by Danzy Senna
Redbone’s voice was different now, nasal. He was no longer speaking in his butchered slang as he said, “Deck, watch your step. Don’t get black and proud on me. You’re the one with the white daughter.”
There was a lot of pushing and yelling. Without thinking I grabbed the leg next to me and said, “Stop it! He’s gonna kill Papa!”
But Redbone didn’t get very far. The men held them safely apart and talked to them in smooth, calming voices. I realized I was clutching Ronnie’s leg. He leaned down to my level and smiled, putting his hand on my head.
“Bird, no one’s gonna hurt your papa. I’ll make sure of it. Now, why don’t you go find your sister and your aunt Dot? I think they’re in the kitchen.”
I nodded and turned to go. Behind me, my father’s voice: “If I ever see you near my wife again, I swear, man, it’s all over.”
I gave one last glance to my father holding his hands in the air and backing away from Redbone, who was looking over his shoulder at me with a pained grin.
Outside of the room I ran down the hall toward the yellow light of the kitchen. Dot sat at the table, smoking, while Cole sat beside her, chopping greens. A woman with bleach-blond hair, darkening at the roots, stood at the stove, singing in a low, Spanish accent.
Dot said to me, “Where you been, girl?” Then she looked at Cole and said, “This sister of yours is always wandering off. You need to keep a better eye on her.” She stroked my hair. “Your father’s been lookin’ for you. He wants you and Cole to perform some dance he taught you.”
Cole piped in, “‘Member, Birdie? He wants us to do the Bump for everybody.”
Dot’s smile faded when she looked into my eyes.
“What is it, Birdie, baby? Did someone bother you out there?”
I hesitated and looked over at Cole, who had stopped chopping and held the knife in midair.
Dot shook me roughly by the shoulders, and my head jiggled loosely like my Sasha doll’s. “Why you look so funny, Bird? Did someone bother you?”
I shook my head no. Dot hugged me to her bony body and said, “Hey there, now. I didn’t mean to shake you. But you tell me if anyone hurts you. You hear me?”
I started to speak, to tell them what had happened, but the words caught in my throat. It seemed secret, what I had just seen, and so I said only, “All right. Let’s go rehearse.”
Cole and I did the Bump to “Roller Coaster” before a group of swaying, grinning grown-ups, who stood jingling their glasses and shouting out encouragement to us. My father had taught us how to do the dance one silly afternoon in the fading light of our kitchen, but now he stood in the back of the crowd, barely watching our performance, his head cocked to the right side as if weighed down by too much information.
In the car ride home that night, as Cole dozed with her head against the glass, I watched the streetlights fly by and tried to eavesdrop on my father and Ronnie, but their words were swallowed by the smooth bullshitting baritone of Barry White.
I HAD THOUGHT the incident with Redbone was bad. But the real battle began as soon as we got home. I lay huddled next to Cole, twisting one of her curls around my finger. We both were quiet, frowning at the ceiling, listening intently to our parents’ muffled shrieks and curses, which came floating up to us from the kitchen.
“Redbone’s full of shit!” I heard my father say, his voice tight and indignant. “I mean, Sandy, you’ve got to be crazy letting that madman into your little group.”
“Fuck off, Deck. All right? ‘Cause your ass sure isn’t helping out with the cause. I mean, there’s a war out there. A fucking war. Not just overseas, but right in your own backyard. Shit, Deck. The FBI is trying to destroy everything we’ve fought for. And all you can think about are the origins of the word ‘Negro.’”
Cole claimed to remember the good times between my parents. But I didn’t. Seemed like they were always breaking up to make up. After their big fights, they usually got back together with a little ritual: Al Green, a bottle of red wine, and a carton of Chinese noodles. Sometimes they would read aloud to each other from one of their favorite writers, Camus or Richard Wright. Other times they would just stand in the living room, lights off, swaying to the soul music, kissing, and whispering to each other secrets Cole and I would never know.
