Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  I tiptoed downstairs, shivering in only a long T-shirt. In the living room, Jim was bent on his knees, placing presents wrapped in gold paper under the tree, and my mother lounged on the couch in a pink terry-cloth robe with the newspaper in her hands. Some Indian music floated through the air, whose haunting and religious words sounded like my mother’s mantra.

  Jim turned around then, and I knew something was different. Something had changed overnight.

  The night before, sometime past midnight, I had heard my mother and Jim go out for a drive. They had disappeared for several hours. I had assumed they were at Jim’s cabin having loud sex, or smoking by the lake.

  But now I saw what their midnight drive had really been for. The news had been broken. Jim was grinning at me as if we were in on some secret together. And watching him watching me, I could see he wasn’t a Fed, never had been a Fed. He wasn’t and never had been dangerous in that way. From his expression, his slow-rising smile, I could imagine his reaction when she told him: dismay, fear, then a growing titillation as he realized that he was involed in something huge. The pieces—the parts that hadn’t fit before—must have come into place for him, and he must have seen himself as a fool. But an important fool. He was beaming at me.

  My mother lay supine on the couch, wool oatmeal socks on her feet and a concerned look on her face. She was trying to read my mood. I had a brief inexplicable urge to run out the door and through the snow to the Marshes’. But I knew they were away in Connecticut. Nicholas wouldn’t be coming back for vacation until spring.

  I stood still, watching them from the doorway, and we all were silent for a moment.

  Jim broke the silence. “Hey, Jess—” He said the name awkwardly now, as if it lay heavy as a horse’s bit against his tongue. “Merry Christmas, kiddo.”

  I stared at my mother. She was blushing. “Jess, babe. Come sit down with me.” She patted the space on the couch beside her.

  I hesitated, then went to the far corner of the couch, to the space at her feet.

  Jim sat cross-legged on the floor, never taking his eyes off me. I shifted uncomfortably. He seemed to be searching my face for something, looking at me with a newfound curiosity, as if I were a jewel he had believed to be counterfeit and only now found out was real.

  He said then, measuring his words: “Jess, I just want you to know that I’m going to stick by you and your mother. She’s told me everything, and she was afraid I’d run. But I’m still here.” He and my mother exchanged a meaningful smile. “And that’s the way I’m gonna stay. By your side.”

  My mother sat up and reached for my hand. I didn’t take it, but looked at it as if it were some strange foreign object being thrust my way. She started to say something: “Jess, he’s with us. He knows who we are—” but stopped, just as the Indian music on the tape player stopped. The room was quiet, as if the stereo too wanted to hear my response.

  I looked at Jim and gave a little cough of a laugh before I said, my voice rising into a pitch I hadn’t used before, “This was supposed to be our secret. Now he’s in on it? What the hell does he have to do with any of this? I thought we were waiting. I thought we were waiting for them.”

  Jim looked sad then and shook his head. “Jess, don’t do this to your mother. To us. I know your mother’s scared and brave and beautiful. And yes”—he sighed, as if he were speaking to a small child—“I know your father is black. I know everything, kiddo. And I think it’s terrific the way you two have—”

  I cut him off. My voice was loud and thick: “Oh, you do know everything? That my father’s black? I feel so much better now. Did you know I was black too? And that I had a nappy-headed sister but my mother didn’t know what to do with her so she sold her to the gypsies—”

  “Birdie!” my mother shrieked. Her chin was trembling. I had finally hit a nerve.

  I stood up, and they both looked frightened, like tourists staring up at a monkey in a tree, waiting for it to throw shit in their faces. Jim even stiffened as if to prepare for attack.

  “Thanks, Mum,” I said, “for sticking by the rules. Now I know who to trust,” before dashing out of the room and up the stairs.

  I BLASTED THE CARS and sifted through my shoe box of negrobilia, staring at the same old dusty objects, fingering the same old plastic pick, the same old Egyptian necklace that was tarnished and needed polishing. Outside, it had stopped snowing and the sky was a pale blue through the trees. The world seemed completely silent. I wondered if Cole missed white Christmases, if she missed my mother today.

