In the Silences

by Rachel Gold

  “Eve trying to play with Aisha’s hair will be the third time it’s happened to her this year. That I know about. Different people each time.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah but it’s only hair.”

  “But you’d hit someone who touched mine.”

  “Her hair is different from ours,” he said. “People are curious.”

  “It’s not different from one-fifth of the people in the world. It’s only that TV and movies didn’t show black hair until the last few years so we didn’t grow up understanding that it’s only hair—” I stopped mid-thought because another idea rammed through my head.

  Dr. Wade had said our visual culture made binary gender seem universal when it wasn’t. I’d only seen white people’s hair on TV and I’d only seen men and women, but a lot more existed in the world than that. Not only did I see TV characters who were exclusively men or women for most of my life, but I only saw certain kinds of men and women: they had to be slender or skinny or fit, men had to have muscles, women had to emphasize boobs and their waist.

  Walking around my school I could see students and teachers who didn’t fit those idealized gender images. And beyond that, if there was a kind of hair that didn’t get on TV, there were also kinds of genders that didn’t get on TV. And they were as real as the genders that did.

  “There are plenty of black people on TV,” Brock said.

  “When have you ever seen a black woman on TV who didn’t have her hair straightened or was wearing a wig?”

  “What?”

  The clueless expression on his face…had I looked like that two years ago? Yeah, probably.

  “The last few years maybe Michonne on Walking Dead and the mom and older sister on Black Lightning. But we didn’t grow up with that. We grew up being taught that black hair is weird and exotic.”

  And I thought: Just like I grew up being taught that any gender that isn’t “straight man” or “straight woman” was freakish or impossible.

  “Who cares?” Brock asked.

  “I don’t want people to see Aisha that way. I want them to see her like I do: this intricate, sweet, vast person who’s into all kinds of cool stuff. So, yeah, I am sorry that I did something that made it easier for our white friends to reduce her to her hair and skin color. I am responsible for understanding how my whiteness interacts with Aisha’s world. Sometimes I cause problems for her or hurt her in ways I don’t mean, and when you hurt someone, you apologize.”

  “Seems to me you understand black people better than white people,” he said. “What about us?”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t you care that we’re being replaced in our own country?” he asked.

  “Whoa, you do know we were very much not here first.”

  “That was hundreds of years ago. We’re here now and we’ve done great things,” he said. He jerked a drawer open, pulled out a fork and jammed it into his steaming mac-n-cheese. “White people made this the best country in the world.”

  “Yeah, by using slaves and then using racism to justify inequality that profits white people,” I said.

  “Why are you so fucking anti-white?” he snarled.

  “I’m not.”

  “Yeah, you are. You’d throw me under the fucking bus in a heartbeat to help Aisha.”

  “It’s not an either/or.”

  “What if it is? If there was a train speeding at me or Aisha, who would you pick?”

  “I’d use my superpowers and save both of you,” I said. “That train scenario is made up bullshit so I get to solve it with superpowers.”

  “You know what’s not made up? Immigrants and people on welfare taking tax money from folks who earned it.”

  I wanted to yell, Bullshit! But even more than that, I wanted Brock to hear me. One of my superpowers was supposed to be not getting stuck in binary situations, so how did I get out of this one?

  “Why are you so worried about that?” I asked, managing not to sound entirely pissed off.

  “It’s not fair. People who work hard should get rewarded.”

  “I agree. And that should be regardless of their race or gender.”

  “Yeah,” he said. We shared a moment of shock that we weren’t disagreeing.

  “So how do we make that happen?” I asked.

  “Make sure we don’t let so many people into the country that they take all the jobs,” he said.

  I didn’t argue even though I felt pretty sure that wasn’t a big danger. “And then?”

  He lifted a forkful of mac-n-cheese and let it drop back into the black plastic dish. Shrugged.

