by Danzy Senna
My mother and Jim wouldn’t be up for another few hours. It was summertime, and we slept as late as we pleased. Jim was going to Boston only a few days a week. He said he wanted more time at home. My mother had been getting up early all year, to do her mantras out in the backyard. I’d hear her out there, that strange monotone song, and I’d know what she was praying for, whom she was praying for. But it was four-thirty, too early even for her mantras, the light across the kitchen gray and milky and soft, like a dream.
I fixed myself a cup of coffee—pale and sweet—and sat at the kitchen table. It was rare that I got this much time alone. I opened the shoe box and stuck the black Barbie head on the end of my thumb, like a thimble. The shoe box was getting crowded. I had begun to steal things lately, adding them to the box like offerings to some greedy god. It had started with the postcard from Dot. Then there had been Jim’s photograph, the one I found in his cabin one afternoon while he and my mother were out swimming in the lake. I had been snooping through his desk drawer, looking for evidence, and had come across it beneath the papers, stuck to a patch of spilled glue on the bottom of the drawer. I had been careful not to tear it, gently pulling it out from the sticky mess. In the photo, Jim looks younger, with dirty-blond hair, and he has his arm around a lean brown woman in a halter top; the two of them sit under the red greasy light of a tropical bar. It was the only proof that he actually had been to Jamaica, that he actually had known the Jamaican people as well as he claimed.
There were other, smaller things I had stolen and added to the box. Things that didn’t make as much sense, but that I had taken anyway, for reasons I couldn’t explain. A baseball card of Jim Rice I had found, crushed and soiled, on the floor of our school gym; a red, gold, and green friendship bracelet that Jim had left on the edge of the bathtub to dry one night; a stray piece of Samantha’s hair, which I had plucked from her sweater when she sat in front of me one day in social studies. She had felt my hand brush her back and had turned around to see what I wanted. But my hand was underneath the desk by then, her hair between my fingers, and I just raised my eyebrows at her and smiled slightly and said nothing.
My latest addition to the box was a page I had ripped from a library book on Brazil. It described a religion there called Candomblé, something that had started in West Africa a long time ago but which the Afro-Brazilians had made their own. I had spent the better part of a summer afternoon curled up in a green vinyl chair by the library window, hiding from Mona and the rest of the gang, reading about this religion while the world rushed by outside. I became especially interested in one of the gods—Exu-Elegba—who the book said represented potentiality and change. It said that although many people thought Exu was the devil, he was really just a trickster, always shifting his form, always at the crossroads. I had a feeling that Cole would like Exu. The page I ripped out showed an ancient clay sculpture of him. In it he looks a little like a fetus, his eyes tiny and squinting, his face amorphous, unfinished.
I wondered if Cole practiced Candomblé in Brazil. I could see her doing that. She had always loved magic and ceremonies. She liked Ouija boards and tarot cards when we were little, and had ordered Sea Monkeys and love potions from the backs of our comic books, believing that the invisible might exist. I could see her with a shrine to Exu. But not my father. He would have laughed at the believers. He didn’t believe in things he couldn’t explain with logic.
I looked at the picture of Exu. I didn’t know why I had stolen it from the book, or why I kept it here, in this box of negrobilia. My mother said it was okay to steal a book from the library now and then, but not to deface a book. Books were sacred. But I had wanted a piece of Brazil, a piece of Cole and my father as they were now, not just the stale artifacts my father had left me with from that other time. And something about this god’s face—this squinting creature entering the world—had made me want to keep it close by my side.
My coffee had turned cold, and I went to put the mug in the sink. Outside, the light had risen and hit the dew on the grass, letting off flecks of color. A few years before, I wouldn’t have believed that my mother and I could end up here, in this life. I had been so afraid when we first arrived. Of not fitting in. Of never making any friends. Of failing my classes. But it turned out I had nothing to fear. I had blended in perfectly.
