by Jesmyn Ward
Most of the students who attended the school were middle- to upper-class. Even though the school was flush with moneyed students, this was not reflected in the buildings. While the private elementary Episcopalian school I’d attended as a scholarship student in sixth grade was in a building much like the public schools I attended, redbrick with open airy rooms, the corresponding Episcopalian high school was nothing like this. Before 1969, the board of directors had purchased a mansion on the beach in Pass Christian to house the school, but Hurricane Camille hit and swept away the building. So the board built a big warehouse further north in Pass Christian, divided it into classrooms using thin walls and partitions, installed lockers in the hallways, and eventually built another, taller warehouse behind the school with spray-on yellow insulation that resembled dried snot. It was disconcerting to walk into the building, as industrial as it looked from the outside, and see all the students, who bore all the hallmarks of wealth and good health: braces, shiny thick hair, tans, and collared shirts. Some of the students were so rich they drove luxury cars especially tailored to their whims: Lexuses and BMWs outfitted for racing. Some of them slept on plantation-era beds that required small ladders to ascend at night. None of them lived in trailers. And throughout my school years, my mother cleaned for them. Sometimes she brought home huge garbage bags of their hand-me-down clothes after cleaning their houses. Joshua, Nerissa, and Charine refused their castoffs. I sifted through them, picking out what would fit, what I thought was reasonably fashionable, and prayed that when I wore it to school, whoever had owned it first would not see me in it. I assembled a ragtag wardrobe gleaned from my schoolmates in the hope that when worn together, my clothes would function as a camouflage, would allow me to be one of the group. I joined their religious youth groups too, became adept in the lexicon of organized religion, all in the hopes of being considered a little less of a perpetual other. But for some students, I could not escape our differences.
One day, a few months into my seventh-grade year, I walked into the gym and sat at the top of a small cluster of my classmates in the bleachers. There were four girls, all sitting with their knees together, all wearing khaki shorts and loose pastel shirts. I watched the other kids playing dodgeball on the court, hurling balls, intending to hurt. Barbara was idly twisting her blond hair: her roots were black. She turned in her seat to look at me.
“Why don’t you put some nigger braids in my hair?”
“Excuse me?” I said. “What did you say?”
“Nigger braids. Why don’t you put my hair in nigger braids?”
I hadn’t misheard her. Barbara smiled, satisfied as an animal that’s eaten its fill, and turned back to watch the games on the court. The heat in the gym was unbearable. I stood up and descended the bleachers, hoping I wouldn’t trip. I couldn’t believe she’d said the word, used it so casually, so denigratingly, and then been so proud of what she’d done. Casual racism was so prevalent in my school, yet encountering it often didn’t make it any easier to understand. It was incomprehensible to me. I didn’t know how to react to it. There were so many Black kids in public school that I could always rely on someone else to fight, to yell out honky and beat the shit out of the offending party. A few years later, my brother and his cohort would sneak knives and brass knuckles into school to fight White kids who wore rebel flag T-shirts, who initiated confrontations informed by race, by the word nigger hurled like a large rock. But at Coast Episcopal, I was alone. And the torments I’d suffered in Gulfport and public school continued, except at my private school, my brown skin was an actual physical indicator of my otherness. There was no need for me to justify my misery by imagining that others saw my sense of inner weakness, saw it as other, and picked on me for it; at my private school, the color of my skin was enough of a signal for some of my schoolmates to see inferiority, weakness.
I was alone later in the year when I stopped in the hallway during a break. A group of White boys, all juniors and seniors, stood in the foyer opposite me, loitering. They were uniformed in khaki and polos, and they were all at least a foot taller than I was. They were also laughing at a joke one of them must have told when I walked by. I stopped to look at them, me with my thin shins, unmuscled calves, a collarbone like a crowbar, my serious dusky face marked by a down-turned mouth that didn’t like to smile since my protruding front teeth marked me as different in yet another way. My mother could not afford braces for me.
“What did you say?” I asked them. They chuckled.
“You heard,” one of them said. His name was Phillip, and my mother cleaned for his family once a month. They always sent us the largest garbage bags of clothing.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You know what we do to your kind,” another laughed.
“No, I don’t.”
They laughed again, each of them elbowing the other, and then I knew. Whatever the joke, it involved a Black person, hands bound, and a choking rope at the neck, a picnic. Lynching. They were joking about lynching.
“You ain’t going to do shit to me,” I said. I said it before I could think that I was one and they were many, and there was no one to help me fight my battle.
Phillip and his friends changed then. They shifted and stopped laughing. One of them crossed his arms, and then another, and they looked as if they could move like a herd.
Even though my heart felt as if it would beat its way out of my chest, I stood. I was sweating and my face burned, but I stood.
“You ain’t going to do nothing,” I said.
They saw I would not move. They watched my eyes, perhaps wanting me to cry. I didn’t. The moment passed. They shrugged, walked past me down to the senior lockers. I watched them go. After they disappeared, I watched my classmates in the student lounge, sliding drinks across the table to one another, eating pizza, chewing and talking. I felt victorious for one moment, proud that I’d stood up for myself. But as I watched my schoolmates, their shining faces and white, wide smiles, separated by the glass between us, I realized I’d achieved nothing. I was still myself. I was still alone.
