Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

To my mother,

Rose Northington Packer,

who “made a way out of no way”

B
Y OUR SECOND DAY
at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.

Our troop was wending its way past their bus, past the ranger
station, past the colorful trail guide drawn like a treasure map, locked behind glass.

“Man, did you smell them?” Arnetta said, giving the girls a slow once-over, “They smell like Chihuahuas.
Wet
Chihuahuas.” Their troop was still at the entrance, and though we had passed them by yards, Arnetta raised her nose in the air and grimaced.

Arnetta said this from the very rear of the line, far away from Mrs. Margolin, who always strung our troop behind her like a brood of obedient ducklings. Mrs. Margolin even looked like a mother duck—she had hair cropped close to a small ball of a head, almost no neck, and huge, miraculous breasts. She wore enormous belts that looked like the kind that weightlifters wear, except hers would be cheap metallic gold or rabbit fur or covered with gigantic fake sunflowers, and often these belts would become nature lessons in and of themselves. “See,” Mrs. Margolin once said to us, pointing to her belt, “this one’s made entirely from the feathers of baby pigeons.”

The belt layered with feathers was uncanny enough, but I was more disturbed by the realization that I had never actually
seen
a baby pigeon. I searched weeks for one, in vain—scampering after pigeons whenever I was downtown with my father.

But nature lessons were not Mrs. Margolin’s top priority. She saw the position of troop leader as an evangelical post. Back at the A.M.E. church where our Brownie meetings were held, Mrs. Margolin was especially fond of imparting religious aphorisms by means of acrostics—“Satan” was the “Serpent Always Tempting and Noisome”; she’d refer to the “Bible” as “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” Whenever she quizzed us on these, expecting to hear the acrostics parroted back to her, only Arnetta’s correct replies soared
over our vague mumblings. “Jesus?” Mrs. Margolin might ask expectantly, and Arnetta alone would dutifully answer, “Jehovah’s Example, Saving Us Sinners.”

Arnetta always made a point of listening to Mrs. Margolin’s religious talk and giving her what she wanted to hear. Because of this, Arnetta could have blared through a megaphone that the white girls of Troop 909 were “wet Chihuahuas” without so much as a blink from Mrs. Margolin. Once, Arnetta killed the troop goldfish by feeding it a french fry covered in ketchup, and when Mrs. Margolin demanded that she explain what had happened, claimed the goldfish had been eyeing her meal for
hours,
then the fish—giving in to temptation—had leapt up and snatched a whole golden fry from her fingertips.

“
Serious
Chihuahua,” Octavia added, and though neither Arnetta nor Octavia could
spell
“Chihuahua,” had ever
seen
a Chihuahua, trisyllabic words had gained a sort of exoticism within our fourth-grade set at Woodrow Wilson Elementary. Arnetta and Octavia would flip through the dictionary, determined to work the vulgar-sounding ones like “Djibouti” and “asinine” into conversation.

“
Caucasian
Chihuahuas,” Arnetta said.

That did it. The girls in my troop turned elastic: Drema and Elise doubled up on one another like inextricably entwined kites; Octavia slapped her belly; Janice jumped straight up in the air, then did it again, as if to slam-dunk her own head. They could not stop laughing. No one had laughed so hard since a boy named Martez had stuck a pencil in the electric socket and spent the whole day with a strange grin on his face.

“Girls, girls,” said our parent helper, Mrs. Hedy. Mrs. Hedy was Octavia’s mother, and she wagged her index finger perfunctorily,
like a windshield wiper. “Stop it, now. Be good.” She said this loud enough to be heard, but lazily, bereft of any feeling or indication that she meant to be obeyed, as though she could say these words again at the exact same pitch if a button somewhere on her were pressed.

But the rest of the girls didn’t stop; they only laughed louder. It was the word “Caucasian” that got them all going. One day at school, about a month before the Brownie camping trip, Arnetta turned to a boy wearing impossibly high-ankled floodwater jeans and said, “What are you?
Caucasian?”
The word took off from there, and soon everything was Caucasian. If you ate too fast you ate like a Caucasian, if you ate too slow you ate like a Caucasian. The biggest feat anyone at Woodrow Wilson could do was to jump off the swing in midair, at the highest point in its arc, and if you fell (as I had, more than once) instead of landing on your feet, knees bent Olympic gymnast—style, Arnetta and Octavia were prepared to comment. They’d look at each other with the silence of passengers who’d narrowly escaped an accident, then nod their heads, whispering with solemn horror,
“Caucasian.”

Even the only white kid in our school, Dennis, got in on the Caucasian act. That time when Martez stuck a pencil in the socket, Dennis had pointed and yelled, “That was
so
Caucasian!”

W
HEN
YOU
lived in the south suburbs of Atlanta, it was easy to forget about whites. Whites were like those baby pigeons: real and existing, but rarely seen or thought about. Everyone had been to Rich’s to go clothes shopping, everyone had seen white girls and their mothers coo-cooing over dresses; everyone had gone to the downtown library and seen white businessmen swish by importantly,
wrists flexed in front of them to check the time as though they would change from Clark Kent into Superman at any second. But those images were as fleeting as cards shuffled in a deck, whereas the ten white girls behind us—
invaders,
Arnetta would later call them—were instantly real and memorable, with their long, shampoo-commercial hair, straight as spaghetti from the box. This alone was reason for envy and hatred. The only black girl most of us had ever seen with hair that long was Octavia, whose hair hung past her butt like a Hawaiian hula dancer’s. The sight of Octavia’s mane prompted other girls to listen to her reverentially, as though whatever she had to say would somehow activate their own follicles. For example, when, on the first day of camp, Octavia made as if to speak, and everyone fell silent. “Nobody,” Octavia said, “calls us niggers.”

