Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  “That’s not some kind of sin here, is it? Did I fail or something?”

  “No pass or fail. Not a judgment. It just tells us which realignment class to assign you. Almost everyone ends up in one class or the other.” She looks up for a moment, offers a pharmacist’s impersonal grin, then drops her head and expression as she looks down to my test again. “But I knew you were a sunflower when I met you. The male sunflowers always hit on me. Somehow they know they don’t have a chance and need to prove their manhood by defeating reality.”

  “We’re leaving,” I tell Tal, and she gets off her phone long enough to stand and gather her things.

  “Was my father being a dick? My father can be a dick. Please excuse his dickishness.”

  “Jesus, Tal, don’t say ‘dick.’ She didn’t mean ‘dick,’ ” I tell Sunita, who actually winks and nods. Instantly, I feel less offended. Then I realize it’s because she’s agreeing with Tal.

  Sunita Habersham’s head bobs and I read that as, You are a dick, a huge dick, isn’t that funny? but her mouth says: “She’ll be in the opposite class. I’ll talk to Roslyn; we can work this out. So come tomorrow, if you can make it. At eight A.M.”

  “We’re going,” I tell Tal again, and holding her arm we head to the door.

  —

  Riding back, I am so angry I say nothing. Tal, for her part, allows me the silence, or at least doesn’t say anything loud enough for me to hear. When we arrive at the mansion, Tal climbs off and says, “Warren? Between the two, you know where I stand. If that Thor-looking goliath at the gate can fit in at Mélange, I got no worries. I just want to get the diploma and go start my life, okay? Just help me. Just help me get the hell out.”

  With her helmet under her arm, Tal heads past the gate and up to my father’s house like she owns it. She is beautiful, my big girl, her feet pointing off at ten and two, slapping straight down on the arch as she falls forward. I watch her walk all the way while I struggle to get the motorcycle’s front wheel up the three steps of the walkway rather than try to unlock the rusty vehicle entrance. Tal, I realize, as I speed through seventeen years of parental epiphanies, is of her own making, not just proof that once I was young and reckless. She turns at the door again to add, “Jesus, hurry the fuck up,” after she uses her own house key for the first time.

  “She ran away!” Irv Karp yells out of his car window as he pulls up behind me. I recognize the voice more than I recognize him; first it’s just a crazy man in a 1997 Buick LeSabre.

  When he climbs out, he’s sweating, his dress shirt’s open, sleeves rolled up. In the outside light, his old flesh looks translucent and fading. “That little weasel ran away, came here. She didn’t tell you that, did she? Did she?”

  “I didn’t know,” I find myself yelling back to match his passion. The bike I give up on, lean it against the fence. Irv takes my hand when I hold it out to him, and I know then it’s not me he’s mad at this time.

  “See this? This is what I’ve been dealing with. She just goes. I go to dialysis yesterday, I come back, I lay down. I wake up this morning and she’s gone. Who does that? Is that how good people act? Who just leaves?” he asks and I shrug back at him even though the answer could be, Me.

  “I would have thought she was running away to the street and who knows what, but she took that little rat pet thing and its cage. That’s when I knew, she’s coming here. To you. Did you know?”

  “I didn’t know,” I tell him again.

  “Of course you didn’t know! That’s the immaturity! That’s what kids do! But now you know,” he tells me, smiling at the absurdity of it. And then he breathes. He puts his hands on his khakied thighs, catches air some more. I offer to take him in for some water but he waves me off, stands straight again to continue. “How is she; is she good?”

  “She’s good. We found a school, someplace she can finish out her year.” Moments earlier I was thinking about GED training instead, nights at a community college somewhere, but here this guy is and he wants a solid answer. I tell him how it’s in Chestnut Hill and he really likes that because it’s ritzy up there. I tell him it’s surrounded by trees and adjoins Valley Green and he looks impressed, so I skip mood-killing details like the fact that it’s actually in the park and composed of gypsy hovels. I hate the awkwardness of talking about race with white people, so skip the whole mulatto-themed bit altogether.

  “Come in, let’s talk this through, figure it out,” I tell him, and I start pushing on the motorcycle again just to get it out of the way. There are a few seconds there when he’s waiting behind me patiently as I struggle, but when I finally get it over the hump Irv doesn’t move.