  I hadn’t forgotten my father’s words just before he had left. He had said to me at the door to the car, looking over my head: “Boston, America, is a fucking mess, and it’s only going to get uglier. Black people need to start thinking internationally.” He had also said that our separation was going to be “just for a while.”

  My box of negrobilia was getting so full it wouldn’t close. Recently, for Mona’s birthday, her mother had taken us out for Chinese food in the next town over. Dennis had come along and he had kept his hand on my knee under the table, licking his lips at me from time to time, when he didn’t think his mother was looking. He had ordered a cocktail which had a little fat-bellied brown woman floating in it, the kind they used to serve at Aku-Aku. After dinner, I had stolen the doll, slipped it in my pocket, and put it in the box when I got home. Looking at the dolls now it seemed a little crazy, an act of kleptomania. It reminded me of how my mother used to steal Snickers bars when we were little, embarrassing Cole, thrilling me. She didn’t do that anymore.

  Later in the afternoon, I sneaked downstairs. I could hear my mother and Jim whispering on the couch in the living room. My mother sounded like she was crying, and I heard my sister’s name being whispered. It had started snowing again, and I bundled up in an old tweed coat of my mother’s before going out into the whipping wind.

  Inside the stable, Mr. Pleasure was cold to the touch, and I put a horse blanket on her. I pressed my face to her nose and inhaled. There was nothing better than the smell of a horse. It comforted me, and I rested my head there for a while, inhaling and thinking. In a way, I was disappointed that Jim wasn’t a Fed. He was just a pothead with a goofy sense of humor. Maybe that was the more dangerous shade of white, I thought to myself as I kissed the velveteen nose of Mr. Pleasure. My father had said white liberals were a disease. At least you know what you’re dealing with in an overt racist. But a liberal was more slippery. You could lose yourself. There was something to that argument. I had become friends with Mona and all the little racists. That way I would always know I was living a lie. Better them than someone who would smile in my face and make me believe I was at home. I was glad that I had resisted Jim’s overtures to become my father. My real father, I decided, would be proud of me, if he ever got a chance to find out.

  The day was almost all over. I considered going to Mona’s trailer, seeing if she had gotten as drunk on egg nog as she had said she would. She had told me the night before that she was fed up with Samantha Taper and was going to “kick her black ass” one of these days. She admitted to me that she wanted Samantha’s boyfriend, Matthew. “I mean, fuck, he’s only the cutest boy in the school.” I didn’t want any of the boys in town. I wondered if there were something wrong with me. Permanent damage from those months at Aurora. I had told Mona that I had almost gone all the way with Nicholas, but really I had only touched him for that moment. Maybe I would never be able to go all the way with a white boy. Sex was the only time, outside of the womb, when a person became one with another, when two people really melted together, into one body. Allowing a white boy inside of me would make my transformation complete, something I wasn’t ready for. I thought about Stuart Langley. Just the week before, he had winked at me during an assembly in the school auditorium. Perhaps I would lose my virginity to him. At least he was black. But the thought of it depressed me. His high-pitched laughter got on my nerves. Besides, he seemed to have a thing for blond girls. Maybe I would remain a v
irgin forever, never letting anything penetrate me.

  Cole had a boyfriend the last time I saw her. A thin brown boy named Anthony. I remembered the first time he had kissed her. She had been twelve. She had slipped into bed with me, giggling. Her body beside me had felt different, softer, more alive, as she said, “Birdie, Ant kissed me today.” I had closed my eyes, feeling sad but not wanting her to notice. I had felt her drifting away from me, into another world. I would always be three years behind her. That difference was forever.

  I HEARD A NOISE and turned. There was a shadow at the door of the stable. My mother. She was shivering in Jim’s big green parka and an old-mannish gray cap that shadowed her eyes. I didn’t know how long she’d been there.

  “Who are you talking to?” she asked.

  I hadn’t realized I was talking aloud. I just shrugged and looked back at Mr. Pleasure, stroking her silky brown nose.