Even when they were getting along, their union seemed fragile, on the verge of ending. I never heard them say “I love you” to each other. Instead, they said, “I miss you,” when they were lying beside each other in bed, or when they walked hand in hand along the banks of the Charles River. “I miss you,” they would say, and overhearing this, I didn’t understand how you could miss something that was right beside you. Lately, though, they didn’t even talk about missing each other. And their fighting had only intensified. As my mother fell deeper into Boston politics, my father went deeper into his book and his ideas about race. Cole said she bet they were going to get a divorce. She said everybody’s parents did at some point.
Sometimes I wondered if it were my fault. I knew their marriage had begun to sour at about the same time as my birth. They couldn’t even agree on a name for me, which is how I ended up Birdie. My sister had been born when they still got along. They named her Colette, after the French writer, though everyone shortened it to Cole. But when I was born, my father wanted to call me Patrice, as in Lumumba, the Congolese liberator; my mother wanted to name me Jesse, after her great-grandmother, a white suffragette. Cole just called me Birdie—she had wanted a parakeet for her birthday and instead got me. For a while, I answered to all three names with a schizophrenic zeal. But in the end, even my parents grew tired of the confusion and called me Birdie, though my birth certificate still reads, “Baby Lee,” like the gravestone of some stillborn child.
Now their words reached us in starts and stops, parts of the conversation missing, so we had to fill in the blanks ourselves. Earlier, at the party and in the car afterward, I hadn’t had a chance to tell Cole what had happened with Redbone. So here, in bed, I whispered to her in Elemeno across the blue darkness of our room. She listened sternly. I told her how I had believed I was invisible until I reached that last room. I told her about Redbone’s teeth, how they crossed over one another so it looked like he had double rows. I told her about the guns, and about my father’s last words to Redbone: “If I ever see you near my wife again…” When I was finished with my story, I felt a little guilty. If I hadn’t been snooping, Papa never would have gotten in the fight.
Cole just took my hand and said jasmu billa woola. Never spy alone.
Downstairs, their fighting continued. My father was shouting, “I’ve had enough of your antics. It’s got to come to an end. I mean, this is insane, what you’re running here. The visitors have got to stop.”
It always came back to the visitors. They’d been coming for more than a year now. They stayed in the guest room on the second floor. They were a mysterious lot—a steady stream of strangers, hunched and tired, who showed up on the doorstep of our big crumbling brownstone at odd hours of the night. International exiles and just plain-old Americans. Cole and I didn’t really understand why these people needed to stay with us. We knew only what our mother told us. That they were wanted by the pigs, the Feds, the motherfuckers in the big house, and that they had nowhere else to go.
Some stayed just a night, others a few weeks or months, before fleeing into the night to the next hiding spot, leaving behind only their thank-you notes and sometimes a piece of them that they had forgotten: a tube of lipstick, a blond pageboy wig, a dog-eared book with notes scribbled in the margins, a comb with missing teeth, a T-shirt with the faded words “Free Angela” across the front, a tarnished silver bracelet from Ghana. When Cole and I came across these objects—found in the back of a closet or under the cushions of the sofa—we always insisted on keeping them hidden in the trunk at the bottom of our bed, buried beneath a pile of costumes, our only proof that those people had existed.
There was an Iranian poet who got drunk one night
at a party my mother gave. Cole and I had fallen asleep on the floor in the television room, and he stumbled over our half-sleeping bodies, thinking we were the rug. A gaunt Irish nationalist who held a fund-raising campaign out of our living room. And the most mysterious of all, an emaciated American girl named Sarah Lou, a vegan who never let us in her room and could make her stomach “talk” on command for Cole’s and my entertainment. Sarah Lou vanished one morning after a three-week stay, leaving only a note to my mother on the kitchen table saying, “Thanks for everything. By the way. Your husband’s an asshole.”
Our last visitor had been a black South African named Lucas. A thin, bespectacled man, Lucas had stayed with us most of the spring. He was quiet, polite, and excessively neat, and dressed awkwardly in too-tight polyester shirts and high-water pants. He had left behind a daughter my age in Cape Town, and maybe because of that he took a special liking to me. He taught me how to suck marrow out of a chicken bone, and brought Cole and me a package of Wrigley’s spearmint gum each evening after his day of university research. After dinner, Cole and I would smack the gum loudly before the light of the television, chewing each piece until the flavor was gone.
