Mixed: My Life in Black and White (23 page)

“I want a puppet!” I said.

“I only talk puppet,” Andrew replied through the firefighter. “You have to talk to me through a puppet.”

I was feeling a bit self-conscious. I’m not one to just pick up a rag doll and talk in a cartoon-character voice on a first date, but what the hell. I promised to stop worrying about what people think. I noticed one black puppet on the rack and decided I would talk back to him with the African American doll.

My hand snapped back when I noticed the black girl puppet had on a gold chain, gold earrings, tennis sneakers, and a T-shirt that said BASKETBALL IS MY LIFE. Hell, no, I thought. I am not talking with Stereotype Doll. I twirled the puppet rack around to find another black doll. Could I get a firefighter like Andrew? A cop, a doctor—hell, a waitress, even?

There were two other black puppets among the white ones on the display. Both were males, both had on two gold hoop earrings, sneakers, jeans, gold chains, and logo shirts. One had on a do-rag. Why, God, why?

Andrew still had his white firefighter puppet on his hand, with a look on his face like, Are you going to choose a doll, or am I going to stand here looking like an idiot?

“Who made that puppet?” I asked Andrew. He looked at the tag. “Sunny Puppets,” he said, his face suggesting asking for the name of a toy manufacturer was a weird inquiry.

“Well, fuck Sunny Puppets,” I said, trying as hard as possible to laugh and keep the mood light. That’s what I would have said with a black man, so I said it to Andrew.
Keepin’ it real, what?

Andrew, looking a little confused, lowered his fireman. I didn’t mean to scare him with my shift in attitude, but how could I explain to a white guy how much seeing a rack with only gold-chain-and-sneakers-wearing black puppets pissed me off? Would he understand? If he didn’t, I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. Andrew might be a really nice guy, he’d just never had to deal with his people being portrayed as puppets without jobs. He never had to ask if there was a firefighter puppet in the back that looked like him. Toys that looked like him were always on display.

Still, I didn’t want this date to go south. Freakin’ smiling gold-chain puppets. There was a white cop puppet. A white doctor puppet. A white army puppet. Why couldn’t there be at least one black military puppet for me to pick up? There are black people in the military! The top U.S. military commander was black! Where is the damn Colin Powell puppet?

I had to get away from the puppet rack. Toy stores are supposed to be fun.

“I have a new game,” I said, leading Andrew away from the display with his nonpuppeted hand. “It’s called Find the Black Doll Not Wearing a Gold Chain.”

Andrew looked like he wanted to laugh but wasn’t sure if he was allowed to. I smiled to let him know it was okay.We started our game in the first aisle, with me leading the way.

“Ooh! Black girl doll! Six o’clock!” I picked up a Barbie-type box with the word FLAVAZ emblazoned across the front. According to the box, the doll’s name was Kiyoni Brown. Kiyoni came complete with boom box and tight pants (maybe I can forgive that; Barbie dresses like a ho sometimes). But I couldn’t forgive Kiyoni’s gold chain, which meant the game was not over. We had to keep looking!

Andrew started getting into it. He pointed to a wall of Matrix dolls. “Look! Laurence Fishburne! Morpheus doesn’t have on a gold chain!” Andrew was right, but c’mon, Laurence Fishburne couldn’t count. He’s a black man in real life and of course I’ve never seen him wear a gold chain. Though I’d bet money that if they come out with a line of Fishburne dolls, someone in marketing will try to stick a chain on at least one of them. No points for the Fishburne doll.

“They have to be fictional dolls,” I protested. “Not based on movies or real people.”

Andrew looked sad, or maybe he was tired of the game. I didn’t know. Hey, I said I was going to act the same way I would act if I were out with a black man, and this was definitely a game I would play with a brother. It’s a variation of the very popular African American game Find the Black Person. It’s mostly played at opera houses, exclusive restaurants (busboys don’t count), watching Nascar races on television, and when you move into a new suburban neighborhood, but you’re allowed to tweak the game any way you want. Black people are innovative like that.

Andrew and I continued the game to the other side of the store.

“Let’s split up,” I suggested. “We’ll find one faster that way.” I headed toward the toddler toy section, leaving Andrew facing a shelf of ceramic dolls. “They’re all white except for Pinocchio!” he cried. I had already moved on.

I was in the toddler section when I heard him yell out again. “I found one!” I started to walk over to him, but seconds later he called out, “Never mind. Nonfiction doll. It’s a Diana Ross Barbie by Bob Mackie.”

Determined not to leave the store until I had found a nice normal black doll, I headed to the back, where the breakable dolls are kept in glass cases under lock and key.

