Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  Cole and I busied ourselves those long summer afternoons playing make-believe in our attic. We spoke our language and, no matter how hot it was outside, we traipsed around the house in our most elaborate costumes—feathered plumes, long dresses from the forties, a man’s stiff black Stetson, an African mask that my father brought back to us from Kenya. I think now that we must have known our days were numbered and that pretty soon we’d be sent out into the world, so our games held an extra intensity. We didn’t have other friends, just each other, and sometimes while we drove around in the back of my mother’s Pinto, I would stare at the children outside with a newfound interest, wondering which one of them I would become.

  It was in late August when my mother drove Cole and me to City Hall to find out where we would be bused. My mother had decided that the public schools would be best—she didn’t want us separated from the people. I think now that she wanted to irritate my father by refusing to send us to the special school in Roxbury. I would never get a chance to experience this thing called Black Power. All I knew of it was that my father agreed with it, my mother and her friends supported it, and it had something to do with the length and consistency of my father’s hair.

  The leaves, tipped with gold already, made a sizzling sound as they brushed together, and the water on the Charles had turned from its summer silver into a murkier indigo. We arrived at City Hall, and the woman behind the desk took one look at Cole and me and assigned us to different districts. I would be bused to a predominately black school in Dorchester; Cole to South Boston, the Irish section, “in the interest of dahvesetty,” the woman explained to us in her thick local accent.

  My mother laughed too loudly. She wore a pair of gray sweatpants with baggy, misshapen knees, my father’s old crew T-shirt, and her hair in pigtails like an oversized school girl. Even at that age, I could see that she had the power to frighten. Her voice would start quivering at some injustice—an inflated price tag, a parking ticket on the Pinto, a doctor’s office bill—and before I knew it, passersby would cluck their teeth at her shrieks, the blasphemy flowing from her lips, and they would look at Cole and me with something that was not quite pity, not quite hatred—as if our presence somehow explained her bad behavior.

  Her grip tightened around mine, and I heard her say, “No, I don’t think you understand. They’re sisters. They stick together. You got a problem with that?”

  The woman behind the desk sensed something brewing in my mother’s tone. She quickly conceded with a brisk, tense smile. “Okay, ma’am, no big deal. Cool down. We’ll bus ‘em both to Southie.”

  We were bused together, but it didn’t matter in the end. We never got there.

  For the first ten minutes of that bus ride, everything seemed ordinary—the children around us slapped and whispered and shouted to one another, shifting restlessly on the sticky green vinyl. Cole and I sat side by side, speaking in hushed tones. Wichita OrenthaKublica…She was telling me a story about a great fallen king when I noticed we were slowing down. We stopped at the corner of Franklin Park. The bus driver, a thin Puerto Rican man with earrings and a goatee, leaned closer to the radio, listening to a broadcaster whose words snapped and crackled in fragments toward us at the back of the bus. For those long five minutes we were utterly quiet and orderly. I held Cole’s hand and looked out the window. The sky was thick and low, the color of smoke, though no rain broke through. The wall of pudding stone that surrounded Franklin Park seemed to have faces etched in it. In the seat beside us, a tiny boy wore clothes so starched they made him look wooden, like a puppet. He began to cry as his big sister patted his hand and whispered to him in Spanglish.

  Finally the bus driver stood and yelled to us, “We can’t go on. Those motherfuckers are crazy. No place for children.”

  No school. It seemed some cause for celebration. I looked around, gleeful. But all the other kids seemed to understand something, and they watched me with somber expressions.

  We must have been a pitiful sight when we arrived in Roxbury that same morning, shuttling off the bus in our first-day outfits, all spiffed up with no place to go. Cole and I clutched our recently purchased Sesame Street lunch boxes—hers with Oscar the Grouch, mine with Big Bird. We were dressed immaculately in starched white shirts and plaid skirts, buffed Mary Janes on our feet. A group of grown-ups waited on the steps of the local high school, a huddle of worried brown faces, and my mother a shock of blond in their midst. Once we were with her, she held Cole to her side like a badge of entrance, and I tagged along behind them.

