearview mirror as he said under his breath, “I guess you could put it that way.”

  Another time, when we were spending the night at his place in Roxbury, they watched television together on the couch. I jumped up and down on a mattress in the next room, with the door open so I could see them in the flickering blue light. Cole’s head rested against his shoulder as they stared somberly at the sitcom. It was “What’s Happening” and Rerun was doing a jig across the diner while Raj, playing the straight man, shook his head and groaned. The invisible audience hooted wildly.

  My father watched it as if studying some distasteful foreign culture. Cole imitated his expression, although I knew she laughed along to the show when he wasn’t around.

  He leaned toward her and said with a tight, sarcastic smirk, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  From the bedroom, I yelled out in midair above the mattress, “Jigaboo time!” repeating something Mrs. Potter had muttered once while watching television in the front office.

  My father didn’t seem to hear me, and I heard Cole say, “White people love to see us making fools of ourselves. It makes them feel safe.”

  He patted her shoulder.

  It wasn’t unusual to find them slouched together late into the night, seated in the living room on his pullout couch while he read chapters aloud to her from Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and poor Cole squirmed and rubbed her eyes, whimpering about needing to sleep. Other nights I stumbled out of bed to use the bathroom and found them hunched under the dim greasy light of his kitchen, listening to the BBC international news on his shortwave radio (because American journalism was all propaganda), Cole resting her chin in her hands, staring longingly out into the night while my father shook his head and scribbled notes onto a napkin, thoroughly engrossed in what the clipped British accent was saying.

  Cole was slipping out of my reach, slowly, inevitably, like water from cupped hands. Not because of our father’s preachings, but more because she found herself in an adolescent torpor with no one, including me, to talk to about it. I think each of us was lonely on those visits. As my father tried to get Cole to learn his language, she chose to stay inside herself, thinking secret, languid thoughts, and I tried to get both of their attention by any means necessary.

  Sometimes I repeated things I had heard in school that I thought would impress them.

  “Salaam Aleikum,” I greeted my father one afternoon as I clambered into his car.

  Another time I kissed him good-bye on the cheek, saying, “Stay black, stay strong, brotherman,” a line from one of Professor Abdul’s poems. My father flashed me a fierce look of bewilderment, then burst into laughter as he ruffled my hair, as if he had just discovered I could talk when he pulled the string on the back of my neck.

  Other times I tried to get their attention through more slapstick routines—by doing a chicken dance across the living room floor while they tried to watch the news, or balancing a spoon on the tip of my nose, or eating my cereal on my hands and knees on the floor in the pantry, lapping it up as if I were a dog, or making a hideous face and doing cartwheels at the same time. I still had the power to crack Cole’s sullen repose, and she would laugh, happy, I suppose, for my comic relief. But my humor was too slapstick for my father, and he would tell me to stop acting the fool.

  My mother called my father’s campaign “Papaspeak, the art of bombastic and iconoclastic racial tomfoolery.” She placed the blame on his shoulders for her growing distance from Cole, but it seemed to me that Cole was drifting away from my mother for other reasons—reasons to do with her body and the way it was changing, reasons that made her private and scowling and bored by the childish Elemeno games that used to amuse us for hours.

  My mother was changing as well, and this scared me most of all. Up until that year, she had always managed her activism, her work with the special-education children, with her mothering—putting us to bed at a reasonable hour; cooking us a dinner of chicken and peas and red potatoes, a breakfast of oatmeal and raisins; carting us off to school bright and early, faces scrubbed down, teeth brushed.

  But lately her distraction had reached a new level. Weekends she simply disappeared—across town to Jamaica Plain, where her frie
nd Linda lived, or on Sunday into the basement with the multiracial crew of activists that my father found so distasteful. They all would emerge a few hours later, slapping palms and whispering excitedly among themselves. My mother always seemed a little pale after those meetings and would sit by the window for a while, twisting a blond lock and thinking so hard that we knew not to bother her.

  One afternoon I came home from school to find her still in her pajamas, her hair a scraggly mess, squatting behind the couch beside the phone, which was off the hook. She was cutting her toenails with a studied precision, leaving the little half-moon nails on the carpet around her. She didn’t look up at me until I said, “Mum?”

  She whipped her head up and stared blankly at me for a moment before saying, “Huh? Yeah, Birdie, what is it?”