by Danzy Senna
Dot was looking at me curiously, as if she were seeing me in a different light—a sorry light. “Bird,” she said, “you don’t have to worry about all that. Your mother’s running from something, but it’s not what you think it is. It’s not what she thinks it is.”
Her words reminded me of the night in the barn, after my mother had told Jim who we really were—the night not believing her had become a possibility. I asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Dot said with a sad smile, “I don’t think your mama’s in—or has ever been in—the kind of trouble she likes to think she’s in. All of us did things during that time that were a little wild—but the FBI is only interested in a few of us. And I truly doubt your mother was one of the wanted ones.”
I felt strangely defensive, and twisted a loose thread around the tip of my finger, watching the red swollen bulb turn to blue. I blurted out: “That’s not true. My mother did do something bad. Really bad. In the good sense. And they do want her. She wouldn’t have run for this long if it wasn’t true. Besides, I saw her. In the night. With the guns.”
Dot was frowning, her curiosity slightly piqued, but doubt in her eyes.
My finger had turned numb. “You weren’t there, Dot, so how would you know?”
Dot only patted my hand. “Maybe, Bird, just maybe. Who knows? Right? But you can be sure of one thing. You don’t have to be afraid of me. I love your mother and I love you.”
She was trying to keep the peace, but I could see that she didn’t really believe me. That she thought my mother was crazy. I untwisted the thread from around my finger and watched the blood rush down into the digit, turning my fingertip pink again.
I needed to switch the subject, turn the focus away from my mother. It was too much to think about. We both weren’t ready. So we talked instead about her—where she had gone and why.
Dot told me, while the light faded around us into a pale winter blue, that she had left because America was poisonous that year. And she didn’t want to let the poison enter her system. She had left in order to save herself. She wanted to go deeper than skin color, deeper than politics, to something more important. Something spiritual. Something she thought she could find only in India.
“I remember the day I finally left,” she told me. “All my friends in their dashikis, with their raised fists, came to say good-bye. I remember thinking that they were so sweet and lost and stuck, and I thought I was so free, just leaving them all behind.”
She stopped talking. She looked a little sad. Then she said, “I knew my people were screwed and I wanted to get as far away from them as I possibly could. Seems so evil. But that’s the way I felt. Deck used to read Fanon to me when we were in college. He used to say, ‘Wait’ll you see the final stage of oppression. Niggers killing niggers.’ And I thought I saw it happening all around me when I left. I had to go.”
She told me she had lived with Raj and his followers in the mountains outside Calcutta. For four years she studied under him. And became his lover. She said she learned a lot from him, but even more from just being away from all that was familiar.
“I wasn’t locked in a body anymore. I was a spirit, searching for something invisible. And I found it.”
She told me of one night, when she was six months pregnant with Taj, when it was so hot outside that everyone—her “family”—slept on the floors of the ashram to stay cool. Dot had gone down to the river, just to cool off. She wore a nightgown as she waded in the water there, touching her belly, and it struck her how happy she was. She told me: “At some point I even started yelling out loud, ‘I’m in India and I’m going to have a baby!’ I couldn’t believe it was me, Dorothy Lee, old ordinary skinny-legged, ashy-skinned Dorothy Lee from the Orchard Park projects, in the middle of the Holy Land acting like a fool. It was too much. I wanted to stay that way forever.”
We both laughed, and I tried to envision her in the water, hollering into the blank Indian night. I looked at her, searching her features for my father’s. There was something in the mouth, the high cheekbones, the forehead, but I wasn’t sure if I was making it up, just seeing things. I had felt an aching in my chest as I listened to her describe the joy of being away from America. It was clear to me, hearing her, that my father and Cole had no possible reason to return. They were free. They were playing in the water, unburdened, no longer held back by that which they had left behind.
When I spoke, my voice was thick. “Did you miss here at all?”
Dot turned to me. She stroked my hair and smiled. “Did I miss America?”
She paused, then let out a low, long whistle, as if her answer were too complicated to put into words. “You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I’d dream about these details, these objects and people and places I’d left behind, and I’d wake up crying. I used to close my eyes before bed and see your papa’s face, my mother’s face, hear the Supremes playing distantly in my ears. Origins sure are powerful and shit. You can’t shake them. I didn’t want to miss America, but the truth of the matter is, in India, I was more American than I’d ever been at home.”
“Why did you finally leave?”
Dot laughed and said it was the music that finally got her to leave India. She told me that she was sitting in Bombay one day, Raj at her side, Taj at her breast, when she heard Roberta Flack singing from some small radio. She hadn’t heard black music in three years, and something opened up inside of her. Roberta, she said, was singing, Try to wake it real, but compared to what… And Dot decided right then that she had to come home.
“I had been agonizing over the question for the past month, but when I heard that sound it seemed so simple, the answer. I didn’t want to be so far from black American music, the greatest music in the world. I just suddenly felt this insatiable hunger for it. So I left.”
“So, are you glad you came back?” I bit my nails and looked down, feeling as if something bigger rested on her answer.
Propping herself up on one elbow, she said, “It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere. But it’s a good place to be, I think. It’s like floating. From up above, you can see everything at once. It’s the only way how.”
casts and die
I slept on the couch that night. I could see into the window across the street. A silhouette moved behind muslin curtains, a male figure hunched and attached to a telephone cord. Earlier that evening I had been given the chance to call my mother, and didn’t. I knew I should have contacted her—from a pay phone, where I couldn’t be traced, tapped, bugged—but I had chosen not to. This was the longest I had ever gone without hearing my mother’s voice. This was the quietest my mother would ever be to me—but it was a not a peaceful silence. It was a silence heavy with her rage and anguish. Dot wanted me to call her, but I was afraid. Afraid she would make me come back to New Hampshire, and afraid I would go back, empty-handed, with nothing to show. When Dot persisted, saying that my mother couldn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to, I resorted to the old line reasoning: I told her that it wasn’t safe, that a promise was a promise and that my mother had made me swear never to tell a soul where she was. Dot had rolled her eyes as if she knew, for sure, there was nothing to be afraid of.
The streetlights were keeping me from sleep. In New Hampshire there had been complete darkness. I had grown used to those pitch-black country nights. The sky here was a city sky, interrupted by concrete and wires. Dot had told me I could stay here as long as I needed. And it seemed the perfect solution. For me to move in with them, make them my new family. But something about it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t Boston I was looking for. It was my si
ster, whispering stories to me to help me fall asleep, holding my hand, telling me in Elemeno that everything was going to be all right. It was my father and my mother loving and hating each other somewhere nearby, their curses and their laughter ringing up through the vents of our house. I had come here on a mission, to find them.
And if I didn’t find them—there weren’t many options. Stay with Dot. Go back to my mother. Or find Corvette. She had told me she’d be hanging out at Braddock Park, and I saw myself suddenly, decked out in a silver dress with a fur stole and bright fuchsia lipstick, a cigarette dangling from my lips, surrounded by a gaggle of similarly painted women. Waiting for some stranger to take me home. My feet were large. Perhaps they would fit Corvette’s shoes, I thought to myself, before succumbing finally to sleep.
LATE THE NEXT MORNING I woke to the sound of my aunt’s voice, one side of a telephone conversation coming from the kitchen. I lay languidly, fingering the tassels on the blanket, listening to the benign “un-hun”s and “oh, of course”s and watching the stream of rain that fell against the window. I felt a lightness, an excitement tinged with hysteria, that I was so far from New Hampshire and my mother.
Dot’s voice came closer, and then I heard her say:
“Yes, Sandy— I know, sugar— She’s— Well, of course you’ve been sick with worry— Are you serious? I’m so sorry that I waited even this long. I just didn’t know the number. I found her school identification and tracked you down that way. Once I knew the town and the last name, it wasn’t so hard. Not too many Goldmans up in those parts—Oh, well. I suppose so. The die has been cast.”
I saw my aunt’s slim figure coming toward me now, with a phone pressed to her ear, a small white bowl in one hand that emanated steam and the smell of coffee.
“Well, she’s right here.”
Then the phone was being extended down toward me. It was too early for this. I glared at my aunt, my best look of outrage. I felt my insides drop and my face heating up. I considered getting up and racing out the door, down the steps, into the Boston rain in only a T-shirt Dot had lent me—a T-shirt similar to something Jim would wear—with the words “Reggae Sunsplash ‘81” across it. But Dot stood over me, forbidding, her dreadlocks piled up in a bun, the phone extended in her fist. She mouthed the word “Sorry,” but her eyes were unrelenting.
I took the phone and sat up, shivering as I pulled the afghan around my body. I put the receiver to my ear.
“Hi, Mum.”
I could hear her sniffle on the other end, pause, sigh. Then her voice came out, raspy: “Fuck you. Do you even realize what you’ve put me through, you little two-faced son-of-a-bitch—”
Someone—Jim, I suspected—took the phone away from her. A hand clamped over the mouthpiece, making a suction sound. I could hear some hissing argument taking place, and imagined that Jim was trying to calm her down.
Jim got on the line. “Jesse, it’s me,” he said. “Listen, kid, you know you screwed up. You know you should have told us what was going on. But we’ll talk about that later. First we need to know when you’re coming home.”
“Never,” I said. I glanced up at Taj, who stood draped in her mother’s red-and-gold kimono at the door.
“Well, that’s just not acceptable, Jess. We need to talk this over, when we’re all a little less—”
He was cut off, and my mother’s voice returned on the line. “Have you forgotten? I can’t fuck around like this with your little adolescent rebellion. We’re not like the goddamn Partridge Family. I’ve got bigger things to worry about. It’s not just about you. You’re putting us all at risk now. Jesus, Jess, I thought you understood that after all we’ve been through together.”
Her voice had softened a bit. She sighed, then said, “Listen, we need to talk. When are you coming back here from your little vacation?”
I paused. “I’m not. Coming back. Dot said I could stay here as long as I need to. I’m looking for them. I’m not waiting anymore.”
My mother was silent. Then finally she said, “Give me Dot. I can’t talk to you right now. This is bullshit.”
