by Danzy Senna
Cherise, a short, serious girl, crossed her arms and shook her head. “You all can get the scissors by yourself. I ain’t getting into trouble.”
Cathy sucked her teeth and said, “You’re such a baby,” shoving past Cherise as she went out the door.
I just stood there with my head tilted toward Maria’s grasp.
Cathy returned shortly, grinning, with some small paper scissors in her hand. They had blue plastic handles. I wondered briefly if they were the same ones I had used to cut my mural pictures in art class earlier that day. Those scissors had been blunt, I remembered, barely getting through the construction paper.
Maria grabbed the scissors from Cathy. “You think Ali’s gonna like you when you don’t got no hair?”
I didn’t know who Ali was, but a vision flashed through my mind—of Maria laughing, her silver train-track teeth catching the light as my ponytail swung dismembered in her hand.
I closed my eyes and heard the cool, swift slice of the scissors. When I opened my eyes, Maria was laughing silently into her hand.
“She thought I really cut it. Damn, she thought I was for real.”
Cherise said then, her eyes downcast, “C’mon, Maria, leave her alone. Let’s go to class before Mr. Murphy catches us.”
They left me standing in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, touching my hair gingerly as if I had just discovered I had any, while the echoing sound of voices and laughter bounced off the hall walls in the distance.
THAT NIGHT I lay under the sheets, listening to the angry swell of South End traffic outside. My sister lay next to me on the old brass bed that had once been our parents’.
I told her in Elemeno what had happened in the girls’ room. She was quiet, listening. When I finished my story, I curled up closer to her. “I don’t want to go back,” I said. “I’m scared. They’re gonna kill me.” I began to whimper. “Don’t you hate it there, Cole? Don’t you hate it too?”
She turned to me so we were facing each other in our fetal positions. “No, Birdie. I kind of like it. It’s fun. I want to stay.” She paused. “Anyway, we can’t do home school forever.”
She wiped a hair out of my eye. Then she said, “Don’t worry, Bird. I’ll make sure nobody messes with you.”
The next day she dragged me back to the girls’ room after gym. Only Maria and Cherise were there. I hung back in the corner by the sink while Cole marched right up to Maria.
“You try and cut her hair?”
Maria had been sitting on the whistling radiator, filing her nails. Now she stood up to face Cole.
“I didn’t cut nobody. We was just playing. Just ‘cause she’s white she thinks she’s all that.” She chewed her gum loudly and glanced over at me standing in the corner. “Besides,” Maria continued, “what you gonna do about it?”
Cole grabbed Maria by her long thick hair. I stood back, terrified for Cole. She was also new in the school. But she whispered to Maria, “Listen, metal mouth, Birdie isn’t white. She’s black. Just like me. So don’t be messing with her again or I’ll cut off all your hair for real this time.”
Maria pulled out of Cole’s grasp and said, “Get your hands out of my hair.” Then she shrugged, smoothing down her vest. “So now I know.”
Cherise stood up and glanced at her watch. “Come on, y’all. We’re gonna be late for third period.”
And she was right. Without further words, the four of us turned and went single-file out the swinging door, hurrying to make it to our next class.
WORD SPREAD AROUND the school quickly. Cole was my protector. Nobody messed with me, but they didn’t talk to me either. I often found myself alone, chewing on my hair and nails with an insatiable hunger, as if trying to eat myself alive, picking at my scabs with a fervor, as if trying to find another body buried inside. I pondered whether it was better to be harrassed or ignored. My insomnia grew worse. Cole slept soundly beside me, and she looked frozen in the blue light of the room, entirely serene and a little waxy, like a doll of herself. I imagined that I was keeping vigil over her. She had a face that betrayed all of its origins, and she wore the expression of the already beautiful—a sleepy confidence that kept other children at her mercy; a face of those accustomed to being watched, used to the approving smiles of strangers.
But even Cole had trouble to contend with.
One afternoon in gym class, she walked into the crowd wearing her blue shorts. She had white knees, and the other children called her out right then and there. I sat in the back on a bleacher, talking to myself in Elemeno. But I saw it and felt for her while the other kids hooted and hollered.
