With the other black kids, I gained traction after Douglas Lawson spread the word that years before, back when he was called Bunny and his mother was hired to help mine with housework, I had come to his house to play. I remembered sitting on the linoleum with him and his cousins, taking turns rolling a toy car across the floor as my father talked with his father, a minister I was instructed to call Reverend Lawson, even though I was allowed to address Bunny’s mother by her first name, Irma.
On the way home, I’d asked my father why Bunny’s family and all the other colored people lived in one part of town and why no white people lived there. I don’t remember his answer; I do remember that it didn’t satisfy me.
It was years after that, in high school, that cordial relations with my black classmates broke down. My hallway hellos were as likely to elicit glares as smiles, and every rebuff hurt my feelings. I could understand animosity directed at people who blocked schoolhouse doors and shouted racial slurs—I felt it, too—but hating all white people didn’t seem fair. Then again, maybe my classmates’ bitterness and the discomfort it caused me were necessary parts of the process of change, the sort of thing Bob Dylan meant when he wrote that song about hard rain. Maybe a thunderous, lightning-charged downpour was the only way to wash the world clean enough to start fresh. But like those flower-child girls in the Newsweek photos, I wanted to think there was a kinder way.
~ ~ ~
I looked up from the magazine when my father came in from the market carrying a bag of fruit and looking pleased with himself.
“Close your eyes. I brought you a surprise.”
I shut my eyes until he said to open them. Atop my magazine sat an egg-shaped piece of produce with smooth, green skin. It looked like a green mango, but then again, not quite.
“Mahng-oh?” I pronounced the fruit’s name the way Samoans did. “Oh, boy!”
I’d avoided green mangoes for a while after Dick’s warning about mango rash, but after seeing my Samoan friends eat them with abandon and no ill effects, I finally got up my nerve and tried one. I liked the way it made my tongue tingle. When I didn’t get a rash from that first taste, I became a green mango devotee, eating them whole from my hand like apples.
I carried the fruit to the sink and washed it with water that I poured from a pan on the stove. We couldn’t use tap water without first boiling it; the island’s sanitation system, though much improved in recent years, was still too chancy. I shook the water from the fruit and took a bite, anticipating the pucker. It was bland and watery.
“Mmmm,” I said, sitting down at the table again. “Thanks, Daddy. My favorite fruit.”
He smiled so broadly his ears shifted up a notch. “Nothing’s too good for my Nanette.”
I returned the smile but cringed inside, as if green mango juice had seeped through my skin. The pet name that once made me glow now made me squirm, especially when my father used it around my friends. Val took perverse pleasure in calling me Nanette just to annoy me. Suzi picked it up, too, and made a point of using it in front of the boys.
When I’d nearly finished eating the tasteless fruit, my father sat down across from me. He looked at the juicy, white flesh in my hand and then at me, with a mix of incredulity and embarrassment.
“That’s not a mango, is it?”
“Um. Well. I think it’s a different kind of mango.” I held up the scrap, turned it this way and that, studied it from all angles. “But it’s good. I like it.” I took a bite and rolled it around in my mouth to demonstrate its lusciousness.
“It’s a cucumber, isn’t it?”
“Hmmm. I guess it could be.” (I’d known it from the first bite.)
My father rested an elbow on the table and pressed his cheek against his hand. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“What would that be, Daddy?” I finished the last bit of cucumber and wiped my hands on my shorts, expecting him to ask if I really preferred boiled taro to potatoes or if I thought his baked wahoo recipe needed improvement.
“You’re spending a lot of time with those Samoan boys. Don’t you have any palagi boy friends?” His tone was earnest, not confrontational.
“Oh sure, at school. And, you know, at the tennis court and Jorgensens’. I’m friends with all the boys who hang out there.” I tried to mirror his chummy attitude, but I felt fluttery, unsure where the conversation was going.
“So why don’t they ever come over here? Why is it always just Fibber, Peki, and Li’i?”
“Well … “ I looked down at my magazine and turned a few pages, then raised my eyes and scanned the room, admiring the freshly painted wall, avoiding my father’s gaze. The tiki, Double Ugly, stared at me with stony eyes from its post beside the front door.
“Well, Daddy, to be honest, the palagi boys are afraid to come over here.”
I stole a glance at my father’s face. Clearly, my answer had blindsided him as much as his question had me. Forehead pinched, he leaned forward.
“Afraid? Afraid of what?”
Paint fumes, pleasantly noxious, hung in the air. My stomach lurched, but it wasn’t from the vapors. I was wobbling atop some new emotional precipice, dizzy from the unfamiliar perspective and the options before me. I could leap into the air of truthfulness and risk crashing against my father’s anger, or I could creep backward into the shelter of my usual white lies, preserving the peace and his image of me as an obedient child. Before, the choice had always been easy, automatic, but now something else was at stake—not just my father’s feelings, but new loyalties, new values.
“They’re all friends of Dick’s, Daddy. They know he’s a good guy, and they know you and Mother won’t give him a chance. They figure you won’t approve of them either, so they don’t come around.” I was surprised at how freeing my candor felt. I’d leapt off that cliff and now floated high above the rough coast of my father’s ire.