  “Nah,” he tells me, head wagging. “Nah, I’m going out to Philly Park, gonna bet on the puppies. Look, I’m leaving. She’s okay, and she’s going to go back to school? Good. She wants to torture her grandfather, just send emails to my niece to tell me she’s okay? Fine. You keep her. You look out for her. I don’t mean like forever or anything, don’t get carried away, but for now, a couple of weeks at least.”

  “I can handle her, Irv. I can. We’re bonding.”

  “Yeah. Let’s just see. Seven years I’ve been struggling with this one. Let her think she’s won. Let her think she got her own way. I need the rest. I need a day at the track and some good luck for once. I can’t do this forever. You know I got the prostate cancer. I mean, I got it bad.”

  Irv just throws that last bit on to the end without pausing. I reply, “Okay,” before I actually hear his last sentence. But it’s not like I have anything else to say. He looks at my discomfort, laughs at it, waves it away with his big spotty hands as if it’s cigarette smoke.

  “Look at your face: it’s like I told you that you got it. You don’t even know me. Trust me, I’m no great loss to the universe. Plus, I’m getting the treatments, so who knows? But don’t tell Tal. She doesn’t know. The two of you, you should come to Shabbat at my place, next Friday. You should meet our family, get to know them so—” And Irv starts coughing like something is in him large and wet that wants to come out, but I hope it doesn’t because I don’t want to see it.

  7

  MÉLANGE CENTER, 7:55 A.M., cold even though it’s still technically summer. What is a gathering of mulattoes even called? A murder? A motley? A mass? I ask these out loud as Tal and I stand gathered at the gate with the others, waiting for it to open. My daughter says, “A menagerie,” and winks like we’re conspiring.

  “It’s called home. Oh yeah, you betcha,” an ebony-skinned woman says next to me in a thick white-girl accent that sounds like it was obtained in North Dakota.

  There are mulattoes in America who look white and also socialize as white. White-looking mulattoes whose friends are mostly white, who consume the same music and television and books and films as most whites, whose political views are less than a shade apart from the whites as well. They ain’t here. Those mulattoes whose white appearance matches up with the white world they inhabit, those mulattoes aren’t coming to Mulattopia. The world already fits well enough for them.

  Those mulattoes who look definitively African American and are fully at home within the African American community—they aren’t here either. Those mulattoes who look clearly black and hang black and are in the full embrace of black culture—nope, they’re not here, nowhere to be found. If they were they would denounce this lot of sellouts. I know they would. I can hear them from the place they have in my consciousness.

  The people whose appearance matches the identity they project, they have a place in society that they fit into with minimal cramping. But here, standing next to us, is everyone else. The human equivalent of mismatched socks. The people whose racial appearance fails to mirror the ethnicity of their inner spirit.

  They’re going to let me teach three days a week, push my reduced payments off till Halloween, when I should have access to the rest of my dad’s modest cashable accounts. I’m looking forward to a whole week of training with Tal, us sitting together making f
un of the cultists in the back of the classroom, me and my teenage baby girl, bonding. But as soon as the blond Neanderthal comes to open the gate, Sunita appears right behind him, reading names off a list. And just like that my daughter and I are separated, broken off into two groups, and sent to sit in trailer homes at opposite ends of the encampment.

  There are a dozen other people sitting around a circular table in the room for Balance Class B, and nobody knows each other yet so nobody is talking or making eye contact. But I am looking at them. And I am looking at some of the whitest-looking black people on the face of the planet. The only reason I know some of them are black is because they’re in this room. I look at these people—a couple adults my age, the rest kids Tal’s age and younger—and I come to the most blissful recognition. I am the darkest Negro in the room.

  I am the darkest Negro in the room.

  Finally. I—lighter than some white people walking around this world, always the palest of any black person, a man who can barely hold on to that mantle—am like an Asante chief in this room. The aspirational blackness of this group is clear in their aesthetic choices. The teenage boy to my left wears a do-rag, presumably so you do-not see the straight brown strands peeking out from around his ears. He has on the basketball jersey of a player most famous for being associated with the reality-TV star to whom he was briefly married. Next to him is a woman whose African braids must have been attached to her stringy mouse-brown hair with superglue. These people, they are not black like me. They are less black than me, and therefore I don’t trust them. And I love it. Embattled groups have to police membership, for their own self-protection. But with policing comes power, and all power’s usual intoxicants. Instantly, my own ethnic bona fides are shored up by the contrast to my present company. This, I realize, is a singular element of the Black Experience I’ve been previously denied. The guilty satisfaction of sitting in judgment over others for their insufficient blackness. I forgive everyone who has ever done this to me maliciously. How could anyone resist such a pleasurable self-righteous indulgence!

