Mixed: My Life in Black and White (7 page)

Inner City Stars

In a culture that idealizes whiteness and devalues blackness, black children frequently identify with the white dominant race. With the interracial person being half white and therefore closer to a white Euro-American frame of reference and privileges than uniracial blacks, becoming black is even more of a challenge.

—Ursula M. Brown,
The Interracial Experience: Growing Up Black/White Racially Mixed in the United States

Nana, my maternal grandmother, was a hard, round
woman who used to dry my mother’s hair by sticking her head in the oven. I knew this because whenever I would complain about how long it took my hair to dry, my mother would remind me that it was better than having to hold your head still next to a pot roast.

“Your nana loves
in her own way,
” my mother would say. I knew that was the adult way of calling someone mean. At Nana’s house, there was no running and no loud talking, and questioning adults was considered back talk, something punishable by beatings with a switch. When my mother told me and my brother that we were moving there until she could save up enough money to get our own place, I sat shotgun in our Ford Granada, desperately trying to think of other alternatives.

“Can we live in the library?” I asked.

“Are you still scared that Nana is going to bake your braids off?” my mother asked. “Nana stopped using the oven years ago. She has a microwave now; it dries hair quicker.”

I wasn’t in a joking mood. I stroked my plaits like they were puppies.

My mother sighed. “Don’t tell your grandmother I told you about that. She didn’t know putting my head in the oven was dangerous. . . .” Her voice trailed off like there was more to say but she decided against it, or maybe the effects of inhaling stove gas on shampoo days were kicking in on my mother’s brain at that very moment.

I decided to give my nana the benefit of the doubt on the oven story. It’s possible that she didn’t know you could die from sticking your head in an oven; she talked about her lack of formal education the same way some people always find a way to toss out that they graduated second in their college class. If you hung around my grandmother for five minutes, you’d know she was Sylvia Smith, SGC (Sixth Grade Completer).

“What do I know? I only went to sixth grade, and I cleaned white women’s floors for a living. I’m just a dum-dum,” she’d moan to my grandfather whenever she felt he was ignoring her, which was often. Technically, he
was
ignoring her, but he ignored everyone who talked to him; he was deaf. He bought a hearing aid, but he turned it off minutes after he slipped it into his ear.

“I don’t blame him,” my mother said as my grandmother’s voice screeched through the room.

While that act of deaf defiance provided my grandfather with inner peace, it also meant there were two levels of speaking in their house: an Indoor Voice (whisper) and a Talking to Pop-Pop Voice (yelling like someone was coming at you with a shotgun). My grandmother didn’t approve of loud children, so during visits I spent most of the time sitting absolutely still, moving only to a chair when the plastic couch covering stuck to my body. Nana had no air-conditioner.

“We’re not going to be living here long,” my mother said as she unpacked our few things. Our new home was her old bedroom, a small museum of 1960s artifacts. I found a space in between her Afro-pick sculpture and STUDENTS FOR JFK button to lay my book bag down.

Five minutes into unpacking, Nana called up through the vent.

“What are you doing?” she yelled. “Come down here and watch television with me!”

All that worrying about oven-dried hair. I forgot to think about how much boring television I’d be forced to watch at Nana’s. Well, not really watching television, more like talking to television. Whenever one of Nana’s favorite shows was on, she’d yell at the screen, her commentary drowning out the program.

If the news was on and there was a report of a mugging but no police sketch of the robber, she’d yell, “You know he’s white, because if he was black they’d have showed it! That’s just how white people do black people.” She’d sigh, waves of bitterness and anger filling the small living room. I hated watching the news with her. I was certain she believed that, being part white, I was also a bad person.

Game shows were a bit more fun. If Nana was watching a game show, her rules dictated that we drop everything to cheer for brown contestants. One night, I got out of cleaning dinner plates because an Indian man was on
Jeopardy!

“Go on, brother, phrase it like a question!” my grandmother yelled.

“Nana, he’s Indian, not black,” I whispered to her.

