Mixed: My Life in Black and White (9 page)

Keyana locked eyes with me and squinted as if she was trying to bring my face back in focus. I put up two limp fists, like a handicapped Rocky.

“Bunk yoouuuu!” I screamed again.

“She’s retarded!” the sidekick exclaimed, backing away from me as if retardation were contagious. Keyana walked backward for a few steps, then they both spun around and ran toward Maureen, throwing their hands up in her face.

“You didn’t tell us she was retarded! That’s messed up!” they yelled. Just as Maureen looked over toward me, the head nun rang the bell, indicating it was time to line up and go inside. I gripped my rosary beads before heading inside. Maureen stared at me for three straight hours until my mother arrived to pick me up.

The counseling center was a row house in the middle of a regular West Philadelphia block, the only home with white people sitting on the porch. The waiting room was decorated with posters I didn’t understand.

One poster looked like the universal NO SMOKING sign, except instead of a cigarette with a slash through it there was a wire hanger.

No hangers? What does that mean? Maybe our counselor hates hanging
up clothes.

Another poster featured two men in a passionate embrace.

“Mom, why are those guys French-kissing?” I asked.

“Because . . . because they are good friends,” my mother replied.

Our counselor called us into her office. She was a middle-aged hippie, the perfect spokeswoman for Birkenstocks and loosefitting skirts. She insisted I call her Sue (instead of Miss Sue like my mother said), and once I was seated on her couch she handed me markers and asked me to draw a picture of my family.

I drew my mother, brother, and myself and then, off to the side, another version of myself being punched in the face by girls in plaid uniforms.

“Who are the girls in plaid?” Sue asked.

I spilled everything, from my hopscotch racial faux pas to my clash with Janine’s play cousin.

“. . . so I had to act like a ’tard!” I finished. I looked over at my mother and immediately corrected myself. “I mean retarded,” I said, dropping my head to the floor.

“I had no idea,” my mother said cautiously to Sue, as if making sure there was no additional charge for bringing in a truckload of extra problems.

“Wow, what a smart girl you were to act retarded!” Sue exclaimed, and turned to my mother. “We’re going to need quite a few more sessions.”

While driving back to my grandmother’s house, my mother asked what would make the rest of the school year go easier for me.

“Please come tell Maureen that my dad is white,” I said.

“Lord, give me strength,” my mother murmured.

The next day, my mother marched into the schoolyard with me. “That’s Maureen!” I said. My mom yanked me toward her and stood eye to eye with my bully.

“Angela says that you don’t believe her dad is white.” Maureen opened her mouth to reply, but my mother cut her off. “Her father is just as white as I am black. If you have any other questions you want to ask about her family, you ask me. Got it?” With my mother yelling at her, Maureen shrank before my eyes. She was just an eleven-year-old in a training bra that I had outbullied with the ultimate weapon: an angry, overworked, single black mother.

Maureen kept her eyes to the ground, looking like she wanted to find a crack in the cement so she could crawl into it and hide. My mother left her and walked over to talk to Miss Shannon. Maureen, in a last-ditch attempt to save face in front of her followers, glanced at my mother and sucked her teeth.

As I was about to join my mother, Maureen grabbed me by the arm. I blocked my face, prepared for the punch.

“You got ends,” she said, holding out her end of the rope. Suspiciously, I grabbed the double-Dutch olive branch and started turning. Not five minutes into the game, another classmate, Erica, who had recently taken my spot in the front row by claiming she couldn’t see the board, accused me of being double-handed.

“Erica, get some glasses ’cause you blind!” Maureen screamed. It’s like I really
was
retarded/mentally disabled/slow Sean, suddenly tight with the class bully. I promised myself I would abuse my Maureen-protected status for as long as I had it.

“Call me double-handed again and you’ll have to give me a fair one,” I whispered to Erica.

Once in the classroom, Miss Shannon startled us all with a bold announcement. “We’re going to start religion class a little late. I want to talk about race and differences,” she said.