“Check it out! Check out Cole’s knees.”
“Ain’t she ever heard of lotion?”
“Shit, I could write my name in that ash.”
After school that day, she dragged herself to the Pinto, head hung low, nearly in tears, and made our mother drive straight to Woolworth’s, where she purchased a family-size container of Jergen’s lotion. That night she taught herself and me where the trouble spots were—where to focus when buttering up in the morning. Elbows, knees, calves, but especially the feet, where the dust could leave such a thick layer that you actually turned white and dry and cracked and old-looking. Since that day I too used the lotion, in the mornings in the bathroom beside her, though the dust didn’t build up so white on me—just a little bit here and there. The Jergen’s lotion made me feel like I was part of some secret club.
Then there was Cole’s hair.
One Saturday afternoon a month into our stay at Nkrumah, I came downstairs to find her seated cross-legged between my mother’s legs, grunting and wincing as my mother tugged on her hair. My mother was talking to the television set. It was the news. She always spoke back to the news, no matter what they were reporting.
“These motherfuckers,” she was saying. “These fucking liars. I mean, spreading these lies about Castro. They should be shot for calling this news.”
A copy of Jet magazine sat open before them, and a bright-eyed new sitcom star grinned up at us under the words “Cute and Sassy Keisha Taylor Tells Her Beauty Secrets.” Cole had been obsessing over the picture for the past few weeks, and now the page fell open naturally to it. Keisha Taylor had tight cornrows with gold beads at the end. Just the way Cole wanted them.
My mother appeared to know what she was doing. Her fingers were quick and nimble as they worked over each section of hair, and she chewed loudly, brassily, on a piece of gum, keeping her eyes on the television set. But it was just an act. I could tell she wasn’t getting it right. The braids she had done on Cole’s head weren’t stuck to her scalp the way they were supposed to be, the way they were on Keisha Taylor. Instead they were thick, uneven ropes that sprung out haphazardly. There was no way that Cole would be able to fit even one gold bead around them.
Cole was about to cry. She whimpered, “It hurts, Mum. You aren’t doing it right. You’re pulling too hard. How does it look, Birdie?”
Before I could answer, my mother shot me a look of warning and said, “It’s not even done yet. Just wait. I’m almost there.”
I bit my lip and looked away.
My mother had been trying to do Cole’s hair for years now, and it always ended in disaster. When Cole was very little, my mother had simply let her run around with what she called a “dustball” on her head. She had thought the light and curly afro adorable and didn’t quite understand the disapproving glances of the black people on the street. At one point, when Cole was three, it had even begun to dreadlock in the back. It had been my father who finally noticed what was going on at Cole’s roots and made my mother cut out the tangles, made her start picking out her little afro.
After that, every few months, my mother would sit on a chair, with Cole on the floor between her thighs, her head tilted back, tears streaming from Cole’s eyes as my mother tugged and twisted and braided, only to end up with Cole’s hair looking just as messy as it had when my mother had started.
Cole muttered to me
now, “Birdie, get me a mirror.”
I looked up at my mother, nervously. She was patting down her completed job, with a slightly embarrassed smile. “Now, it’ll take a few hours to settle into the look, but really, I mean, I think it looks cute. Cuter, really, than that Keisha Taylor. Don’t you think so, Bird?”
I mumbled, “Uh, yeah, I guess, in a way.”
Cole was fingering one of the braids suspiciously. “I want a mirror,” she repeated.
I tore out of the room and came back with the cracked hand mirror from the bathroom. I held it up in front of Cole, and she wrenched it out of my hands.
She stared at herself for a few minutes. It was hard to read her expression. I was biting my nails and scratching my leg and waiting, while my mother had already begun to put the hair tools back into her bag, humming a little song to herself.
Finally Cole threw down the mirror. It had been cracked already, but with the force of its landing the broken half fell out onto the floor.
“Colette!” my mother shouted. “What the fuck was that for?”
Cole’s chin had crumpled up in horror, and her eyes were liquid green. She turned to my mother. “You liar. It doesn’t look like Keisha Taylor. You can’t do it! You’ll never do it right. It looks like a bird’s nest, the same way it always does.”
