Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  She looked down at me, and her eyes were somewhere distant as she said, “We live in disgrace. We slaughter our own and we slaughter people overseas who don’t think or look like us. This is a sick, sick country, baby girl. I know. Trust me. And the only way to get people’s attention is to do something drastic.” She glanced back at the television set, where they showed a bunch of protesters outside of the courthouse with placards and angry, shouting faces.

  I ran my finger over the pattern of faint freckles on her hand. “Why is this a sick country?”

  She smiled and said, “They didn’t teach you that in Nkrumah?”

  I shrugged, trying to remember Mrs. Potter’s last lesson on the slave trade. School seemed so long ago. I couldn’t remember.

  My mother looked out into the night and said, “Everybody who can will fuck you over. Never trust power, wherever it comes from. It’s always”—her voice had raised a notch—“and I mean always, corrupt. You hear me?”

  I nodded.

  She kissed my head and said, “That man on television is on the right side of history. It doesn’t matter what your color is or what you’re born into, you know? It matters who you choose to call your own.”

  On the television screen, the newscaster was introducing the weatherman, who announced an “ice alert.” The drizzle of the afternoon had frozen into a thick layer of ice, and the streets were treacherous.

  My mother seemed to snap out of her melancholy daze and said, “I’ve got a great idea! Get up. Get your coat on.”

  The two of us bundled up, put on ice skates, and went out into the glowing streets. They had been plowed just that day, but the snow blower had pushed the snow to the gutters, building a fortress more than five feet tall.

  She held my hand and pulled me along, hooting laughter as we slipped and stumbled over the sidewalk, her breath like fog before her face. She was enormous and she was moving fast, and I followed, feeling the contagion of her spirit. She slipped at one point and the two of us fell onto the soft pillow of newly fallen snow. After our laughter had subsided, she rolled over so that she was leaning above me. She brushed the hair out of my eyes and said, “This is how it should be all the time. No fucking car-r-r-r-r-r-s! This is when the capitalist wheel comes screeching to a halt.”

  On our way back to the house, I was shivering, and she blew hot air onto my fingers, rubbing them between her own, telling me she would make me cocoa and popcorn when we got home. She sang a nonsensical and not-quite-rhyming ditty she had made up:

  Birdaloo, Birdalee

  So much melancholy

  In this planet of deceit

  I’m so glad we got to meet

  Birdaloo, Birdalee…

  Later, while she tucked me into bed, she whispered in my ear, the tip of her nose still cold, “Sweetie, if anything happens to me, no matter what they try to tell you, remember that I love you and your sister more than anything in this world, and that I did it for you.”

  I asked her what she meant, but she just tweaked my nose and then left me to ponder it on my own.

  THE RAIN CAME, speeding up the thawing process, turning the fortress of snow into a dingy-gray stream that rushed down the gutter. The streets were slick and black as if buffed by shoe polish overnight. It was a week after the first snowbound day, and my mother and I were beginning to circle each other like caged hyenas. Even she seemed tired of being cooped up inside, and that morning we both waited anxiously for my father to return Cole, now that the streets were clear.

  I heard his familiar beeping outside and peeked out the door to see his orange Volvo shining in the winter light. The cars parked around them were emerging from under their casts of snow, and their bodies peeked out like bright hard candies. Cole sat in the backseat, and in the front I could make out a vague feminine figure.

  My mother yelled from the kitchen, “Tell Cole to get her booty in here and kiss her mother. It’s been a week, for Christ’s sake.”

  Cole didn’t appear to be budging, and waved nonchalantly at me from inside the car. My father rolled down his window and said, “C’mon, Bird. We’re going to Bob the Chef’s for brunch.”

  Bob the Chef’s was a soul food restaurant just down the street that my father liked to frequent. They served my favorite breakfast of grits, eggs, and sausage.

  I paused, then shouted back to my mother that we were going to Bob the Chef’s and would be home soon, wincing as I heard her slam down a pan. I knew she had been preparing Cole’s favorite breakfast: hard-boiled eggs served in the green, chipped, family egg cups; raspberry tea; and English crumpets with expensive marmalade. I didn’t wait around to hear what I suspected would be an obscene rant against my father. Instead, I went bounding down the stairs to greet him, wearing my old winter parka and my sister’s L.L. Bean boots, a size and a half too large.