Huh? It’s not February, why are we talking about race stuff? Oh, God,
my mother must have told her what Maureen did. Please don’t single me out,
Miss Shannon. I finally got Maureen to be my friend. Let it drop, lady!

“What color am I?” Miss Shannon asked the class.

“White!” the class clown, Rufus, called out without raising his hand. He was very excited to be able to answer a question correctly.

“Yes. I’m white,” Miss Shannon said. “And what color is Charmaine?” she asked. Charmaine was a light-skinned girl with hazel eyes and more beads in her hair than hair. Every time she moved her head, it sounded like the beginning of a mariachi tune.

“White!” Rufus called out again, laughing. This time he knew he was wrong, but emboldened by one correct answer, he couldn’t resist going for a quick second dose of attention.

Charmaine whipped her head around and glared at Rufus. “You white! Your mother white!”

“Charmaine, be quiet!” Miss Shannon said.

“I ain’t white!” Charmaine said. She folded her arms across her chest and slid down in her seat.

Miss Shannon was in over her head. She didn’t know that being called white was a dis. Actually, I’m not sure she knew how to give a lesson on race. For ten minutes, she just called the names of various civil rights activists and musicians and then asked what race the person was. When she finished running down the entire Motown roster (“and what color is Jermaine Jackson?”) she summed up her lesson: “Black and white people can do anything, and they can do it together.”

Maureen’s hand shot into the air. “Black people can’t do anything! My mother said they can’t be president.”

Miss Shannon clapped her hands against her cheeks. “Why, Maureen, that’s horrible! Of course a black person could be president,” she said. “Maybe what your mom meant is that we haven’t had a black president yet!”

“No,” Maureen replied. “My mom said
never.
She said if it does happen, he’ll be shot the next day. Bam!” Maureen said, pointing a fake gun at Miss Shannon.

Miss Shannon’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

Janine raised her hand and broke Miss Shannon’s silence. “I know something else black people can’t be! They can’t be nuns!”

Miss Shannon’s face lit up. “There are indeed black nuns!” she said, smiling. With murmurs of disbelief moving through the classroom, Miss Shannon took out Field Trip forms from her desk and passed them out. “We’ll just have to go see one, won’t we?”

As Miss Shannon passed a packet down each row, she caught my eye.
If she asks me to get up and say a few words, I’m running out of this
room and going home,
I thought.

“Angela,” she said, “make sure everyone in the class gives you a big thank-you. You’re the reason we get to go on this field trip.”

With those words, Ms. Shannon transformed me into the most popular girl in class. I was the magic new girl with the white dad and the ability to get them out of school to see black nuns.

The day of the field trip, Maureen saved a space for me on the school bus. When we hopped off the bus at the entrance to the convent grounds, Maureen shouted, “ ’Scuse me, where’s the black sister?” to the first nun we saw.

“Maureen!” Miss Shannon exclaimed, embarrassed.

The nun laughed and led our group to the convent entrance. She told us to wait as she went inside. A few moments later, a black nun popped her head out of an upstairs window like a cuckoo clock bird. She looked a bit irritated, as if someone was always interrupting her prayers to get her to wave at groups of disbelieving schoolchildren.

“She’s too pretty to be a nun. She could get a man,” Maureen announced to the group. I agreed, even though I’d never thought of nuns joining the convent because they were ugly.

No one paid attention for the rest of the trip. We were all giggling in excitement at seeing a real live black nun.

“Still, that don’t mean a black person can be president,” Maureen said, as we boarded the bus to ride home. “A nun I can understand, because nobody shoots nuns.” Before she boarded the bus, she pointed an imaginary gun at the convent window.

“We have a surprise for you!” Sue said, clasping her hands together.

It was our fifth visit, and I was starting to tire of the counseling center. I didn’t see the point. My problem was solved, Maureen was my friend. Plus, I felt like I was always letting Sue down. She’d give my mother and me homework assignments, but we could never get around to completing them. Two visits ago, she’d told my mother to take me to the park to show me how to turn double Dutch. That was a train wreck. It was impossible for my mother to turn the ropes with me and keep an eye on my brother. He tried to chase some geese and almost fell into the Schuylkill River. When my mother ran to save him, she slipped on goose droppings and twisted her ankle. “That’s enough jump rope,” she said, while I helped her limp to the car. She was in so much pain, I had to help hold the steering wheel steady while she drove home.