She was right. It did look funny. Like big snakes growing out of her head, flopping into her eyes now as she stood up to go.
My mother slapped her thigh and shook her head. “I don’t believe it. The nerve of this child. This is what I get. I was trying to make you happy, and yeah, sure, it doesn’t look exactly like Keisha What’s-Her-Name. But it looks cute. Now, I at least deserve a little credit.”
Cole turned to me. My own hair was braided on one side—I had done them myself while watching Cole. I hadn’t known how to make them stick to my head like corn-on-the-cob either. I could feel them slipping out already. She stared at me for a moment, then burst into tears before running out of the room.
She spent the rest of the afternoon taking the braids out of her hair, playing the Ohio Players, and doing her homework behind closed doors. My mother cleaned the living room noisily, blasting Bob Dylan over the vacuum cleaner and singing along to him, imitating his drunken slur. I sat out on the stoop, throwing pieces of stale saltines to the pigeons and watching a man piss across the street. After she finished cleaning, my mother took me shopping for groceries. She was quiet and seemed upset about Cole’s outburst. As we wandered the grocery store aisles, she stared into the faces of the passing black children and their mothers while I held on to the side of the cart and sucked on a Tootsie Roll. As if in some cruel hoax, it seemed that all the children we passed wore their hair in neat, elaborate hairstyles.
I tried to catch a glimpse of each child’s skin, to see if it was ashy. As my mother and I turned the bend toward the produce, one particularly pretty cocoa-colored girl with a head of cornrows tipped with rainbow-colored beads came toward us. She was wearing slacks, but I bet that her skin was glowing with lotion underneath. She was laughing and babbling to her mother about school. I glanced at my mother. She was staring at the girl and the mother, and she looked sad. I grabbed her hand.
“It’s okay, Mum. You can do my hair.”
She peeled her eyes away from the girl and stroked my hair. She seemed to see something funny on my face, and laughed a little. “I know I can, Bird. I know it.”
I had worried that Cole would be angry at me. But when we got home I heard her bellow from our bedroom upstairs, “Birdie! Comeer.” I tore up the stairs, two steps at a time. I found her lying on our bed, flipping through a magazine, her head wrapped in a silk scarf from the bottom of our costume trunk. I slumped down beside her. She seemed changed. As if she had made some profound decision in just the few hours we had been gone. She looked older, more determined.
She threw the magazine onto the bed. Her eyes were gray. Like the weather outside. She said, “They all laughed at me last week. Just like the time my knees were ashy. ‘Cause of my hair. It looks crazy. They were calling me ‘Miz Nappy.’ None of the boys will come near me. Mum doesn’t know anything about raising a black child. She just doesn’t.”
I nodded but felt a warm pain growing in my stomach, rising up through my chest.
“We talk like white girls, Birdie.” She picked up the magazine she had been reading, and handed it to me. “We don’t talk like black people. It says so in this article.”
I glanced at the article. The heading read, “Black English: Bad for Our Children?”
The magazine was Ebony. I knew Cole must have stolen it from the teachers’ lounge because the words “Property of Nkrumah” were stamped on the front cover across Billy Dee Williams’s perfect smile.
Cole continued: “They have examples in here. Like, don’t say, ‘I’m going to the store.’ Say, ‘I’m goin’ to de sto’.’ Get it? And don’t say, ‘Tell the truth.’ Instead, say, ‘Tell de troof.’ Okay?”
I nodded, and whispered to myself, “Tell de troof.”
My mother’s old friend Jane came over for dinner that night. She and my mother had known each other since childhood, from prep school in Cambridge. She had graying brown hair, Indian jewelry, and a bright-colored smock, and she was involved in Boston politics. My mother said she was a real radical.
Cole was quiet at dinner, only occasionally whispering to me in Elemeno and avoiding my mother’s eyes. My mother seemed sad and kept trying to speak to Cole, only to be met by silence.
Jane didn’t notice any tension and spoke to my mother now in hushed excitement about something she referred to only in code as “the drop.”