Lucas had been taken away one night by men in suits who said they were immigration authorities, but who my mother told us were “fascist murderers, monsters.” My mother had stood cussing at their car on the front steps to our house, while my father had tried to call friends at The Boston Globe to help. But Lucas had gone as quickly as he had come, leaving a room smelling of foreign cigarette smoke, a framed picture of his daughter, and a plastic pink lighter with the word “Pretoria” across it. After he left, I pocketed the lighter, not willing to share it even with Cole. I lit it each night in bed, hypnotized by the blue flame, until eventually the lighter fluid ran out.
Our room had turned a deep, dark blue as the street light sifted through our little window. Their voices still came strong through the heating vent. My father was getting nasty, the way he sometimes did. I heard him laugh and call my mother a “walking, talking marshmallow.” I knew my mother was fat. At least that’s what everyone said. Her very own mother in Cambridge once called her a “whale of flesh” and found every opportunity to comment on her size. But I had never really seen my mother that way—just as big and solid, with a rope of blond hair swinging between her broad shoulders.
He was on a roll now, in the middle of one of his monologues. He said she was ten years too late to be storing radicals, that she never knew when to stop. Didn’t know when to stop eating. Didn’t know when to stop drinking. And she damn sure didn’t know when to stop this game of cops and robbers. The movement, he bellowed, had shifted gears, and she was still living in another time, another era, not realizing everyone else had moved on to other tactics or had dropped out of dropping out.
My mother replied that intellectuals like him were parlor-pink creeps who never really practiced what they preached. At least, she bellowed at him, she was trying to do something to change the world, not just writing about it.
It was true that my mother had always been the practical one. Driving through Boston was like taking a tour of my mother’s accomplishments: a community health clinic she had helped to found; a breakfast program for poor kids; and a mural that spanned a whole block, depicting the brightly colored faces of revolutionaries, with the words of some Puerto Rican poet below. My mother liked to tell Cole and me that politics weren’t complicated. They were simple. People, she said, deserved four basic things: food, love, shelter, and a good education. Everything else was extra.
But for my father, politics were more complicated. He was obsessed with theories about race and white hypocrisy, and seemed to see my mother’s activism as a distraction. My mother said that my father was paralyzed with “the weight of his intellect.” “That’s the tragedy of your father,” she had told us one night. “He thinks too much to be of much use to anybody.”
That night there was the sound of flesh hitting flesh, cries and shrieks and doors slamming. The house seemed to shake with their combined rage at each other. I whispered to Cole: tempa mi walla stu. This is their worst ever.
The last thing I heard before falling asleep was glass breaking, something hard and porcelain splitting into a thousand pieces.
A COLD DROP hit my forehead. It was the next morning, and Cole was leaning over me, her hair wet, shiny ringlets, water clinging to the ends. She was serious, upset about something. It was in her eyes. She held my face in her hands, and her curls lightly tickled my cheek. shugaray musunka dalo. Papa is leaving. They’re splitting up for real this time.
A pale strip of light fell across the wood floor. In the distance, I could hear something sharp and angry—the same sound I had fallen asleep to the night before.
I followed Cole to the half-moon window. Outside, the asphalt already shimmered with the heat.
My mother and father looked small and toylike from our window. I was surprised and relieved to see them both standing. Nobody had died during the night. My mother stood on the steps, hands on hips, watching my father stuff a garbage bag into his rust-colored Volvo. They moved their mouths, but from up so high, I couldn’t make out their words.
I was barefoot and wore only my mother’s T-shirt, which hung down past my knees.
Cole said, “I’m going down there. I’m going to find out what it’s about.”
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, then sighed. “Yeah, yeah, you can come too. But only if you’re quiet. They can’t see us watching. If they do, we’re not gonna find out anything. We’re spies. Got it?”