  There was a television inside the principal’s office, and we all crowded around it to watch the news, the image grainy and crackling on the small screen—one lone black man being pulled from his Volkswagen only to disappear under a cloud of white fists. The parents were silent as they watched, mesmerized by the image. I held my mother’s hand and stopped breathing, terrified by what I saw. My mother seemed frozen as well. The newscaster talked excitedly over the live footage, saying something about riots and race wars. At one point the man’s face rose from the throng, anguished, terrified, bewildered. I was reminded of Lucas’s expression the night he left, the two men holding him roughly as they led him down the steps. He had looked slightly surprised, as if he had expected more from our country, as if he had expected more from our house.

  I turned to my mother and buried my head in her jacket.

  “Make them stop, Mum. Make them stop hitting him.”

  She tilted my head back to look at me, and something in her expression—a slight smile, but dead-serious eyes—made me believe her when she said: “That’s what I’m trying to do, baby.”

  I had the vague notion that the problem had something to do with the Irish. I knew the Irish lived in one part of town, that black people lived in another, and that we lived in a part that had once been black and Puerto Rican but was now being, as my father had put it, “overrun by settlers.” The Irish lived mostly in Southie, which was entirely different from the South End, our neighborhood. My father had to duck down when we drove through Southie. I didn’t know any Irish kids, and it had been about a year since Cole and I had had a run-in with a pack of Irish girls in the underwear department of Decelles in West Roxbury. They wore matching Windbreakers and had thin dark hair. I had been seven years old, and Cole had been ten, and the girls had smiled at us as if they knew some secret they wanted to let us in on, as if they wanted to be friends, as if they wanted us to join them in something. I stopped smiling only when they shoved Cole into the rack of bras and one of them stuck some chewed bubble gum in her hair. They hurried off then, laughing, but not so fast that I didn’t hear what they said: Go back to the jungle, darkie. Go wash your ass. Go, you little culahd biscuit. They left her standing, hidden in the curtains of cloth, her bottom lip quivering but not letting go.

  I wondered if those girls were the same ones who wouldn’t let us come to school today, the same ones who stood in that crowd on the television set—the ones who hooted delight as a baseball bat fell to a scalp, turning it all soft inside.

  As we left the building, I heard shouting. It was a familiar voice. It was Redbone. He was standing at the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a small group of parents. I tugged at Cole’s sleeve and whispered, “It’s him,” but she seemed distant, disturbed still by the man on the TV screen. We followed my mother to the huddle of parents, and I stood at the outskirts, scuffing my shoe, feeling scared all of a sudden. My mother pushed through to the front of the group, pulling Cole behind her. I heard Redbone saying, “We need more drastic action. No more of this pussy-footing around these devils—they’ve proven to us today that they can’t handle the peaceful solution. Ain’t we fed up yet with getting the shaft? What’s it gonna take before brothers and sisters start doin’ it for themselves?”

  Most of the parents left, shaking their heads, and I heard mutters.

  “He’s crazy. Doesn’t know what he’s calling for.”

  “Looks like a white boy with clown makeup
on, if you ask me.”

  “I heard he was part of that crazy group.”

  “Bunch of hoodlums, if you ask me.”

  But my mother stayed. Later, when the crowd had dispersed, she and Redbone talked together in tones of restrained excitement and outrage, leaning into each other as if they had been friends for years.

  I couldn’t hear what Redbone said to my mother, but in the car ride home, I piped in from the backseat: “That’s the guy from the party. Papa said he’s bad. Why were you talking to him, Mum?”

  Cole backed me up: “Yeah, Mum. Birdie said he was a real freak.”

  My mother didn’t seem to hear us and only turned up the music on the radio and tapped her hands on the steering wheel as we waited at a traffic light. She kept taking her foot off the brake so that we inched forward slightly, over the crosswalk. She ignored us sometimes, and then just when we thought she hadn’t heard us, she’d answer. As we started to move, she said, “Well, girls, your father isn’t God Almighty. I do have a life of my own. And besides,” she said, scrambling in her purse for a cigarette, “he should be happy. I’m sending you to Nkrumah. The Black Power school.”

