“Dude, did you see the Times story and this thing in People? This fucking guy is everywhere.”
“I’m looking now,” said Gina. “Yeah. Gay.”
“Dex called it an ode to bromance,” I told her, and yes, I’d told Dexter all about my date and he was kind enough to act jealous, going on and on about how Reggie holds Barack Obama’s nuts in a briefcase for a living. Actually, they were MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars, but what did that matter?
Really, I was the one going crazy, finding fault in a nationally ranked bachelor in favor of a retard who made nonsensical gonad jokes and couldn’t tell the difference between friend feelings and more-than-friend feelings. I wished I could get Lisa Nowak on the horn. Honk if you have impossibly high expectations that never get met so you’ll settle for an idiot with a law degree and commitment issues. Sure, Reggie was no Cliff, but perhaps he was something even better. But then again, white people hot is never the same.
“You’re so crazy pants. He’s super friggin’ hot. Look at him in this magazine,” said Emily, doing the ta-dah hands in front of her computer, which was displaying a full-screen photo of one Reggie Love in the kind of oversize business suit pro athletes wear.
“Why do white people always think black men who take baths are the hottest things since Morgan Freeman?” I asked. “That guy is in his seventies, you know.”
“You’re the whitest black girl I know!”
Now how to take this? Sometimes I wanted to go through my entire life story as a way of explanation: “Well, my mom has a high-falutin’ accent—basically she speaks the King’s English, I spent a lot of my childhood on an island with no black people, I went to an Ivy League college. So don’t let the white girl accent fool you—I was raised in da ’hood. Compton, Cali-forn-yah to be exact, pimpin’. Left Co-ast!” By now I’ve thrown some C’s on it, having just finished up the complicated heel-toe known to a certain demographic as “the Crip walk.”
“You’re not from the ghetto. You went to Columbia. Please.” Emily always felt it acceptable—nay, necessary—to knock my street creds. Almost as often as I felt the need to offer them up. One time I invited her and her now-husband, then-fiancé, to the fish fry I have at my house every year.
“You eat fried fish?!”
“Emily, I’m black.” That’s as far as I got. Because, really, she was a good friend of mine. A friend I allowed to ask me mildly racist questions because, really, who the hell else is going to answer them for her? A friend for whom I’d Googled, printed, and pushpinned the lyrics to “Ebony and Ivory.” A friend who once asked me if it was “ghetto” around where I lived, and to whom I’d given an unflinching “yes.” We were walking down U Street—like 125th in Harlem, but with many more “hot spots” and many fewer black Jesus posters—when she said she had something for me to see. Get ready, Emily said, for “the most ridiculous thing” ever in “five, four, three, two…” It was the McDonald’s walk-up window.
“Isn’t that the most hilarious thing ever?”
“Umm, they have that so crackheads don’t shank some poor guy on the midnight shift for a McFlurry.”
“I know, but still!” She had the innocent wide eyes of someone who’d never bit into a delicious McRib sandwich. I bet they never even sold them in Indiana. Sad. If I took her under my wing, then maybe she wouldn’t get henpecked (shanked) by a real black person sometime in the immediate future.
The most egregious indictment of my racial invisibility happened, coincidentally enough, on my way to Emily’s wedding the next summer. I’d planned the trip with another girl named Emily because we were both taking the cheap flight into Kentucky and then “driving” the hour and a half to Evansville, Indiana. I put “driving” in quotes because, as previously stated, I do not now nor do I ever plan on obtaining an actual license to operate a motorized vehicle of any kind, but no one says “I’m gonna ride from point A to point B,” because it sounds too passive-aggressive. Basically, I needed a chauffeur, and for half the rental car costs, this chick was up for the task.
Chauffeur Emily and I had suffered through work wife Emily’s day-long bachelorette party and the string of mass e-mails leading up to it. The only one I added to the thread was about cup and panty size: a subject no one else would touch. Chauffeur Emily sent me an e-mail saying, “Thank God,” and we immediately got to synchronizing our flight schedules.
