Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  “Should we ask her what’s going on?” I wondered aloud once we were back under the covers.

  Cole shook her head. She looked scared. “No, Birdie. If she hasn’t told us now, she ain’t gonna tell us. And besides, I don’t trust her. She’s crazy. Papa said so.”

  Cole said we should spy instead. “That’s the only way we’re gonna get to the bottom of this.” We made a pact that what we had seen would be our secret.

  MY MOTHER SAT at the table in the same uniform she had worn the night before, the red bandanna still in her hair. She looked tired, her skin transluscent and tinged with blue. She was building a house out of cards, and a record played distantly from the living room stereo. It was Al Green singing about wanting old-time love.

  My mother didn’t seem to notice us, even as we went about getting bowls for cereal and milk and juice.

  Finally, digging into my bowl of Cap’n Crunch, I said, “Mum, earth to Mum.”

  She blinked at me over the house of cards, which was getting big and absorbing all her attention. Then she placed a final card on top, knocked down the house with a flick of a finger, and said, “Forget about school today, girls. We need to go visit your grandmother.”

  “Oh, no,” Cole groaned, slapping her hand to her forehead. I guess she was getting sick of my mother pulling us out. “Mum, you can’t keep doing this. Papa’s right—”

  My mother slammed her fist on the table and belted out, “Papa Shmapa!” She rubbed her temples and closed her eyes as she went on, calmer now: “This is important. I need to see her.” She stood up. “I’m going upstairs to change. I didn’t sleep a fucking wink last night. Now, I don’t want to hear another complaint out of either of you. School will be there tomorrow. Be ready by noon.”

  After my mother had gone, I whispered to Cole, “Let’s go check out the basement.” I was still thinking about the previous night’s activities and Cole’s promise that we would be spies.

  But Cole was stirring her cereal around angrily and staring at the table with shining eyes. She shook her head. “No, Birdie. Fuck Mum. And fuck the basement.” Then she stood up and left, stomping up the stairs two at a time.

  It was odd to me that we were visiting my grandmother. Last time we’d gone, more than a year before, my mother had sworn we’d never go back. It had to do with the Christmas presents my grandmother had brought back from England for us that year—that is, the one she had brought back for Cole. When we’d opened them on Christmas morning, mine was a dreary little book for a child much younger than me about a character named Noddy whose car went “parp, parp” instead of “beep, beep.” But Cole’s present was a doll. Its body was made of cloth and hung limply, like a long-legged puppet. Its face was a perfect black circle, its hair a crescent of steel wool. Its eyes were huge white plastic circles with tiny black pupils, and its mouth a half-moon strip of red felt that sat in a perpetually mocking smile. There had been a tag hanging from its wrist with the words: “Hello! My name is Golliwog, but you can call me Golli,” and there had been a card for Cole from my grandmother that read, “Your mother played with one just like this as a little girl. Hope you like it! Granny.”

  Cole and I had loved the doll immediately. He looked nothing like the black dolls my father had given us in the past, the ones who looked just like our white ones except for the fact that they were made of brown plastic and their hair was dark and slightly curled and maybe they had strips of African cloth sewed to the hems of their pinafores. Golliwog was completely different—wild, laughing, cool. He wore little tuxedo pants and a bright-red bow tie that matched his lips in color and cloth. This was before Nkrumah, before we had any idea what was wrong with dolls like Golli.

  My mother, however, knew damn well what was wrong with Golli. When she’d told us we couldn’t keep him, Cole and I had wailed and screamed and babbled obscenities in Elemeno. My mother had tried to explain to us that Golliwog was “a racist tool, a parody, a white-supremacist depiction of African people,” but we would hear none of it.

  My father had come home later that day to find Cole asleep with Golliwog clutched in her arms. Instead of getting angry, he had thought it was hysterically funny and referred to the incident as “Golliwog’s revenge.” Cole continued to sleep with Golliwog every night, even now, keeping him far out of my mother’s reach, for fear she might try to hurt him.

