Cack-Handed

by Gina Yashere

  And I couldn’t have a relationship with Asi—who besides being much younger was Oncle’s biological child and so belonged to him. She was the center of his attention, and I, Dele, and Sheyi became the enemies. Oncle kept Asi separate from us, and though we were her brothers and sisters, he instilled an us-versus-them mentality in her. From an early age, she was taught to spy on us and tell on us at every opportunity. We, in turn, began to see her as the enemy and excluded her from our games—hiding from her for hours and telling her that we had been to places like Narnia, and that she wasn’t welcome. This was our only weapon against her, as she had everything else.

  Oncle spoiled Asi—to the point that she had pretty bad tooth decay at a young age because of the sheer amount of candy, chocolates, and other sweets she was allowed to eat. While Mum rationed the amount of sweets and biscuits the boys and I ate, keeping them under lock and key, Asi had mountains of the stuff, which Oncle kept in his man cave and padlocked at night to keep us out. Every day after school and all day through the weekends, he would unlock the door, leaving it open so we could see the piles of sugary treats. We were warned never to go in that room, and that those sweets were for Asi and Asi alone. She would wander in and out of that room at her leisure, chomping away, while I and my brothers looked on in envy. She never shared any of it with us; in fact, she made a point of eating the sweets with a gleeful slowness, to prolong our agony.

  Mum, surprisingly, never really had that much say in Asi’s upbringing, and I always wondered why. Looking back, it seems almost as if Asi was an offering to Oncle to keep him around. He obviously put his foot down about how she was to be raised. He didn’t want her to be anything like us. She was special. She was his. And she was going to have everything we didn’t.

  My mother had been so notoriously overprotective of us, but Asi was not subjected to the same discipline or restrictions, and she was also allowed to go on every school trip. The trips that Mum had made us stay home from. The trips that Mum had told us would kill us.

  On Asi’s birthdays, Oncle would buy a mountain of toys and arrange them like a damn Hamleys toy-shop display. Then we’d all be dressed up and photographed as a family next to her toy arrangement, and afterwards banished to our rooms while Asi played by herself and gorged on every imaginable confectionary. We were never allowed to play with any of her toys, under threat of severe punishment from Oncle, hence in every one of those pictures from my childhood, me and my brothers look . . . fucking . . . miserable.

  Although Oncle worked for the Royal Mail, he had once harbored dreams of becoming a lawyer. As a frustrated prosecutor, he began practicing his “lawyer skills” on us kids, interrogating us for hours over heinous crimes like “Who ate the last of the cornflakes but left the empty box in the cupboard?,” “Who left baked beans in the sink?,” “Who put the fork in the knife compartment?,” and other equally serious offenses. He became equal parts harasser and bogeyman for me and my brothers, constantly tiptoeing around, trying to catch us doing something bad, or eavesdropping outside our bedrooms, listening to our childish conversations. This is how one day he caught me telling my brothers how much I disliked him. He had been crouched outside the room, ready to pounce, and he kicked open the door as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

  I was paraded before my mother and forced to apologize to him. I was then forced to do another dreaded version of Hold the Bottle for a couple of hours. In this version, I had to lie on my stomach with both feet and arms raised off the floor while holding the glass bottle over my head, for as long as was deemed enough for me to have learned my lesson. If those arms or feet moved down an inch closer to the floor, the belt was waiting. It was around this time that, although publicly I called him Oncle, in my head he became the step-bastard. My dislike bloomed into a full-on hatred.

  He took great pleasure in punishing me and the boys this way and encouraged Asi to enjoy our humiliation. She would often stand beside him, giggling during our torture and pointing out when our limbs looked like they were about to touch the floor. We three musketeers developed super-acute, ninja-like hearing to where we could pick out the sound of a creak on the staircase from two floors down and know the step-bastard was sneaking, ready to pounce on us, and we’d stop whatever we were doing and pose innocently when he busted open the door.