The Raleigh-Durham International Airport is ghetto—period. There are no good places to eat, and the seats smell like missed connections mixed with dreams deferred. We had an hour lay-over and were forced into Maui Tacos. Between bites of burrito, the two of us waxed poetic about overblown Washington men and my coincidental singledom.
The guys in town, we agreed, had inflated stomachs and egos to match. I was supposed to have a date for the wedding—James, the one who announced at a pizza place that being an intern twenty floors up from my cubicle precluded the possibility of us getting “romantically involved.” This from the guy who convinced me to swallow his man juice because anything else was “emasculating.” So the District, we decided, just wasn’t the place to meet anybody normal—although she and her lawyer were currently redoing their kitchen. Plus, everybody’s gay! And then there’s the shitty club situation! With like two places to go, you end up seeing the same people over and over and over again.
“I mean, everybody goes out to all the same crappy places,” said Chauffeur Emily, picking through her beans and rice. Mouth full of pico de gallo, I nodded my agreement. “Plus, if you want to go to like a big club, especially on a Saturday, it’s always all these minorities.”
Wait, what? I looked around to make sure we were still in this zone and not the Twilight one. She was already folding a napkin around her leftover burrito, headed for the trash cans. Alone at the table, I wondered whether or not I’d heard her correctly. Minorities? That’s me, right? But I don’t think she meant to include me in that category. Had we gotten so chummy in the security line that Emily had mistaken my bronze skin for a tan, a costume, a cover?
Adrienne was always wary of me “getting too cool” with “the whites,” as Gina called them. “You can’t trust them,” is what she’d say when I’d tell her about a bitch session work wife Emily and I had over burgers at Ruby Tuesdays. “I know you think she’s your friend and ish, but be careful. She’s not your friend friend.” Ah, the difference a double makes.
What was this, West Side Story? Or, even more apropos, the “Bad” video? I didn’t straighten Chauffeur Emily out, because I didn’t want our travel plans unraveled. Once again my lack of a driver’s license was making the ride uncomfortable. Especially since I was in charge of Google Maps for the next two hours. How would the navigating have gone if instead of “Turn right here,” I shouted, “Excuse me, I am black, and you, my good lady, are out of or-dah”? Or pointed out the street sign that read, AIN’T I A WOMAN? Nope, I was a Shark with no teeth.
So we got to Evansville no problem, and as long as I kept my mouth shut, the weekend would go off without a hitch. Because we were here to see my good friend get hitched, and bringing up racism at the rehearsal dinner is just plain rude. Later that night when I met Chauffeur Emily downstairs for a glass of “the red one” at the Evansville Airport Marriott’s bar, she looked shocked. “How’d you get your hair like that? It’s gorgeous.” I wrapped my new ponytail around my wrist and whispered, “un-be-weaveable, isn’t it?” She didn’t get it, and I promised to show her later.
“Dude, did you see that article about the blacks and best friends forever?” When Gina gets super hyped about an “article,” I stop what I’m doing and click on the link.
“Please hold.” It only took minutes to get enlightened. “Are you serious right now? This is awesomeness.”
“Am I your BBF?” she asked.
“If not you, then who?”
It’d been a week since Emily’s nuptials, and my spinelessness in the face of wedding favors. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times had obv
iously been stalking me. In the article “Buddy System,” the paper coined the acronym BBF, or the “black best friend.” I was immediately reminded of the “LMBAO”—“laughing my black ass off”—phase we went through online in college, which in turn gave birth to my favorite Chicana’s cyber acronym of choice, LMMAO.
Anyway, according to the Times, BBFs were a pop culture phenomenon in which black actresses were repeatedly cast as characters whose “principal function is to support the heroine, often with sass, attitude and a keen insight into relationships and life.” They were most often “gorgeous, independent, loyal and successful…. And even though they are single or lack consistent solid relationships, BBFs are experts in the ways of the world, using that knowledge to comfort, warn or scold their BFF.” (The latter being their “best friend forever,” otherwise known as the white heroine.) I was pissed I didn’t come up with this shit first. They were typing my pain with their fingers, writing my life with their words.