  As we drove over the bridge that led from Boston to Cambridge, my mother puffed on a Marlboro and shouted to us over her shoulder about what we could and couldn’t say in the old woman’s presence.

  “Don’t mention the basement. I mean, not a word. She’ll freak out if she thinks I’m up to any funny business.”

  I thought back to the men going in and out during the night and almost opened my mouth to say something about it. But Cole must have read my mind, because she pinched me hard.

  Spring had come as a surprise after the long gray winter, and I watched the white blossoms on the trees, thinking maybe things would look up. We had a field trip planned for the next week at Nkrumah, to the Black History Trail. We’d see the African Meeting House, where Frederick Douglass spoke when he came to Boston from the South.

  My mother beeped her horn at a stalled car ahead of us, then wound around it, flashing her middle finger at the driver. She went on: “And don’t tell her your father’s left for good. She still thinks he’s with us. And I don’t want to give her any fuel.”

  I glanced at Cole. She had pulled out an Archie comic and was thumbing through it, ignoring me and my mother.

  “Oh yeah,” my mother added as we cruised down Brattle Street, getting closer now to the destination, “and if she asks you anything about where you’re going to school, just say it’s a public school. Don’t tell her it’s called Nkrumah, and don’t tell her it’s all black. ‘Cause she’ll flip.”

  My grandmother traced her family line back to Cotton Mather, the Puritan prosecutor in the Salem witch trials. But according to my mother, there was more class than money left in her family. “Blue-blood bandits and Mayflower madames” was how she described her ancestors. Whatever the case, our family had inherited only two things from the legacy. One was a print of Cotton Mather wearing bushy white curls and a sneering expression, which hung lopsided in our living room. It had been my father’s idea to hang it up. He said, chuckling, that Mather looked like an “octoroon dandy” and liked to show it off to friends. The second was a collection of semivaluable silverware with the family initials engraved on it. My mother washed the silverware in the dishwasher along with our regular stainless steel knives and forks from Zayres, joking, “At least there’s democracy in the dishwasher.” She was always threatening to sell it to pay off her bills or buy a new car.

  My grandmother owned a valuable first edition of Cotton Mather’s how-to-spot-a-witch guide entitled The Wonders of the Invisible World, which she kept under glass in the library. My father had used a play on the title for his first book. I wasn’t sure how the books were related, but I knew that my grandmother had disapproved of his using it. She thought he was mocking her. She was proud of the Mather link and liked to remind me of my heritage every time I came over. She would pull me close to her and say, “You’re from good stock, Birdie. It still means something.” I always seemed to get the brunt of her attention, while Cole was virtually ignored. I thought Cole was the lucky one because she was allowed to stay locked in the guest room watching television while I had to sit under the old lady’s scrutiny, hands folded on my lap, listening to her tell me stories about how good my blood was.

  It was strange. While there seemed to be remnants of my mother’s family everywhere—history books, PBS specials, plaques in Harvard Square—my father’s family was a mystery. It was as if my father and Dot had arisen out of thin air. I knew this wasn’t true, that they had come from somewhere, namely my Nana’s slight brown body. And there were other facts I picked up: My father had been born in Louisiana, but Dot had been born later, when they had already moved north, to Bos
ton, to the Orchard Park projects. I knew there was some tension between Dot and my father that went back to way before I was born. But I knew little of their real past, their blood, which lay somewhere in the Louisiana bayou, where Nana was born. There was nothing in writing, nothing in stone.

  What I did know was what my father had told me: that Nana had been adopted as an infant by “a bunch of piss-colored Creoles” who hadn’t realized how dark she was when they took her in. A few weeks after her birth, when her hair began to kink up and her skin turned a rich nut-brown, they wanted to send her back. But instead they kept her and treated her as a stepchild and sometimes maid. At night, her adoptive mother would put a clothespin on Nana’s nose and bleaching cream on her skin, and the poor child couldn’t sleep. Her hair was straightened so many times, with such chemical force, that by the time she was twelve, it began to fall out in great chunks. The family embraced Nana only when they noticed she was at the top of her class at a black college in Alabama. She had studied Russian, done her thesis on Tolstoy, and had dreams of going to the Soviet Union. After her graduation, she took off instead for the Northeast, New England, with a diploma in her bag and a fantasy of herself in fur, downing vodka shots in a dank pub with a man named Vladimir.

