Mixed: My Life in Black and White (13 page)

“It’s good to be home,” my mother said, ignoring the laughing children as she held her dress together and skipped up the front steps.

Two Longer Bus Rides
and a Benz

Diversity rocks!

—Classmate’s signature in my
tenth-grade yearbook

By the middle of ninth grade, I had a cumulative C
grade average. Two and a half years of cutting classes to avoid bullies and then not raising my hand when I was in class (to avoid being labeled as “acting white”) had caught up to me.

Okay, spending every night on the phone with my boyfriends instead of doing homework didn’t help either.

Anyway, I applied to, and was summarily rejected from, all of the top-tier magnet schools. I received one acceptance letter, from a small agricultural school. “We welcome you, future farmer!” the letter began. The only other option I had was the neighborhood high school, which had recently installed metal detectors. (“I’ll work as a hooker and home-school you before I let you go there,” my mother said.)

As exciting as it would have been to pick my mother up from the strip every night, I told her my choice was the agricultural high school.

“Mom, I can’t fail at farm school because black people are more in touch with nature,” I said, putting a cassette in my boom box. “It says so right here in this song,” I continued, turning the volume up.

A short blip of black pride had fallen over hip-hop and even though I mourned the end of the light-skinned era, I was hooked. I was learning more listening to the radio than I was in my classes. The top song was KRS-ONE’s “You Must Learn,” in which he rapped about black inventors. A black man invented the traffic light? Pioneered the first blood bank? How come I hadn’t learned this in school? Before that song, the only black inventor I knew was the peanut butter guy. As cool as peanut butter is, it’s a bit shameful for that to be the crowning achievement of your race.

“Mom, school isn’t meant for black people. If it is, how come they don’t teach about anyone except Martin Luther King?” I asked, hoping to tap into her latent Black Panther.

“Maybe they covered it on the day you were cutting,” she replied.

I decided that I’d just cruise through agricultural school and spend my free time concentrating on a rap career, though I didn’t quite know where I fit in with the conscious rap movement. For example, I could never mention my brother’s name around hip-hop heads.
Jack
was now the official name for
the white man,
thanks to Public Enemy. To tell someone you had a black brother named Jack would be like telling someone you had a black brother named Honky. “Why on earth would your mom name a black man Jack?” people would ask me. “It’s his dad’s name,” I’d say, like we had different dads.

Some people took the pro-black hip-hop movement as a chance for retribution against all the attention light-skinned people had been getting. It was already an accepted stereotype that light-skinned girls couldn’t fight, but now some people were saying we weren’t even all that pretty. One rapper had a moderate radio hit with “Dark-Skinned Girls,” a song about how horrible and stuck-up girls of my hue were.

Once, while watching a made-for-TV movie, I caught a vision of my new rap marketing scheme. The television mother was explaining to her daughter that she had the family ability to see the future. “It’s both a gift and a curse,” the mother said. That’s what I decided being light-skinned was. I decided my first album would be titled
Light-Skinned: The Gift and the Curse.
I wrote songs atoning for my past abundance of self-love and ones asserting that, even though I was light, I was still blacker than most people. Had a record label actually signed me, people would be laughing at the VH1
Where Is She Now?
special featuring my hit “Your Mom Don’t Like Light Skin” and “No Hot Sauce, Bitch,” my requisite militant track, inspired by all the times waitresses assumed I wanted hot sauce because I was black.

My mother, of course, was beside herself with concern when I told her my career plans. I don’t know which she thought was worse: that I’d actually become a rapper or that I’d excel at farm school and she’d have to introduce me as her daughter the sheepherder. A few days later, she told me she was going figure out how to get me into “a rich white private school where no one cares about rap,” she said. “Hopefully, one without boys,” she added.

All “rich white private schools” required a test given by an educational company before admittance. Part of the test was interactive: the administrator would say a string of numbers (“six, five, seven, four, three”), and I’d have to repeat them back to her. We got up to eighteen digits before I stumbled.

