I was full of apprehension, wearing a halter dress that I’d bought with money saved from mowing lawns, cleaning houses, and babysitting. It was Memorial Day, 1976, the year of America’s Bicentennial, which we’d been hearing about all year in school, seeing giant flags painted everywhere. A hot May afternoon, and instead of casually stopping by one evening after school to meet Dwayne’s parents and maybe some of his brothers and sisters, he was bringing me to Memorial Day. I didn’t know until we pulled up to the driveway that any Sims holiday meant about a hundred people. Uncles and aunts, cousins, neighbors, and friends. People were holding Miller High Life or Coors tall cans. From a stereo set up under the carport, Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger was playing, his inimitable voice mixed with roaring laughter from Dwayne’s brothers and cousins. General Sims II shouted for them to turn it off because he was going to play Earl Grant, his favorite obscure jazz organist, and everyone protested. Then they noticed me.
I had taken off my glasses, so everyone was a little blurry until I got within about ten feet. But I knew what they saw: a way-too-short, way-too-thin white girl with my best attempt at Farrah Fawcett wings of hair (I had bought a blow-dryer). Platform shoes I’d borrowed from a friend, shoes so old that the tiny nails all around the edges of the leather, which kept the insoles and wood together, kept coming out under my heels. Dwayne had seen me at school between classes, crouched over trying to hammer the little black nailheads with the cap of my Bonne Bell lipgloss. He had knocked the nails back in with a pocketknife. He took my arm now and began to say my name to the assembled.
The assembled were the descendants of Fine and her daughter Callie. The descendants of Mary and her daughter Daisy.
To get to this driveway, in a predominantly black and Mexican-American community formed back in 1880, to have arrived this far west in America and then finally rested, those women had survived white people whose inexorable violence was like Charybdis, the deadly whirlpool that pulled in the ship of Odysseus, and Scylla, the six-headed monster that plucked men off the deck—one for each head to swallow. They had fled black men like the Cyclops in his cave, who had to be fooled in order for his captive to leave, and ignored male Sirens whose songs told them to leap into the sea.
By 1976, Daisy lived around the corner from Alberta, on Eleventh Street and Kansas Avenue. Callie lived on Tenth Street, near Park Avenue, a few blocks away. Their beloved grandson was bringing home a white girl.
I knew none of the stories yet. Dwayne and I had been “going out,” meaning we had been meeting at parks and parties and riding around in other people’s vehicles, for months, but we had talked mostly about how I had to clean the laundromats, and one had just burned down, which was hard on my dad. How he and his brothers had to trim branches for their father, who was a gardener, and because his father was too cheap to buy tarpaulins to cover the load on the way to the city dump, the boys had to lie strategically spread-eagled on top of the heap of leaves and fronds so the cops wouldn’t give General a ticket. We talked a lot about basketball and tennis, and teachers, and our friends. Our friends could get drunk and high on Friday nights, but both of us had to be up at dawn on Saturday mornings—me for chores at the junkyard, him to trim trees and head to the dump. That was our bond.
But we were a couple now. At school, to recent public queries by cool athletes, “Oh, man, is that you, Sims?” Dwayne had raised his chin in the affirmative.
I knew nothing of Sunflower County or Tulsa. He knew nothing of the Swiss Alps or the Colorado Rockies.
In the driveway, he guided me first toward his uncles and the elderly neighbors. Some of the older relatives had watched black Tulsa burn in 1921 from fires set by white mobs after a young black man was accused of accosting a white woman in an elevator. Some of the older neighbors had lain as children under beds while the Klan wrecked their living rooms in Louisiana, looking for their fathers to drag outside. Two of Dwayne’s brothers, along with many other young black men, had been hauled to the police station and kept there for hours after two white policemen had been shot and killed near the park at the end of Michael Street, in 1971.
I wore no glasses. All faces were blurred. But men shook my hand. Or they nodded. They smiled. They lifted their chins one inch, reserved.
