Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (7 page)

No one had to tell us that our skin might be different colors, but underneath we were all the same. Given the amount of blood we spilled in that backyard every day, we saw this firsthand.

Still, our parents weren’t taking any chances. Flush with the activism of the 1960s, they were determined to raise us free from all prejudice—a goal which they seemed to attempt primarily through the strategic use of T-shirts, lunchboxes, and sing-alongs. Every kid’s Fisher-Price phonograph had “Free to Be … You and Me” spinning around on its turntable. For our birthdays, we received black Raggedy Ann dolls and consciousness-raising children’s books with titles like
The World Is a Rainbow
or
Che Guevara: An I Can Read Book!

On television, we watched animated versions of the Harlem Globetrotters and the Jackson 5 every Saturday morning, as well as the cartoon
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,
which, just like
Josie and the Pussycats,
ended each week with the characters playing in a rock band and singing snappy songs about loving each other and getting along. The head shop on 94th Street sold “Black Is Beautiful” T-shirts, peace sign necklaces, and buttons that read “America: Let’s Get It Together” that showed a map of the U.S. constructed from profiles of people of different races. Every day, we jumped rope and played freeze tag to the funky Top 10 hits that emanated from transistor radios on stoops throughout the neighborhood. The scorching anthem of “Brother Louie”:
She was black as the ni-ight/Louie was whiter than white…
Sly and the Family Stone singing “
I-hi-hi love everyday people…
”

On weekends, we were trotted over to the Goddard-Riverside Community Center for special multicultural “family events,” where a white woman named Minna Bromberg had us sing Swahili folk songs and drink unfiltered apple juice. Minna was a pale woman with cheekbones like paper cutters and blue-black hair pulled back so tightly it virtually improvised a face-lift. Although she dressed in tie-dye and armloads of hammered brass jewelry, she was really far too high-strung to be a hippie. “Goddamn it,” she’d mutter as she scrambled amid the onslaught of hysterical, folksinging six-year-olds. “Where the hell are those peace posters? Could we please have a little more quiet in here, please?”

Other weekends, my friends and I sat squirming and poking each other as we watched multiethnic “Shadow Box” puppet shows, listened to Hopi storytellers, and clapped in time as a bearded banjo player named Satchel led us in one interminable round after another of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

“Remember, children,” Satchel instructed cheerily at the end of each concert, “when you look at people, don’t see the color of their skin. Only the content of their character.” He always said this extra slowly and loudly for emphasis, as if we were not actually children but mildly retarded beagles.

To my playmates and me, this was perplexing. That everyone was equal was obvious to us. As far as we were concerned, the only legitimate reason to ever discriminate against anyone was if they happened to be your little brother or sister. In that case, it was perfectly acceptable to relegate them to the role of “deaf-mute orphan” and “houseplant” whenever you made up games.

But how weren’t we supposed to see another person’s skin? As kids, we noticed
everything.

We knew, for example, that only Tabitha Cohen could roll her eyes back and fake a truly convincing epileptic seizure. Gregory Dupree was double-jointed and could dislocate his own thumb. Ricardo had a scar like a piece of dental floss from his wrist to his elbow from the time he ran through a plate glass window. Chieko ate strange and frightening seaweed for lunch. Peter could play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with armpit farts. Karis had a special condition that made her eyebrows fall off.

In the backyard one day, Michelle, Adam, Juan, and I tried to figure out how, exactly, to be color-blind.

“Okay, look at me,” said Adam, balancing precariously on the rim of the jungle gym. His skin was the golden brown of pancake syrup, and the rest of us squinted at him, trying to make him appear translucent. “Do you still see it?”

“Mm-hm,” we nodded.

“Still black,” said Juan.

“Try me!” I volunteered. Adam, Michelle, and Juan screwed up their faces and squinted at me fiercely.

“Still white!” they chorused.

William, Adam’s fifteen-year-old brother, sauntered over to us, followed by his friend Georges.

“Ay, Adam. What’s up? Skins,” William said, slapping Adam’s hand, then running his palm smoothly across it. He walked around the jungle gym and “gave skin” to Juan, Michelle, and me, too, which made all of us feel enormously grown-up and privileged and worshipful and cool. “You all okay over here?” William asked.