I handed the phone to Dot, glad to get away from it. Taj slid off her mother’s lap, came over, and crawled under the covers with me. She said to me, “I like you. You’re my sister now. Can I bring you to show-and-tell tomorrow?”
I was distracted, though, trying to eavesdrop on Dot’s conversation with my mother. She had left the room with the phone. I heard her whispering, “Yep, I know, Sand. Of course. Well, okay. Let’s talk then.”
A pause. Then, “Baby, it’s good to hear your voice too. It’s been too long.”
She came back into the living room, frowning. I started to say something, but she put up a hand. “Bird, let’s give this some time. Stay here for a while, think about the situation you’ve put yourself in. Then we’ll talk about it. I think you and Sandy just need a little time before you can think straight about this. Okay?”
She came toward me, pulling out a chopstick that had been stuck in her hair like a magic wand. Ropes of hair came flooding around her face. I hadn’t noticed before, but her locks were gold at the tips.
DOT WORKED HARD. As much as she seemed to float above the world’s problems, in her everyday activity she was totally grounded on earth. She taught English at a high school in Mattapan. She loved her job. She told me that in that cramped and dingy classroom she had found the meaning of all that soul searching. She left for work at the crack of dawn, taking Taj to kindergarten along the way. After a day of teaching, she usually went with Taj to some spiritual center in Cambridge, where she would meditate and socialize. She had friends all around Boston. Her friends were white and black and international, but they all were linked by a similar fixation on natural food and spiritual enlightenment.
A couple of them came by my second day—a lean, bearded black man in ethnic clothing, and a tiny pixyish white woman with pale, glowing skin. Dot introduced me to them as her niece, and they flashed me spacey smiles and asked me to join them for tea in the kitchen. I had grown shy, and slightly jealous that my aunt had friends outside of me, and retired to Dot’s bedroom.
After they left, Dot came and lay with me on the bed. She told me that they were friends of hers from her religious center. As we lay there, Dot filled me in on her theories. She had plenty of them. They weren’t like my father’s theories, which had been based on bodies and where they fit in the world. Her theories were based on the soul, the spirit, and she said they were the thing—besides Taj—that had helped her survive over the years. Like my mother’s mix-and-match school of religion, Dot’s was a blend as well, of Buddhism, Hinduism, mystical Catholicism, and something of her own.
“You only meet five souls in your life, baby,” she said that evening. “They come disguised in different flesh, different skin, different bones, and they float around you always in an invisible circle.”
She said that people just look different. “Actually, they’re a part of someone you’ve known before. Taj is a soul I’ve known before. I’d swear to it. I mean, she’s only three years old. But I can tell. She’s so damn familiar. Always has been. Like the taste of red wine. It’s in her eyes.”
I watched Dot as she spoke. When I was little, I had wanted to grow up to be just like her. Now we lay side by side, and it struck me that I was more like my father than I was like her. I wondered if I’d ever transcend the skin, the body. If I would ever believe in something I couldn’t see. It seemed that in order to be as light as Dot, one couldn’t afford to believe in evil. Not the way my mother and father did. They believed in evil they could see, and evil they couldn’t. Dot believed only in good.
She was busy explaining to me her thoughts on color. “There’s skin color, eye color, hair color, and then there’s invisible color—that color rising above you. It’s the color of your soul, and it rests just beyond the skin.”
I asked for examples. Like my father, I too needed proof.
She was happy to oblige. She was silent for
a moment, thinking. Finally, she said, “Okay. If my memory serves me correctly, your papa is green, your mama is blue, and your sister is most definitely purple.”
I wanted to be skeptical. Her ideas reminded me too much of my mother’s mantras. But something in her words rang true.
She told me Taj was orange, like a Creamsicle, and that she herself was yellow.
Then I asked Dot, “What color am I?” The last time I’d asked that question, I’d been in the woods of New Hampshire. Samantha had told me what color I was. She had said I was Jewish, but she had been joking, just playing along with what she knew to be a gag. Later she had told me I was black like her. At least that’s what I had heard. Those words had made something clearer. Made it clear that I didn’t want to be black like Samantha. A doomed, tragic shade of black. I wanted to be black like somebody else.
Dot hoisted herself up on her elbow and looked down at me across the darkness. She smelled of cocoa butter. I felt self-conscious, nervous about what she was going to say. But finally she smiled and said what I hadn’t expected.
“I’ve got it. You, Ms. Birdie Lee, are a deep dark red.”
WHILE DOT TAUGHT and Taj learned, I wandered the city. It was a cold March, and the wind froze in my nostrils, stiffened my fingers. The sky was the bleak shade of dirty snow, turning dark by four in the afternoon. I had been in Boston only three days, but I felt different. Each step I took forward made it more difficult for me to turn back. The city felt haunted—cold, merciless, unyielding. The same city my father had said was “suicide for a black man.” Everything seemed smaller, dingier than my memory had allowed. There was Aku-Aku, the “tropical Polynesian getaway” where I had ordered the “pu-pu platter with toilet paper on the side.” The swan boats in the Public Gardens. The roller disco in Kenmore Square, where Cole and I had zoomed around and around, hand in hand, while my father sat nearby, scribbling notes for his next book.