  We weren’t total Cinderellas, though. My mum always made sure we got a decent present ratio at Christmas and on our birthdays, but spreading her income over five kids, she could never match the lavishness of Asi’s stuff. Every kid in the ’80s had a bike. The most popular ones were the Raleigh Chopper, a low-riding high-handlebar bicycle modeled on the Hell’s Angels–type motorcycles, and the Raleigh Grifter, a predecessor in style to the BMX. The boys and I were desperate for bikes.

  We all had secretly taught ourselves to ride by begging kids at school to let us ride theirs. We knew we’d never own our own bikes, as they were expensive, and they were on my mum’s scrapbook list of things that got kids killed. That didn’t stop us from asking, and dropping catalogues open on the bike pages around the house, whenever our birthdays were coming up. My mum completely ignored those hints.

  One year the step-bastard bought Asi a bike. She was the first and only child in the family ever allowed to have one. It was a large, gleaming beauty, close in style to the Chopper and way too big for her but perfectly proportioned for my brothers and me. We would have killed to have one like it. We were furious—especially as Asi was quite unimpressed with it and maybe rode it twice. We knew the step-bastard had only bought it because we would never have one, and he took perverse pleasure in our pain. He stood us all in front of the bike and warned us that we were not to touch it, then he placed the bike in pride of place in the kitchen, next to the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room, so we would be forced to walk by this forbidden pleasure multiple times a day. When the step-bastard worked the night shift, my brothers and I used to sneak from our rooms in the middle of the night just to sit on it and imagine what it would be like to ride it around our neighborhood. Dele, by the time he was ten, had become quite the master at taking his toys apart and rebuilding them, and had taught himself how to pick locks. On those bike-sitting nights, we also broke into the step-bastard’s man cave and stole some of Asi’s sugared treats. Chocolate had never tasted so good.

  The bike sat in the kitchen for over a year, then in the backyard, rusting away. Eventually the step-bastard threw it down into the cellar to die. Anything but let us enjoy it.

  * * *

  The new house meant a new school. Stroud Green Junior School was run by a matriarch with an iron fist. Mrs. Say wore sandals all year round, probably because she had the type of toes that didn’t fit in any shoes. As a kid, I was fascinated by them. They seemed to be super long, with an extra knuckle on each one, and they refused to sit in line like normal toes. They piled on top of one another in her stockings like rugby players.

  Mrs. Say had no qualms about laying hands on errant children. A week didn’t go by without a child caught whispering in assembly being grabbed by the collar and dragged on their ass out of the auditorium. If you got sent to her office, you better believe you were getting a thigh slap.

  Most kids were terrified of that. My brothers and I were unbothered, as were a lot of the other Black kids. She didn’t have a belt? No shoe? Not even a slipper? Puh-lease.

  I was most excited about going to this school because the playground, unlike the one at my previous school, was large and spread out, and had an array of swings and other outdoor equipment that the East End lacked. I was particularly looking forward to getting a grip on the large climbing frame that stood center stage, gleaming, in the middle of the playground. I couldn’t wait to get on it. The ’70s and ’80s were much simpler and less safety-obsessed times. Kids didn’t wear helmets while riding their bikes. There were adventure playgrounds made from wood and ropes and pipes where you might suffer tetanus from a splinter or break a leg falling off a makeshift zip line.
School playgrounds, like this one at Stroud Green, had climbing equipment bolted right into the concrete—no padding, no warning notices, nothing! Back then, if a kid fell off the frame and cracked their skull open, the blood was cleaned up, we poured some apple juice on the scene of the crime for our homies, and we worked harder on having better hand-eye coordination. I knew I was going to love this school.

  On my second day, as I happily hung upside down from the bars of said climbing frame, a large dark-skinned girl in the class a year behind me, Esther, strode up to me and said, “I’m not going to be your friend because I’m Jamaican, and you, you’re an African bubu.” She then spat on me.

  That was my first lesson in the animosity between Black people who were the descendants of slaves and those who weren’t. It was also my first lesson in climbing-frame defense. If I was ever again hanging upside down and someone was striding towards me with purpose, I would get the fuck down and get my hands up.