“Uh-huh,” nodded Adam. Then he squinted up at him, practicing.

“We’re trying to be color-blind!” I explained.

“Huh?” said William.

“Satchel the Banjo Player said we should all be color-blind,” Adam said.

“He said we shouldn’t see people’s skin,” I said. “So we’re trying not to.”

“So far, it isn’t really working,” Michelle said.

“Yeah,” said Juan, squinting up at the sky and lolling his head back and forth like Stevie Wonder. “So far, everyone’s just a little fuzzy.”

William and Georges looked at each other.

“Ho, shit, man,” Georges said, shaking his head. He exhaled with a whistle, then threw his basketball against the wall and caught it on the rebound.

“Color-blind? Are you kidding me?” William hooted. “You’re supposed to pretend you don’t see who people are? You supposed to act handicapped? Shit. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

He leaned down and draped his arms around me and Michelle conspiratorily.

“Look. Let me tell you something,” he said gently, squeezing our forearms in a brotherly fashion. “Every day of my life, I
know
that I’m black. And Georges here, he
knows
he’s Puerto Rican. And both of us, we
know
that you two are white. And
you
should, too. In this world, everyone’s gotta know who they are and where they come from. Understand? Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not important. Because it is.”

Then he stood up and grinned at us. “I don’t want any of you pretending to be blind, you hear? Not color-blind, not blind-blind, just 20/20, you got that?”

Obediently, we all nodded. He smiled and made a “Right-on!” fist at us, and we all made one back. Then he and Georges headed off to play basketball.

Sure enough, as we got old enough to walk to school by ourselves, we started to see things. Not just things like Puerto Rican girls wearing communion dresses. Things like the white proprietor of the corner bakery giving my brother and me free Swedish candy when we stopped by after school, but ordering our friends Jerry and Tremaine, two black kids from our building, to leave if they weren’t going to buy anything.

But mostly what we saw was that, while the adults around us might have been singing “Joy to the World” and reading aloud stories like
George Washington Carver: Father of Peanut Butter!,
a lot of kids in the neighborhood were simply interested in kicking each other’s ass.

Every day during recess at PS 75, boys in my first grade class tumbled onto the asphalt and pummeled each other mercilessly. Christopher and Ricardo against Barry and Juan. The fights were like dance contests, really. When boys fought, there was a blunt, muscular grace to it, a choreography, a parsing of the air, and as they locked together, other kids encircled them, cheering, clapping, hooting.

Sometimes, Christopher Kleinhaus yelled, “I call ‘Boys against girls!’” Then it was a frenzy of yelling, chasing, and running. When this occurred, my friends Audrey, Sara, and I took refuge in the bathroom until the bell rang. We had a reputation as crybabies and cowards, and saw no reason to contradict this. Some of our other friends fought back, though, especially the black and Hispanic girls. The moment the boys flew at Alissa and Shana, they proclaimed flatly, “Excuse me, but I don’t think so,” then slonked them expertly in the kneecaps. “That’s right. You
better
run,” they shouted after them gleefully.

Still other times, two older girls fought each other. Then the temperature dropped dangerously. The schoolyard became frozen, suddenly vicious and terrifying. There was no prelude, no sense of decorum, just an instant eruption of violence.

“Excuse me. What did you just say?” one girl would say, stopping dead in the middle of the asphalt.

“You heard what I just said,” another would reply venomously. “What? You deaf?”

“Whoa, that’s it, bitch. I’m gonna fuck you up.”

Then it was if a starting gun had been fired, and they lunged at each other, tearing out each other’s hair in clumps, clawing each other’s faces, clamping on to each other in a mutual, squalling death-choke until some hapless teachers finally managed to pull them apart.

No matter how much liberal gloss the adults tried to put on it, our neighborhood was simply a rough place. A decade before I was born, it had been riddled with Irish and Puerto Rican gangs. Now the gangs had gone, but the sense of foreboding and antagonism remained, crackling in the streets like static electricity.

When Michelle and I walked to Carvel for ice cream, boys and girls we didn’t know hung on the chain link fence of the basketball court and taunted, “Hey. You. Ugly white girl. In the ugly pink coat. Yeah, you.”