I also hated the way Sue always tried to pull “feelings” out of me. Every session she’d ask, “How does it feel to be mixed? Do you feel like you have to choose sides? Is it confusing?”

Who cares about feelings when you’re popular? I thought. I wasn’t confused at all, I just wanted people not to tease me. The more I insisted that I wasn’t confused, the more Sue pressed me on it. “But I see the squiggly marks you drew around your head,” she said, holding up my latest drawing.

Even when I told her the squiggly marks weren’t symbolism, they were my version of cornrows, she prodded for feelings.

“Are you ready for the surprise?” Sue asked.

I nodded.

“The surprise is you’re moving back to your old neighborhood so you can go back to your old school!” Sue exclaimed. “How do you feel about that?”

“Great,” I lied.

I didn’t tell Maureen I was leaving until the last day of school. My mother came to pick me up, the backseat of her car filled with boxes. Maureen hugged me like I was her daughter.

“Will we hang out over the summer?” Maureen asked.

“No, I won’t see you this summer. I have to go back to my white school. It’s better than this school,” I said, just for the sake of being mean and making her feel as bad as she’d once made me feel. Of course now, in my paranoid old age, I’m afraid that telling her my white school was better than her school may have scarred her for life, made her hate white people, half-white people, or, more likely, herself. Whenever a black person is rude to me for no reason, I suck it up, figuring it’s my Maureen karma.

“I’d tell you where it is, but I can’t give directions to black people,” I said, pronouncing the word
black
as if it were a disease.

I turned around to walk to the car. My mother was standing right over me, looking like she was trying to decide whether it would be easier to choke me with my uniform collar or bite my head off.

“If black people can’t go to our old neighborhood, you’d better find somebody else to drive you.” My mother planted herself down on the nuns’ favorite bench and crossed her legs. “How are you, Maureen?” she asked, smiling at her.

“Mom, I—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” my mother said. “I don’t know who told you that you were better than anyone else because you have a white dad, but let me tell you, you’re just as black as me,” she said. “One drop of black blood makes you black, young lady.” And she left me with Maureen. Maureen looked shaken. It was the only time I’d ever seen her speechless.

“I’m sorry, Maureen,” I said, and tried to give her a weak apology hug. She shoved me away.

When I got in the car, my mother turned up the radio, her sign that she didn’t want to hear anything I had to say. To add to the punishment, she drove up and down almost every West Philadelphia street that day, as if what I’d said to Maureen was correct and her blackness kept her from knowing the directions back to Southwest Philly. I’d call out frustratedly, “Mom, you’re supposed to turn here,” and she’d slap her forehead.

“I’m so glad I have you in the car, I’d be so lost!” my mother said twenty times in ten minutes.

A half tank of gas later, the sight of a cop riding her bumper startled her into ceasing the role of Lost Black Driver. Since my father still held title to the car, we were driving on expired tags. We avoided interactions with cops like we were a drug mule family.

“Angie, crawl in the backseat and wave to the cop,” my mother said.

I hesitated.

“Wave to the cop. If he pulls up and sees that you look part white, he’ll understand why the car is registered to a Nissel. I can’t afford a ticket,” she said.

“But I’m not part white. You just said I’m all black.”

“Please, Angela, just wave!” I obeyed and crawled into the backseat, waving and smiling like I was on a parade float. The cop drove off.

I stayed in the backseat, wondering if being half white was some kind of hidden superpower, one you only pulled out in times of danger. When was I supposed to hide it? With black schoolgirls? What happened if the wrong person found out? How come one drop of white blood doesn’t make you white? Who made these rules, anyway, and why couldn’t I get a copy of them?

“Mom, I want to see Sue,” I announced. I was certain Sue would be proud of me. I finally had the confused feelings she’d been searching for.