  SCHOOL HAD ALREADY BEEN in session for several weeks before she got around to taking us there. Burnished leaves drifted from the trees, leaving stark frames and a chaos of colors. I sat in the backseat of our battered green Pinto, watching the city fly by. Cole sat beside me, humming to herself, holding my hand loosely in her own. I could see my mother’s eyes, darting and blue, reflected in the rearview mirror. I could feel my breathing begin to tighten up in my lungs the way it did sometimes. Outside, a clutter of housing projects where Irish kids in bright winter parkas kicked a ball around the pavement. Farther down the road, tenements, boarded up and covered in Spanish graffiti. As we passed under the Washington Street El, the street darkened like a premature nightfall and a train roared by overhead. I closed my eyes as I leaned my head on Cole’s shoulder.

  When I opened them, we had arrived. We were in Roxbury, and ahead of us I could see a brick building where a red, gold, and green flag waved over the littered street. The Nkrumah School.

  We pulled to a halt at the curb, and the Pinto let out its ceremonial grunts and wheezes. My mother turned to us, but fixed her gaze on me. “Well, here we are.”

  Next door to the school, on the corner, sat an abandoned Jewish synagogue with weeds growing out of the cracks in the stone. Soda cans and gum wrappers lay scattered on its untended lawn. There were words engraved into the temple’s pale granite, words that somehow stuck with me later, when we were on the road and all that was just a memory.

  Not by might

  Nor by power

  But by my Spirit,

  Saith the Lord

  Inside the Nkrumah School, a woman wearing fuchsia lipstick sat at the front desk, typing. A cigarette burned in the ashtray beside her, and at its tip was the bright ghost of her lip print. She looked at my mother over the tops of her cat-eye glasses and said in a cool voice, “Can I help you with something?”

  My mother held me to her side while Cole wandered around the front office, examining posters on the wall.

  “Yes, I’m here to register my daughters for the school program.”

  The woman looked at us now. She stared hardest at Cole. At eleven, Cole’s tight black ringlets hung around her face in a bob. She had turned honey-colored over the summer, though later, in the winter, when she lost her tan, she would turn closer to my own shade of beige. She had my father’s kinky hair and small, round nose. Her eyes, however, were my mother’s—the color of sea glass, forever shifting between blue, green, and gray.

  “Is this our new student?”

  My mother gripped my hand, and I suddenly felt sticky, stifled in the small cluttered office. Something smelled of food, and I glimpsed a foil wrapper with a half-chewed bagel and lox peeking out from under a newspaper.

  “Both of them are new students,” my mother said with that edge to her voice. “They’re sisters.”

  The woman glanced at me now, a wan smile forming on her lips. After a pause, she pulled out some registration papers, stuck them onto a clipboard, and said with something like exhaustion, “I see.”

  “WHO’S THAT?”

  “She a Rican or something?”

  “I thought this was supposed to be a black school.”

  The teacher was late, and I kept my head down, reading the scribblings on the desktop and trying to ignore the whispers of the other kids around me. The classroom was small and run down, with battered boxes of textbooks in the corner, a caged and anemic gerbil that sat stone-still in its treadmill, and a mismatched collection of desks—some terribly small, so that our knees pushed against the tops, others so big we had to sit perched on our knees to see over them.

  A boy threw a spitball, which hit me square in the forehead. Laughter sprinkled the room. He hissed, “What you doin’ in this school? You white?” All eyes were on me, and I tried to think of something to say. I felt the familiar tightening in my lungs. The children stared at me, mouths hanging open. A terrifying silence had overtaken the room.

  Underneath the desk, I could feel dried lumps of bubble gum, and there was something comforting about those lumps, as if they were the writing on the cave wall from some ancient civilization—proof that others had lived through this moment. I moved my fingertips over the gum slowly, as if I were trying to read Braille.