“He’s not what?” she replied, angry that I had taken her attention away from the
Jeopardy!
board. “He
is
a black man. See, they always put black people in the last space.” She pointed to the third
Jeopardy!
podium.

I conceded and cheered Mr. Bhatia, hoping he would go on a winning streak so I’d never have to clear dishes again.

The only programs that required absolute silence were her “stories,” the soap operas. From the time on the clock, I knew that was what my grandmother was watching when she called up through the vent. I would have chewed off my right foot not to have to go down to the living room. Watching soap operas was torture: The people talked too slowly, no one laughed, and none of the
Young and the Restless
characters had their own cereal.

As my mother started down the stairs, I told her I had to go to the bathroom but promised I’d be right down. I sat on the toilet trying to figure out how long I could stretch out my freedom before I got in trouble. Nana answered me by calling up through the vent again. “What are you getting into up there?”

I pulled up my pants and headed downstairs.

At the top of the stairs, I looked down at the living room. Nana was humming “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” while trying to push herself up from the sofa. With one forceful shove, she finally rose and stumbled to the china cabinet that housed her army of orange medicine bottles. She stood in front of her cabinet reading the pill names and adding commentary. “No, that one is for my arthureye-tis; I don’t take that one until dinnertime.”

She was blocking my path to the sofa. I knew I would be stuck on the steps until she moved, so I offered up my assistance.

“Do you need me to get something for you, Grandmom?”

Her eyes locked on mine. “Vertigo!” she screeched back at me. She rocked slightly before throwing her upper body into the banister pole. “Vertigo!” she screamed again, and gripped the pole like it was the only stable tree in a hurricane.

My mother jumped up to help her. That wasn’t enough.

“Vertigo, John!” Nana screamed in her Talking to Pop-Pop Voice. My grandfather slowly rose from his seat, and the three of us gently guided her back to her permanently indented cushion on the sofa.

Until I was eleven, because of my grandmother, I thought
Vertigo!
was what you shouted whenever you were struck with sudden pain. When I experienced my first menstrual cramps, my mother yelled to me to hurry up and get ready for school. I called back, “Vertigo!” and got in trouble because she thought I was mocking her mother.

After my grandmother’s vertigo subsided, she picked up her “lottery book,” a small reporter’s notepad in which she had recorded every Pennsylvania daily lottery number since 1949. She was certain there was a pattern to the lottery numbers, and if she could just crack the code she’d be a millionaire. While she was flipping through her pages, a preview for the news came on. I got nervous—I wasn’t ready to be hated. I asked my mother if I could go outside.

“Yes.”

Yes?
That’s when I knew things had changed and Nana’s house was truly our new home. Usually, the farthest outside I was allowed to go was sitting on the enclosed front porch with Nana as she surveyed the block, talking about how downhill it had all gone.

Before my mother could change her mind, I bolted toward the door like I was making a prison break. I ran down the street toward three girls jumping rope, only with two ropes instead of one.

Two ropes should be just as easy, I tried to convince myself, watching the ropes swing like manic egg beaters.

“Big Mac, Filet of Fish,” the girls chanted in unison. They all had braids like mine, except theirs lay flat on their scalps, as if they were glued down. Each tiny braid ended with beads and aluminum foil. When a girl jumped into the ropes, the sun danced off the aluminum and made her head seem to be surrounded by a universe of tiny stars.

I immediately wanted to be a Star Girl, to look like a planetarium when I jumped. I got up the nerve to ask if I could play.

“You got ends,” one girl said, handing me the ends of the wiry clothesline. I would have preferred to start off jumping, bobbing my head as I bounced, practicing for my day as a Star Girl, but since I was the new arrival, I had to start at the bottom. I started spinning my end of the ropes like I’d observed them doing. The girl who had handed them off to me finessed her way into the rope and started jumping. The fast-food chant began—“Big Mac, Filet”—and stopped abruptly when she missed her footing.

“Dag, Kim, you only got to Filet!” my co-turner called out.

Kim stomped out of the rope. “That’s ’cause she’s double-handed!” Kim replied. I knew the
she
was me. Everyone looked at me. Confused, I looked at my hands.

