by Danzy Senna
It was only recently that my father had decided that we should go to a real school—-that my mother’s lessons weren’t adequate. And he had picked this school in Roxbury, where some of his new friends sent their kids. He hadn’t even consulted my mother first, had just come home one day and announced that this was where we were going. Now my mother stopped in her tracks and turned to him. “Jesus, you’ve got nerve. If you think some Black Power school’s gonna make up for your absence, it won’t.” With that, she threw the object that was in her hand—a sock—and as it sailed through the air, I could see it was mine. A red sock with blue polka dots. It grazed his head, then rolled beneath his car. I thought of running to fetch it, but I knew it was against the rules.
My father stared at the sock for a moment with clear disgust, then clicked shut the trunk to his Volvo before walking around to the front of the car, jingling his keys.
My mother watched him start up the engine, her arms hanging loosely so that she looked bewildered, like a girl. “Come off it, Deck. I mean, I guess the school makes some sense with Cole. But Birdie? Look at her sometime, really look at her. Try to see beyond yourself and your goddamn history books. She looks like a little Sicilian.”
Sicilian. I didn’t know what it meant. Only that it sounded dirty off my mother’s tongue. I could feel Cole beside me, studying me, struggling to see something on my face, something she had never seen before. I stuck my tongue out at her, trying to make her laugh, but she looked sad, worried, and turned back to my father, who was starring up the motor of the old Volvo. Soul music from his car floated in the air around us.
He spoke slowly, softly, to my mother now, so I had to strain to hear him. “I know what my daughter looks like, thank you. Maybe you need to cut this naïve, color-blind posturing. In a country as racist as this, you’re either black or you’re white. And no daughter of mine is going to pass.”
He revved the engine of the car, and before he cruised away he shouted out his window: “You should really take a look at my book again. It explains everything.”
He was referring to his last book—Wonders of the Visible World—which was about the fate of black people in an integrated society. He tried to read it aloud to Cole a few times, but she always began to rub her eyes and whine that she wanted to go play. Nothing drove my mother more crazy than when he mentioned the book. During his research for it, he had given Cole and me a sort of racial IQ test using building blocks, questionnaires, and different-colored dolls. I was three at the time, and those dolls were the only part of the test I really remembered. Some of them were black, some of them were white; the rest were soiled and ripped stuffed animals he had found at the Salvation Army. He had us play with them in our bedroom, while he sat nearby, his lanky form squeezed into our child-sized blue plastic chair, watching us intently and scribbling notes on a little pad. He had devoted several pages of the book to the results of that test, referring to Cole as “Subject A” and me as “Subject B.” My mother had been infuriated, but Cole and I had thought the tests were fun. We got new toys out of it, as well as his attention, uninterrupted, for hours on end.
He was supposed to be working on a new book. This one also would be about race, he had told us one night over dinner at Friendly’s, but it would be bigger, better, more groundbreaking than the first. He had said it would cover not just America, but the whole wide world. Cole and I had asked if we could do more experiments. He had only laughed and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be in there.”
But he was gone now, his car just a distant speck of rust in the distance.
Cole was squeezing my hand tightly, and I could feel a slight moisture between us, though I couldn’t tell whose sweat it was.
My mother stood for a moment, watching his car, and I couldn’t see her expression, only that her shoulders were hunched angrily forward. Finally she turned around toward the house and blinked in surprise at the sight of us staring at her from the steps.
Cole was the only one to mourn after my father left. She stood frozen for several minutes, watching the street even after his car was out of sight. After we had gone inside, she cried into her cereal bowl, dripping fat hot tears and heaving in shivers, while my mother swept the floor obsessively and, with her eyes averted, talked in a high, quavering voice about how often we would still see him, how close Roxbury really was. I patted my sister’s hand, whispering consolations in Elemeno, wishing all the while that I could muster up some tears too. But I couldn’t, for I felt a secret relief at seeing him go, a tinge of hope that he might take their fighting with him.
That night I looked at myself in the steamy bathroom mirror while I brushed my teeth, the white toothpaste foaming onto my hand, making me look like a rabid dog, and I tried to think what Sicilian meant by reading my own face. I glanced at my sister’s reflection behind me. She was also brushing her teeth, only neatly. Her hair was curly and mine was straight, and I figured that this fact must have had something to do with the fighting and the way the eyes of strangers flickered surprise, sometimes amusement, sometimes disbelief, when my mother introduced us as sisters.
same difference
I liked to play a game with myself. I would try to imagine the days before I was born—what my parents were wearing, what the weather was like, what the smells in the air were. Sometimes I saw that first meeting, as if I were there with them, floating over them, waiting with bated breath for them to bring me to life. But most of the time the image disintegrated into the people they had become, no matter how hard I tried to see something different. They didn’t have a wedding album. It was as if nobody had cared enough to document the event. My only proof that they had even been married was a snapshot I found stuck inside my father’s huge encyclopedia. It marked the page that delineated the three racial phenotypes of the world—Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid. The page included three drawings, the first of a Chinaman, the second of an African Bushman, and the third of a European explorer, but I was more interested in the wedding photograph.