My BBF blues song was sung mostly at work. The New York Times, Politico, even Oprah magazine, were all “pretty vanilla.” I remember complaining to a young black reporter whom I admired that the folks at the Times always seemed so afraid to ask me about my life after five. “It’s not like I was beating African drums all weekend.” Laughing, she said that sometimes it pays to be the only black girl in the room. “Everybody here knows who I am.”
When I got tired of being asked about Michelle Obama, I started freelancing stories for TheRoot.com, and one of my bosses referred to the Washington Post–owned Web site as “some blog.” I got the most hits on a piece about Jennifer Hudson’s character in Sex and the City: The Movie, basically comparing her to a twenty-first-century Mammy: big-breasted with plenty of down-home love to offer her hapless white charge. The story got dozens of comments from women who were tired of being the “magical Negro.” One chick said that I had low self-esteem, and another claimed I just wanted to be part of the in crowd. Duh. But the feedback from someone calling herself “Uppity Negress” got to me:
“I think because we are older, Generation X, we are set in our sub-demographics and with me not being married and with the same exact interests, I don’t fit in or get invited. That has a lot to do with my being single and Black with a tongue that tends to pronounce that there are elephants in the room. That is not SATC’s responsibility to work this out for me and my White Peers. It’s upon us.”
I guess my tongue, having been tied for so long, was suffering from atrophy. And if there were elephants in the room, stepping over their massive poop was always preferable to stepping in it. The thing is, Uppity Negress, as BBFs we’re all too busy being defined by that negative space, by what we are not, to actually focus on what we are. We aren’t weak. We aren’t white. We aren’t idiots. That leaves: strong, black, women. I wish I could say we were goddesses. But the BBF is anything but divine; in truth, she is destroying us.
Helena to Gina: “Dude, I am in these streets right now fighting for survival!”
“What are you doing, dude?”
“Fighting. For. My. Damn. Life. Do I need therapy?” I knew what her answer would be. Gina was a sociologist. “I was watching Sex and the City last night,” I said. “That episode where Carrie sees a shrink.”
“Everybody needs therapy, dude. Especially you. I’m totally familiar with how you get down.”
I had been very down. Adaoha was gone. Adrienne and Stella were studying for the bar, and I hadn’t spoken to them in weeks. Kia was busy with three kids now. Evelyn was getting married. And Dex, the dum-dum, was in Indianapolis for the summer, learning about how not to be with me. But who cares about Dex? We broke up right before he left during a torturous car ride to work.
“So you don’t want me to visit this summer?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you should. I mean, how would that help things?”
Things? Where are these things everyone keeps talking about? And how do I get rid of them?
I started ignoring my mother’s calls and spent entire weekends in the farthest reaches of the bat cave, not caring that the rats had probably given me the bubonic plague. Rashes broke out on my arms that hadn’t been visible since 2004, when West Point Willy told me he got some other chick pregnant. I was drinking a $4.99 bottle of Whole Foods wine on a good day, two on a bad one. The fainting spell behind me, I was still too scared to walk over the Key Bridge from Virginia to Georgetown because jumping seemed all too doable. I cried at the office twice and refused to look up from my computer screen when someone asked me a question. Emily gave me a sign that read, “Out to lunch: If not back by 5, out to dinner.” I hated everyone, especially this jackass named Jonathan who insisted on saying, “Hello Hah-laaaynuh,” every time he walked past my desk. We’d shared an excruciating slow dance at Emily’s wedding. She forwarded the picture evidence to all the cool kids, and I got mad because my face looked greasy.
In short, I was in a weird place. Every morning, Emily would tell people who stopped by our cubicle that I was “grumpy-pants today.” So they kept walking past without saying “hello.” Most days I appreciated the intervention, but on others I just wanted someone to fucking say “hello” to me! Someone other than Jonathan (and sometimes even him).
“He just wants to flirt with you but doesn’t know how,” she explained. “He’s scared.”
“Why the hell is everybody so scared of me around here? Is it because I’m black?”
“No,” she said. “It’s because you’re a bitch.”