Double-handed? Did they mean double-jointed? I knew all about that; my next-door neighbor could bend her pinky back until it touched her thumb. If they didn’t mean double-jointed, what did they mean? Should I show them that I wasn’t double-jointed? Should I tell them they were making the game more confusing than it needs to be by using two ropes and a McDonald’s commercial as a counting system?

From the looks on their faces, I was the oddball, so I refrained from offering my jump-rope suggestions. I’d wait until they accepted me to try to change them.

“Here, try again,” Kim said. I started turning the ropes. Keisha, a tall bronze girl shaped like a pogo stick with tiny breasts, entered. She held one arm protectively over her breast buds as she jumped. I studied her feet as I turned. She made it all the way to “Apple Pie.”

“Have you ever jumped double Dutch before?” Keisha asked, snatching the ends from my hands.

Everyone was annoyed with me, but it was finally my chance to jump.
This is my chance to prove myself. God, please let me make it past
Filet.

The ropes slapped the ground, awaiting my entrance. I held my breath and leapt in with all the grace of a drunk jumping off a cliff. My arms flailed at my sides. My legs landed heavy on the rope as if I had cement in my shoes.

“Big,” all three girls called out unenthusiastically.

I didn’t even make it to “Mac.” I couldn’t even get a whole burger.

“Let her get a freebie,” Kim said, enlightening me on two double-Dutch rules. One: She was in charge because it was her rope. Two: If a jumper can’t get past the first word of the McDonald’s jingle, it must be everyone involved’s fault (no one is that un-talented); thus the jumper gets a second try.

The ropes spun again. This time I tried to imitate how the other girls looked when they jumped in. I scowled at the ropes like they had killed my firstborn. I put my arm protectively across breasts I didn’t have yet. I swayed my body back and forth to the timing of the rope turns, timing out my entrance in my head.
Jump now! No,
wait. Jump now! No, wait! Just do it!

I jumped in, and a sharp pain flew across my forehead. I fell backward to the cement, heard a popping sound, and saw a barrette launch into the street and hit the tire of the G bus, which had stopped to discharge passengers.

I tried to get up, but when I moved it felt like someone was pulling a zipper through my hair. When I could think past the pain, I deduced that one of the ropes had smacked me in the forehead, traveled along my head, and got tangled in my braid. My curly hair tends to spiral around anything close to it, and with the barrette no longer holding the ends of the braid together, the individual strands were coiling around the rope.

Butt cheeks still on the cement, I tried to yank my head out of the rope. The girls, stunned stiff with looks of pity until this point, dropped the ends and rushed to unravel me from the clothesline.

“No, Kim, you untwist and I’ll hold her head straight!” Nikki yelled, cradling my head in her hands. “Twist the rope to the left,
then
to the right! Go
with
the braid!” she yelled.

I looked up at her helplessly as she commandeered the double-Dutch surgery. I was one notch above a shivering dog floating down an icy stream yelping at the amateur rescue squad. Perhaps I could have been the feel-good story on the evening news:
Oreo kid
moves to hood, gets curly Oreo hair caught in rope, and is freed by local girls.
They’d interview Kim.

“No, I don’t consider myself a hero,” she’d say, explaining that anyone in her situation would have done the same thing.

While looking up at them unraveling me, I wondered how the Star-haired girls hadn’t met this same fate. It must be the flat braids, I reasoned. If your braids fling around loose, you were bound to get ensnared by clothesline.

“You got it!” Nikki yelled. “She’s free!”

“Ick, there’s a bunch of hair on my rope!” Kim said.

Nikki released my head. “Where are you from?” she asked, her tone indicating that she was asking a grander question, like “Where is your type of person manufactured?” as opposed to which house I lived in. Even though I knew this, I turned my sore head slightly and pointed to my grandmother’s house, where I saw my mother coming onto the porch. I used her as an excuse to bow out gracefully.

“Well, it was nice meeting you-all. I’m going to go home now,” I said, then remembered my manners, “And thank you all for untangling me.”