My God Complex

“Tonight, the Academy is honoring both my people with
Fiddler on the Roof
and
Shaft.
”

—Sammy Davis, Jr.,
black entertainer who converted to Judaism

“Why do you still go to that white church?” Miss Marlo, a
frequent visitor to the beauty shop, asked my mother.

“Because the service is short. The priest has you in and out of there in forty-five minutes flat. Sometimes it’s only a half-hour service if there’s a game on that afternoon,” my mother replied. “Plus, I don’t have to buy dress clothes. You can wear jeans to that church!”

Every corner of Miss Lillian’s basement salon responded with shouts of disbelief.

“She ain’t lying,” Miss Lillian chimed in. “Them people going to church look like they about to go camping.”

“Well, that’s just rude,” Miss Marlo said, shaking her head. She was a diehard Southern Baptist and seemed more married to Jesus than any of my nuns. “If you can’t dress up for the Lord, who can you dress up for?”

“God doesn’t care what you wear,” my mother said. “Plus, a lot of times, people in black churches aren’t dressing for God. They’re dressing for each other.”

“Didn’t you grow up in a black Baptist church?” Miss Marlo asked, the tone of her voice whispering
Heathen, sinner, sellout.
“Your kids need to come to my church. They need a place with community.”

My ears perked up. Did she say that Baptists had
community
? Why, I should go to Miss Marlo’s church, declare my allegiance to Baptists, and get welcomed into this community. Why concentrate on racial acceptance when I can have a club where everyone has my back regardless of color as long as I worship their God? Besides, racial wars are so passé, so sixties. Holy wars are all the rage.

“Mom, I’d like to go to Miss Marlo’s church,” I chimed in.

“See, she don’t even like your church,” Miss Marlo said, folding her arms across her chest.

“Fine, she can go to your church,” my mother said to Miss Marlo. “As long as I don’t have to buy her a new dress. Shoot, I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul as it is.”

Attending Eagle Rock Baptist Church required more clothing, hair, and makeup preparation than going to a transvestite prom.

Saturday night, Miss Marlo thumbed through my closet until she found the only church-suitable dress, a frilly yellow Easter getup from 1985 B.C. (Before Cleavage). When I modeled it, my eleven-year-old breasts almost burst out of the thin cotton. Miss Marlo quickly threw her shawl over them like she was trying to smother a fire.

After the shawl/Easter dress outfit was deemed acceptable, I ironed it and changed into my nightclothes, and Miss Marlo began braiding my hair. It took two hours, as Miss Marlo took several pauses to pluck her eyebrows and tend to the collard greens she was cooking to take to church. When she finished my hair, she asked where my mother kept her hair wraps. I didn’t know what a hair wrap was.

“It’s like a bonnet to keep your hair from getting messed up.” Miss Marlo sighed. I could tell by her tone that she would have been annoyed if she had to get up and look for it, so I brought her back the closest thing I could find: my swimming cap.

She shook her head from side to side and laughed a little. “I guess that’ll do. Your head might get kinda hot, though.” Miss Marlo placed the swim cap over my braids and secured it with the chin strap.

I woke up early Sunday morning and showered (with my swim cap on, of course). Miss Marlo inspected my washing work. She licked her finger and then rubbed the corners of my eyes. It was bad enough when my mother cleaned my face like that, but it seemed doubly disgusting when done by a nonrelated hand.

“You’re about the ashiest little high-yellow child I’ve ever seen,” Miss Marlo declared. “Go grease your face and legs.”

“
Grease
my face?” I asked, confused.

“Good Lord.” She sighed and took a jar of Vaseline from her purse, scooped a dollop of the jelly out, and smeared it over every exposed part of my body. When I glanced into the mirror, I looked like I was made of wax. She handed me the pot of greens to carry, and it almost slid out of my hands.

From the outside, the church looked unassuming, a tiny red building in the middle of a beat-up block of stores. Once inside, I was greeted by a hurricane of sequined hats and matching change purses. The smell of our collard greens mixed with the burnt smell of freshly hot-combed hair. Women greeted each other with shouts and hugs, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years.