In it, my parents stand on a lawn behind my mother’s family home in Cambridge. My mother looks like a missionary in her flowing Guatemalan skirt and peasant blouse; she wears her hair in twin braids on either side of her face. Her transluscent blue eyes are those of a child on her first day of school—terrified, blinking, expectant. My father looks frightened as well in his stiff collar, the kink of his hair cut close to his scalp. The lawn around them is sprinkled with relatives, smiles so tight it could have been a funeral. Dot stands in the corner of the photo, wearing a silver lamé minidress, the only one whose smile looks sincere.
That discarded photo was the only proof that there had been a before. My father wasn’t a nostalgic man and just shrugged, irritated, when we asked him for stories of how they had come to be together. My mother didn’t talk about that time either, except to say that she had been drowning in the cream of Cambridge society and that the day she met my father, she came up for air. But I knew that in order to understand how it all fell apart, I needed to know how it all had come together.
I got my chance a few weeks after my father moved out. My mother had been lonely since that day, and each night, seated cross-legged on the living room floor, she put back Scotch or Irish whiskey. Cole and I tried to keep out of her way, sticking to the attic, where we played our elaborate games of make-believe. But one evening my mother called us down to keep her company. She wasn’t drunk yet, but moving toward it, and Aretha Franklin belted out from the stereo. Cole and I were dressed in tattered antique gowns that held the faint smells of old women—talcum and dust and Chanel No. 5. We sat on either side of her on the couch. She said she was going to tell us the story of how she met my father. I’ve never been sure how much of the story was fact, how much was fiction. But as she spoke, Cole and I listened, quiet as we’d ever been, staring out the darkened window as if the scene she described were a silent movie that played on the glass before us.
IT WAS THE COLDEST day of the year, January 17, 1963, and my
mother was lost. She was eighteen, less than a year out of high school, and her future sat before her, blank and bleak as the New England winter. She had been accepted to Brandeis but had turned the school down at the last minute. Even then, she thought of school as a kind of prison. She had never fit into the world of the Buckingham School. There, she had been a hefty and pensive girl in a world of lithe and winsome debutantes, girls who accepted their good fortunes with style and manners. The Cambridge boys were no better and had treated my mother as a joke, the one to tease one another about. “You’ll end up with that lardass, Sandy Lodge, if you’re not careful.” She had never really had a boyfriend in all her years at Buckingham. She didn’t count the night that three athletes from the boys’ school, Browne and Nichols, had followed her home drunk and held her against a brick wall on Lowell Street while each of them felt underneath her skirt, calling her disgusting and ugly, a sloth, even as their pants bulged with desire. In the daylight those same boys had chosen girls more like my mother’s own mother, whose hips stuck out beyond the flatness of her belly, whose body was fragile, hard, androgynous.
So the winter after her high-school graduation, my mother found herself still living at home. Her father was a professor of classics at Harvard, and that night she went to meet him in the Square to discuss her future. She walked with her head tilted to the side, toward the light and confusion of Harvard Square, toward her father, the gentle professor. He had sworn there were plenty of options for her. The Peace Corps. A job in publishing. A research position with a professor friend. Her interests were literature, existentialism, and the Holocaust. She was obsessed by the footage she had seen of the Jews being liberated from Treblinka, and often found herself crying over photographs of the sad-eyed skeletons of the camps.
As she walked, wearing a mannish tweed coat and her hornrimmed glasses, she carried a book under her arm. Her father had bought it for her. He was always doing that—bringing her gifts after a day of teaching: pistachio nuts; a chocolate malt from Brighams; Tintin comics, which both of them shared a passion for. The night before he had come home with The Notebooks of Albert Camus. It was Camus’s diary, and she had stayed up all night reading it. As she walked, she pondered a line from the book, under the date November 11, 1942: “Outside of love, woman is boring.” She read that line over and over and felt an intense emptiness.
She came to the building where her father taught his evening class on Plato and Aristotle. On the lawn around her stood marble bodies frozen in thought. She sat down to wait in her usual spot, on the bottom steps, where, with mittened hands, she read more of Camus’s diary. After a while she looked up to the sound of footsteps on the concrete. Her father was coming toward her through the darkening evening air, wearing his black herringbone jacket, a hat perched over his eyes. He looked old to her all of a sudden, like a ghost, and she rose to meet him. Trailing after him, following him out and into the night, were three students—later she would remember the other two, but at that moment they faded like unnecessary scenery. All she saw was the one who stood out, the brown-skinned boy who wouldn’t look her in the eye. Her father introduced this student with some amount of paternal pride—Deck Lee. He added, with a note of apology, that the students needed to discuss their papers for a bit at the café at the corner. She didn’t mind, did she? Her future would have to wait.
On the sidewalk outside the café, some street musician sang a Pete Seeger song. Inside, the men talked over cups of steaming coffee about the subject of the class: Plato’s cave. Given her youth, my mother was still ignorant on the topic, so she sat in the corner with her hot chocolate and muffin, sifting through the pages of Camus’s diary. She said she felt a discontent with these, a force willing her to glance up from time to time at the quiet and elegant black man who watched the others talk with a kind of knowing disdain.
