by Reif Larsen
“He is okay?” Kermin was asking from behind. “He looks . . .” There was not a word for this. And now the first full-force wail from the infant, announcing his own arrival.
“Doctor, should we do an Apgar test?” the nurse asked. The doctor hesitated, mystified, holding the baby up to the beam of light. The body squirmed, half white, half black—a negative image of itself. There was a chance this was all still a dream, though the pain in his oblique muscles told him otherwise. He had lived long enough to know that pain never appears in dreams.
From somewhere down the hall came the sound of urgent shouting.
Dr. Sherman snapped back to life. “It’s a boy!” he said, flushing out the obvious. He busied himself with wiping away the rest of the vernix and then snipped the umbilical cord with a precision that calmed his nerves.
“I’ll get an Apgar. Can we get some more lamps in here?” He was enjoying speaking aloud. The act of speaking was making this world possible again. “And what the hell happened with the electric? Can someone find out? You would think with all of this modern technology . . .”
“Can I have him?” Charlene said from the darkness.
“We just want to run a few tests to make sure—” Dr. Sherman was in the process of handing the baby off to the nurse when a deep, mechanical moan rose up from somewhere in the building. The central air system shuddered and the ducts began to exhale above their heads and then all of the lights in the room sputtered on, one by one.
Those collected in the birthing room blinked as their pupils constricted with this explosion of photons. Everyone stared at the baby wriggling in the doctor’s outstretched hands. In the harsh light of the fluorescents, the infant’s skin, marked by the last globs of remaining vernix, was as black as the darkness from which he had just emerged. The umbilical cord and its apparatus dangled white and translucent against tiny, pumping legs the color of charcoal. Such monochromatic contrast appeared manufactured; the child looked like a puppet come to life.
“Why is he . . . so like this?” Kermin finally blurted out.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Dr. Sherman said reflexively, finishing the handoff to the nurse. “Many newborns have a different skin color when they first come out of the womb. A mark of transition. This will all correct itself.”
“Is something wrong?” Charlene asked, drunk on her drugs, her pasty skin flush with the exertion of her labor. She reached for her child, but he was already being wheeled out of the room on a special trolley, followed by the doctor, who began yelling at someone down the hall.
“Is something wrong?” Charlene asked again. “What is that smell?”
“He is . . .” Kermin said, staring at the door, left to wander closed on its hinges. They were suddenly, strangely alone. “He is . . . Radar.”
“Radar?”
“His name: Radar.”
To her horror, Charlene realized they had never settled on a name. On several occasions they had tentatively circled the topic, but each time, all she could muster was a halfhearted short list of names for girls, and these tended to be lifted directly from famous novels: Anna, Dolores, Hester, Lucie, Edna. Every choice seemed either too obvious or too obscure or both too obvious and too obscure at the same time. How to name someone who existed only in theory? And coming up with a single viable boy name proved next to impossible. You were not just naming the boy—you were naming the man. Kermin, of course, proved no help at all; all five of his suggestions had been lifted from an electromagnetic textbook. And so Charlene succumbed to the narrative that they would have a girl and that all would become clear later. The decision of the name had been abandoned for simpler, tactile assignments, such as assembling the crib. They had cleared out space for the nursery; they had bought diapers and a kaleidoscope of onesies; they had inherited an outdated perambulator from her parents; but they had chosen no name. Except now that the baby had arrived (and left again), now that the baby had in fact revealed himself to be a he, the absence of a name suddenly took on great significance. He could not exist without a name.
“Radar,” Kermin said again. “You know, radar. Like bats. And aeroplanes.”
“I know what radar is,” she said. She willed her brain into action. “What about . . . Charles?” Charles had been the name of her preschool boyfriend. He had punched her in the stomach to declare his love. She had not thought of him in at least thirty years, but now his name rose from the depths and became the stand-in for all things male.
“Charles?” said Kermin.
“Yes, he can be a Charlie . . . or Chuck . . . or Chaz.”
“Chaz? What is Chaz?”
She sighed. She was too tired for this.
“Okay, not Charles, then. What about your father’s name?”
“Dobroslav? This is peasant name.”
“I’m being serious, Kerm! What about your name?”
His own name was not so much a name as a signal of protest. In the small Serbian village in eastern Croatia where he was born, a name was practically all you had. To know your name was to know your history, your present standing, the circumscription of your future. It was the one thing you could never escape. His father, in a feat of madness or brilliance, had bucked their heritage and invented the name Kermin, in service to no tradition, lineage, or culture. Kermin had thus been both blessed and cursed: his singularity established, he could claim to have never met another with his same name, but he had also weathered a lifetime of confused looks when introduced on both sides of the Atlantic. Kermit? Like the frog?
“But listen,” he said. “I am being serious: Radar is name. Have you seen this television program M*A*S*H?” He articulated each letter, as if they were made out of wood. “Corporal Radar O’Reilly can sense the choppers before they arrive. It is like he has this ESP.”