Is this really a church? I wondered. Where are the stained-glass windows, and how come there are only six rows of pews? Is that podium and microphone supposed to be an altar? How . . . quaint. I questioned my decision to come; I wondered why God would visit such a shabby place when he had huge Catholic churches with air-conditioning to hang out in.

Plus, if I was looking for a group to have my back, these people were hardly the type. My brother and I were the only people in the church not eligible for AARP.

“Where’s the priest?” I asked.

Miss Marlo pointed to a man of about sixty, one of only two men in the room. He was chatting with three women, dressed all in white. “He’s not called a priest, he’s a minister,” Miss Marlo explained. There wasn’t enough time to ask her all my other questions, like, Why were people greeting her as Sister Marlo when she wasn’t a nun? Where were the altar boys? Who are these Sick and Shut-In members and why are they shut in? Did they lose their house keys?

“Jeez-us! Praise his name!” a woman in the front pew called out and walked up to the podium. A parade of women followed her, each walking up to the front of the church to unburden themselves of all the week’s troubles—lost jobs, recent cancer diagnoses, cut-off electricity. When they sat back down, they looked quite a bit lighter, like they had thrown pounds of pain from their shoulders. Testifying, they called it. It seemed different from the testifying my mother was called on to do in family court.

A song began. Miss Marlo’s brown hands shot up toward the white stucco ceiling; she opened and closed them as if she were grabbing for something just beyond her reach.

“Hal-le-lu-jah,” she intoned.

“Praise him!” the woman next to me hollered. The loudness of her voice startled me. I stared at her, trying to prepare myself for the next outburst. The woman closed her eyes and then shot out of her seat. As she stood, her body jerked back and forth as if she were being hit by multiple cattle prods.

In response, I let out an extended scream and pulled my breast-covering shawl over my eyes. Our pew was rocking. The more the backs of her knees hit our bench, the louder I screamed.

Miss Marlo gripped my hand. “Calm down, it’s okay, she just got the Holy Ghost,” she said. That gave me enough courage to pull my shawl down so it only covered my nose and mouth. The entire church was staring at me like,
Who’s the screamer in the burka?

My brother, in a daring act of sibling empathy, started crying and tried to crawl over Miss Marlo to get to me. She flattened him with a light karate chop to the back. He fell silent for a few seconds and then let out a freight train of a scream. The church stopped staring at us and turned to the ladies in white.
Do something,
their looks said.
Their screams are drowning out the Holy Ghost!

“Breathe deep, honey,” one of the ladies in white instructed me. As I opened my mouth to take in a big gasp of air, another lady in white popped a peppermint in my mouth.

“You can’t give her those candies!” the first lady admonished. “They’re for Sister Jean, in case she goes into diabetic shock!” The peppermint lady ignored her and started cooling my face with a funeral hand fan.

The service had completely stopped. Miss Marlo hugged my brother, who was slobbering on her shirt. “I’m so sorry,” Miss Marlo whispered to the woman fanning me. “They’ve never been to a black church before.” The woman glanced at Miss Marlo quizzically, put a cold towel on my head, and started singing about “a wretch like me.”

I think my mother liked having a few hours during the weekend to herself, because she started buying me dresses so I could attend church with Miss Marlo every Sunday. The more I went, the more I became accustomed to Holy Ghost catching; actually, I welcomed it as an entertaining diversion from the three-hour-long church service.

About three months later, my mother announced that staying close to God was becoming a little too expensive. She couldn’t handle having two kids in Catholic school and fulfill Baptist church dress-buying requirements. I was staying in Baptist church, but I was going to a public school.

“You’ll like it. It’s a magnet school for smart kids from all over the city,” my mother said.

Public school? Kids from all over the city? That means all types of religions, I thought. I got excited thinking of opportunities to find a friend with a new religious community I could join.

Public school also meant public transportation—two buses and the subway. It was my first time alone on public transportation, and on the first bus I was too intimidated by the crowd to claw my way off at my stop. I ended up having to walk over a mile back to the second bus stop, where two buses passed me by because I wasn’t standing close enough to the curb. By the time I arrived at the school auditorium, I was bushed. I dragged myself into the assembly room and sat alone near a group of white kids.