Finally. Three beautiful black dolls chilling in designer gowns surrounded by their white and Latina friends. I couldn’t touch them because the display was locked, but, like visiting my ex–high school boyfriend in jail, it was comforting just seeing them behind the glass. God bless this dollmaker, I sighed. Everyone is getting Madame Alexander dolls for presents this year.

I walked over to Andrew. “I won,” I told him proudly. After I proved it to him by walking him back to the Madame Alexander dolls, we walked back outside and watched a group of Mexican kids break-dance as a crowd formed a circle around them. “C’mon, white people, you can move closer,” the leader of the dancers urged. “We’re not in a gang!” I didn’t laugh. Andrew laughed loudly along with the rest of the white people.

As the stores were shutting down, Andrew walked me back to my car. He had hung in there through my game; he hadn’t made a mad dash out of the toy store once we split up on our non-gold chain-wearing black doll search. I really could like this guy, I thought. I don’t think he thought the same; he nearly shoved me in my car before giving me a cheerful wave and jogging off. “I’ll call you!” he yelled, from across the parking lot.

As I drove home, I pictured Andrew at work, suiting up for his fall off a bridge and telling people about the psycho black chick he went on a date with. “Then she told me the Fishburne doll didn’t count.”

Still, I felt proud of myself. At least I had tried to date a white man. But I wasn’t going to end up in a relationship with him, so I hadn’t betrayed my mother! Her struggle was not in vain, I thought. I called her and told her about my date, awaiting her supportive cheers and motherly reassurances that I was smart and beautiful and that one day the perfect black man would come for me on a white horse or in his pearl SUV. Instead, I heard thirty seconds of silence followed by a long exhalation.

“Angela, why would you put that poor white boy through all that?”

Huh? “Mom, I thought you’d be supportive. Remember when I was eleven and you told me not to marry a white man?”

“Girl, I was just mad at the system. Don’t miss out on a good man because of something I said over fifteen years ago! Just find someone who loves you. I want some grandbabies before I die.” She yawned. “I’m going to bed.” She hung up.

All the worry I had that I would let her down by dating a white guy, and she got mad and hung up on me? Damn, why didn’t she give me that white-guy-dating permission when I first moved out here? It would have been more useful than the Target gift certificate.

Before I went to bed, I logged on to my account and expanded my search to include all races. Then, in a purely selfish move, I checked off every box possible for my race when the system prompted me so I’d get tons of matches and make up for all that lost time.

White Thug, Black Panther Part II

“Your mom knew I was white,” my father said, laughing.
“I mean, come on, I have red hair and green eyes.” He said this as if I might have forgotten, since I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years.

I thought it only fair to get my father’s side of the story. Like the judge always used to do when he was in child-support court. I had talked myself out of calling him for months. How do you start interviewing your father when you know your mailman better than you know him? What small talk would I use to start the conversation?
Hey, Dad! Remember that day the police had to escort Mom into your
house to get the rest of my clothes? Good times, huh?

The conversation went more smoothly than I anticipated. My father’s mouth was on waterfall mode, asking questions of himself and then answering them. Of course, a lot of them had nothing to do with his marriage to my mother.

“Did I ever tell you about the scathing letter to the editor I wrote about the gas rate hike?” my dad asked, laughing again. “I know that’s why they turned off my gas.”

“What about the dancing date where Mom asked if you were white?” my brother asked. Thank goodness for his interjection. I made my brother make the call with me, since he and my father spent a lot of time together, especially since Jack III was born. My brother was barely four when my mom left my dad, so unlike me, he doesn’t have all the bad preseparation memories. Mom reintroduced them when my brother was seven. My brother and my dad would go on trips while I stayed home and imagined Dad didn’t exist. When people would ask me how I got so light when my mom has a deep brown complexion, I’d lie. “My dad is light-skinned,” I’d say, reasoning in my mind that my dad does indeed have light skin, so it wasn’t really lying.

“I can’t dance! There never was a dancing date!” my dad said. “I did take her to an oldies night, but it was a sit-down date with theater-style seating.”

“Great date,” I said. I couldn’t imagine a worse date than being stuck in a hardback chair listening to oldies. I’m surprised my mom gave him a second chance after that one.

My father started defending the merits of a sit-down musical date (“You see, the point is to talk while the music is playing. . . .”). This caused my brother to laugh through his nose, his snorts drowning out my father’s words.

“You can’t dance! You’re so white! Sit-down oldies night! Bwahahahah!” my brother screamed and snorted. I heard Jack III crying in the background. “Hold on, I have to give my son his medicine. Wooooo.” My brother’s phone dropped to the floor. I heard his whooping cease as he calmed his son.

“Couldn’t Mom have thought you were black because she thought your black stepdad was your biological dad?” I asked.