“I’ve never seen someone perform quite so well,” she remarked.

She’d probably never tested a girl who had to memorize boys’ phone numbers before her mother found them and threw them away.

That skill, combined with my financial need, helped me get into the Baldwin School. “Grace Kelly went there,” my mother would tell anyone who would listen, as if I could be the next Grace Kelly.

Damn, we’re poor,
I thought, the first time we pulled through the expansive wrought-iron gates of Baldwin. Our Chevy Nova was pulling up at the rear of a long row of Jaguars, Mercedeses, and Porsches. My new school was situated on twenty-three acres of lush greenery. The only brown patches seemed to be the baseball field, the janitorial staff, and me and my mother. It was the same neighborhood Will and I had gotten pulled over in.

“They’re just regular people with a bit more money,” my mother said, but I could tell she was overwhelmed, too. The school building itself looked like a castle. We got lost three times just trying to get to registration.

The highlight of my first day was learning that my Greek mythology teacher had a Mercedes Benz with a license plate that read TROY 1. I took a photo posing in front of her license plate to make my boyfriends jealous. (“Troy, who the fuck is Troy?”) I hoped the jealousy would spur them into picking me up. In a car, the drive to school was forty-five minutes; to get there on public transportation, the journey stretched to two hours.

Like my grandmother’s house before it, Baldwin had a whole new culture to learn. I was corrected when I referred to it as high school, it was
upper school.
There was no hallway; there were
corridors.
Who knew Mercedes made station wagons, and why would anyone buy a fly car like a Mercedes and mess it up by getting the station-wagon version? I’d gotten a job at Roy Rogers so I could pay for the expensive sneakers my mother refused to buy me; at Baldwin, new expensive sneakers were made fun of. These girls purposefully scuffed up their sneakers. It was almost as if they were embarrassed by their wealth.
Give it to me,
I thought.

My mom, despite her enthusiasm at having gotten me into Baldwin, had a bunch of things to learn as well. She always seemed blindsided by the things my scholarship didn’t cover. Instead of issuing out-of-date science textbooks with titles like
It’s Definite: The
World Is Round
like public school did, we now had to buy a stack of new books every semester.

As soon as she recovered from the book sticker shock, I bought home a note detailing the school’s mandatory after-school sports program. I had never played a team sport; “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” was the extent of my school physical activity.

“What’s a cleat?” I asked my mother, reading the requirements for field hockey.

“Something else I have to pay for.” She sighed. Neither of us knew what field hockey was, nor did the sales guy at our neighborhood sporting goods store. That’s why he sold me a neon orange “Go Flyers!” street hockey stick. Wearing my Baldwin uniform on public transportation was bad enough without the added burden of being a black girl with a bright orange hockey stick.

“What school is that?” the girls from my neighborhood Catholic high school would sneer on the first bus I caught. When I transferred to the suburban rail line, the black domestics who caught the same train to clean houses would stare at me. On the train platform, I met other uniformed black students, all of us shuffling off to different schools but having the same tenseness with the domestics.

One girl who went to a school across the street from mine warned me about saying anything positive about my school in front of the younger housekeepers. “The older ones are fine; if they want to talk to you, it’s only because they are proud of you,” she said. She was right. My third week on the train, a group of older ladies asked me to sit near them. For the one-hour ride, they told me to “do them proud” and make sure I got good grades. “You don’t want to end up cleaning their houses like we do,” one said. What was I supposed to say,
Yeah, cleaning white folks’ houses
would
suck?
I just smiled, looking over to make sure the younger domestics weren’t about to jump me.

The day I had to take the hockey stick to school, I tried to hide it by dragging it behind me like an old blanket. A younger girl in a cleaning uniform tripped over it and yelled about how the “private school girls think they’re smart but don’t have any damn common sense.” I felt like it was Christina and Tascha all over again.