There were more kids in the assembly room than I had ever seen in my entire life, and they all seemed to know one another. Some were chasing around; others were doing graffiti on notepads. None looked especially gifted to me.

A chubby white girl clutching a Trapper Keeper entered the auditorium looking just as overwhelmed as I did. She sat next to me and introduced herself. By seventh period, Dara Silberstein was my best friend.

Dara was a transfer from Hebrew school and glad to be in public school. When she talked about how much she hated Hebrew school, I shook my head like I knew what Hebrew school was. I thought being at a school for smart kids meant you had to know everything. I imagined if a teacher overheard me admitting ignorance of Hebrew school, she would call a hall monitor to escort me out through a secret dunce-cap-shaped door.

The second week of my new Best Friendship, I admitted to Dara that I was ignorant of all things Jewish. I explained that, in Catholic school, Jewish culture was next to Darwinism on the “things God really doesn’t want us to talk about” list. Dara invited me to her house to spend the night and go to a synagogue.

I was hooked on Judaism halfway through the service. It combined the best of Catholic church (central air!) and Baptist church (talks of “how far we’d come since slavery”!) and had one important extra: No one passed around a collection plate. I figured the last part would appeal to my financially stressed mother and I’d be rewarded for finding a place to worship and save money simultaneously. I imagined how cute my brother would look in a beanie.

On the way back to Dara’s house, I told her mother my Jewish desires.

Dara gasped and tried to warn me off the kosher path. “You’d have to leave and go to Hebrew school!”

Exactly, Dara.
I wanted to go to Hebrew school. There, I planned to mix and mingle with Jewish children my age—my community.

“How cool would it be if you were Jewish!” Dara said, grabbing both of my hands and smiling. Her mother said nothing.

When my mother rang Dara’s bell later that evening, I pounced on her before she stepped into the living room.

“Mom, can we be Jewish? Please?”

“Well, hello to you, too!” my mother said.

“Sorry. Hi, mom. Black people can be Jewish,” I explained. I considered myself an expert on the subject, since I’d seen one black woman at the temple, sitting in the front row.

“Sing the song,” Dara said, nudging me.

“Ain kaolhain no!”
I sang out, doing my best version of the Hebrew chant that I had heard earlier. I remembered the words because the first line sounded like
ain’t constipated.
To this day, I feel comfortable in any temple, because I still remember that first line.

My mom’s eyebrows raised and her eyes widened; she stared at me as I belted out song after song in broken Hebrew.

“Yes, we’ve had quite a day,” Dara’s mother said. “Is Angela’s father Jewish?” I’ve always wondered if she asked this because of the high percentage of Jewish males who hooked up with black women during the civil rights movement and gave birth to little Lenny Kravitzes.

My mom started choking on her juice. She beat her chest to clear her lungs and announced that it was time to go.

For months, I stuck to my Jewish plans. In my mind, I
was
Jewish. When Jehovah’s Witnesses came to our door, I told them I was Jewish. I asked the lunch ladies if the tater tots were kosher. I used Yiddish terms Dara taught me in general conversations. This did not go over well at Miss Lillian’s beauty salon.

“Mazel tov, shiksas!”
I announced when entering the salon.

“What’s with the Jewish thing?” Miss Lillian asked.

“You know the K on their bread stands for KKK, right?” Miss Marlo asked, after I politely refused a sandwich made on non-kosher bread.

“It’s just a phase,” my mother told them.

“No, it’s not! They are my people! They have their own school and their own language. It’s like a club,” I replied.

“Well, for your sake, it’d better be a nice club because being black
and
Jewish you won’t be able to get into any other ones,” Miss Lillian informed me.

The next weekend, my mother decided to take me to a real club full of people like me, a multiracial group of parents and children entitled Rainbow Connections. (It wasn’t that much of a rainbow; my mother was the only black mother there.)

I played board games with a new mixed friend while my mother sat uncomfortably in the back of the room listening to white women chatting excitedly about the upcoming Kwanzaa holiday.