My mother drove us to visit our father in New Orleans on weekends in her small, rattling Toyota Corolla. Charine invariably sat in the front seat while the rest of us sat in the back. Sometimes we sang along to the radio, and when we did, my mother told us to shut up and let the radio sing. She had no patience, and I imagine it was because she drove and her children sang and all she could think about was our father and the fact that she had never wanted to be a mother in this situation. By this time Joshua was taller than me by at least two inches, and wider. Nerissa was a premature beauty. Charine was small, skinny, and funny. In the backseat, Josh and I would tussle with our elbows, each of us fighting for room by leaning forward and smashing the other person’s arm into the seat. I usually lost because he was bigger and stronger than me; at the time, I was beginning to realize that all the dominance I’d exercised over him while we were growing up was fading. The trunk was even more crowded with paper bags filled with groceries; even when we weren’t with her, my mother took responsibility for feeding us. She knew my father’s refrigerator held only condiments. She packed easy things to cook, things she thought we could handle: Top Ramen noodles, tuna fish, eggs, boxes of Tuna Helper, sandwich bread, peanut butter and jelly, cereal, and gallons of milk. During the summer, when we stayed with my father for a week at time, we’d run through the food, so at the end we were eating dry cereal out of the box for breakfast and lunch, and inventing things for dinner.
“I’m hungry,” Nerissa said.
“Are you hungry too?” I asked Charine.
Charine nodded, hopping in front of a large mirror my father’d set against a wall in the living room. She was preening. My father, as usual, wasn’t home. He wasn’t next door at his fourth baby mama’s apartment, either. We didn’t know where he’d gone. He did that often, leaving us alone in the apartment while he disappeared. I worried about him, but I knew that eventually, sometime later that night, he’d
be back. I was accustomed to being in charge when my mother was gone or working, so I took it as my obligation. Of course I had to feed us.
Joshua took a pan out. We’d never cooked together before, but I needed help. I had no idea what to do with what little we had left over from the week. I opened a can of tuna, dumped it in.
“What else we’re going to put in it?” I asked Joshua.
“Cheese,” he said.
I dumped leftover rice from some red beans and rice Mama’d packed for us, and Joshua added some peas. Finally I added more cheese. It bubbled.
“What should we call it?” Josh asked.
“It looks like throw-up,” Nerissa said.
Josh tasted a spoonful, then added salt.
“It’s good,” he said.
“Regurgitation,” I said. “We’ll call it regurgitation. We’re chefs!”
We ate most of it. When my father came home, there was only a little left. He tasted it, but much of what we’d saved for him stayed in the pot. Later on, he played music on the big stereo in the living room, and all of us danced in front of the mirror.
The next afternoon and evening, my father was gone again. My little sisters were at my father’s baby mama’s apartment, so our sixteen-year-old cousin Marcus decided he would take Joshua and me to the movies to see Boomerang. Five minutes into the movie, an usher bent over our seats.
“Joshua and Mimi?” We’re too young to be in here, I thought. They’re kicking us out. “Your cousin passed out in the bathroom. We think he’s drunk.”
We followed the usher to the bathroom and saw Marcus facedown on the tile. He’d been drinking before we got on the bus that took us to the Galleria to see the movie, but I hadn’t realized he’d been that drunk. I panicked. Our father didn’t have a house phone, and I didn’t know the numbers for my father’s brothers or his baby mama. We were marooned.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
“Come on,” Josh said.
He walked to the pay phone in the hallway, began flipping through the phone book.
“Uncle Dwight’s number is probably in here,” he said. I hadn’t thought of that, and felt stupid for panicking when my brother, three years younger, was so calm. And practical. Joshua found the number, and I called our uncle. Thirty minutes or so later, our father arrived at the Galleria in a big old Cadillac with white leather seats. Daddy dragged Marcus out of the theater and dumped him in the backseat, and we followed. I asked Daddy whose car we were riding in.
“A friend’s,” he said. I assumed he’d borrowed the car from one of his girlfriends.
“Josh had the idea to call Uncle Dwight. I didn’t know what to do,” I said.
Joshua was disappointed. Our tastes in movies had changed from horror to Arnold Schwarzenegger action films and Eddie Murphy comedies. Our trip to view Boomerang would be the first time either of us had ever seen an Eddie Murphy film in a theater, and he had really looked forward to it. Even though I hadn’t been the one to faint in a pool of vomit in the bathroom, I felt like I’d failed my brother in some way that evening. But he’d shown me that he could be levelheaded and solid when I could not be.
“That was smart,” my father said. “Common sense. What happened to you, Mimi?”
I didn’t reply to my father. It was the first time that someone had told me that I lacked common sense, and it was an odd thing for me to hear, since I’d been praised for my intelligence my entire life. My father probably meant it as a joke, but I couldn’t see it as one; instead, I added it to the long list of reasons that helped me to make sense of why he’d left us, and why he continued to leave us even when my mother brought us to visit.