What did my mother know of black people at this time? She read the papers often enough to know that the Negroes down South were mobilizing for their civil rights and that the Kennedy administration was getting nervous. She had asked her father about all of this, and he had told her with a look of grave concern that the Negroes had a right to be angry. Her parents had discussed the issues with their friends, mostly Harvard faculty, some Cambridge eccentrics—actors, writers—thrown into the lot, but all with a kind of distance that struck her as odd.
She looked at the man across the table, who was blowing on the steaming mug in front of him. He was immaculately dressed. She told me she had wondered about this fact: Why were Negroes so neat and tidy compared to white people? She had noticed this more than once. She had no particular interest in Negroes at this time—not in them or their cause. Just a sense that they were a mysterious race, full of secrets that the white world would probably never glimpse. The ones she saw on the streets of Boston seemed so different from the happy, smiling brown faces she saw in the movies, on television—the Bojangleses and Hattie McDowells of the world. Outside of pictures, they seemed closed, tense-faced people, forever in a hurry, forever averting their eyes from her.
This student called Deck was steadily ignoring my mother. She supposed it was because of her hefty frame. But she wasn’t bothered. She was glad to have a chance to watch him closely, as close to a Negro man as she had ever come, really. He was not very dark, and his features were not very African—it was only his milk-chocolate skin that gave his race away. His face spoke of something other—his high cheekbones, his large bony nose, his deep-set eyes, and his thin lips against the brown of his skin. It reminded her of the drawings in her high-school history book of half-nude natives at the first Thanksgiving. His hair wasn’t so woolly, either. It was more like that of some of the Jews she had seen who had afros—black ringlets pleasantly curling into his scalp. Fingers. His were long, darker around the knuckles. Looking at them, she could tell he was nervous. They drummed against his knee under the table, and she wondered what reason he had to be uncomfortable. She had a sudden urge to reach out and pat his hand—a motherly urge—and say, “It’s all right. We’re on your side.” But she wouldn’t and didn’t do it. Instead she thumbed through more pages of Camus, and later, when they all stood under a clear, starless sky, she shook each of the young men’s hands. My father’s, she says now, was a weak handshake, not a good sign, as he pulled his soft dainty hand away from her large gruff one and then stuffed it in his pocket as the professor went on with the other two men about something terribly boring. That was when their eyes caught. At first my father’s shot nervously away, then came back, resting on her face with a strangely placid interest.
He said to her in a soft voice, “Do you drink coffee at night?”
My mother blushed, and stammered, “No, never. I mean, not usually. It keeps me up.”
My father nodded, somehow amused, and my mother wondered if she had misheard his question. Soon her father was ready to go home, and they waved good-bye to the huddle of boys who stood chattering to one another long after they had turned the corner.
She usually spoke everything to her father, but that night, as they walked, she was speechless. Something had shifted inside of her during that interaction, though nothing had happened. She felt separate from her father in a way she never had before. He was quiet as well, and they went home that way, immersed in their own thoughts. It was only when they were close enough to see the house, with the yellow lit windows, and could hear the sound of opera being played loudly from the phonograph that her father spoke to her.
He said it as if they had been talking all along, were in the middle, in fact, of a conversation: “Sometimes I get the feeling that Deck character despises us—even us liberals. It’s just a feeling I get, nothing obvious. I think all Negroes despise us, really.”
My mother cried out, “But why?”
Her father turned to her and smiled slightly, sadly, as he said, “Because they know we’re cowards.”
She felt a cry coming on, and turned her face away from him so he wouldn’t see her expression.
&
nbsp; That night my mother lay in bed, buried beneath her pink, girlish duvet, and flipped through Camus in a distracted state, only half-digesting the words on the page. But something did jump out at her, on the bottom of page 199—Camus’s sketches of dialogue for a novel.
X: “Do you drink coffee at night?”
“In general, never.”
COLE AND I waited for their reunion. We waited for Chinese noodles, red wine, and Al Green to appear and make everything better. But the Redbone fight seemed to have been the kicker. It had been three weeks, and my father was still in Roxbury. There were no more shrieks or curses or glasses hitting the walls. At first I was relieved with the peace and quiet. But then, as the weeks went on, the vacuous silence of our house began to keep me awake at night, the way their fighting once had.
The visitors were gone as well. They seemed to have evacuated along with my father. Instead, my mother, Cole, and I were left to fill the corners of the big old dusty house. I missed the visitors. It had always been an adventure, waiting to see who would show up at midnight, a dirty knapsack slung over a shoulder. When I asked my mother why the guests had disappeared, she was vague, puffing on her eternal Marlboro and glancing around her shoulder as she said, “Things are getting crazy out there, Birdalee. We can’t fool around anymore.” But Cole said that my mother was keeping the house empty to get my father to come home.
My mother did seem to be waiting for something. She would sit on the front stoop till late into the night, smoking, and scanning the street as if waiting for someone to show. She was quiet a lot of the time, cleaning the house with a new vigor and watching the nightly news with a studied rage.
