See No Color (4 page)

You're boating the mar from your most family
, she says, and she is squiggly and kind of melting. I laugh. She frowns.
You're floating too far from your host family
, she says. This time I understand her words. Kind of. I get my legs under me, feet touching sand, brush water from my eyes and she is not squiggly anymore, she is an old lady who is mad. Mad at me?

Your host family
, she says again.
You need to get back to them
. I try to smile at her, to make her not mad, but the smile falls out of my mouth too quick. The old lady sticks her face in mine.
Do you speak English? Where are you from? Can you understand me?
She looks like a witch from the Halloween book who has lost her hat, so I laugh again.
I don't know if they swim where you're from, but here, children need to swim close to the shore. It's dangerous. You should be careful.
The laughing stops. There is that word again:
careful
. I was not being
careful
, like Mom said.

I try to back up, toward the shore, away from the lady witch who smells like garlic. Then Mom is beside me, wading into the lake, all towel and top-of-head kisses.
What seems to be the problem?
Looking to Mom to me, no words come from the lady, but she is still speaking with her eyes.
Was my daughter bothering you somehow?
I whip around to Mom's eyes.
No, Mom! I was just floating. Then she grabbed me for no reason.
Then the words crawl out of the space between the lady's lips, spider-like.
She'
s …
How is she your daughter?
Mom's face is empty, nothing there at all except her eyes, blinking.
She's your host daughter, then? From Africa?
Mom's eyes explode.
What are you talking about? This is my daughter, Alex. I just wanted to make sure she was all right, since you were—
The light on the waves is shimmering back and forth.
But she's black!
The lady says. She spits it out,
black
, like a bug in her mouth. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black. I say it over and over in my mouth and later that night in my bed.
I am black. Black. Black. Black. Black. Black.
Something else. Something dark, in the night. Dad, Mom, Jason, Kit, are not.
She's adopted
, Mom says, pulling me into her side.
Not that it's any of your business.
She turns us around, and we are walking back to our part of the beach, the waves turning darker. I see my hand now, beside hers, and for the first time it is
brown
. Hers is not, hers is
light
.
I am brown and they are light
, I whisper to myself. Mom's legs are stiff boards, and she is huffing.
Listen to me, Alex
, she is saying.
That woman doesn't know what she is talking about, okay? She is jus
t …
crazy.
I move my head up and down, because she wants it.
We are all one in this family, okay? We don't even see color.
I want to ask her what she means, but I know she needs me not to.
Right?
She says.
Right
, I say. I need her hand, so I take it, and Jason and Dad come to us, and they are
light
, and I am
black/brown
as I wiggle my toes deep into the sand.
Adopted
, I whisper to it, remembering the witch lady's words.
That is also what I am.
But I don't understand.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“K
atherine, please pass the salt,” Mom said at dinner. Half the time I didn't know who she was talking about when she used that name, and I knew I wasn't the only one. Mom had maintained a perverse dislike of Kit's nickname since she was a child and still held out the hope—however slim—that she might someday revert back to the name given to her at birth.

Kit lazily reached for the saltshaker and took her time to hand it to Mom. I knew she hated her formal name as much as Mom loved it.

“I like these cheddar potatoes,” Dad said, spooning a second helping onto his plate. “New recipe?”

Mom nodded and then took the saltshaker from Kit. “Got it from
Cooking Light
. It's part of their new summer issue on quick and easy sides.” She sprinkled a dash of salt on her green beans as she babbled on. “I saw about a million more recipes for things that would be perfect. Roasted beets, sweet potato fries, fresh cabbage salad. That magazine is a miracle.”

Dad shoveled a full forkful of potatoes into his mouth and grunted his agreement.

I felt a laugh bubbling up from the bottom of my stomach and looked across the table to Jason to share in the absurdity of the moment. Were we in the middle of a
Cooking Light
commercial? But he was too busy cutting up his pork chop to notice my glance. Beside him, however, I felt Kit's eyes probing my own. They were huge and filled with mischief. I looked away before I laughed out loud.