“We don’t want our child to have ESP,” said Charlene, bringing her hands to her face. The hospital bracelet white against her wrist. “I just want to see him . . . Where did they take him? They can’t just take him like that . . . I want to see him, Kerm. Bring him back to me.”
Later, hunkered down in a deserted corner of the hospital, Kermin tapped out a message on his telegraph key, his thumb conjuring signal with the quiver of the smooth brass lever. The clusters of clicks and clats evaporated into the air, invisible pulses slipping out into the Jersey night, to be collected like dew by the radios of those who were listening in the early-morning hours:
—• —•• — •— 4 17 75.
MY SON IS BORN. RADAR RADMANOVIC.
MOTHER IS FINE. BABY IS FINE. I AM FINE.
KAKAV OTAC TAKAV SIN.
73, K2W9
Moments before, the nurse had asked Kermin for the child’s name.
“I must type it up,” she said. “For the certificate.”
He had glanced through the doorway at his sleeping wife.
“Radar,” he said, testing the boundaries of truth. “It’s Radar.”
“Radar?” The nurse raised her eyebrows, unsure she had heard the word correctly.
“Radar,” he confirmed, bouncing and recalling his fingers from an invisible barrier. “Like this: Signal. Echo. Return.”
Fig. 1.1. Radar’s Certificate and Record of Birth
From Popper, N. (1975), “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s,” Newark Star-Ledger, April 18, 1975, p. A1
2
The birth of such an extremely dark baby (described as “blacker than the blackest black” by an overeager Star-Ledger reporter) to two white parents was Jersey gossip that could not be kept quiet for long. The news of the birth must have been leaked by one of the orderlies, or one of the janitors, or perhaps even the nurse who had typed up the certificate of birth. Someone had talked to someone who had talked to someone, and suddenly there was a small group of reporters wandering around the maternity ward the next morning asking questions to an
yone who would listen: You’re telling me this wasn’t just a mix-up, right? The kid could be from another family . . . No? Okay, well, had the mother slept around? All right, all right. Fair enough. So then what was wrong with him? Okay, but what do you call that kind of thing? Was it a disease? What were the chances of this kind of thing happening? Yeah, but ballpark: one in a million? One in a billion? How black was he really? That black? Like Nigerian black? So then, when can we see him? What do you mean? Well, come on now, that’s a load of horseshit.
The day after his birth, the Newark Star-Ledger ran a front-page article with the relatively modest headline “Caucasian Couple Give Birth to Black Newborn at St. Elizabeth’s.” Lacking a serviceable photograph, they settled for a poorly rendered xerox of Radar’s birth certificate, as if this was all the proof anyone could need. Across the Hudson, the New York Post declared, “Jersey Freak of Nature: White Parents . . . Black Baby!” and then proceeded to give very few details elaborating on their inflammatory headline. Baby Radar, caught in a genealogical conundrum not of his choosing, had suddenly become a cultural touchstone.
Perhaps all of the fuss was due to the alchemy of that particular time and place: eight years removed from the ’67 Newark riots, urban white flight was now in full swing. The manufacturing industry was steadily collapsing, leaving New Jersey in the throes of a severe recession. People—both white and black alike—were struggling to come to terms with the great expectations laid forth by the civil rights movement of the previous decade. How would such lofty ideals play out in the banal commerce of the everyday? Had everything changed? Or, as many were slowly realizing, had nothing really changed at all?
No doubt the story also gained traction because the simplest and most obvious explanation for Radar’s appearance, the explanation that spawned a thousand breakfast table jokes—a.k.a. “the milkman theory”—ultimately proved inadequate, given the child’s coloring. If the people could only have gotten a good look at the baby, they would have understood, once and for all, that mere infidelity could not possibly have triggered such a dramatic swing in color from the whitest of whites to “the blackest of blacks.” And yet the people could not get a good look at Radar Radmanovic, because there were no photos of him save a (supposed) shot of his incubator, taken from some distance. With such scant evidence, the public was left to wonder on their own about the nature of inheritance, about what was passed down to a child and what was not, about the chances of such a highly unusual genetic occurrence—if it was indeed a genetic occurrence—ever happening to one of their own children. In the midst of all this, the family remained secretive, declining all interviews, shunning photographers, despite rumors of several five-figure offers for an exclusive photo shoot and rights to their story.
On one of the morning talk radio shows, a then relatively unknown Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, who was about to embark on the famous ten-day tour of apartheid South Africa that would subsequently springboard him into the international spotlight, weighed in on the case, admonishing the media for implicitly accusing “the black male scapegoat of raping another one of its white women.”