“My stepdad died before I even met your mom,” Dad answered, as if he was dumbfounded that Mom would say that. “Unless she thought Mr. Earl, our landlord, was my stepdad. But that man was old enough to be my mom’s grandfather.” I wondered why my dad called his landlord Mr. Earl. I had never heard a white person address people with “Mr.” in front of their first name. Maybe he was blacker than he thought.

My brother picked the phone back up, still laughing. “My boy loves his medicine. It tastes like bubble gum and raspberries,” he explained. “I like it, too.” I imagined my 250-pound brother with his thick Philly-boy beard and saggy pants sneaking a taste of his son’s berry-flavored medicine. My mind wandered to all the times people raced to cross the street when they saw him coming. My brother’s ethnicity rarely gets questioned. His son’s will. My brother carried on the biracial tradition and married a woman with a black father and a white mother. Their son has gray eyes and hair that doesn’t snag even if you run a fine-tooth comb through it.

I asked my father about the men who confronted him when my mom and he were on dates. He paused, trying to remember any, but came up blank. I wondered if my mom was more sensitive to them because she’s black or if my father didn’t want to admit in his first conversation with his estranged daughter that he used to whup people’s asses for looking at him sideways.

“I don’t remember any serious problems. I remember this white guy in Sears staring at us. We were on the up escalator and he was on the other one, going down. He kept staring at us, so I said, ‘Why don’t you take a photo? It will last longer.’ ” My dad laughed.

My brother asked, “What was it like being white around mostly black people?”

“I didn’t think much of it. I grew up around all white people, then the neighborhood started changing. When we moved to 56th Street, I was one of the only white people around, but I didn’t think much of it. Back then, I had jobs where there were only white people around, but I didn’t see anything weird about that either. That’s just the way my mom raised me.”

Of course you didn’t notice anything wrong with the store having only
white employees,
I wanted to say.
You’re white.
A black person would notice, especially if he tried to put in a job application. I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure what I expected from him. From what my mom said, I thought he was so black he almost didn’t know he was white. Oh, well, hopefully I still have some ass-whupping stories coming up.

“I met your mom while I was playing chess with her sister, Bea. She was the only one on the block who could play chess,” my dad said, toppling his status in my mind from a Fonzie-like thug dad to a Sears-shopping, chess-playing dad who gets his comebacks from
MAD
magazine cartoons.
Take a picture, it will last longer?
Who says that when they’re grown?

“But I remember you play-fighting with friends on the street!” I exclaimed, leaving my brother and father to figure out how I made the leap from chess to play-fighting.

“We’d do that just to get a rise out of people,” my dad replied.

“I do that, too!” my brother yelled, like a little boy happy that he had something in common with his father. “If I’m following behind my friend in a car and we both come to a red light, we’ll jump out and start fighting in the street for ten seconds, then jump back in our cars and drive off.”

I made a mental note to tell my brother not to do that. Didn’t he know a black man jumping out of his car play-fighting was different from a white guy doing it? I thought back to when my mom lamented that she let my brother visit my dad. “Can a white man raise a black child?” she asked her hairdresser, Miss Lillian. “Yeah, if you want your son to get shot,” she answered.

“Dad, have you ever been in a real fight?” I asked, clinging to the hope that he had a little tough guy in him. I’ve got a soft spot for those guys. The Al Pacinos, the Indiana Joneses, the cute little rappers who wear Band-Aids over their bullet scars.

“Yeah, I got into a fight in high school. It lasted three punches. This guy Bill punched me in the nose, but it started bleeding, so he went to the corner store to get some tissues for me. We became best friends after that.”

Okay, white thug has totally left the building. I asked him something I had always been curious about, since all the mistresses I remembered were black.

“Have you ever dated a white woman?”

Another pause. “Once. No, twice.”

I never understood when people say they don’t see color but only date people of a certain race. I tried not to judge, because, hey, that preference resulted in me being on earth, but I didn’t understand.

“Why does anyone prefer anything? It’s just what you prefer. Why do some people prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla? I prefer black women.”

“I hear that!” my brother screamed. The conversation had left me a little drained, and I wasn’t sure if my brother was screaming for ice cream, black women, or black women who prefer ice cream.

I told my father I’d call him later, though I wasn’t sure if I would. I was confused. I just wanted the story of how he met my mother; I thought perhaps I would glean some insights about race and love. How two people find each other in the middle of the melting pot. What he told me totally contradicted the story my mother gave me.

While I was trying to make sense of it all, I suddenly wondered if their relationship wasn’t the perfect metaphor for how people feel when they’re trying to figure out what I am. Everyone sees the same thing, but they each have different interpretations about how it all came together.