  “I don’t want to spend my whole life working in a shitty coffee shop,” he said. “When we were little, Dad had money, a bunch of it. Where did it go? Where did he go? What if he’s laid up somewhere, sick or hurt, and can’t get the help he needs because so many other people are getting taken care of first? Would you pick Aisha’s dad over ours?”

  “Mr. Warren is a senior engineer at 3M, he’s got everything covered.”

  “Why? Why is he here and our dad isn’t? Why does he have a great job and a big house and Tariq has everything?”

  “Tariq works his ass off.”

  “So do I! So do a lot of white people who just get shit for it and it is not fair! Why can’t you see that!”

  I stood there way too long with my mouth open. How did he not see that this argument applied many times over to people of color in this country? He must’ve not known that Aisha’s family was the exception, not the usual experience for black families in our country. But how could he miss that the unfairness applied to our generation had been applied to ten generations of Aisha’s family?

  He grabbed his congealing mac-n-cheese and stomped down the stairs.

  I stared after him, my sock-covered feet getting cold on the kitchen tile. Wolvie butted the side of my knee with her forehead because she wanted to go out.

  “Do you think if I google ‘privilege’ I’ll see a video of Brock just now?” I asked her.

  She sat and peered up at me as if to say: Remember that one time when you switched me to the better dog food and then tried to switch me back to that other stuff? I was mad too. You can’t take good things away without offering something else good. At least not if you want me to eat my dinner instead of throwing pieces of it around the living room.

  I held the back door open for her, hearing the loud, angry rock belting up the stairs from Brock’s room. Was Wolvie right? Did I have anything good to offer him?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Late October 2017

  The next morning, Brock hauled ass out of the kitchen as soon as I came in from walking Wolvie. I wanted to be gone when he came home, so when Aisha invited me to run errands with her and Tariq, I about teleported over to her house.

  Aisha talked Riq into driving us to Target. She had photos to pick up and I looked at dog toys. Then we walked down the street to the Applebee’s for lunch. The temperature had dropped from mid-fifties two days ago into the thirties, but Tariq still wore light blue knee-length shorts above his white sneakers.

  “You’re turning into a Minnesotan,” I told him.

  He snorted. “Haven’t done my laundry.”

  “Mom stopped doing it for him,” Aisha said. “It’s a crisis.”

  He ignored her and walked ahead of us into the Applebee’s. When we were seated, Aisha pulled out the photo envelope and started spreading photos across the table. She got out her big school notebook and arranged a few on the front cover inside the plastic coating.

  “Can I look?” I pointed at the photo envelope.

  “Sure.”

  They were mostly black women, some historical, a few in sepia. We’d both been reading books and articles that Dr. Wade recommended about gender and race and the intersection of the two. I’d been amazed at the parallels. Like so many white scientists and leaders, decades and centuries ago, tried to prove that black people were profoundly different from white people, to justify racism. They�
�d failed, even if everyone hadn’t gotten that info yet. And men scientists and leaders tried to prove—to make us believe—that only two sexes and genders existed, were natural, were mutually exclusive, and men were better. Now they were failing too.

  I held one photo up toward Aisha. “Who’s this?”

  “Dr. Jane Wright, surgeon and cancer researcher. And this is Dr. Alexa Canady, pediatric neurosurgeon.”

  “Wow, badass.” I saw a corner of a comic book illustration and pulled out a drawing.

  Aisha said, “Dr. Cecilia Reyes, showed up in the X-Men sometimes.” She fished around in the pile and pulled out a photo of a smiling woman with short hair next to an anatomical image of a dog’s skeletal system.

  I touched the dog and raised my eyebrows.

  “Dr. Erika Gibson, first black veterinary neurosurgeon.”

  I studied that photo while she arranged two more inside the front cover of her notebook.

  “This is what Darius was talking about, yeah?” Tariq said. “Reminding yourself every day that there are a lot of brilliant black women doctors…and vets.”