Sixteen
YOUR SIXTEEN CENTS
I might be forced to have Frances committed way earlier than previously planned. The woman’s got a crazy case of “grandbabies.” In her room, nailed up on the wall opposite her bed, is a fucking baby christening dress, white, lacy, and with a satin bow in the middle. Its hem is a little dirty, most likely because she found it in a trash can or maybe stole it off an unsuspecting baby at a baptism—either way, it ain’t mine and it ain’t hers. I refuse to ask about it because the answer might make me an accomplice. A white baby prom gown that needs a good spot-clean is tacked to a wall in my mother’s bedroom like how a teenager puts up posters or prisoners a pinup. I just thought that needed repeating.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened—the metaphysical and temporal shift in my mother’s mind when I went from being her prized only daughter to her only hope for progeniture. When the name Helena became synonymous with her dashed hopes.
It had to have been last fall, when I turned twenty-eight and spent a stimulus check on a purebred named Miles. Her first response was, “You girls nowadays would rather get a dog than a baby!” Significant because it was the first time I’d heard her say the word baby with such craving, such conviction—as if it were a prophecy being revealed to me in pieces she’d been hiding. The word was magic I just didn’t know yet. Each side now revealed, we both laughed that nervous laugh, and I changed the subject to something more suitable for mothers and their adult-ish daughters—boys.
Jake, yea that Jake—the porno pizza deliveryman of my dreams—and I were “dating.” Turns out the tension was sexual that night we sat on my sofa watching Seinfeld and typing on our laptops. He just really had a lot of work to do. And me, well, you know. I’m a work in progress. Anyway when I told her that formerly “just friends” Jake and I were something more than, she screamed. Like this undulating Amazonian mating call type scream.
“But he doesn’t want to have kids anytime soon, woman,” I said, ripping off her baby Band-Aid.
“How do you know?” she shot back. “Right now, of course not. But laaaater.”
When I told Jake this, he laughed, remembering the time his own mother showed up at his house with a “lap protector” after watching something on the news about how much damage a laptop’s heat can do to a man’s spermies. Maybe things would work out between us, after all. Grandbaby-crazed mothers? Check. He’d found out from Google how much a temporary vasectomy would cost, and I considered the fee n
ominal.
A month later when I almost broke up with him because he works like a maniac, leaving him precious little time to be obsessed with me, Frances screamed again. This time at me. Said I was being selfish.
We were on opposing teams again, and I should’ve seen it coming. Around Christmastime, my mother’s baby craving became impossible to ignore. My cousin’s oldest son—the first kid I babysat for free—had just had his own son. Right. The baby was the first member of our family’s sixth generation, and apparently the first baby ever. My mother cradled her great-great-nephew, looking down at him—and across the room at me, expectantly.
The next week, it all came out in the open. We were on our way to Gina’s great-grandmother’s house to eat gumbo for good luck in the New Year. Randomly, between radio commercials, Frances admitted that she could not, in all fairness, harass me about having a baby, since she was almost thirty years old when she decided to have me.
“Ma, you know I’ll be twenty-nine in less than a year, right?” I asked, immediately regretting that decision.
“Oh,” she paused. “Right.”
Then, to either shock or silence her, I said it wouldn’t be the end of the world if an alien life form decided not to invade my womb for nine months. It wouldn’t do irreparable damage to my self-worth or anything. “Lots of women are childless, and somehow they find a way to go on,” I said. We rode the rest of the way talking about everything but the ten-pound hypothetical baby in the backseat. I thought the issue was tabled until she announced, unsolicited, at Gina’s great-grandmother’s dining table that she’d never have her own grandchildren—ever.
“Do you know what Lena said in the car…?” Gina and I thought it wise to hide in the kitchen.
If you’ve ever been to a wedding, funeral, or father-daughter purity ball, then you’ve sat—perhaps teary-eyed—through John Mayer’s “Daughters,” basically the sound track of every Lifetime movie in existence. It’s about how some girl got so messed up by her parents that now she can’t truly love the man standing on her steps with his heart in his hand or whatever.
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