My first school year had come to a close, and most surprising to me, I had done well in my classes. I had struggled at first in science and math but had quickly caught up and made it through without much trouble. In my other classes, though, I was second only to Nora in school performance. My mother was proud of me, and proud of herself, too. She had been my teacher all those years on the run, and clearly she had done something right. “See,” she told me when we were alone, “didn’t I tell you my curriculum was the best?” The teachers were sometimes surprised at how much I knew. Sometimes I even worried that I had revealed too much of myself to them. Like when I quoted from Fanon, or when I repeated things my mother had said about the stages of revolution, or referred to Simone de Beauvoir in my reports. They wondered. I could see it in their eyes, and Mrs. McGuire, my history teacher, a short unhappy woman with huge goggle glasses, had asked my mother at Parents’ Night what kind of schools I had been to before this one: “Seems like they had a very unusual curriculum,” she had said suspiciously. But even Mrs. McGuire was impressed. She told my mother and Jim that I was way ahead of my grade, that in high school I could skip ahead to advanced English and history and social studies if I wanted.
I would turn fourteen in September, older than Cole had been the last time we’d seen her. High school was right around the bend. And somewhere closer to the equator, Cole was seventeen, probably on her way to college. Sometimes I stared at the girls around town who were her age, at their bodies, and I couldn’t believe that my sister, the long-legged twelve-year-old in the training bra, looked something like that. I wondered if I’d recognize her if I were to meet her on the street. I wondered if she’d recognize me.
A truck rolled by on the road outside of our house, a dairy farmer on his way to work. My mother and Jim would be waking soon. Jim was going to Boston that day. My mother had a student coming at ten o’clock. An autistic kid who she believed was a hidden genius and wanted to cure. I knew I should put the box away. I stared down at Exu-Elegba, the unformed face, the squinting eyes that searched the world for answers, and I whispered under my breath a little prayer that I made up. A prayer in Elemeno. A prayer to Exu, the God of Change, the God of Potential, to bring some kind of change.
NICHOLAS WAS AWAY for the whole summer on an exchange program in Paris. He wouldn’t be coming home again until Thanksgiving. Whenever my mother asked Libby Marsh how Nicholas was doing, she looked strained, unhappy, and offered only a slight “Oh, you know. He’s at that age.” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but I imagined him with Piper, her long downy limbs wrapped around him, her golden hair in his eyes. I could still hear her voice: “I hate you! You’re so skinny.” And I remembered his face, how strangely embarrassed he had looked to see me there. I wasn’t sure if he had been embarrassed of me or of them. I fantasized about joining him at Exeter, about becoming a girl like Piper, a casual rich girl who played Frisbee and lacrosse and sang along to Cat Stevens.
But I wouldn’t fit in there. I was a New Hampshire girl now. I had a gang—Mona and Dawn and Kelly—and we were inseparable, bored together, waiting for high school to begin, for our world to move forward. It was mid-July, and the days seemed longer than ever, lazy and claustrophobic. Most afternoons we went swimming at the YMCA, just after the flock of little camp kids had finished their swimming lessons and the water was warm with their piss. After swimming, we would hang out in front, sometimes eating Softee cones, but most of the time just biting our nails, always waiting for some boy to come along and distract us from ourselves, from one another.
One particularly hot day after swimming, we stood on the gray stone steps in our little girl cluster. We were jittery but tr
ying to keep our cool. A group of high-school boys had pulled their car up to the curb. Mona’s half brother, Dennis, was in the passenger seat. The boys were eating cheese fries and sucking on lime rickeys, while heavy metal music blared from their radio. We swayed our hips together, mouthing the words to the song and closing our eyes as if we meant it.
Mona was smoking a cigarette, sucking in deep and making rings, while the rest of us leaned against the wall, watching her. Our hair was wet at the ends from swimming, and our skin smelled faintly of chlorine. We dressed identically: cutoff jean shorts, halter tops that exposed our tan bellies, and jelly shoes on our feet. We had bought the shoes together, each picking a different color. I had been stuck with the clear ones, and they made my feet sweat and stink inside of them.