I could always gauge the intensity of his anger by how long it took him to respond. If he paused a few seconds or more, he was calm enough to give some thought to the issue at hand and choose his words carefully. But if he shot back an immediate retort, he was already over the brink of rationality and flailing away with whatever verbal weapons he could find to wound me as much as he felt wounded.
This time there was no hesitation.
“Well, maybe they’re right.” The words spattered out like raindrops at the height of a storm, stinging as they struck. “If they’re on his side, they’re the wrong kind of friends. As far as I’m concerned, they can just stay away. And those Samoan boys, too. They don’t need to be hanging around here all the time.”
The balloon of my euphoria collapsed into cold, flat resentment. Bitter thoughts shoved tenderness aside, outrage withered sympathy, and my mind clogged with caustic retorts I would hoard for future confrontations.
Within a couple of days my father had calmed down, and we were speaking again, if only about trivial matters. When I asked if he’d drive Val and me to a school dance in an outlying village, he readily agreed. I stressed the fact that the school’s palagi teachers would chaperone and glossed over the reason Val and I were so keen on going. Val had been invited to the dance by Uili, who played guitar with the Vampires and competed with Li’i for her affections. For me, there’d be a new contingent of polite and sociable Samoan boys to check out.
When party time arrived, we piled into the Tempest and headed west from Utulei to that bend in the road where the light made the waves fluoresce. But though it was still daylight, the sky was dim, and instead of glowing, the ocean’s silvered gray shimmered like the skin of some enormous fish. Farther down the road, past palm groves and fales, we came to the village—a cluster of concrete houses, a boxy, white church, and a school built in the same design as all the new village schools that had cropped up since Governor Lee took office: a round, fale-like central building with detached, flat-roofed classroom wings. The wing that faced the parking area reminded me of a roa
dside motel, each classroom with its own door opening to the outside.
After confirming the presence of chaperones in the round building where the dance was being held, my father left. The dance got underway: lights dimmed, a local band began playing, and the room filled with teenagers from nearby villages. Right away, Val and I were whisked onto the floor, where boys lined up for turns to dance with us. Uili kept cutting in to dance with Val, but I gyrated and spun with a succession of smiling young men, some wearing garlands of flowers around their necks, all with hair preened to high gloss with coconut oil. The more we all danced, the warmer and closer the room, and the stronger the scent of all those oiled heads. What was at first mildly pleasant now made me queasy. I was relieved when the band took a break and I could step outside.
I sat on the edge of a paved walkway that circled the building, inhaling moist air that smelled of ocean spray, breathing contentment in with the scent. I’d lost sight of Val on the crowded dance floor and hadn’t seen her since. I wasn’t concerned; I knew Uili wouldn’t let her wander far. I wasn’t nervous being among strangers in an unfamiliar village, either. If danger had existed, I’m sure I would’ve been oblivious to it in that heedless way that all adolescents miscalculate risk, but there truly seemed to be nothing to fear here or anywhere on the island. The only crimes reported in Samoa Times were petty larcenies and bar fights, and neither seemed likely in this setting where even the breeze was so gentle I barely felt it on my skin.
The band started up again, I went back inside, and a flower-festooned boy pulled me onto the dance floor. I didn’t see Val, but I still wasn’t worried; maybe she’d slipped out the back door to sneak a smoke. When she hadn’t shown up after half a dozen songs, I started asking around.
“The palagi girl, Valerie, have you seen her?”
Shrugs.
“She came with me. She was dancing and now she’s gone. Where’d she go?”
More shrugs. Finally, one boy remembered seeing her leave. “With Uili.” He gestured toward a classroom wing. I considered searching for her but didn’t want to intrude, so I kept dancing, watching for her return and glancing at my wristwatch as the hour neared ten o’clock, the time my father had said he’d pick us up.
At nine-thirty, headlight beams swept the parking area like flashlights scanning a crime scene. I took one more look around the room, but all I saw were strange faces, happily unaware of my plight. Threading through the tangle of dancers, I found the boy who said he’d seen Val and Uili leave. I gripped his shoulders and fixed my widened eyes on his.
“Find … palagi … girl … Valerie. NOW!” The boy hurried out the door and ran along the walkway, banging on classroom doors. I headed for the parking area, hoping to distract my father and give Val a chance to slip unnoticed through the back door and pretend she’d been at the dance all along. But just as I stepped outside, my father got out of the car. At the same moment, the door of the classroom directly in front of him opened, and a disheveled Val and Uili emerged. Val made a feeble attempt at slinking along the front of the building, but it was pointless.
My father glared at Val and Uili, then at me. His eyes were hard as the tiki Double Ugly’s, his lips so tightly pursed they looked stitched together. Even in the darkness I could see the shade of his skin deepening.
“Get in the car,” he ordered.
Val turned to give Uili a surreptitious wave. I shoved her into the back seat and crawled into the front, where my father sat staring at the windshield. A light rain was falling; the droplets looked like sweat beading up and trickling down the glass.