Once I got onto the school grounds, life was gravy. Because I lived in the city, I was popular from the first day. Most of my Baldwin classmates viewed all parts of Philadelphia as dangerous. Not one had ever been there without her parents. I indulged their taste for spooky stories about the city, telling them about my subway fight and, when that became old news, I told them I’d seen someone get robbed (true, it was me; Christina stole my flute from my locker) and that I’d seen someone get shot (true, on TV). “That’s just how it is in the city,” I’d say, shaking my head like an old hardened cop.

I hoped that filling them up with firsthand accounts of incidents they’d never experienced would distract their attention from me and all the private school things I’d never experienced. Like, where the hell did they buy those wooden hockey sticks? When I saw everyone come to practice with the correct field-hockey stick, I again hid my orange one behind me. The two black students in my class noticed my discomfort.

“You should come to Black Student Union meetings,” one said, eyeing my Day-Glo stick as if she’d seen this kind of mistake before. I made it to two BSU meetings. In the first, I listened as the seven students brought up grievances about the school. When they asked me how I liked it, I told them as long as no one was trying to beat me up, I was happy. Frowns all around. At the second meeting, I did my homework as they strategized about how to promote black culture around the school. A Frederick Douglass After-School Jam? Are they serious? I wondered. I decided to leave the BSU; I was the only black student who didn’t go to the weekly meetings.

I’d have more time for blackness if it met my schedule, I thought. I lived farther from school than anyone else, and I hated having to give up the one night of the week I could actually make it home before 7 P.M. I secretly envied the white girls who were chauffeured home by their housewife mothers after hours of sweaty practice.

Still, it was nice being seen as
tough
and
urban,
two labels I didn’t have a chance of obtaining with people who knew more about the Boonies. The only thing that stood between me and total school domination were the thirty pounds I had put on since puberty. In my neighborhood, the extra padding of layers I’d grown on my ass wasn’t fat, it was
thickness,
a sign of womanhood. At school, I was constantly being given lessons by my classmates on how to lose weight.

Girls at Baldwin were catching anorexia like the flu. One girl stopped eating completely, and almost everyone else decided to join in. They’d have weight-loss clubs, where size-6 girls would extreme-diet down to a size 2. At lunch, girls would fill up their plates with food, so the faculty, who ate in the same lunchroom, wouldn’t suspect anything. Instead of eating, these female leaders of tomorrow would shove the food around on their plates while asking mind-bending questions like “Would you rather have a fat face and a skinny body or a fat body and a skinny face?” Everyone wanted a fat body with a skinny face. They were pros at not eating, so they could lose body weight. “Face weight is there to stay,” they all concurred.

I actually tried really hard not to eat, but the food was actually good there, for God’s sake. The cafeteria ladies didn’t just slap a half-warmed frozen chicken patty on your plate, they made sandwiches according to your instructions. “Don’t be like them girls and not eat,” the salad-bar tender told me. “I won’t, Miss Betty,” I said. For that, she reached around the grill and gave me extra fries. “I haven’t had one of these students call me
Miss
yet,” she said. “Your mother raised you right.”

While everyone else got thinner, I gained more weight, thanks to Miss Betty’s extra helpings. After three months, I gained a dress size.

“It’s called
portions,
Angela,” my mother said. “I love you whatever size you are, but my pocketbook doesn’t. I can’t afford new uniforms.”

At lunch the girls cautioned me about my hips as I dug into cheese fries. “Black guys like meat on their woman’s bones,” I told the table.

“There isn’t a boy in the world who wouldn’t mind his girlfriend being a little skinnier,” one girl said, and the table nodded in agreement.

With that statement, I started to hate Baldwin. My mother was working harder than ever to put food on the table, and these girls wouldn’t eat? That’s selfish, I thought, it’s not a disease. You don’t see poor people with anorexia, I reasoned. How were they going to tell me what black boys wanted? Just like my hip-hop songs said, they seemed to think their culture was the only one. My interaction with the white students and faculty soon became limited to pointing out how racist they were and how black I was. I was determined to stretch their “dare to question” motto until it snapped. I wanted out.

“How come you offer ten languages but they are all European languages?” I asked the school’s headmistress.