  As I got closer I could hear Brazilian music sifting out from the steamy vehicle.

  The new woman, Carmen, sat daintily beside my father in the front seat, a wet smile turned toward him, her hands folded in her lap. As I climbed into the car, my father introduced us. She glanced back at me, and there was something in her look that made me pause—a sort of surprise and hesitation before she attempted a smile and mumbled a lukewarm “Hi.” She had glowing mocha-brown skin, a faint feminine mustache, and a small splotch of a birthmark flowering like a coffee stain on her left cheek. As we drove down the street, she snapped my father’s suspenders playfully. Other than the mustache, I thought she looked like a black Barbie come to life. Her nails were painted a rosy pink, and she waved her fingers around like a sorceress when she talked.

  Cole looked different, more put together, with light expert makeup, her hair tightly bound in a French braid. She wore a soft fuzzy sweater, two-toned jeans, and gold hoops in her ears. On her feet, she wore moon boots in daunting hot pink.

  Bob the Chef’s was filled with people standing around like a pack of bears who had simultaneously emerged from hibernation. The air was thick and sizzling with the smell of soul food, and the windows were all greasy, blurring the ugliness of the slushy city outside. My father, tall and thin and stooped over, nodded at some of the regulars, and the obese cook—Tony, not Bob—came waddling over to greet us at the door.

  “Well, well, well. If it ain’t the professor. Professor Lee. How’s it goin’, man? Looks like it’s back to work.”

  They laughed and slapped palms, and my father slipped into the slang he used when we were in all-black establishments. He introduced Carmen as his “brown sugar.” She blushed as Tony’s eyes lit up and he kissed her outstretched hand, taking in her sleek figure with his eyes. “That’s a fine sister for you, Lee.” Then, winking at Carmen, he said, “I could tell you some stories about this cat. We used to roll together, down in the Orchard Park projects. He was always a little bit of the loner, you know. Preaching to us about how he was gonna make it out. And I guess he did. Hahvahd and all that.”

  My father was laughing, pleased, I could see, to hear this rendition of himself. Carmen slipped her arm through my father’s, and Tony led us to a booth in the back.

  Cole and I sat across from them and automatically began our old habit of knocking feet under the table. I had felt incomplete outside of her presence, and now felt safe with her beside me. But Carmen seemed to have grown chillier toward me since we entered the diner. She didn’t make eye contact with me through the whole brunch, and spoke only to Cole and my father. When I asked her a question, she gave curt, one-word answers, looking at Cole while she spoke, as if I was my sister’s ventriloquist dummy.

  At some point Cole began to talk about me to them as if I weren’t there. She told them I could dance, stand on my head without a wall to support me, that I had memorized whole episodes of “Good Times.” “She got an A-plus on her project on Toussaint L’Overture. Mrs. Potter said it was the best in her class.”

  It sounded, from the high, strained tone in her voice and the way she squeezed my hand under the table, that she was a used-car
salesman trying to convince them to buy.

  “Professor Abdul put Birdie’s report in the front hall with a mural that Ali Parkman drew to go along with it—”

  Carmen looked bored by Cole’s stories and kneaded my father’s shoulder while Cole talked on. At some point, my father cut in and said, “Why don’t you tell Birdie about what we did this week?” And Cole paused in mid-story, finally getting the hint, and she turned to me, leaving Carmen and my father to their massage.

  Cole spoke to me in Elemeno about how much fun they had had all week together, playing card games and reading out loud to one another about Brazil, where we all were going to visit one of these days.

  rula mest fundacolo. midge part ridge yazza.

  As she spoke, I saw the new life in my sister’s face, as if she had found some reflection of herself in this tall, cool woman. I felt heavy with grief as I played with the greasy food in front of me, cutting it up into tiny pieces, then mashing the eggs, grits, and sausage together into a revolting, inedible stew.