  I had to learn to be tough because the majority of kids at school were of Caribbean descent, such as Jamaican, Trinidadian, Bajan. Black people from the Caribbean had been fed a steady diet of Tarzan on TV and tended to believe people from Africa were dumb, animalistic barbarians, and so they looked upon us with disdain and, in some cases, hatred. The English had been so thorough in their obfuscation of their part in bringing slaves from Africa to the West Indies that a lot of Caribbean people had absolutely no idea they were descendants of Africans. They had never been told. The knowledge of who they were had been wiped out over generations, and it hadn’t been in the interest of the English to reeducate them. Many had been led to believe that there were distinct “breeds” of Black people in Africa and the various Caribbean islands, and that we were all different. In America, Black people knew their history because they were all descendants of Africans who had been forced to work on American plantations. That history was woven into the very fabric of the US. They were called African Americans, for crying out loud!

  The Europeans had done slavery differently. They had set up plantations in the countries they had colonized, therefore not bringing their dirty work home. The Portuguese had used slave labor in Brazil, Angola, and several other countries, thus the official language to this day in those countries is Portuguese. The French did the same, from Haiti to the Congo. The Belgians, the Dutch—basically, Europeans carved up Africa and the Caribbean like a huge pie.

  The Americans, by bringing all their stolen people to the American continent, had done the equivalent of burgling a house, then keeping the stolen goods in their own home. The Brits and the Europeans had also burgled but kept the stolen goods in someone else’s house. If you’d gone to England in the 1700s and shouted, “Hey! Thieves! You have stolen Black people,” they could have smugly waved their arms across the quiet English countryside and said, “But where?” They had separated themselves from the evidence of their misdeeds.

  The British education system helped in hiding what the Brits had been up to. Children studied history for several years in high school, and spent an inordinate amount of time on Henry VIII, memorizing the names of all his wives and becoming intimately acquainted with the lineage of the British monarchy. When it came to the hundreds of years of British slavery, that lesson seemed to last only about half an hour, before moving over to the French Revolution. The slave trade was also glossed over in a way that made it seem like a benign trade of manpower. I distinctly remember my history teacher using words like “help” and not “people theft,” “kidnapping,” “rape,” or “murder.” At the time, looking at that now-ubiquitous drawing of bodies laid out on slave ships, I failed to register the connection between those stick figures and the Black children I sat with in a classroom. All I remember thinking was that the ship looked a little bit uncomfortable.

  Not long after that history lesson, the movie Roots came out in the UK. Sheyi came home complaining that his best friend at school, whose family were from Barbados, had begun laughing at him and calling him Kunta Kinte. My mum retorted, “Tell your friend he is a fool. He is Kunta Kinte, as his people were slaves. Our people were never taken.”

  The feelings of distrust went both ways. Many Africans believed that people from the Caribbean and African Americans were below them because every image they’d been fed, in movies and TV, was of African Americans as lazy people, thieves, drug dealers, or prostitutes. The images of Caribbean people were very similar, with their predominant stereotype of being criminals. As a result, many Africans saw themselves as separate and “better.” Basically, we took the racism directed against us and internalized it. We all believed in these racial hierarchies that had been made up by somebody else, and they still exist to this day.

  In the US, “African booty scratcher” is a distinctly Black on Black insult bandied about by children of color against the children of African immigrants. I have no idea when or where the term originated, but if I hazard a guess, I’d say it comes from the belief that Black Africans are primitive and used to live in the jungle, naked and scratching ourselves like monkeys. What is an “African bubu”? I know that a bubu is a traditional garment worn widely in West Africa. I assume it was adopted as a slur in England because of its African origins, and the fact that to kids the word “bubu” would have sounded hilarious. I mean, it is a funny word, “bubu.” White people in England had their own derogatory terms for us, like “jungle bunny” and “spear chucker,” which were epithets sometimes adopted by the Black kids as well. In fact, it was mainly the other Black kids who used those against me—so much so that when later I discovered an affinity for athletics, I tried everything—hundred meters, two hundred, shot put, long jump—but I tell you what: I never went near a javelin.