Standing on a movie line at the Olympia, Audrey and I heard snickering behind us, then whispering in Spanish, followed by a sharp poke. Turning around, we saw two girls sticking us in the butt with the pointy tips of their umbrellas.

“What?” they glared. “You got a problem?”

Audrey and I consulted each other nervously. We’d been instructed to love everyone and that “violence is not the answer,” but now what were we supposed to do?

“If we yell at them, will they think we’re prejudiced because they’re Puerto Rican and we’re white?” Audrey whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said. But meanwhile, why were the girls picking on us? Since they didn’t know anything about us, except what they could see, were they ganging up on us
because
we were white?

Some of the older kids in the neighborhood seemed to have no use for us. Their contempt was palpable for the white so-called liberal culture, with its smiley face stickers, its patronizing “famous Negro” storybooks, and its TV jingles that professed to want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony while really selling you a Coke. They knew what I couldn’t possibly have known at that age: that all of us might be low-income at the moment, but that not all of us would be in ten or twenty years’ time, and odds were that
they
would not be among the ones “movin’ on up.” To them, we white kids weren’t “brothers and sisters” or “amigos” at all.

Being little kids, however, my white friends and I didn’t understand this. All we saw was that some kids seemed to loathe us on sight. We struggled to understand why. What had we done wrong?

With no working knowledge of history, and without the usual host of prejudices to fall back on, we were left to develop our own. And the prejudice we developed was this: we white kids were disliked because we were so hideously un-cool.

When it came right down to it, declared my white friend Andrew, we had to face facts: white people came in dead last in the Hip Pageant. We were the lowest branch of the Cool Tree. We were losers in the Lottery of Soul and Ail-Around General Funkiness.

As he said this, our friends Juan, Steven, and Adam looked down sheepishly. “Aw, c’mon,” said Steven halfheartedly. Steven was black. But why should he apologize? We white kids could see it for ourselves. Every morning, when we all walked down the hill to PS 75 together, we stopped to look in the window of the Ottowa Record Store. There were two albums always on display, set at right angles to each other:
The Partridge Family’s Greatest Hits
and
ABC
by the Jackson 5. “Like, doy, who’s better?” said Andrew disgustedly, rolling his eyes.

White dorkiness was glaring and embarrassing. Augh, how we wanted to wriggle away from it! Our black and Hispanic friends seemed all-knowing, almost invincible to us. They were like the superheroes of the neighborhood. They were clearly the best at anything that truly mattered to us kids: Loyalty. Cracking Jokes. Thinking Quickly. Musical Taste. Opening Up a Big Fresh Mouth. Playing Stickball and Basketball. Bravery. Resisting Pompous Authority Figures. Jumping Rope. Beating People Up. Telling It Like It Is. Hairdos.

Compared to them, we white kids were hothouse flowers—pampered, hesitant, gutless children who followed instructions and clung to our mothers. We were callow. We thought nothing of selling each other out for a baseball card or a Zagnut bar (I personally could be persuaded to change seats in the lunch room for a can of 7-Up). By contrast, if I just
looked
at one of the older Puerto Rican girls on the cafeteria line, her
friend
would say to me: “Ay, who you lookin’ at, girl? You lookin’ at my friend Diana, here? You better not be.”

With black and Puerto Rican kids, it wasn’t enough just to have the right dolls or an extra package of Devil Dogs. You had to be initiated into their friendships and prove your allegiance. “If you’re really my friend,” Alissa told me in the corridor at school, “then whatever you have to say, you say it to my face or not at all. You’re either straight with me, or you’re not with me. You got that?”

Of course, the great irony was that the black and Hispanic kids in our neighborhood were among the most vulnerable populations in America. Their toughness wasn’t a luxury or a fashion statement. It was a survival kit, plain and simple. But we little white kids were too young and naive to see that. All we saw when we looked at them was their strength and indifference, coupled with style—the fundamental essence of Cool. Black and Hispanic kids gave the impression of having thrown off all the humiliating albatrosses of childhood that the rest of us suffered with: the obedience, the dependence, the frustrating helplessness. Strangely, if they threatened us, it only fueled our desire to become more like them.