Mixed: My Life in Black and White (6 page)

When we were tired of playing Chinese jump rope, marbles, Mother May I, and Red Light Green Light, we undid one another’s braids. They also wore their hair parted down the middle, pulled into two thick braids, and secured with elastic. There was no teasing about hair, no mention of Brillo pads; we’d exchange barrettes as a sign of friendship.

After a few weeks, I learned Jacqui and her friends were scared of white people but curious about them as well. My background as an ex-friend of white kids made me the perfect conveyor of information.

“Are all white people’s houses dirty?” Jacqui asked me.

I told them the truth, which seemed to shock them. “No, some white people’s houses are clean,” I said.

“Are you sure? My mother said white people are dirty,” Kim asked.

“All white people do smell like wet dog, though,” Jacqui stated. “Does your dad smell like wet dog?”

“No, that’s crazy!” I said. No matter how comfortable I felt with them, I wasn’t about to betray my white side wholly.

“You’re lying. I want to come into your house after it rains and smell for myself!” Kim said.

I promised them they could come over during the next rainstorm. That next rainy day we gathered in my basement, practicing steps—the black version of cheerleading with no pom-poms and more rhyming words. We were excessively loud, and my mother and father came downstairs to see what we were doing. I jumped up to show my parents.

“My name is Angie and I am fine! I am fine, just like my sign! My sign is Sagittarius!” I yelled, rotating my hips like I was twirling a hula hoop. My mother clapped. My father walked out of the room.

“I don’t want her learning street games!” my friends and I heard him yell from upstairs. I knew street games meant black games. My new friends were terrified; they froze, looking to me for guidance.

I hated my dad at that moment. I thought he was no different from the arson supporters on television. Looking back, I’m more forgiving. I know preconceived notions don’t die because you marry someone of a different skin tone. I wonder if parents realize that, despite how much love you give your children, one word said in anger can change how they feel about you and themselves.

I sniffed the air. “Do you smell something?” I asked Jacqui. She shook her head
no.

“I smell it,” I said, sniffing the air and moving toward where my father’s yelling could be heard more clearly. “It smells like wet dog,” I said, hoping my face looked astonished.

Jacqui and Kim got up cautiously. “Wait, I think I smell it, too!” Jacqui said.

“I told you! It’s your dad!” Kim whispered.

“My dad smells like Chihuahua!” I said, throwing out the funniest dog name I could think of. I inhaled deeply and pretended to pass out.

Jacqui and Kim fell to the floor, laughing.

I felt a pang of shame—how low can you go?—sniffing around my basement and selling out my father for a chance at friendship. The pang was easily snuffed by thinking of how angry I was at him and how much acceptance I would gain by selling him out.

Even the joy of acceptance came uneasily. I have always been a worrier (so much so that people constantly ask me if I’m sure I’m not Jewish). How much more of what my parents told me was really a lie? Why was stepping a street game and kickball wasn’t? What would happen if Kim and Jacqui sniffed me one day and decided they smelled “half wet dog?” It seemed that race, like whether Santa Claus was real or not, was something I would have to figure out on my own.

Miss Julie

First marriages in which the husband and wife are members of the same race/ethnicity are more likely to succeed than those in which the spouses are of different race/ethnicity.

—
Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the United States,
National Center for Health Sciences, Vital
Health Stat (23) 22, 2002

Being a mixed child, you get used to people staring at
you. I learned that rolling my eyes or sticking out my tongue was the quickest way to get people to avert their gazes. Even now, when someone stares at me—if the person doesn’t look like the concealed-weapon type—I sometimes revert to my adolescent days, rolling my eyes and mumbling hollow threats under my breath: “If you don’t stop staring at me . . .”

“You’ve really got to stop threatening old ladies,” my husband says. I know, I know—but until they start a tragic-mulatto twelve-step group, I’m doing the best I can.

My mother, a bigger fan than I of the
kill them with kindness
approach, used to start conversations with the starers. “Hello!” she’d say, in an overly cheery voice. Usually the person would reply with an awkward smile or simply continue staring, mouth agape, as if they were startled that a woman with a half-white child could speak English.