“What do you think, Alex?” Mom asked me out of nowhere.

I chewed on a piece of pork chop. Suddenly, all eyes were on me. “What do I think about what?”

Mom stabbed a bean with her fork and began to cut it with her knife. “What do you think of the potatoes?”

“Oh … yeah, they're delicious.”

Mom smiled, satisfied with my answer. She always needed to have her cooking abilities praised. It was annoying, but necessary. Dad turned to Jason to ask something about school, but I was distracted by Kit. Something was going on. She made a screwed up face at me and I looked away again.

Then Kit clanged her fork onto her plate and folded her fingers together, almost as if in prayer. “What do you all make of Alex being the only black person in our family? I mean, I've been thinking about it, and I know I'm not the only one. Sometimes I see people staring at us in the grocery store like they can't figure us out, and I feel weird, and then I know it must be like ten times weirder for Alex. But it's like this
secret
, you know? Like no one is supposed to actually admit that
she's black
, or maybe more that
she's not white
. But it's impossible because she's just right there, with us and it's like, ‘How can't you see this?'” She said it in a completely credulous tone, no different from Mom's rambling on about the recipes.

Mom coughed on her potatoes, and Dad set his wineglass on the table with a thud. I stopped chewing and shoved a long, stray, frizzy curl back into my ponytail.

For a minute, the air was thick with electricity, and then Dad spoke. “Excuse me?”

Kit looked him straight in the face, clear-eyed, and repeated the question. She had never asked anything like that before, but then again, she seemed to grow bolder—and more careless—every day. This must have been what she was trying to address with me earlier. I tried to decide if I was angry or just surprised, and what I realized I was feeling most at that moment was fear. It wasn't what I'd expected.

Dad's jaw was set, and he picked up the wineglass again. “Alex is only half black,” he said.

I couldn't even look at him.

He cleared his throat and stared down Kit. “And there are lots of white families who adopt black children, anyway. You know that as well, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.” He squinted at Kit. “Is there something going on with you? You're acting even stranger than usual lately.”

Jason looked completely perplexed. I could sense him trying to catch my eye, but I was trained on Kit, waiting for her response.

Kit shrugged, nonchalantly meeting Dad's glare. “Lulu says that even though Alex is mixed and dresses like a white kid, people think she's black when they look at her.” Lulu was the black girl who lived across the street, and also Kit's best friend. “And she was also asking me why our family adopted Alex when you already had Jason and me.”

Mom's face was flaming red, and she was breathing hard. “You hadn't even been born yet when we got Alex, and I had no idea I was going to get pregnant with Jason.” The words were spilling out of her, like she didn't know where they were coming from. “And anyway, what business is it of Lulu's? Why would you even be talking about personal family stuff with Lulu anyway? That's not her business! That's nobody's business but ours.” She shook her head and blinked at Kit, like she didn't know her.

Kit sighed. “She asked.”

I felt
my
face turn red. My clothes felt too tight. So people were talking about me in the neighborhood?
What else are they saying about your not-so-black ass?

“Lots of people will ask you lots of things,” Dad said, holding Kit's eyes with his own. “Things which absolutely do not concern them. And when that happens, it's your job—no, your
responsibility
—not to answer them. Some things are just private.”

“And this is not exactly dinnertime conversation,” Mom said, her voice wobbly.

I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell them to quit talking about me like I wasn't there, but I didn't know what words to use. And yet, at the same time, there was a part of me that was grateful to Kit for saying something and grateful to Lulu for being able to verbalize what I could not.

Kit laughed. “Alex being black is
private
?”

I looked, alarmed, between Dad and Kit. Not two feet away from her, he looked like he wanted to slap her. But she either didn't see this or didn't care. “I mean, I get how some parts of her
adoption
are private. Or at least that you guys
want
it to be pri—”

Mom grabbed Kit's arm and hissed, “Be
quiet
, young lady!” I swear I could see tears in her eyes.