  “Listen, Jesse, I know you feel betrayed. But I had to let him in on it. I trust him. And you’ve been heroic, but I need more than just you in my life, baby. Really, it’s healthier for both of us this way.”

  I turned to her, shoving my hands in my pockets. “What the hell is going on, Mum? Why are we here?” My voice surprised me. It sounded different—angry, adult, scolding.

  She stiffened, her shoulders bunching slightly. I had asked it before, but there was more weight to the question this time. She laughed harshly. “So, you don’t believe me. After all this time, you don’t believe me.”

  I didn’t say anything. I had never thought not to believe her. But now the possibility rose up between us, making me slightly dizzy in its implications.

  She said, “It’s strange. The only way you’d believe me is if I were in prison.”

  This was how she answered questions. Sideways.

  It was so dark now that I couldn’t see her expression as she came toward me and said, “It was illegal. Very. Nobody was hurt or killed. But I was a part of something big, and because of it, we had to split up. Your father and I. And we had to choose which one of you looked more like the other. We had to. In order for me to disappear. We had to choose.” She sounded strange. Not drunk. More broken. Beyond crying as she said, “And the crazy thing is, your sister was the reason I did what I did. Having a black child made me see things differently. Made it all the more personal. It hurts to see your baby come into a world like this, so you want to change it.” My mother did that sometimes, spoke of Cole as if she had been her only black child. It was as if my mother believed that Cole and I were so different. As if she believed I was white, believed I was Jesse.

  She was in front of me, and her features looked beautiful, abstract, in the shadows of the barn. Mr. Pleasure was rattling her chains and snorting beside us.

  I said something then, something I never knew I felt until the words came out: “She was your favorite. Wasn’t she? You loved her the best. Both you and Papa did. She was the one you both wanted to keep.”

  Now that I had spoken it, it seemed so clear. Cole was the one my father and mother had fought for, not me. I was the one they both knew they could have without asking. And then I was crying. Sobbing. So that I couldn’t breathe. And she was holding me to her, crying with me, saying softly, “That’s nonsense, Birdalee. There, there, you’re going to give yourself an asthma attack. Breathe, baby, breathe.”

  She had said that to me when I was little and was having a tantrum. The crying always made me wheeze, made my lungs close up.

  “You miss her too,” she said, stroking my hair. “Don’t you? You miss her too.”

  It seemed a odd question. Odd that she would even have to say it. I just said, “Yeah, I miss her. And him.”

  I didn’t think she’d heard me, but after a moment she said, “And him.”

  I smelled her hair. It smelled of green apples. Some new shampoo.

  I pried myself out from her arms and looked down at our shoes, letting my hair fall forward over my eyes. I said in a small voice, “Did you even love him?”

  She didn’t pause. “I never loved a man more. Never will.”

  I was surprised. “Do you love Jim?”

  She bit her lip and looked away. Then she shrugged. “I do love him, in a way. But not in the same way. Someday you’ll love like I loved your father, and you’ll spend the rest of your life recovering.”

  She draped her arm around me and led me outside into the cold white field. We began to walk back toward the house, which was lit up, smoke billowing from the chimney—the picture of a happy home. Merle Haggard played from the living room.

  I wasn’t sure I believed anything my mother had told me, but I put my head on her shoulder anyway and tried to imagine her as a young girl—fat and young and lost—on the verge of something beautiful in my father’s arms.

  the brown and the pink

  Mona leaned in and whispered into my ear, “Stuart Langley might be at the party tonight. Would you ever do it with him?”

  I shrugged, not sure of the right answer. “I don’t know. Would you?”

  Mona licked her lips and said, “Me, I’d try anything once. But I know you. You’re a baby. You’d be too scared of that big black cock.”

  I laughed and hugged myself against the wind of the open road.

  The pickup truck belonged to Dennis, and the party was at his house. He was twenty-one, too old to be giving high-school parties, and because of his reputation, none of the other freshman girls was allowed to go that weekend. But my mother had simply smiled when I had asked her. She’d told me: “It’s your choice, mush.”

  We’d be the youngest girls there, and Mona promised me that all of the upper-classmen boys would want us. I had only one boy on my mind. I had heard that Nicholas was coming back to stay. He had been expelled from his boarding school for good, though I still hadn’t been able to find out why. His parents had mentioned it to my mother with grim expressions, saying, “If he wants to stay in this podunk town, throw away his opportunities, we’re going to let him, goddamn it.” My mother had reported this news to Jim and me over dinner. She had seemed impressed by Nicholas, his ability to get kicked out of an institution of wealth and privilege. She said, “He probably feels more at home around real people, not those snobs at boarding school. I can totally relate. I went through the same thing at his age. Good for him.”

  Nicholas had told me before he left: “Don’t get too comfortable here.” Back then, I still wore grass-stained Toughskins and my hair in twin braids. Nearly two years had gone by since then, and I wondered if he’d notice the changes in me.

  Dennis lived on the outskirts of town, where he and his roommates could grow marijuana in the backyard, free from the eyes of nosy neighbors. The house was littered with junk—beer, garbage, underwear strewn over furniture.

  Before the party began, I went into the bathroom to primp. I was just putting on some peacock-feather earrings that Mona had lent me when Dennis opened the door without knocking. I was glad I hadn’t been on the toilet. He stepped inside, leaving the door open a crack behind him.

  He had a six-pack of beer in his hand. “Bud, Jesse?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  He winked at me. “You look good.”

  He was being nicer than usual, and he stood behind me, watching me in the mirror as I finished putting on the earring.

  “You’re growing up,” he said, eyeing me in the mirror. “You’re growing up real nice. You got a boyfriend, Jesse?”

  I didn’t like the way he was looking me up and down, and watched as he hawked and spit into his trusty brown-and-pink cup. “No. Not really,” I answered.

  “You will,” he said licking his lips.

  I blushed and tried to squeeze past him out of the bathroom to find Mona.

  He stood in my path and slid his hand around my waist. “Aren’t you going to thank me for the beer?”

  I began to wheeze as if I were having an asthma attack, saying, “Thanks. I gotta go find my inhaler. I got asthma.” Sweat tickled my arm
pits as I shoved past him.

  I found Mona in Dennis’s bedroom, where she stood before the mirror in a stuffed black bra and dingy gray Hello Kitty underwear. She was rubbing her cheeks furiously, trying to blend in the streaks of hot-pink blush. The room smelled of damp laundry.

  “Hey, Jess, how does this blush look? I stole it from my mom.”

  I told her, “It looks fine. I mean, listen, your brother, Dennis—”

  “Half brother, you mean.”

  “Half brother, yeah. He was acting kind of funny in the bathroom just now. I don’t know—” I stopped in mid-sentence, hoping she would read my mind.

  She sort of laughed. “Oh, was he trying to feel you up or something? Next time tell him to go jerk off.”

  Mona and I emerged from his room—full makeup, stuffed bras, skintight jeans, hardened hair—just as the party people started filing in, cracking beers, blasting the J. Geils Band, and slumping onto the furniture.

  I stood in a corner for the first hour, by the keg, filling people’s plastic cups and drinking out of my own. Although I had been taking occasional sips of my mother’s beer and wine for as long as I could remember, I had never had this much, and before I knew it, I was dizzy. The people around me looked ghoulish, waving plastic cups in my face and belching. I told a bucktoothed girl in braces to watch the keg, and stumbled off toward the kitchen.

  I peeked in the swinging door and breathed in quickly with shock, surprise, delight. Nicholas’s hair was longer and hung around his face like a girl’s. He looked intoxicated and was laughing hysterically with another boy, the black kid, Stuart Langley.

  I stepped in, and the two boys turned to me.

  Their eyes were red and doped. Nicholas didn’t seem to recognize me at first, then a slow smile slid onto his lips.

  “Well, if it isn’t my little riding partner, Jesse.”

  He pulled me to him and knuckled my head. “Look at you, all made up like a little clown.”

  I blushed, embarrassed now at the mounds of powder-blue eye shadow, the streaks of hot-pink blush that Mona had encouraged me to put on.