“It’s happening, Sandy. It’s really happening. It’s major. The shit is going to go down, and I think you should be a part of it. All you need to do is let them drop it. Here.”
My mother was quiet and looked at Cole and me with a funny expression I had rarely seen on her before. She was smiling, but it was more of a grimace.
I finally broke the silence as I turned to Jane.
“Jane, pass de butta, please?”
I heard Cole giggling, but my mother and Jane just gave me blank, distracted stares.
That night Cole and I lay face-to-face, touching each other’s hair and speaking in Elemeno.
sambosa malengtha kristo. bella warma.
Cole’s hair was soft and crunchy at the same time, and my fingers got caught when I tried to run them through it. Mine was thick, but straight, dark, an Indian girl’s head of hair, with a cowlick in the back.
barana sipho mundana.
Cole was telling me she was going to get her hair braided by professionals. “Mum better let me. Ms. Green at school told me where to go. She said she sends her own daughters there.”
“Are they gonna make you look like the Pointer Sisters?” I asked.
“Yeah, like that, only better.”
I could imagine her that way, and smiled slightly as I pictured her in a gold spandex suit, dancing to “Taste of Honey” while I played backup on the guitar.
She got her way in the end. My father was the one to put up the money for her to go to Danny’s His and Hers, a black hair salon on Tremont Street. It cost fifty dollars, and my mother still insisted that she could do it just as well. My father also had refused at first, saying it was ludicrously overpriced. Then Cole told him, “Mum just doesn’t know how to handle raising a black child, Papa.” He had stared out the window of his Volvo for a few minutes, pondering this fact, then handed her the fifty with a pained sneer.
A week later, she came home with a full head of tiny cornrows with gold beads on the ends. Even my mother had to admire the look. Cole was splendid, ladylike, suddenly in a whole new league.
I grinned and jumped around her while she peered at herself in the mirror.
MY FATHER WOULDN’T come into the house. Ever since he had left us that bright July morning, he acted as if the house were contaminated. Cole and I told him that the visitors had disappeared,
but still he refused to enter. Instead, he’d just honk outside and Cole and I would go tearing down the stairs together and out into his car. My mother would watch from the window, a scowl set on her face, and I always felt a little guilty leaving her behind.
He usually came for us on Saturday mornings. Cole called it “Divorced Fathers Day.” She said all her friends had them too. He’d take us to the Public Gardens if it was nice out, or to the Museum of Fine Arts if it was raining. Sometimes, if we begged, he would take us to a movie—any kind, any rating, so we always made him take us to slasher films. Once there, he would wait for us in the lobby, reading a book on some obscure topic, while we shoveled popcorn and Jujyfruits down our throats and stared, glassy-eyed, at the horrors on the screen.
I can’t say that I enjoyed these visits with my father. He never had much to say to me. In fact, he never seemed to see me at all. Cole was my father’s special one. I understood that even then. She was his prodigy—his young, gifted, and black. At the time, I wasn’t sure why it was Cole and not me, but I knew that when they came together, I disappeared. Her existence comforted him. She was the proof that his blackness hadn’t been completely blanched. By his four years at Harvard. By my mother’s blue-blood family wedding reception in the back of the big rotting house on Fayerweather Street. By so many years of standing stiffly in corners, listening to those sweatered tow-haired preppies talk about the Negro Problem, nursing their vermouth, glancing at him with so much pleased incredulity in their eyes. Those Crimson boys with all their asinine questions, all their congratulatory remarks about how they saw him as different, had made him want to disappear. They saw him and all his seeming repose, his sardonic smile, as evidence that the black race was indeed human. The very fact that they needed evidence made him nauseous. But somehow, somewhere, he accepted the terms of their debate, and he spent years perfecting his irony and stale wit in order to distinguish himself from the poor black blokes scuttling around the outskirts of the city. Perfected it so well that when he finally returned to Wally’s one night, a small jazz joint on Tremont Street, he imagined that the cluster of brown and yellow and black faces that dotted the smoky air were laughing at him, mocking his stiff posture and tight smile.