Just before we got to the front door, I stopped to look up at the porch light, a Spanish-style lantern with amber glass. Dwayne’s sister Christine Sims, granddaughter of Callie, and his cousin Margaret Chandler, great-niece of Daisy, both stood there, glaring. I put out my hand and Margaret said, “Oh, hell, no.” Christine was wearing a dashiki. She rolled her eyes and turned away.
But Alberta opened the screen door and said, “Here she is! Come on inside and get you a plate.”
At the long table in front of the mirrored dining room wall, Alberta made me a plate of food. Then, holding the plate, I met a whole circle of women in the living room, who sat near a huge fireplace with custom shelves on either side of the mantel, filled with black history books and Louis L’Amour paperbacks, and black cowboy portraits hung above. Maybe twenty women: Alberta’s sisters and their daughters, General’s sisters and their daughters, and his brother’s wives and their daughters, along with godmothers and neighbors. But I really couldn’t see the details of faces or hair or dress. I felt the stares of amusement, protective suspicion, and sidelong glances, and heard the murmurs of surprise. There were four generations of women inside that room.
Dwayne took me back outside to sit near the sidewalk with his brothers, who knew me from school and basketball games. They teased me for a time. I looked at the massive chimney at the head of the driveway. There was no garage, in this style of house. A carport, under which General II and the uncles and older men held court just on the other side of the distinctive gold-toned bricks from the women inside. General II and his friend Oscar Medina had built that chimney and the block walls surrounding the house, where he’d lined pots of orchids. From the huge ash tree, chains dangled to lift engines out of trucks and cars. By 1976, General II and his best friend, Jesse Lee Collins, from Muskogee, Oklahoma, had stopped working at the local Air Force base and become landscapers. Lawnmowers were lined up near the walls. But the most fantastical things were the odd trees plucked into comically Dr. Seuss–style shapes, growing in pots along the wrought-iron fence.
“My greens trees!” General II shouted. “Look at this young lady checking out my greens trees!” He led me over to the pots—the plants were collard greens that he trained into bonsai form, so people could easily harvest the leaves.
I heard laughter, music, shouted stories—circles of men, circles of women, kids our age sitting in truck beds or throwing footballs in the street. This was the exact opposite of my own grandparents’ gatherings, at their mobile home in Hemet, with the tiny platform of porch off the wrought-iron screen door under their pleated metal carport, the rectangle of wood covered with bright green artificial turf, only a few folding chairs that held my mother and stepfather, my two uncles and their wives. I was the eldest of Rosa Leu’s nine grandchildren—none from her own daughter. Every move we made annoyed my grandmother, so she invariably said, “Children are to be seen and not heard. Go now and play.” We’d cross the yard of gravel painted solid green to resemble lawn, presided over by a cement roadrunner, and head straight into the alfalfa fields. I never heard a single story under that carport.
But Rosa had Swiss chard plants—like greens trees, after she cut the outside leaves with a knife, leaving the white stalks with amputated arms. In the driveway, General’s perimeter garden was exactly like Rosa’s, the five-foot strip of earth around her trailer, the trellised grapevines and tomatoes and the Swiss chard. Memorial Day, I was holding the plate of food—and if you asked me what it was, I’d guess it was what we still eat in the driveway even now: ribs, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, and collard greens. I remember this: I wanted these women to like me. I was eating greens, and someone said, “I bet you never had greens before.”
They looked at me like I was crazy. How could I explain Switzerland? Explain a leafy vegetable named chard no one had ever heard of, and why my grandmother, the meanest woman I’d ever met, didn’t even like the green part but ate the thick white stems, boiled until soft? No. These collard greens had been cooked with ham and salt; they were ribbons of flavor in my mouth.