  “Vets are doctors,” I said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Stereotype threat,” Aisha told him. “Dr. Wade sent me a bunch more about it so I’ll know what I’m dealing with. So I won’t freeze up because I’m afraid the whole school’s going to see me as some stupid black girl. And so I see how possible it is to be a great black woman doctor.”

  Aisha slid another photo into her notebook. I reached for the one below it, pulled it in front of me. The woman looked almost familiar with her strong nose, bold face, prim smile. “She wasn’t a doctor,” I said.

  “Who is that?” Tariq asked.

  “Lucy Hicks Anderson,” Aisha said. “She was born in Kentucky in the late 1800s—and we’d say she was assigned male at birth—but she said she was a girl and a doctor told her mom she could raise her as a girl, so she did. I asked Cori and Royce who I should print out for you…is this okay?”

  I lifted the photo off the table, grinning. “She’s for me?”

  “Yeah, I made a bunch for you. Here, this is Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh from Egypt who was depicted with a beard. And this is the goddess Inanna from Mesopotamia, the one you were telling me about with the trans priests. I know they didn’t call them trans, but we would. Here are hijras from India and fa’afafine from Samoa. Parinya Charoenphol from Thailand; she’s the kickboxer from that movie we watched. I didn’t find a famous trans vet, but I did get a picture of Joan Roughgarden, American biologist who studies animals and evolution, and Jowelle de Souza from Trinidad, she’s a huge animal rights activist.”

  As Aisha named people, she slid them along the table to me and I fanned them out on the dark wood surface. In the presence of these faces, I understood what I hadn’t been seeing for most of my life: people of all races, all ethnicities, genders, sexualities, body sizes and ability.

  One way to fight our very visual culture’s shaping my ideas was to keep looking at all kinds of people—to keep them in front of me so I never forgot the full wonder of human beings.

  Aisha reached to the bottom of the stack and pulled out an illustration, saying, “And this.”

  The artist had drawn a boy and girl on top of each other, semi-transparent, with a nebula in the background. They looked like Cloud from the comics and like me because the artist had done their hair more like mine.

  I loved it so much. “You had someone draw this for me?”

  “I paid an artist online,” Aisha said. “Is it right?”

  “It’s perfect. What nebula is that?”

  Aisha smirked. “The California Nebula. I couldn’t help it.”

  I beamed back at her. “From the future, where we belong?”

  She nodded and returned to putting photos in her notebook. I contemplated the beautiful faces in front of me.

  Brock didn’t have this. Maybe he didn’t look at Milo and Pops like I did, wanting to grow up like them. He didn’t have faces of white men who were powerfully anti-racist. The really visible faces were the ones spewing hate about “immigrants” and others. Maybe he’d gotten as trapped by what he saw everyday as I had and didn’t know what he wasn’t seeing.

  Could I give him other options?

  * * *

  Having the photos in my notebook—trans people from history and the drawing of me as Cloud, nebula and all—made school easier. But it also made me want to fight.

  I couldn’t let things go in Chemistry because I knew something Aisha didn’t. I’d spent those two weeks last summer with Mrs. Alexander at the science camp, run by the high school. Mrs. Alexander taught the chemistry portion that I’d signed up for, figuring I’d get ahead for tenth grade. Plus it’d come in handy if I had to fall back on that career in Materials Sciences and I’d started thinking that I might really enjoy mixing things and occasionally blowing them up.

  Most of the kids in the class were some kind of geek, but one girl clearly got dropped off there because her parents didn’t know what else to do with her. She knew nothing about biology or the scientific method.

  Mrs. Alexander had come to me and asked me to mentor this girl because I was good at explaining the concepts. And she’d checked on us at the end of class at least every other day.

  The girl texted during lectures and laughed at things she read on her phone. Sometimes she put in her ear buds and ignored the lecture. Most of the other students were over her by the end of week one. Two of them moved across the classroom to get away from her texting, laughing, gum-chewing disruption.