  But she never made it to Moscow, and the Northeast wasn’t what she thought it would be. Something happened to her there, something broke her. She liked to say that the Great Migration was the worst mistake black folks ever made. She said they were spiritually freezing in the North and that they should have stayed where they were and built a new history on the land they had been tending so long. My mother said that the first year I was born, when she was so busy with Cole and the dyslexic students, Nana had baby-sat for me and would rock me for hours by the window in the attic, where she would read Pushkin to me in between Creole lullabies. She died working but poor as a nurse at Brigham and Women’s, still living in those Orchard Park projects, with a dog-eared copy of Anna Karenina beside her bed.

  My white grandmother had met her a few times before Nana died, and liked to talk about how “intelligent, dignified” she was, as if that fact were a surprise, proof of something that needed proving.

  THE PINTO BACKFIRED LOUDLY as we pulled into the driveway, and I saw a face come to the window of the glass porch out front. I made out my grandmother’s tall stooped form and gray bun. The rosebushes that circled the house were in bloom—red and lavender and white and pink—and Gory, the dog, sat watching us with his eternally depressed expression as we climbed out of the car. The gardener, a small dark man, was crouched on his hands and knees, tending to the flowers, and my mother shouted to him, “Hey there, Joe! How’s things?”

  He laughed, and waved at my mother. “Just surviving, Sandy.” He looked at Cole and me. He always seemed amused by us, ready to burst into giggles at just the sight of us, and now he winked at Cole. “Colette sure is getting big. You got yourself a boyfriend yet?”

  Cole smiled and blushed. He handed her a pink rose. I wanted one too, but my mother was pulling me by the hand toward the house.

  I could feel she was angry already, preparing herself for some sort of offense to come. Edna came to greet us at the door. She was my grandmother’s housecleaner, a Caribbean woman with salt-and-pepper hair. She smelled of lemon and wore chunky white nurse shoes and neatly pressed hair. She made everything sparkle, but a faint smell of must lingered.

  “Hi, Sandy, your mother’s waiting in the living room. Food’s almost ready.”

  “How’s her mood today?” my mother whispered to Edna.

  Edna looked around, a weary smile creeping across her features. “Let’s put it this way. It’s not nearly as good as this weather.”

  My mother laughed. “Well, let me at her.”

  Cole and I followed her down the hallway. We passed my grandfather’s old study, and I glanced in. It was where my grandmother kept her safe. On one particularly nasty visit, my mother had pointed the safe out to Cole and me and told us that was where my grandmother kept her “loot.” She had made us memorize the combination number—it was the birth year of Cotton’s father, Increase Mather. Apparently there was quite a lot of money in the safe. My grandmother had kept a stash of extra cash handy ever since the Great Depression. My mother said, winking at us, that it might come in useful some day.

  My grandmother sat at the window in her usual armchair with her cat, Delilah, at her feet. She had a crossword puzzle folded on her lap and a tragic expression on her face. Cole whispered something to me in Elemeno, and my grandmother scowled at us. “Please speak proper English in my house, girls. It’s all I ask. Sandy, I thought you said they had stopped with that twisted little dialect of theirs.”

  My mother sighed. “They still speak it sometimes. But don’t worry, they know how to speak English, and that’s all that should matter.”

  My grandmother looked my mother up and down.

  “Sandy, what is that queer uniform you’re wearing? Have you put on more weight?”

  My mother touched her collar lightly. She wore overalls and a blue-checkered work shirt. I felt sorry for her.