On the ride back to town, the car was silent except for the sounds of quickening rain on the ragtop and wipers sweeping the windshield. I wanted to talk to relieve the tension, but I knew better. Instead, I picked at a scar on my wrist until the skin peeled away. Even Val, who never took parental wrath as seriously as I did, had enough sense to keep quiet until we dropped her at her house. She spoke up only to thank my father for the ride and then whisper to me as she crawled from the car, “Call you tomorrow.”
My father had barely backed the Tempest out of the Pucketts’ driveway and turned it toward Utulei when he unloaded on me.
“How could you let her leave the party?” It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. “She’s younger than you. You’re responsible for keeping an eye on her.”
“Sorry.” I tried to sound meek, but the word came out snippy.
“That girl’s headed for trouble if she doesn’t watch out. It makes me sick, seeing her carry on with those … nnn—” The next word stuck in the back of my father’s throat.
My head snapped toward him. Those what? What was he going to call Uili and his friends? Natives? Or was he about to use another, even more offensive, word? I waited for him to expel it, but he pressed his lips together and stared through the rain-streaked windshield.
The drops hit harder now, pelting the roof with hostile force. I drew my knees up and huddled against the passenger door; the armrest pressed into my spine like a gun at my back. Thoughts tangled as I tried to reconcile my father’s outburst with what I knew of his attitudes toward people of other races and cultures.
He wasn’t a racist. He wasn’t. Was he?
Back in Stillwater, where scholars from various African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries came to study at the university, he was one of the few physicians in town who welcomed their families as patients, taking pains to learn about their countries and show respect for their customs. Our family had been guests in some of these people’s homes; they’d given us gifts and treated us to delicacies, and I’d been proud that my father’s kindness and open-mindedness made them think so highly of him.
Where had that father gone? Who was this man beside me in the car? I didn’t want to look at him, yet I felt compelled to study the face I so often explored for clues to his state of mind. I looked but didn’t know how to interpret what I saw. The twitch of his jaw and set of his mouth—did they signal resolve or regret? Was that steeliness in his eyes, or shame?
More memories crowded my jumbled thoughts. It wasn’t just international visitors my father treated respectfully. Whether talking with Irma or Reverend Lawson or the yard man Clarence, or any of the admittedly few local black people whose lives intersected with ours, he seemed to take a real interest in their lives and treat them as equals, and he stressed to me the importance of doing the same.
That’s not to say I’d never heard him use a racial slur. He reserved the term, though, for a few “low lifes” who repeatedly showed up in Stillwater Hospital’s emergency room on Saturday nights, tanked up and bloodied from quarrels that turned nasty when somebody pulled a knife. The way he used the epithet made me think it had more to do with conduct than color. (Though now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall him ever using the word to describe a white person.)
Was he lumping the Samoan boys into that category? The boys Val and I found so courteous and charming? The boys who treated us the way our parents constantly reminded us we deserved to be treated? And if he was, why? I knew it wasn’t their Samoan-ness—or at least not just their Samoan-ness. In spite of his unthinking references to “natives,” he’d never said anything negative about other Samoans. He had nothing but praise for the Samoan medical practitioners and nurses he worked with, and he and my mother enjoyed the company of Samoan friends. What made those people so different from the boys who’d now become UA SA—FORBIDDEN?
For the first time in memory, I had no idea what my father was thinking and feeling. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Chapter 15—Reconciled
O le upega e fili i le pō, ‘ae talatala i le ao.
(The net that was tangled at night will be straightened in the morning.)
—Samoan proverb interpreted as “The dispute will be settled.”
reconcile
- to compose or settle (a quarrel, dispute, etc.)
- to win over to friend
liness; cause to become amicable, e.g. to reconcile hostile persons
- to bring into agreement or harmony; make compatible or consistent
- to accept or be resigned to something not desired
Steam coated the bathroom mirror and hung in the sodden air. I picked up a towel and wiped away the haze, careful not to bump two geckos that clung to the mirror’s surface. The little lizards no longer repulsed me; I’d come to think of them as secret, silent friends, diaphanous as fairies—ever present, always watching, never judging, even now as I stood wet-haired and naked.
“It’s not fair,” I hissed. Reflected in the mirror, the geckos’ wide eyes and upturned mouths urged me on. “Just when I’m starting to feel like I belong, he wants to cut me off from everyone.”
One gecko cocked its head as if needing clarification.
“My dad, I’m talking about,” I said. “As far as he’s concerned, nobody’s good enough—except maybe Prince Carlson.” I spat the last two words so forcefully the geckos skittered to the top of the mirror. Days had passed since my father’s flare-ups, but my resentment still festered.
A knock at the bathroom door interrupted my rant. I wrapped a lavalava around myself and opened the door a crack.
“Mind if I come in?” My mother seemed unusually buoyant. Christmas was three weeks away, and she and my father had been to a pre-holiday soirée at the governor’s house the night before. I was sure she was about to bust wanting to tell me how grand it was. I wasn’t in the mood to hear about it—just a bunch of palagis, no doubt, partying in Government House, high on a ridge, far above the “natives.” I beckoned her in anyway. She leaned against the vanity and watched me comb snarls from my hair. Her fingernails, polished in Revlon “Fire and Ice” pitter-patted against the countertop, echoing rain on the roof overhead.
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