One day, Topher, a boy two years older than me, walked into the classroom while my classmates and I were taking a history test. My teacher had stepped out of the room to make photocopies, and she’d already been gone for ten minutes when Topher wandered in the room. He smiled at the classroom in general: when he saw me, he stopped for a moment, his face frowned long. Then he smiled and sat on my desk. I looked up and he began telling nigger jokes.
“What do you call a nigger that …?” He said. He was taller than me, wore a dirty blond crewcut, and had a narrow face. He answered himself.
“How many niggers does it take to …?” he said. He looked down at my head, and I looked down at my desk. He answered himself.
“What does one nigger say to another nigger when …?” he said. I told myself: Don’t cry. This asshole wants to see you cry, wants to see you freak out. Take your test. Just take your test.
“A nigger, an oriental, and a Polish man walk into a bar …,” he said. He finished the joke, leaned back and laughed to the fluorescent-lit ceiling. I was hot, sweating. I wrote down a word or two of a sentence, held my pencil poised above my test as if I were on the verge of writing something profound, something worthy of an A. Topher was impatient.
“Come on, Mimi,” he said. “I know you know some good honky jokes. Why don’t you tell them to us?” I stared at him and thought of how good it would feel to lunge at him, to grab his throat, to sink my thumbs into the skin and muscle over his esophagus, to push and see him turning blue. To silence him the way he silenced me just by walking into the classroom, just by being White and blond and treating the world as if it were made for him to walk through it.
“Topher.” My history teacher walked back into the classroom, her blond hair feathered and framing the egg of her face like a nest. “Get out of my classroom.” She didn’t address what he’d said, the jokes. She hadn’t heard. I looked at my classmates, and they looked at their tests. None of them said a word.
Some of them were my friends, and they never took up for me, for Black people, when I was in the room. And according to what some of them told me in private conversation, they didn’t when I wasn’t in the room, either. Perhaps they were just as shocked or uncomfortable. I didn’t know. One day, one of my classmates, Sophia, who was moonfaced with straight brown hair, cornered me in the student lounge during our study break.
“I heard something,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, we were all sitting in Ms. Day’s classroom, and she left, and we started talking about stuff. We started talking about Black people and Molly said she could never kiss one, couldn’t imagine it because their lips are so big. And then Wendy told us this story about how some Black people pulled into her driveway to turn around and her dad started yelling at them to get out. She said he called them scoobies. Scoobies, she said.” Wendy was one of the few other ethnic girls in the school at the time: her family was Chinese American. At the time, this surprised me; I hadn’t expected this from another person of color. Years later in college, I’d read an essay by Toni Morrison that posited that this was normal for newer immigrants to the United States: place oneself in opposition to Black people from the beginning so that the members of that ethnic group would not be aligned with Black people, the lowest of the low, but would instead be aligned with others who disdained us.
“Like Scooby Doo?” I said. “Like dogs?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“And what did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Sophia said.
Why are you telling me this? I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t ask because I thought I understood from her face some of why she told me. She looked sorry and guilty, her eyebrows drawn together and the ends of her mouth turned down. For the first time I understood that some of my schoolmates felt guilty by complicity, felt bad for keeping their mouths shut, for going along with it. For not taking up for me when I called them my friends.
“Well, thanks,” I said. I squirmed on the dark green bench, looked down at my hands on the table. I didn’t know how to respond to Sophia. I never even imagined confronting Wendy.
Years later, I understood that what Sophia wanted when she told me that story was absolution. But I didn’t understand that when she finished speaking, her upper body leaning forward expectantly over the tab
le. At the time, what she told me didn’t mean much to me. I assumed that, regardless of the friendship we shared, a lot of my White schoolmates were racist: some of them, I thought, just had the balls to come out and say it in front of me. I should have spoken to some of my teachers about how I felt, but I didn’t think to do so at the time. Later, when I was an adult, I told one of my science teachers about what had happened to me and she said, “I wish you would have told me.” But I couldn’t. I was so depressed by the subtext I felt, so depressed I was silenced, because the message was always the same: You’re Black. You’re less than White. And then, at the heart of it: You’re less than human.
Sometimes I wanted to leave that school. But how could I tell my mother that I didn’t want to take advantage of the opportunity she was working herself ragged to provide for me? I broached the subject once, spurred by two of my friends, artists and writers, who were leaving my private school to attend private boarding schools in California. You’d get a scholarship so easily, they’d told me. They’d even invited me on a trip to visit them in school, and though I knew racism was everywhere and the dearth of Black faces at their boarding schools scared me, I wanted to apply, to leave Mississippi, to escape the narrative I encountered in my family, my community, and my school that I was worthless, a sense that was as ever present as the wet, cloying heat. “You can’t leave,” my mother said to me. “You have to help me with your siblings.” When she said that, I felt all the weight of the South pressing down on me, and it was then that I resolved to leave the region for college, but to do it in a way that respected the sacrifices my mother made for me. I studied harder. I read more. How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?