  My mother had always been fat. And my grandmother had always been bone thin, even during her first pregnancy. We had a few old pictures from when my grandmother was pregnant with her first child, Randall, before my mother’s existence. She looked like a snake in the process of devouring a rat, the bulge on her belly only making the rest of her figure look sleeker. The one time my grandmother had put on an ounce of weight was when she was pregnant with my mother—and she always reminded my mother of that, as if it had been my mother’s fault even then, in utero.

  Now my mother just laughed bitterly at my grandmother’s latest comment and said, “Listen, I didn’t come over here to be insulted.”

  My grandmother sighed. “I didn’t mean it that way, darling. I just wish you’d take better care of yourself. You’re really quite pretty.” Then she turned to me. “Birdie, Cole, have a seat. Edna’s bringing you lemonade.”

  Cole seemed bored and flipped through a National Geographic. She wore her glasses, which meant she didn’t want to be disturbed. I sat still beside her, listening to my grandmother rattle off to my mother about some production of Huckleberry Finn she had been to recently in Harvard Square. “I wish the girls could have seen it. Splendid production. And the most delightful black man playing Jim. So noble.”

  My mother was sneering at my grandmother, who just ignored her and beckoned to me, “Come here, Birdie. Let me have a look at you.”

  I came toward her, tentatively. She smelled strongly of Chanel No. 5, and her eyes looked like two bluish-gray jellyfish floating in her head. She took my hand and pulled me closer.

  She smiled, her first real smile since we had entered the room. She reached out and stroked my hair.

  “Birdie, dear, you look lovely. I think she looks a bit like Arabella, those old photos of when she was young. Don’t you think, Sandy?” Arabella was one of my mother’s distant cousins from England, whom I had seen only in photographs. As I recalled, she looked nothing like me.

  My mother rolled her eyes. “Arabella was blond and blue-eyed, Mummy. Don’t you remember?” She leaned toward Cole to see what she was reading, glad, I think, to have me entertain my grandmother.

  “Yes, but something in her face structure,” my grandmother replied wistfully.

  We ate lunch in the big dining room. Edna had made salmon and asparagus, with only butter and lemon juice for seasoning, the way my grandmother liked it. I ate the asparagus with my fingers, but Cole barely touched hers. She had brought the magazine to the table with her, and read it there. Nobody seemed to care. Not even my grandmother. She was too focused on me to notice.

  “What have you been doing with yourself, Birdie? Have you started going to a real school?”

  My mother and Cole looked up from their plates and watched me with identical expectant gazes. I could feel the cat moving in and out of my legs underneath the table. I turned back to my grandmot
her. “Yeah, um, me and Cole, we’re going to—public school.”

  My grandmother raised her eyebrows at my mother. “Well, finally. You couldn’t keep them at home forever, after all. I never thought it was a good idea. It was beginning to show. They were completely without manners. You’re wonderful with those mongoloids, Sandra, but normal children are simply not your specialty.”

  My mother dropped her knife loudly. I could see she was about to lose it. My grandmother didn’t seem to notice, though, and turned back to me. “Well, I hope it’s a good public school. Tell me about it, Birdie.”

  I turned to my mother. Her rage had passed. She was biting her lip while she waited to see what I would say. Cole looked like she was going to burst out laughing, and put the National Geographic up in front of her face so that I stared at the pelicans instead.

  “Yeah, it’s a good school. Super-good. You have to take a test to get in and everything. It’s special, for special kids. The smart kind,” I said.

  My mother was trying with her eyes to get me to shut up. I had said too much.

  My grandmother watched me. “A test? For public school? Where is it?”

  I paused.

  My mother jumped in to my rescue. “It’s in Boston. And yes, it’s perfectly good.”

  My grandmother pressed on, seeming to sense that something wasn’t right. “Birdie, what’s your favorite class?”

  I knew, even as I said it, that it was the wrong answer. But I went on, and my lips moved as if detached from my body: “I like Mrs. Potter’s black-history class. I did a report on Toussaint L’Ouverture. I also like music. Want to hear a song I learned? We are children of the sun, Survived the boat and genocide—”