I had been trained for this. I could not panic. I stood up and walked toward the front door, and went directly to the kitchen, where Alberta was checking pots on the stove. The Formica counter was exactly like ours at home, except we had pink and gray lines like cake sprinkles in the white, and Alberta had gold flecks and sparkles in the white. I began to wash the dishes. She said, “Now, aren’t you sweet?” and as I had been trained by rigorous implacable Swiss women, I dried the dishes as well and cleaned the area around the faucet and then wiped down the counters. Alberta stood beside me, putting foil over the numerous plates I would later learn she prepared for everyone, the hundreds and hundreds of plates of food my mother-in-law sent home with people so they would not be hungry on a Monday, and then she began to talk as if we’d known each other forever. “You know, you have to make enough food for everyone,” she said. “Even the stranger that might stop by. You never know who’s gonna be hungry.” The foil in her hands rippled like a silver sail and made that shimmery sound before she settled it over the meat.
Alberta changed my life in ways immeasurable. She was the center of every constellation of people gathered in her yard and house, every afternoon, every weekend. She was lovely as a Supreme, with her sisters. But Alberta had a different charisma from her sisters. It was as if her face could not hold somberness. Her mouth curved upward even as she spoke, and she would nod with the exact slant of encouragement or sympathy at whoever she was listening to—whether an elderly visitor or a small child, or me—and say, “That’s right.”
I knew no one in my neighborhood who wore sequined formal gowns and dazzling dresses, with high heels and hats, and went to dances. But Alberta did—with her social club, with General and other couples out at March Air Force Base. Her eyebrows arched and flew, her lipstick was magenta, and she was so tall.
In the living room, on New Year’s Eve, she and General and their close friends Jesse Lee and Clarice Collins would dance. Cha-cha and mamba and hustle. They played cards, and music swung through the house.
But in the daytime, the house belonged to the women. Every afternoon when I was there, the soap operas playing were only choral background for the endless news and eternal weaving of family history and today’s gossip that made Alberta’s house, and General’s driveway, the center of the neighborhood.
And from the first moment she took my hand and led me to the kitchen, she taught me to cook in a way completely different from my own home. I had been cooking dinner since I was ten and my mother went back to school—but that was hot dog casserole and enchilada casserole and tuna casserole. My mother cooked well, but only for our family—seven of us, seven pork chops or seven pieces of chicken. There were no strangers.
Alberta cooked for the whole community. Huge pots of black-eyed peas with neck bones, fried chicken in massive cast-iron pans, smothered steak with gravy, and entire hams. I was good at cleaning, and watching. And if someone came into the kitchen and saw me, a short white girl, and was surprised, Alberta just laughed and said, “Look at her! You wouldn’t think somebody so little could lift a pot! She and Dwayne are so cute together. She knows how to clean greens!”
I had never known someone who had a line of credit at a department store, but Alberta did. Cocktail dresses, cocktail rings—I didn’t even know what a cocktail was, and she taught me the fashion. She took Dwayne shopping for me, and chose a jade pendant in gold filigree. It was the nicest piece of jewelry I had ever had. I still wear it.
One thing Dwayne and I laughed about: On Thursdays, the day liver was on sale at the local market, our mothers were the same. “You walk in the house and you smell onions and it’s the best smell in the world—and then you see it’s liver in the pan. Damn,” he’d say. “And your mom, too.”
II
10
Castas
There are paintings of the sixteen racial classifications Spanish colonizers “invented” in Latin America during the fifteenth century. Soldiers and other men arrived from the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, to a new continent, and immediately fathered children with women who were indigenous and then with women who were enslaved Africans.
Ironically, the painter chose very particular clothing and stylized family arrangements to display the fathers, mothers, and children for whom the Spanish gave an imaginary casta—a breed, a lineage, bizarre designations for each human.
Español con India: Mestizo. Mestizo con Española: Castizo. Castizo con Española: Español Criollo. A human could “work his way” back up to what was considered white Spanish within two generations, but of course that depended on melanin, facial features, and hair, and none of those characteristics were predictable.
Español con Moro: Mulato. Mulato con Española: Morisco. Morisco con Española: Chino—from cochino, the Spanish word for pig. Pelo chino—curly hair, like that of a sheep or pig.