“This,” he said emphatically, “is an act of God, not of one man. This child is blessed. I hope the family realizes just how lucky they are.”1
Radar’s story lingered in the Jersey tabloids for only a week or so. Various medical professionals and semi-professionals were called in to offer half-baked theories for what might have happened to the baby—theories that ranged from a rare double-recessive melanism gene expression (“A distant black ancestor come to life!”) to toxic waste exposure from one of New Jersey’s many Meadowlands industrial sewage dumps (“The child was a mutant!”). After this initial flurry of coverage, however, the story, like all stories, shriveled up and eventually disappeared, and Radar and his condition would not be heard of again until nearly four years later, when Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald would deliver his much-anticipated diagnosis, “On an Isolated Incidence of Non-Addison’s Hypoadrenal Uniform Hyperpigmentation in a Caucasian Male,” in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
Charlene Radmanovic, for her part, emerged from the afterglow of the birth with a strange olfactory condition, in which everything around her smelled exactly the same, and of such an intensity as to be almost paralyzing. At first the hospital and all of its contents smelled of something approximate to burnt Cocoa Krispies. The night nurse, the squishy spinach greens in her muted meals, the urine-resistant plastic pillows, the television remote buttons—everything was morning cereal, permanently singed and distinctly nauseating. Most distressing of all was that her own son, whom she was eventually allowed to hold, smelled so strongly that she could not be near him for long without becoming overwhelmed by his smoldering stench. It was the worst kind of torture—to be repulsed by the very thing one should love above all else. Breast-feeding felt like the most unnatural act in the world. He would not latch, and she quickly grew too dizzy to persist for long. Her complaints were answered with more painkillers, and when these did not work, a half-blind British otolaryngologist was summoned to her bedside. He prodded her sensory orifices and declared the condition temporary.
“A childbirth is an explosion,” he said by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?”
A week of intensive tests confirmed that everything else with Radar, save his unlikely hue, was more or less normal. A couple of the results were slightly worrisome: the iron content in his blood was elevated, as were his cortisol levels, though neither of these was unusual for newborns recovering from the hormonal starburst of birthing and the violent adjustment to a new world of oxygen and sunlight. Baby Radar also exhibited slightly higher-than-normal blood pressure and suffered from moderately dry skin that required treatment with a prescription lotion. But nothing so out of the ordinary as to point to a cause for his unusual appearance. His hair, present from birth, was soft and black and straight, just like his father’s. Indeed, if you could look past his darkness, Radar perfectly resembled a little Kermin: there was the same dimpled chin, the same funicular jawline, the same protrusive brow. If not for their diametric coloring, there would be no question of their relation.
Luckily, the public debate around Charlene’s possible infidelity, a debate that had ignited all sorts of heated exchanges about race and sexuality in the local media, had not quite managed to pierce the cocoon of their hospital room. Dr. Sherman had done well to keep the cameras at bay. He was distinctly aware of the care one must take when wading into such a sensitive subject. At the time, comprehensive DNA testing was not readily available, and questions of legitimate parentage could often linger indefinitely. Still, Dr. Sherman thought it his duty to inform them of their options, should they want to pursue certain answers, and so, the day they were scheduled to take Radar home, he called them into his office for a final meeting.
“Here we are!” he said. “Hard to believe it’s only been a week.”
Charlene looked exhausted.
“What,” she asked, bringing a hand to her nose, “do we do now?”
“Well . . .” He thumbed at his pen. “That all depends. I’m not sure if you want to do a test.”
“A test?” she said. “For what?”
He paused. “For paternity. There’s a new procedure available that uses HLA from both father and baby, but it’s expensive, and the lab needs a significant amount of blood to test, so we would need to wait until the baby is at least six or eight months—”
“What’re you saying?” she said.
“What am I saying?”
A silence.
Dr. Sherman held up his hands. “Look, I didn’t mean to suggest anything one way or another. I was merely pointing out that there are tests out there, should you choose to want to know these things.”
Kermin was staring at his wife. She was looking back at him, steadily. After a moment, her eyes filled with tears.
“Kermin,” she said, rea
ching out for his hand. “Kermin. Kermin.”
Dr. Sherman decided it was time to start speaking again. “It’s all your choice, of course. Regardless, you’ll no doubt want to see a specialist about your son.”
He handed her a list of referrals, which Charlene accepted, only briefly shifting her gaze away from her husband’s face. His eyes had stayed hot, but there was now something dull and sooty around their edges, something she had not seen before, like glowing embers suddenly shushed by a bucket of water.
“One of these doctors I’m sure will help you get to the bottom of what’s going on here. Truly, in all my years, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” He paused, looking at them over his spectacles. “But I say this not to worry you.”
That evening, at the suggestion of Dr. Sherman, they left the hospital through a service entrance, so as to avoid any lingering paparazzi. They arrived home to a house that felt like it belonged to a couple of strangers. Everything was familiar but not their own. The curtains were too brown, the forks were too big.
During her first week out of the hospital, Charlene’s olfactive focus gradually transitioned from burnt breakfast cereal to something more sinister. Descriptors proved elusive; the closest she could come to describing the stench was rotten meat that had been heavily grilled and then doused with an astringent lemon-scented cleaner. It was a three-toned miasma that pounded her in waves. She tried to nurse her son but would quickly be consumed by an enduring sensation of rotting flesh. One evening, she left him squirming on the bed as she fled to the bathroom, weeping at her own futility.