  I was about to say “Sicilian,” when Mrs. Potter, the teacher, entered. She was a tall, big-boned, camel-colored woman with gray eyes and a thick braid down her back, and, like my mother, her thighs made a swishing noise when she walked. She glanced at me as she passed my desk. “You must be the new girl. Birdie Lee, right? I just met your sister.”

  She talked in a circular kind of lecture to us that day about Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner. She seemed to fall into a reverie of sorts, pacing in and out of our rows, rubbing her hands together as if concocting a recipe as she spoke. Her voice was tough, scratchy, and she knew how to tell a story. She made each of her subjects seem like superheroes, and even the baddest-looking of boys rested their heads in their hands and just listened. I forgot about the whispers of the other children. At the end of class, she stopped abruptly as if wakened from a sleepwalk, and turned to us, only now remembering we were there.

  “Our tradition,” she said, looking directly at me, “is that at the end of each class, everyone stands and says, ‘Black is beautiful.’ Loud and clear. You gotta be proud of where your people came from. We are the first people, and we will be the last. Understand that, and nobody can touch you. Who wants to start? Cynthia?”

  A slender girl with thick glasses stood and said the slogan in a bored voice, scratching white lines like dust tracks onto her thin, dark thigh.

  Then each student, one by one, stood up and recited the phrase, some with passion, some mumbling.

  When it was my turn, I stood. My fingers clenched the cloth of my skirt, and my voice quavered: “Black is beautiful?” It had come out more like a question.

  I heard one boy—the same one who had thrown the spitball at me—say into his cupped hands, “Guess you must be ugly.”

  Snickers filled the room.

  “Damn, he called her shit.”

  “Ali, you so goofy.”

  “Ali, I heard your mama—”

  Mrs. Potter hit her desk with a ruler, and the class went silent. “That’s enough. Birdie, you can sit down.”

  At five o’clock we all gathered in the gym for a fifteen-minute break. Whistles were blown, balls thrown, and sneakers screeched on the shiny wood floor. I sat in the corner by myself, staring down at my fingers. But I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned. It was Cole.

  “C’mon, Birdie, come play. They know you’re my sister.” Cole had already made friends with a group of gossipy girls.

  I sat on the sidelines, watching them jump rope because I didn’t know how and was afraid to be laughed at. Cole, meanwhile, played alon
g, jumping in the middle of the flying ropes, clumsy as she wanted to be.

  I OPENED THE DOOR to the second-floor girls’ room and saw them gathered there by the window, the midafternoon light turning them all golden for a moment. I had been at the school for only three days, but already I knew enough to hesitate. I wanted to turn around, go to the bathroom on the first floor, but they had spotted me at the door already and I knew it was too late. I put my head down and made my way toward an open stall. I recognized one of the girls as Maria Miller, a pretty girl with thick black hair and smooth brown skin. She was a year older than me, and already wore braces. She stepped close to me when I tried to pass her, so that our bodies brushed together.

  Inside the stall I felt too afraid to pee, self-conscious they would hear it hitting the water. Their whispers and laughter were muffled beyond the thin piece of wall, and I closed my eyes, trying an old trick my mother had taught me—imagining running water—to help get my own waters flowing. Nothing came for a few minutes, and beyond the partition there was a heavy silence, an occasional bark of laughter as they seemed to wait with me. Finally a trickle came out.

  In order to use the sink, I had to stand right next to Maria, and I recognized her perfume, Jean Naté, the kind Cole wore. They sold it at Woolworth’s. She stepped closer behind me and looked over my shoulder at me in the mirror. I felt a droplet of sweat rolling down my back. In the mirror I watched as Maria reached her hand up ever so slowly, in an almost tender motion, and I wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Then she yanked my ponytail hard, her large brown eyes flashing mischief. She said, sneering, “Why you so stuck up? You think you’re fine?”

  I tried to smile as if it were all a joke, even as she pulled my head back toward her.

  Cathy Murphy, the drama teacher’s daughter, who was tall, yellow, and smelled like pencil shavings, moved close to me and said, “She thinks she’s all that just ‘cause she got long, stringy hair. I say we give Ms. Thang a makeover. Cherise, go get some scissors from the art room.”