  I remember that day when Esther spat on me like it happened yesterday. I was confused for a second, because I hadn’t yet heard the term “African bubu,” and I didn’t understand how this little girl who looked and sounded just like me deemed me unworthy of friendship before we’d played a single game of hopscotch. But I just shrugged, wiped off the spit, and skipped over to play with some other, friendlier kids. I think the reason I was so unfazed was because back in those days my mum harbored many of the aforementioned ideas about people from the Caribbean, which she invariably had shared with me. I just took Esther’s hostility as confirmation of what my mother had always warned me about.

  “African bubu” would become a term thrown at me all through school. All this made for a very un-fun school life for me. Most kids of African descent lied about their ancestry, saying they were either half American—I know, what does that even mean?—or from Guyana instead of Ghana. They often Anglicized the sound of their names, so Ola (pronounced like the Spanish hola but more aggressively) became “Oh-la,” Tunde (“Toon-deh”) became “Tun-dee,” etc.

  I was no different. In high school, I told people I was from the Cameroon, as to me it sounded less African, and people spoke French there. (Ridiculous.) I got away with that for about a month, till my mum turned up at a parent-teacher conference looking like she’d just come from an African birthing ceremony. She was in full Nigerian costume: a bubu, a loose-fitting blouse, and a wrapper, with a colorful material tied around her waist and a matching Gele head wrap. This was the type of outfit normally reserved for large social events and parties among Nigerians, but my mum liked to make an impression when she came to my school, and parent-teacher conferences in her mind were important events.

  7

  It Is Not What You Are Called, but What You Answer To

  When I moved up into high school, at St. David and St. Katherine Church of England Secondary School in North London, I decided I was no longer going to be Dapo or Bus Depot; I was going to use my British first name, Regina, and become a cool, new, unteasable version of myself. I instructed all of my family and any friends who were following me to my new school to address me with my new moniker. I was excited to start this cooler phase of my life.

  Nobody warned me that I’d picked the absolutely wrong pronu
nciation of my name.

  I discovered this in my first biology lesson. The moment the teacher began discussing female genitalia, the entire class turned to stare at me. The laughter began, and I realized I had made a huge mistake, and ruined the next five years of my life. I went from the seemingly harmless nickname Bus Depot to Regina Vagina. I had jumped out of the frying pan into a damn inferno. Whenever my name was called out, whether in assembly or for attendance, sniggers followed. It was a Groundhog Day of humiliation.

  Totally my mum’s fault. She had given me that name and the pronunciation. She’d ruined any chance of coolness for me at that school, and I was sure she’d done it on purpose. What better way to make sure your daughter didn’t get invited to parties or sleepovers and therefore end up dead or, even worse, pregnant?

  I didn’t enjoy school. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. It was an escape from the monotony of my home life, which revolved around chores, studying, keeping out of the way of Taiwo, avoiding Oncle, and fighting with my brothers, with the odd trip to the park if Mum was feeling generous. I wasn’t particularly interested in academics, but I was under pressure to do well enough at school to fulfill Mum’s doctor ambitions for me. My mum was happiest when I brought home high test scores, and fortunately I was blessed with the knack of being able to memorize large chunks of information that I could regurgitate at will.

  I had school friends in the loosest of senses, in that there was a group of girls I often hung out with. I’d known Beverley and Michelle since I was eight and had attended Stroud Green Junior School with them, but on arrival in secondary/high school, they swiftly disowned me in favor of the more popular friend groups. But I’d gained the respect of Andrea, the proclaimed toughest girl in school and leader of a group, by fighting her on my second day, and thereafter I was allowed to hang in the periphery. There was also Jackie D, one of at least eight Jackies in my school alone—there were a lot of Jackies in 1980s London. In order to stave off constant physical confrontations, I tried to use humor to ingratiate myself with the other kids, or at least slow down the rate of ridicule directed at me. I’d crack jokes, do silly voices, even ridicule my teachers, incurring many detentions in my attempt at popularity. I was the only African girl in my friend group. The rest were all of Caribbean descent, which became a problem when I had a falling out with one, as it tended to spread to the group, and then I was ostracized with the whispers of “Regina Vagina,” “African bubu,” or “stinking African” as I passed.