  I’d asked Mrs. Alexander if someone else could be the mentor for week two.

  “She doesn’t care about this,” I’d said. “She doesn’t want to learn.” I did not say, but thought: Let someone else waste their energy on her.

  “She’s having a tough time at home,” Mrs. Alexander told me. “Have you thought about why her parents might drop her off at a camp she’s not interested in? She needs a friend and I think she’s starting to look up to you. I’ll try to help you out more if you’ll keep mentoring her.”

  I got the tough time at home thing, so I’d said yes. And Mrs. Alexander did come by and explain things that I hadn’t. I started liking it because I got to hear some real-world applications I wouldn’t have thought of. Mrs. Alexander made sure that by the end of that second week, that girl was for real getting curious about biology.

  But that girl had been white.

  So for a white girl, Mrs. Alexander would devote her time and attention and other people’s resources.

  I’d let two weeks pass after Aisha got assigned the bogus measuring task, in case Mrs. Alexander was going to swap tasks around. She didn’t. I added one more week, benefit of the doubt. No change. Then we had a two-day week because of teacher conferences.

  By the last week of October: no more waiting. That Tuesday, I got out of English a few minutes early, by asking nicely, and slipped through the Chemistry class door as students from the earlier class left. Mrs. Alexander sat at her desk sorting her notes back into order for our lecture.

  When she looked up, I asked, “Mrs. Alexander, do we need to keep measuring everything? Can Aisha work on the online part of the project with me?”

  She put her notes into a stack and tapped them. “We have enough people online.”

  That was true, we probably had one too many. “Well then swap me with her,” I suggested. “I’ll measure and she can do the online stuff.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No. Class is starting, take your seat.”

  I walked back to my seat numb and cold with shock. I’d figured Mrs. Alexander owed me a favor since I’d done that mentoring thing at summer camp. I knew she remembered me by how she’d greeted me the first week of school. And I’d thought she liked me, I was even good at Chemistry, so was there any reason not to say yes?

  “What did you ask her?” Aisha asked me as I stumbled into my seat.

&nb
sp; “To swap you and me on the tasks so you can do the online parts,” I said.

  “Huh. Thanks.”

  “She said no. I’m going to ask her again.”

  Back to trying to fight supervillain Apocalypse’s control of other people’s minds. How could I do that if they believed his thoughts were their own? Or if, like Brock, they thought it was the truth of the world? How could I tell Mrs. Alexander that she was being mind controlled? Not in those words, for sure.

  I knew what had happened: Aisha had left her third period class with Chloe but got stopped in the hall by the monitor because the voice of Apocalypse inside his mind had said: “Dangerous.”

  And then Aisha came in late to Chemistry and Apocalypse told Mrs. Alexander, “That girl’s lazy.”

  But the hall monitor and Mrs. Alexander couldn’t hear those words—they just obeyed them. If Mrs. Alexander could hear it, she’d have stopped when I asked her to swap with Aisha or do our assignments together. If she got how she was being mind controlled, she could’ve resisted it.

  * * *

  I waited two days, until we had a lecture day, nothing to wash out, and told Aisha I’d meet her in the cafeteria. Then I went back to Mrs. Alexander at her desk.

  “What if we both do both?” I asked. “I’ll measure things with Aisha and she can help me with my part of the online project.”

  She stood up, a few inches taller than me in her thick heels, and said, “I told you, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Aisha needs to learn discipline and precision.”

  “So do I,” I said. “Way more than she does.”

  “Her answers are sloppy. She needs to learn to persist until she improves.”

  “She’s bored. If you had me do all that, I’d be way worse. This is an AP class and you’re having her spend most of her time measuring volumes. That’s not fair.”

  “If she wants harder tasks, she has to show me she can do the basic ones,” Mrs. Alexander said.

  I wanted to say: A fifth grader could do the basic ones.

  Instead, I asked, “How long does she have to show you?”

  “What?”