Mona winked at me and said, “Watch this.” With her back to the boys, she proceeded to bend over to buckle and unbuckle her jelly shoe, so that her shorts rode up her thighs even farther. The boys laughed and hooted as she lingered down at her shoe, her butt high in the air for them to view, while the rest of us girls snickered into our hands at her audacity.
She stood up and ceremoniously pulled out the wedgie she had created. She flicked her hair and whispered in my direction, “Were they looking? They want it so bad. Too bad none of them are gonna get it.”
We laughed, and our laughter was louder and shriller than normal, canned for the sake of those boys who sat just outside our circle.
Just then something hard hit me on the back of the head.
I let out a loud “Ouch,” and when I looked at the ground, I saw a penny, as shiny and copper as my mother’s hair. I heard giggling from the car behind me, and a voice, high and nasal: “Want another one?”
Mona rolled her eyes and said: “Don’t pay attention to them. Pretend you didn’t feel it.”
But then another flying penny hit me in the center of my back. It didn’t hurt, but my face burned as I heard one of them yell, “Yo, you in the blue!” I was wearing blue, and I turned.
He was in the backseat and wore a baseball hat. When he smiled it was all silver with braces. “You want another? I know you do.” He was looking at my chest, not my face, and for a moment I thought he was admiring my breasts.
I looked down as if to check whether they had grown overnight. But they were flat as ever.
I looked up. He was still smiling at me, but his face was half-curled into a sneer. “Fuckin’ kike. I’m talkin’ to you. Do you want another penny?”
I looked down again, this time noticing my Star of David, thick and gleaming in the sunlight. I only realized then that they were throwing pennies at me because I was Jesse Goldman, daughter of David Goldman. I felt a pang of loyalty toward this imaginary father, and touched the necklace.
The boys’ car shone brightly, warbling slightly under the heat. They were grinning at me, waiting to see what I would say. I felt an aching in my fingers, then in my fist, an urge to go to the one who had said it, punch him so hard that his face would stay permanently dented in like a car fender. I could see my mother doing something like that. But not my father. Never my father. He would have turned to me with a tight smile and spoken softly: They’re primitive. Pity them for their lack of sophistication. See how they work, see how they play. Watch them, baby, and learn. These words came to me like a memory, but I wondered if he had ever really said such a thing.
I turned back to the girls, who were smiling at the ground with dazed expressions, as if they hadn’t heard anything.
Mona was the only one to defend me. She turned back to the boys and shouted, “Cut it out, you little pricks! Dennis, I’m gonna tell Ma!” The other boys laughed and began to pull the car away from the curb. But as they drove off, the boy who had thrown the penny at me leaned out the window and gave us the finger as he shouted, “Sit and spin, cunts!”
We turned back to one another, and Mona flicked her hair, unfazed, it seemed, by the encounter. My fingers were shaking slightly as I held the star’s weight. Mona looked at it as she took a puff of her cigarette, squinting down at me through the smoke, an imitation of some adult she had known.
“So, are you Jewish, or what? I mean, is that what that necklace is for?”
I let out a rather harsh laugh and looked away.
There had been one other Jewish girl in the school. She had played the clarinet and also wore a Star of David, only hers looked like real quality gold and had a diamond on it. She had gone away for the summer, telling us all at the end of school that she wouldn’t be coming back. That she was going to boarding school. I wondered if she’d be at the same school as Nicholas. If they’d be friends. I bet they had plenty of Jewish kids at boarding school. Piper had said that her best friend, Abbie, was Jewish. I bet there was even an exclusively Jewish boarding school. I’d ask my mother if I could go to one when I got home, but I knew she’d say no, that she didn’t have any money.
I looked back at the girls. They were waiting for an answer, and it struck me that they had discussed this before, outside of my presence. That something unspoken rested on my answer. I said, “Well, not really Jewish. I mean, only my dad was, and he’s dead. And to be really a Jew, you have to have a mother who is Jewish. It’s like the religious law or something.”