At the end of that first day, when half of our troop made their way back to the cabin after tag-team restroom visits, Arnetta said she’d heard one of the Troop 909 girls call Daphne a nigger. The other half of the girls and I were helping Mrs. Margolin clean up the pots and pans from the campfire ravioli dinner. When we made our way to the restrooms to wash up and brush our teeth, we met up with Arnetta midway.

“Man, I completely heard the girl,” Arnetta reported. “Right, Daphne?”

Daphne hardly ever spoke, but when she did, her voice was petite and tinkly, the voice one might expect from a shiny new earring. She’d written a poem once, for Langston Hughes Day, a poem brimming with all the teacher-winning ingredients—trees and oceans, sunsets and moons—but what cinched the poem for the grown-ups, snatching the win from Octavia’s musical ode to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, were Daphne’s last lines:

She’d always worn clean, though faded, jumpers and dresses when Chic jeans were the fashion, but when she went up to the dais to receive her prize journal, pages trimmed in gold, she wore a new dress with a velveteen bodice and a taffeta skirt as wide as an umbrella. All the kids clapped, though none of them understood the poem. I’d read encyclopedias the way others read comics, and I didn’t get it. But those last lines pricked me, they were so eerie, and as my father and I ate cereal, I’d whisper over my Froot Loops, like a mantra,
“You are my father, the veteran. You are my father, the vet
eran, the veteran, the veteran,”
until my father, who acted in plays as Caliban and Othello and was not a veteran, marched me up to my teacher one morning and said, “Can you tell me what’s wrong with this kid?”

I thought Daphne and I might become friends, but I think she grew spooked by me whispering those lines to her, begging her to tell me what they meant, and I soon understood that two quiet people like us were better off quiet alone.

“Daphne? Didn’t you hear them call you a nigger?” Arnetta asked, giving Daphne a nudge.

The sun was setting behind the trees, and their leafy tops formed a canopy of black lace for the flame of the sun to pass through. Daphne shrugged her shoulders at first, then slowly nodded her head when Arnetta gave her a hard look.

Twenty minutes later, when my restroom group returned to the cabin, Arnetta was still talking about Troop 909. My restroom group had passed by some of the 909 girls. For the most part, they deferred
to us, waving us into the restrooms, letting us go even though they’d gotten there first.

We’d seen them, but from afar, never within their orbit enough to see whether their faces were the way all white girls appeared on TV—ponytailed and full of energy, bubbling over with love and money. All I could see was that some of them rapidly fanned their faces with their hands, though the heat of the day had long passed. A few seemed to be lolling their heads in slow circles, half purposefully, as if exercising the muscles of their necks, half ecstactically, like Stevie Wonder.

“We can’t let them get away with that,” Arnetta said, dropping her voice to a laryngitic whisper. “We can’t let them get away with calling us niggers. I say we teach them a lesson.” She sat down cross-legged on a sleeping bag, an embittered Buddha, eyes glimmering acrylic-black. “We can’t go telling Mrs. Margolin, either. Mrs. Margolin’ll say something about doing unto others and the path of righteousness and all. Forget that shit.” She let her eyes flutter irreverently till they half closed, as though ignoring an insult not worth returning. We could all hear Mrs. Margolin outside, gathering the last of the metal campware.

Nobody said anything for a while. Usually people were quiet after Arnetta spoke. Her tone had an upholstered confidence that was somehow both regal and vulgar at once. It demanded a few moments of silence in its wake, like the ringing of a church bell or the playing of taps. Sometimes Octavia would ditto or dissent to whatever Arnetta had said, and this was the signal that others could speak. But this time Octavia just swirled a long cord of hair into pretzel shapes.

“Well?”
Arnetta said. She looked as if she had discerned the hidden severity of the situation and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Everyone looked from Arnetta to Daphne. It was, after all,
Daphne who had supposedly been called the name, but Daphne sat on the bare cabin floor, flipping through the pages of the Girl Scout handbook, eyebrows arched in mock wonder, as if the handbook were a catalogue full of bright and startling foreign costumes. Janice broke the silence. She clapped her hands to broach her idea of a plan.

“They gone be sleeping,” she whispered conspiratorially, “then we gone sneak into they cabin, then we’ll put daddy longlegs in they sleeping bags. Then they’ll wake up. Then we gone beat ’em up till they’re as flat as frying pans!” She jammed her fist into the palm of her hand, then made a sizzling sound.

Janice’s country accent was laughable, her looks homely, her jumpy acrobatics embarrassing to behold. Arnetta and Octavia volleyed amused, arrogant smiles whenever Janice opened her mouth, but Janice never caught the hint, spoke whenever she wanted, fluttered around Arnetta and Octavia futilely offering her opinions to their departing backs. Whenever Arnetta and Octavia shooed her away, Janice loitered until the two would finally sigh and ask, “What
is
it, Miss Caucausoid? What do you
want?”

“Shut up, Janice,” Octavia said, letting a fingered loop of hair fall to her waist as though just the sound of Janice’s voice had ruined the fun of her hair twisting.

Janice obeyed, her mouth hung open in a loose grin, unflappable, unhurt.

“All right,” Arnetta said, standing up. “We’re going to have a secret meeting and talk about what we’re going to do.”

Everyone gravely nodded her head. The word “secret” had a built-in importance, the modifier form of the word carried more clout than the noun. A secret meant nothing; it was like gossip: just a bit of unpleasant knowledge about someone who happened to be
someone other than yourself. A secret
meeting,
or a secret
club
was entirely different.

That was when Arnetta turned to me as though she knew that doing so was both a compliment and a charity.