  The blond Neanderthal comes into the classroom. I have a moment of panic that I’m going to have to take a week of lectures from Thor the Thunder Mulatto, but he sits down next to me. I can see his dreads close up and marvel at how a man who looks so white can have hair kinky enough to hold them. And then I almost chuckle when I can see that his thick strands are held together by some sort of product. Egg whites or wax, or more likely some organic paste that comes in a jar with a lot of little Africas or ankhs or marijuana leaves decorating its sides.

  “One drop,” he says when he catches me looking. I smile and look at him. And then he says it again, “One drop.” And I know he’s calling me out. Amazingly, all of my air vacates and is replaced with something the opposite of helium. Just like that. The familiarity of this next emotion’s so complete that it takes only a moment to accomplish. Here I have sat in judgment, yet am no better. One drop of African blood, the legal definition of blackness in America. And really, look at me, am I much better? Does the wideness of my nose or my full lips somehow obscure the fact that I hold to this ridiculous fallacy as well? I am more ashamed for having forgotten this at the first opportunity. And when he says, “ ‘One Drop,’ like the Marley song. What do you go by?” holding his hand out for me to shake it, and I get that he’s giving me his name. That he’s actually telling me that he’s willfully chosen to call himself this insult.

  “Warren,” I say. But can’t resist asking, “You really like to be called One Drop?”

  “They used to tease me with the name, when I was a young boy coming up. Now, I own it. And it can’t hurt me since it ain’t true. You feel me, Dubs?” he says, then offers me a fist bump, which is a nice way to accentuate that he understands the unspoken rule that any brother with a W anywhere in their name has the opportunity of choosing “Dubs” as a nickname. He has studied the culture well. I give a pound in appreciation.

  “Don’t be nervous, yo. First day jitters, but it ain’t nothing. It goes quickly,” One Drop tells me. He says it like he truly knows, like this isn’t just conspiratorial bluster.

  “You took one of these classes before?”

  “Man, I’ve taken this jawn three times. My blackness runs too deep, yo,” he says, putting a fist over his heart. “See, they make you take it till they whitewash you, yo. But the teacher, she’s the best.” And when Sunita Habersham walks in and authoritatively takes the front of the table, I turn to agree with him.

  —

  I stare at Sun, but she’s the teacher, and she’s lecturing, so it’s perfectly appropriate. So she likes comics. So she’s height-weight proportionate, in a manner I find voluptuous. Yes, she’s displayed an unattainability that enhances her attractiveness to me. But still, rational thought here, what am I being attracted to? All those reasons are so petty, my desire doesn’t accrue from their sum. I look at her neck. It’s got all those lines running across. She’s a little younger than me and blessed with more melanin, so those aren’t wrinkles, its the skin of her neck being too long for the bones holding up her solid, monumental head. The size of it eludes perception because of the distracting oversized glasses masking a third of her face.

  The enormous concave lenses shrink her eyes down to the size of a small child’s. Her pupils are two little brown dots floating in empty aquariums. If Sunita Habersham wore contact lenses, they be as thick as Russel Wright plates. Sun could swim at the bottom of the ocean with contacts that solid. She is not attractive in pieces, but what human is? She is the most beautiful tall, half-black, female comic-book nerd in the world, of this I have no doubt. The whole is what matters. And she is whole and balanced. She must be or the blasphemy that she’s preaching would shake her to the ground.