Mulato was dreamed up from mules. It gets worse. Moro con India: Zambo. Negro con India: Lobo. Wolf. The men who spent their days categorizing humans according to animalistic, completely non-science-based categories referred to themselves as penínsulars.
Love. Melanin. Hair. One category says everything: torna atrás, which means, literally, “turn back.” This is a child of one-sixteenth black ancestry, born with dark skin and curly hair, to seemingly white parents.
The Spanish went to the Philippines, too. There, there were torna atrás, children who did not look like their parents. The Spanish, on those islands, came up with indio and india again, but there were Chinese people, whom they called sangley. A mestiza de sangley was a woman part Spanish, indigenous, and Chinese.
In America, the racial classifications set down in Haiti by the French and then brought to Louisiana employed more terms made up in random, dehumanizing fashion, and much more obsessed with mathematics: noir was a human thought to be “100%” African; sacatra was ⅞ noir and ⅛ blanc; griffe was ¾ noir; marabou ⅝ noir; mulatre ½ noir; quadroon ¼; octoroon ⅛; mameloque ; quarteronne ; and someone who was black was called sang mele, which means “mixed blood.”
In our part of southern California, not near the ocean, not anything the rest of America would have recognized as “California dreaming,” we were the descendants of the love resulting from combat, military movement, and chance. As in other nations around the world, we were the result of war. The Civil War, which brought men from every state in the union, including Buffalo soldiers, Mormon soldiers, Mexican and Swiss and Apache mercenaries, and Italians who wanted to grow grapes; the Mexican Revolution, which brought men from Mexico and New Mexico and Arizona and Texas; World War II, which took men to Germany, France, Britain, the Philippines, Japan, Guam, from which places they came back with brides; the wars in Korea and Vietnam took men to Korea, China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, and Thailand, from which places they came back with brides. Here from the beginning of time: indigenous Cahuilla and Chemehuevi people who numbered in the thousands around inland southern California. A descendant of Hine Thomas married a member of the Torres-Martinez tribe, near Mecca.
Growing up here, if anyone had tried to use weird animal or math-related terms, a serious beating would be the result. People weren’t necessarily polite, but before grilling someone about heritage, they tried to figure others out by looking at their parents, siblings, vehicles, houses, clothes, and second languages. The word most often used: half. She’s half. He’s half. You had to be capable of nuance and observation: Here for generations had been indigenous families, many Mexican-American families like the Trujillos, who had arrived in 1842, and pioneer Africa
n-American families whose ancestors had arrived in the 1870s. But many mothers were from somewhere else. Fathers were from every state in the nation, black men who’d decided never to go back to the rural poverty and racism of Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Texas, white men who’d decided never to go back to the snow and cold of South Dakota, Minnesota, or in the case of my stepfather, Canada.
We, their children, just wanted to figure out who had a car, money for tacos or burritos or pizza, money for alcohol or drugs, and a yard or field where we could party. We cared about transportation, clothes, shoes, hair, and who could dance. You had to be able to play music at deafening volume, and to dance. We only cared about which human might possibly come to love us.
11
Mulato
Riverside and Los Angeles, California, 1979
To our daughters:
There is no way the Spanish or French colonials could have handled this place. They would have lain on the sidewalk in front of our houses and cried, while we laughed and stepped over them on our way to school or work.
In junior high, we were Lobos, the word those penínsulars assigned to people who were indio and moro. We were everything, in the orange groves where smudge pots still stood like one-armed soldiers, remnants of the winter freezes when kerosene was lit to send sooty smoke over the fruit to keep it warm. We were lobo and chino and pardo and cholo and zambo and mestizo and mulato; we were the Filipino version, sangley and mestiza, and the American versions. I was Swiss and French and the only person in my family with the last name Straight, as opposed to my parents, brothers, and foster siblings. People asked whether I was adopted. They asked why I had such a stupid name to go with the severe limitations of my wardrobe and body. I was not someone a Tony would call.
In the Country of Women Page 9