I remember a few black women coming right out and asking if my father was white. The white women never did that; they said nothing with their lips; their eyes would say it all:
How in the world
did that happen?
Our family vacation photo album actually has a section called Staring White Women. Every time we got pictures developed, my mother noticed a few in which she’d be posing with me while in the background a white woman stares at us, eyes squinting as if she’s unsure of what she’s looking at. My favorite photo in that collection is from Disney World. As my multiracial family cheeses in front of the Haunted Mansion, in the background you can see Snow White gawking at us, ignoring the screaming children at her feet.

Before I learned to stick out my tongue, the staring would make me uncomfortable. I hated walking to school alone in first grade; the crossing guard used to drill holes into me with her eyes. One day we’d had a police officer come to our class to teach us about kidnappers. I became convinced that the crossing guard was trying to kidnap me. I told my mother of this fear in the beauty parlor.

“No one kidnaps black kids,” her hairdresser replied.

“If they do, they bring them right back,” another woman said, laughing.

On the last day of school, my mother walked me to school, and finally the crossing guard spoke.

“You’re so pretty,” she said, leaning in closer. “Is your father white?” When I replied
yes,
she reached into her pocket and gave me a piece of hard candy. “Here’s a present for my cute little mulatto,” she said, showing all her teeth.

“Don’t eat that candy,” my mother whispered. I ate it anyway. I had no clue that my mother was afraid the crossing guard was a racist who carried a pocket full of poisoned candies just in case she encountered someone like me.

“Mom, the cashier is staring at me,” I said as my mother gathered her purse to go pay for a fill-up on pump seven.

“She’s staring because you’re so pretty,” she said, and left my brother and me in the car as she approached the cashier’s booth and slid five dollars into the drawer. Instead of taking my mother’s money, the cashier kept staring at me. My mother tapped on the bulletproof glass. The cashier leaned into the microphone, and instead of your normal gas station cashier-customer chitchat (“What pump are you on?” or “We’re all out of Newports”), the cashier screamed out my name.

“Angela! I’d recognize your little high-yellow butt anywhere!” The confused look on my face led her to continue. “I saw your picture, the one with you holding the Read-A-Thon trophy! I’m good friends with your dad, sweetie!”

Oh, God, why do I have to look so different from everyone, so recognizable?
I put the blame on my complexion instead of where it belonged:
Why doesn’t my father take down my photos when he’s sexing a
mistress in the house?

My mother rapped on the glass again, this time like she was trying to shatter it. This caused the cashier to realize she was shouting
too much information
through a gas station mike. She unlatched the door to her tiny booth, and my mother walked in. After a few moments of making sure their conversation wasn’t turning into a cage match, I grabbed my brother’s hand, got him out of the car with me, and squeezed us both into the booth next to my mother.

“Angela, this is Miss Julie,” my mother said, like she was introducing me to British royalty. She was using her high-pitched things-aren’t-okay-but-I’m-damned-sure-going-to-pretend-they-are voice. She didn’t have to front; I already knew my parents were having problems and she suspected my father was cheating. (Note to parents: Trying to have cryptic conversations by spelling words out no longer works once your child is reading.) I hadn’t come into the booth to hear about the cheating. I had two things on my mind. One, I wanted to ask Miss Julie what “high yellow” meant. (
Zebra, mulatto, mixed, high yellow—so many words to learn to call myself,
so little time.
) Two, I wanted my mother back.

Ever since the first argument about my father c-h-e-a-t-i-n-g with w-h-o-r-e-s, my mother had started working a lot: double shifts, triples, the graveyard shift. (Some people drink to escape their problems; my mother works. It was an addiction that worked out well financially for the family, since my dad worked only sporadically.) I rarely got to see my mother. Miss Julie was sucking up my precious moments.

“I ain’t never seen a black woman come up here with half-white kids. Hell, I ain’t never been in a white man’s house where he got half-black kids on the walls and shit,” Miss Julie said. “This here done fucked up my high. For real.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t in such a rush to get out of the booth. I’d never heard anyone admit to doing drugs or curse so much—and so well. Miss Julie was taking curse words I knew and merging them with other curse words, thereby creating wonderful new double-layered curse words (“Yeah, he must have thought I was some bitch-ass trick”). She was using curse nouns as verbs (“Your husband asked me for free gas, but I’m, like, motherfuck that”). I sat down in Miss Julie’s chair. For this, I could share my mother.

“You know, when a regular black guy comes up and starts hitting on you, it ain’t nothing new, but when it’s a white man, you start feeling all special and shit. I thought he had some money. I didn’t know he was a broke ass.”