  “Without accepting all of ourselves, we can never be ourself,” Sunita declares. And then she repeats the sentence of import over again, slower, stopping to write on the board. I haven’t been closely following her actual lecture, the entire line of discussion is too disturbing to take in big chunks. Fortunately, I don’t really need to because Sun’s done the same thing with all her key sentences and they’re all written up there. Love yourself for who you are, not who you wish you were. Then there’s All of your history is within you. My favorite is You are half of nothing, for you are whole, because ain’t no one in this room half of anything. These people would kill to be half. Nobody in this room has had an ancestor who was “half” since Abraham Lincoln was president. Hell, the guy next to me is making do clinging to one drop and bragging about it. This mixed race stuff is heresy. It’s the opposite of what I’ve been taught since a child: if you have any black in you, you’re black—very simple, very American. It’s worked fine since slavery but she treats the dogma like doggerel.

  For two hours, I’m nodding my head and taking notes, mostly listing how to get Loudin done in six months, the order of what needs to be fixed, and estimates as to what each repair will cost. They don’t have to be good repairs, just enough to get the appraisal higher for after the fire when the insurance pays out. When I reach an enormous, impossible sum, I look up, surprised. Sun sees this and she actually smiles, mistaking my revelation as a response to something in her lecture she is calling “tri-racial isolates.”

  Sun says, “We’re writing our parental histories?” and I look at the others and they’ve got they’re notebooks open and are jotting, so I ape them.

  I start with my mom. Pauline Duffy, née Skaggs, who came from Chicago in the late sixties, running from an alcoholic father who only sobered up to preach on Sundays and to push a mop at the post office on weekday mornings. While he was drunk, he did some things too horrific to specify, to her, at night, and she had a hard time overcoming those memories, which is partly why my mom smoked a lot, which cut her time on earth to deal with said trauma. The name Skaggs came from his father, who showed up in Chicago running away from certain lynching in Acadia Parish, Louisiana, leaving behind the corpse of a drunken Cajun who overesti
mated his white privilege. I can’t trace them all the way back to Africa, but I do know that his grandfather came from Haiti in the beginning of the nineteenth century—as to why he would chose to go from free Haiti to the Deep South before the end of U.S. slavery, I don’t know. I do know that creoles can be hardheaded, so maybe that’s reason enough. The rest of the family, my grandmother’s side, came from Tennessee, where they worked for the same family they’d been enslaved by for another twenty years after the South lost its war. When my mom left my dad, money was tight. Bills went unpaid, and utilities routinely went out. Light’s out. Water’s out. Heat’s out. When it was the water bill, we’d line buckets in the backyard to have rainwater to flush the toilets with. Sometimes it was the phone, which meant that when we got home my mom would spend all night talking to me, which was lovely. Sometimes it was the gas, which wasn’t bad because we only used it to cook and that meant cereal for dinner. But usually it was the electric. We’d get back from work and school and it would be dark and stay dark. And my mom would get candles from the dresser drawer and ignite a cave of visibility for us. She was a skinny woman, skeletal in the shadows, but they were soft bones to me. Mornings there was no heat and too much cold, she would come downstairs and turn on the oven to take the chill out, leave its door open so you could see the hot air rippling as it escaped. And we would stay there at the counter, hands over the opening, Mom taking pauses to light her menthols on the burner. “Love keeps us warm,” she said to me once, which was not literally true or particularly poetic but is lodged forever in my mind.

  I tell this story to the group. I’m the first one to read out loud, too, and I volunteered. I stand up in front of the room and everything. And part of it is that just thinking about that time brought it back for me and I miss my mom. And I know that saying it out loud, sharing it, will amplify the feelings I just remembered. And it does. I can see the oval burns from the curling iron, on my mom’s neck, and the smile that got so big you could see her missing teeth in the back. And I remember the lines of her gaunt face, how they raced down to her sharp cleft chin, how her neck was long and thin and she tried to wear high collars and shoulder pads to obscure that. I remember the smell of that horrible placenta treatment she used to put in her hair, sealed in a glass tube and broken with great care directly onto her roots. I remember the horror of visiting her in the hospital, skinnier every time. I remember that she told me to stop coming, that she didn’t want me to see her like that. I remember, “I can’t get out of this, but you can, so go.” The relief of this reprieve would only be matched by the guilt of accepting it forever after. I tell them all this, telling far more than what I wrote down. There is a petty me in there that wants Sunita Habersham to know that I had been loved once. That I knew how to love once as well. But even that smallness is smothered under the details remembered. When I finish, I’m thinking that I actually like this Mulattopia, this campground of self-indulgence. That it isn’t all bad, being forced to say: This is me, this is me, this is me.