  THINGS UNRAVEL. Slowly. Without warning. We all had been going through our separate changes for a while. Moving in different directions. My mother disappearing into the basement. Cole disappearing into her adolescence. Me into my life with the Brown Sugars clique at Nkrumah. My father into his book. But looking back on it, I think Carmen was the icing on the cake, so to speak. Others before had made me see the differences between my sister and myself—the textures of our hair, the tints of our skin, the shapes of our features. But Carmen was the one to make me feel that those things somehow mattered. To make me feel that the differences were deeper than skin.

  Cole tried. She went out of her way to make sure I was invited along on her and Carmen’s activities—trips to the hair salon; shopping sprees to outlets; visits to Carmen’s girlfriends’ houses, where they sat around the kitchen vaguely watching soap operas and discussing their men. But even then I sat perched on a stool in the corner, chewing on my hair, feeling the ever-present weight of Carmen’s silent irritation. It seemed that around my father she made more of an effort, but when we were alone, I sometimes thought I saw her looking at me with muted disgust.

  Cole even donated to me many of the gifts that Carmen had given to her—a Peaches and Herb cassette, a gold ankh necklace from a museum gift shop, a baseball shirt with an iron-on unicorn emblem across the front—and we both understood without saying it that our exchange was secret and that Carmen would not find out that her gifts were being funneled my way.

  On Cole’s twelfth birthday, Carmen took her to get her hair done. I came along with them, at Cole’s insistence and Carmen’s annoyance. The salon smelled of a pungent mix of hair chemicals and Chinese food, and a fat woman sat at a manicure table eating egg foo young with chopsticks out of a white carton and watching a soap opera with a cynical smirk.

  Carmen, it turned out, was an old friend of the hairdresser’s, a man named James who wore a yellow blouse unbuttoned so I could see his smooth chest, and his hair wrapped in an orange silk scarf.

  Carmen kissed James on both cheeks, then said, pointing to Cole, “This is the one. Deck’s girl. Isn’t she just gorgeous? She wants braids. Like all the girls are getting them.”

  James came toward Cole and fingered her hair, which Carmen had picked out into a soft afro around her face. He clucked his teeth and smiled. “She’s got a good thick head of hair. Enough for three heads.”

  Cole wasn’t smiling, though. She was watching Carmen with a quizzical expression, her lips parted and her brow furrowed. She then belted out loudly enough for the whole salon to hear, “And this is my little sister, Birdie.” I heard an edge to her voice that was somehow combative, and I worried that I’d ruined her birthday. My mother was at home making a special dinner for her and had asked me to stay home and help her chop and dice. I was wishing I had stayed there.

  James spotted me then, standing behind Cole, staring at my shoes, and he broke into a smile. “Hey there, little sister. You want braids too?”

  Carmen turned to me and frowned. Then, looking back at the man, she said, “Yeah, that’s Cole’s little sister, even if she doesn’t look like a sister.” She giggled at her pun rather unhappily, with an anxious expression, and touched my hair as if to show she was just kidding around. James turned away, seeming embarrassed. Before starting on Cole’s hair, he handed me a Tootsie Pop out of the drawer at his side and winked at me, saying, “See how long you can suck it before you have to bite.” For the rest of the afternoon, as the light turned from yellow to orange on Tremont Street outside and the traffic grew dense and noisy with the ending day, Carmen sat beside James’s workstation smoking and gossiping with him about his latest romantic escapades. I, meanwhile, sat in the waiting area, reading back issues of Soap Opera Digest and listening to the sounds of the manicurist’s tiny television set.

  Later, at dinner, when it was just my mother, Cole, and me, it felt like old times. My mother had made lemon chicken, mashed potatoes, and a fancy salad with walnuts; for dessert, an upside-down cake. It was the first time I had seen my mother and sister get along in a while, so I forgot about Carmen and the hairdresser’s and enjoyed myself. We sat together around the messy kitchen, giving Cole her gifts. I gave her a diary—a gold notebook from the Museum of Fine Arts with a profile of Anubis’s head on the front. My father had helped me pick it out. My mother gave her a stack of tarot cards and a silver locket that had been her grandmother’s. On the front were her grandmother’s initials, but on the back she had engraved Cole’s initials. She made each of us put a lock of hair into it that evening—my mother’s fine gold one, my straight brown one, and Cole’s wiry black curl. Cole hugged my mother for a long time, and I felt a little left out. They seemed back to the way they once had been. She told my mother that it was the best gift yet, and I could see how much it meant to my mother. Her eyes were all watery, and she seemed unable to speak as she cleared the dishes.