Mona looked at the other girls and laughed blandly, bored already by the topic at hand, as she said, “I told you guys she wasn’t really Jewish.”
It was sometime that same week that I took off the Star of David and put it at the bottom of my underwear drawer. My mother didn’t notice.
IN AUGUST, I LEARNED that a black boy was coming to the high school. Mona told us one bright afternoon while she painted her toenails on the steps of the trailer. It was a little past noon, and the sun glared over the field. A family was having a barbecue some distance away, and the smell of smoke and cooked flesh wafted over to us.
“He’s a football player. The high-school coach drafted him from another town. Heard he’s pretty good.”
I felt a gnawing in my belly and tried to change the subject. “I hope we don’t have to take Freshman gym in the fall. I suck at sports.”
But Mona persisted: “His name’s Stuart Langley. I’ve never known any black guys, just Samantha. Wonder if they got big dicks, like everybody says.”
They often talked like this around me. My grandmother in Boston used to say that “the Negroes should stop obsessing about race. Then maybe everybody else would.” But I was finding that in New Hampshire, the white folks needed no prompting. It came up all the time, like a fixation, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it.
Now I felt myself floating, looking down at us, the three of us, almost identical in our blue jeans, polo shirts, scuffed flats, our feathered hair falling around our faces. I saw myself as I sat there kicking the dirt, trying to disappear under my overgrown bangs.
Dawn pitched in: “Shit. We’re gonna look like little niggers if we stay out in the sun any longer. Especially you, Jesse.”
Mona looked me up and down, then said with a laugh, “Shit, Jess. You never burn. What’s your secret?”
I looked over at the family across the lawn. They were fat, and the adults sat sprawled out in lawn chairs. In front of them, a little boy was tormenting a dog—pulling its tail, dragging it around like that while it yelped and squealed.
I stood up abruptly, and they all looked up at me.
“Where the hell are you going?” Mona asked.
“To take a leak.”
In the bathroom, I stood at the sink, splashing cold water on my face. I was breathing in little asthmatic wheezes. I closed my eyes and thought of my father’s face and of Cole’s hand holding mine on the first day at the school in Roxbury. I thought of her sticking up for me: She’s black. So don’t be messing with her. I thought of a game I had long since forgotten, a game the four of us, still one family unit, used to play. A game we played when we wandered into enemy territory, into Southie, home of the Irish, or the North End, the quaint Italian neighborhood with the
cobblestone streets, or when we circled the streets that surrounded the white ghetto in Brookline called Whiskey Point.
My parents called the game “Now You See Him…” My father would pull out the raggedy plaid blanket we had in the backseat and hunch down real low in the passenger seat, making a tent out of the cloth. Cole and I thought it funny to see him disappear like that, transformed into a plaid lump hidden under the dashboard, all folded up in a cocoon like a caterpillar. My mother, as she maneuvered the car, leaning forward and squinting at the street signs, would say: “Look, girls. Papa’s gone away. Papa’s disappeared.” And we would squeal with delight, “Papa, Papa, come out and play.” And often he was quiet, but sometimes he would play along and speak in an ogre’s voice or a wicked witch’s voice: “Your papa can’t come out. The monster’s eaten him all up. Yum, yum.” He made chewing and gnashing sounds, and we played along, clutching each other and screaming, “Mum, Mum. Make the monster let Papa go! Make him stop.” Sometimes he went on too long—made the sounds of chewing too believable—and we would start to really get scared.
My mother, smiling slightly, would say: “Calm down, girls. Just cool it. Your papa’s just playing. Deck, cut it out.”
They wouldn’t stop the game till we were out of the neighborhood, on safer ground, and then she would say, “Coast’s clear, Deck.”
“Jesse?”
The trailer around me. Flimsy walls made of fake wood paneling. A strong smell of something pink, something fluffy, something there to cover up the bodily odors. A potpourri in a ceramic elephant on top of the toilet. My face staring at me from the small chintzy mirror.
“What did you do, shit yourself in there?” came Mona’s voice from beyond the door. “We’re going to get milk shakes without you.”