She wore slippers, her glasses (her eyes were already weak at eleven, making her seem more serious than she actually was), and a blue silk kimono from Chinatown. I put on my Dr. Scholls and grabbed her hand. Their voices grew louder as we descended each flight, until the cool morning air hit our faces.
My father was in the middle of a speech. His wire-rimmed glasses had caught the glare of the sun, and they glimmered, shielding his eyes, making it impossible for us to read his expression. My mother stood facing him on the cracked bottom step. She had her back to us, so I couldn’t see her face. She still wore the flowered muumuu. She held something balled in her fist and appeared to be on the verge of throwing it at him.
I listened to my father speak. It was never clear exactly to whom his words were directed. They were difficult words, and they seemed to rise above the person before him, as if aimed toward the sky rather than at anything on earth.
“It’s a law of physics,” he was saying now. “People can’t ever truly get away from where they came from. And you, Ms. Sandra Lodge”—he pronounced her maiden name with a venomous clarity—“need to go back to Cambridge.”
Even then I knew that this was a sore spot for my mother. Cambridge was where she had grown up, the daughter of a Harvard professor and a socialite wife, both the decendants of old Boston families. Her father had died before I was born. He was the only one in the whole Lodge clan that she spoke of with any real affection. Her mother still lived in Cambridge in the family house on Fayerweather Street, guarded by weeping willows and an ancient barking bloodhound named Gory. We didn’t see much of her, and I knew that whenever we did, my mother grew depressed and angry. My father liked to call my grandmother, jokingly, “the last of a noble line,” referring to her heritage, which she never let us forget. But my mother called her “the last, thank God, of an evil line” and drove us there only on special occasions.
My father went on taunting my mother: “You belong in the Square, just where I found you, Sandy, no matter how much you try to fight it. You’re a Harvard girl at heart.” He paused to light up a cigarette, then continued, changing the tone of his voice slightly: “And I need to go to Roxbury. Find me a strong black woman. A sistah. No more of this crazy white-girl shit.”
I saw my mother clench her fist around the object in her hand. She forced a harsh sound in her throat, something like a laugh. “Oh my God. Since when do you talk that
way? ‘A sistah.’ Don’t blacken your speech around me. I know where you come from. You can’t fool me.”
My father ignored her and continued putting his stuff away with a methodical concentration. He had been trying to grow an afro, and it was crooked that morning. He was ordinarily so meticulous in his appearance, and the sleep-molded slant to his hair told me something serious was going on. He had changed since last night and was dressed casually, blue jeans and a faded B.U. T-shirt.
Cole leaned over and said, “You think we should try to go with him?”
I shook my head. “No way. He’ll be back. This is just an act.”
Really, I wasn’t sure he’d be back. But I knew I didn’t want to go with him. He was so distracted all the time. I thought my mother was more fun, even if she did act wild on occasion.
She was acting pretty wild now, ranting, pacing up and down the sidewalk with her fist still balled at her side. She was in the middle of her own speech: “Let me tell you something, Mister Esteemed Professor of Bullshit. If you think you know everything, then explain this. How can you talk about Black Power and leave your two daughters with their white mother? Tell me that. If I’m such a ‘crazy white girl,’ how am I going to raise these two?”
He shrugged. “We’ve been through this already, Sandy. I’m taking them on weekends. And besides, they’re going to the school in Roxbury.”
I had heard mention of a school in Roxbury before, but wasn’t sure what it was all about. Cole and I had never been to real school. Only my mother’s school, in between the dyslexic kids who came to be tutored in the afternoons. My mother said she wanted to keep us safe from the racism and violence of the world. She said she could teach us better at home, and prided herself that Cole and I were well above the reading and math levels for our ages. In the beginning, when my parents still got along, my father had agreed that we should be taught at home. He had even contributed to some of our lesson plans. He liked to joke to his friends that Cole and I were going to be proof that race mixing produced superior minds, the way a mutt is always more intelligent than a purebred dog. (My mother agreed with this theory of his. She said that’s why Wasps were such a stupid race; like golden retrievers, she said, Wasps were experiencing the effects of too much inbreeding.)