My mother looked cautiously at me, torn between wanting to know more and shielding my head from the flurry of swear words raining down on it. I pretended I wasn’t listening. I swiveled on Miss Julie’s chair, watching the cars pulling up.

“You and your daughter look just the hell alike, except she’s light. Now, your son, he has some color. How’d that shit happen?”

How
did
that shit happen? I didn’t have time to contemplate it. My mother ripped two packages of Reese’s Pieces off the display rack and stuffed them in my hands. “Here, feed some to your brother.”

“Yeah, I met him right here,” Miss Julie continued. “He came up to the window asking can he get free gas. Free gas, my ass,” Miss Julie said, rolling her eyes. She talked for ten minutes without one interruption from my mother. She didn’t even break her verbal stride when customers approached. I marveled at her multitasking; she was taking money for gas, pushing numbers in on the cash register, while detailing to my mother the times she’d been in our home. I don’t know why she was so excited to give up this information; perhaps my dad cheated on her as well. “He said he was going to give me that rocking chair you got in your bedroom. I never got the shit—”

“I want to go to Chuck E. Cheese,” my brother yelled, pulling on my mother’s shirt.

Before my mother could answer, Miss Julie leaned over me and showed him how to push the drawer out to get people’s gas money. My brother, who could be content for hours with just a cardboard box, fell in love with the money drawer. Chuck E. Cheese left his mind. “You want to talk on the microphone, sweetie?” Miss Julie asked me, lowering it to my height. When people came up to the booth, instead of talking to them, she delivered the responses through me while still holding court with my mother. “Angie, tell him we don’t have no more menthols. . . . Gwen, yeah, I did end up giving him five dollars of free gas. . . . Angie, tell him pump number five is broken, honey. . . . Gwen, who did the tiles in your bathroom? I like the pink and white thing.” My mother kept giving me more candy every time I finished a package.

I was preoccupied with doing well at my new job. Within minutes, I knew the difference between 100s and regular cigarettes and what color tree air freshener went with what scent. Then I heard something that meant our time in the gas station booth was going to be over soon: two uses of the F word in one sentence (“So I’m, like, ‘Fuck him’; I’m not fuckin’ getting fired for his ass”).

Awww, man, I thought. If Miss Julie keeps it up, we’re going to have to leave. My mother tolerated cursing around kids only in extreme circumstances, but her patience wore thin at multiple F bombs. I’d lost friends over that word. One time, I was over at Shelly’s house, and her mother and dad got into an argument. Shelly’s mother yelled at her father, “I give you fucking blowjobs and you do
this
?” I went home and asked my mother what a
fucking
blowjob
was. She covered her mouth as if she’d seen a ghost; then she exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” I was never allowed to play at Shelly’s again.

Miss Julie could talk about my father’s penis, smoke, stare, and call me “high yellow,” but once she said
fuck
two times in one sentence again, it was time to go.

“Well, we have to get to the store,” my mother said finally, got Miss Julie’s number (she already had ours), and piled us into the car.

We rode in silence for a few minutes. I knew the silence meant she was upset, so I tried to make mother-daughter small talk.

“Mom, what’s high yellow?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it,” she said, looking straight ahead.

I tried again. “Mom, I want to work at a gas station when I grow up.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, still staring straight ahead even though we were at a stoplight. Right before the light turned green, she added, “Don’t tell your father who we met.”

I was mad that our day together wasn’t turning out to be
our
day at all.

“Free gas, my ass!” I mumbled, imitating Miss Julie and knowing that a curse would irritate my mother.

My mother pulled the car right over. This time she looked at me. “If I ever hear you curse again, you’re getting a spanking. When we get home, you go straight up to your room.”

I was pissed. “Ass is not a curse! It’s a donkey! It’s not a curse!” I lied like I believed my lie.

“Child, don’t give me any lip! When we get home, go right upstairs, pack a bag, and put it under your bed. We’re going on a trip soon,” my mother said, turning the radio on.

This time, I was the one who stayed silent. I was steaming. It would be so much more fun to have Miss Julie as a mother. We could curse and eat candy all day. I could ask her what high yellow meant. Why couldn’t my mother be more like Miss Julie? I wondered.

“You are in so much trouble, young lady,” my mother reminded me, as we pulled up to our door.

The only consolation I had was knowing that my dad was in way
more
trouble. As I started packing my book bag full of clothes, I had a feeling he was not going to be invited on our impromptu trip.