  After dinner, Cole lay beside my mother on the couch while my mother fingered her hair and read to her from a Colette novel. I sat on the floor with my knees pulled into my chest, watching them and pretending to listen to the stories my mother read. It struck me how much they looked alike, sitting side by side, their high foreheads and deep-set green eyes, their hands small and delicate. People generally didn’t comment on their resemblance to each other, but if you looked at them in the right light—like just then, the two of them tilting their heads toward the book my mother was holding, eyebrows raised in identical expressions of amusement—it was clear that my sister’s face held both my mother’s and my father’s within it, the raw and the cooked in aesthetic harmony.

  THERE IS STILL a lot about that spring that I feel unable—or unwilling—to tell. When you’ve been let in on a secret, told that your very existence and your mother’s freedom and even the negritudinal forces of the universe depend on your keeping that secret, you kind of lose the ability to speak it, even after the secret’s reasons are no longer clear.

  But it is true that one night I was drifting into sleep when I heard a car door slam down on the street below, then my mother’s voice, muffled by the windowpane. I lay beside Cole in bed. It was two o’clock in the morning, and now I was wide awake. An indigo darkness blanketed the room, interrupted by bars of light from the street. I could make out only the shapes in our preteen sanctuary. A stuffed animal that, in the darkness, had acquired the profile of Karl Marx. A poster of an afroed Jackson Five that in the half-light appeared as a cluster of dark, swaying lollipops. A sock-monkey doll with red felt buttocks, which in the darkness created a second smile.

  I looked at Cole, whose face was turned upward, mouth slack, and I knew she was really out for the night. A man’s laughter floated up to the room. I thought then that it must be my father returning home. I went to the window silently. My father was nowhere in sight, and I saw instead a green van and a group of strange men: black men and one or two white men dressed casually in jackets and blue jeans. Men who seemed nervous,
tension holding their faces frozen in masks of ivory and gold and mahogany. They came bearing long duffel bags shaped like bodily limbs—and they came silently, speaking in a kind of sign language under the glow of the streetlamps. My mother stood before them—the lone spot of white womanhood in their midst—wearing blue jeans, a dirty T-shirt, her red bandanna in her hair. She had her hands on her hips, watching the men as they climbed in and out of the van, whispering and gesturing directions to one another. I couldn’t make out her expression.

  There were two metal doors built into the sidewalk that opened to steps that led down to our basement. Usually those doors were locked with a padlock and a chain, and I liked to imagine that they opened not into our basement but to a ladder that went straight through the earth, eventually to Hell, where flames would tickle your toes as you made your way down. Now I watched from above as the men methodically pulled duffel bags out of the van and carried them into the lighted cavern.

  I went back to the bed and shook Cole. After I had woken her from her grumpy blur, I told her that there were men down on the street with our mother.

  She threw her hands angrily over her eyes. “Damn, I was asleep,” she said, rolling away from me onto her side. “It’s probably just Hassan and Charles came over to drink wine.”

  She sighed deeply and began to fall back to sleep. I shook her harder, and she turned violently toward me and said, “What, Birdie? Shit. I gotta get up in the morning.”

  I hissed in her ear, “I’ve never seen them before. And they’re driving a van and taking big bags into the house.”

  Her eyes fluttered open. Her curiosity had been piqued, and she came to the window, dragging her blankets behind her.

  The two of us stood at the window now, watching as the men unloaded the rest of the long duffel bags and brought them into the open basement. My mother stood at the van door, looking up and down the street, wringing her hands, biting her nails, talking with her face close to one of the men’s. Cole and I were silent, our questions floating unspoken between us. We watched until all of the bags had been brought in and our mother had crouched to bolt-lock the basement door and the men had hugged her, raising their fists at her in a silent salute of comradeship as they piled into the green van again, like circus clowns squeezing into a trick mini. They drove away, leaving her on the sidewalk hugging herself. Neither Cole nor I turned to go back to bed until my mother had made her way up the stairs to the house and we could hear her locking our front door behind her.