But it was like Kit was a ghost, outside her body, because she wasn't even fazed, didn't seem to even register that Mom was clutching her. “I mean, what if Alex's other parents can teach her about black people, so maybe she wouldn't feel so—”

“Shut up!” Mom and Dad both yelled at the same time. It was like two cymbals striking with Kit between them.

Kit looked stunned, like she had just woken up, except that the waking world was much worse than her dream.

I clenched my fists tightly under the table. Then I pushed my chair out and ran from the table.

“Alex!” Mom called after me. And in the background I heard, “See what you did?”

When I got to my room, I played Maroon 5 as loud as it would go and dove under my covers. There were times like this when I wanted to just disappear, when my body seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. And the worst part was that I knew that later everyone would act like nothing had happened. That was always just the way it went.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
am not stupid. I see things. I catch certain repeated phrases. I can sense discomfort. I notice willful blindness. There was, for example, the matter of the video clips Dad dug up on YouTube of Hank Aaron talking about hitting more than twenty home runs for twenty straight seasons. “You'll learn more from him than I could ever teach you,” he told us.

I no longer needed a computer to see that at bat in Atlanta on April 8, 1974, where he hit his 715th home run in front of 54,000 people, breaking Babe Ruth's record. It happened in the fourth inning with two outs and a man on first base. I would never fast-forward, though; somehow, that seemed like cheating. Dad always said that it was a whole game, a whole season, and ultimately an entire career that led up to an unforgettable moment. That there was no way you could cut corners and get there and that Hank Aaron's story exemplified this fact perfectly. So I felt that I absolutely needed to watch the whole game, see the way he played Al Downing (career ERA 3.22, 1639 SOs, 123–107 W–L), the veteran pitcher, and take notes on Aaron's patience, which was something I always needed to work on. I was never more my father's daughter than when my nose was an inch away from the screen as Hank Aaron stepped into the box.

But there were also other videos of Aaron a click away from the prescribed clip. In the sidebar of related videos, I found film from the early sixties with Aaron discussing removal of segregation signs and policies at the Milwaukee Braves' spring training facility in Bradenton, Florida. My favorite video (after the record-breaking game) was Hank explaining the hate letters he received from people around the country who didn't want him to break the record, just because he was black. Jason found this clip morbid; I could tell by the way his nose wrinkled up every time he heard the word “nigger.”

“Dear Nigger Henry,” Hank Aaron read to the camera, enunciating each word. “It has come to our attention that you are going to break Babe Ruth's record. I don't think that you are going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it. Getting back to your blackness, I don't think any coon should ever play baseball. Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. I will be going to the rest of your games and if you hit more than one home run it will be your last. My gun is watching your every black move. This is no joke.”

Jason would slowly back out of the room whenever I played this one. If Dad was in the room, he'd focus on whatever magazine or scouting report was closest. I could sense their discomfort, but it didn't bother me. Sometimes when I watched that clip, I actually laughed, because Hank Aaron had done it anyway; people were threatening to kill him every time he went up to bat just because he was so good that he was going to break a record that a white man had happened to set. I was sure I could see it each time he stepped up to the plate; the laughter, which could also be my laughter, settling into the contours of his face. Though I had never faced what he had, I felt like I knew something about how he felt up there, how he just had to play, even though he himself might never know why.

I'm not stupid. I was just a little blind.

CHAPTER NINE

T
he tub felt solid against my ass as I perched on its edge a week after Kit's odd dinnertime outburst. Warm water surrounded my calloused and tired feet. My wet hair sprayed out like a wild mane down my neck and onto my back. I had already used up a third of the new conditioner Mom had bought for me and Kit, lathering it everywhere. Soon I would have to pick my hair out—my least favorite part of bathing because it could take almost an hour. I might as well soak my feet at the same time. This was why I had placed a copy of
Americanah
on the floor beside me—a reading break from the frustration of my hair every twenty minutes or so. I had just read a passage that was now jammed in my brain, mostly because I felt like I was hovering on the edge of really grasping it: