Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  I stopped. A thick silence had fallen over the table. My grandmother was staring at me, mouth agape.

  Cole was giggling into her napkin. She looked up and mouthed across the table at me: sima welta vicu. You screwed up.

  My grandmother let her fork rest, then said, “Sandy, what kind of place is Birdie going to?” I noticed she hadn’t asked about Cole. She didn’t care what kind of school Cole was going to.

  My mother said it as casually as she could. “It’s called the Nkrumah School. It’s a school that focuses on Afro-American arts and culture. It’s in Roxbury. Okay? There you have it.”

  Then it began.

  My grandmother’s words seemed to rise up and fall onto my mother’s head in sharp blunt cuts.

  “It’s crazy, child abuse, to send your child into a neighborhood like that. She could be robbed or killed or anything! Jesus Christ, Sandy. I told you I’d pay for them to go to The Friends. I told you.”

  Cole and I got up to clear the table, eyes to the floor. I glanced an apology to my mother as we left the room. She appeared smaller than ever, curled over her food like a broken doll.

  Cole and I waited with Gory in the living room. I could hear my mother’s voice in the next room. It didn’t sound like her. She sounded choked up, on the verge of tears, and pleading.

  “Why are we here, anyway?” I asked Cole, who was rubbing Gory’s forehead and searching for the cartoons in a copy of The New Yorker.

  She shrugged without looking up. “Mum’s asking her for money. She’s freaking out about something. Whatever.”

  Cole didn’t seem interested, so I decided to spy on my own. I went to the door and peered around.

  My mother was standing over the dining room table, arms crossed, waiting, while my grandmother wrote her out a check. My mother’s cheeks were red, and I could see she was ashamed.

  My grandmother was shaking her head, saying in a disapproving whisper, “I don’t know what you need this for, Sandra Lodge, but I hope you’re not up to any funny business. I mean, you didn’t have to take all this so far. You took it too far.”

  We left my grandmother’s house early, before dessert. My grandmother walked us to the door and put her hand on my shoulder. She looked down at me with some expression that made me feel small and pitiful. I didn’t like the feeling, and looked away. She said quietly, “You know, Birdie, you could be Italian. Or even French. Couldn’t she, Sandy?”

  I expected my mother to bark something back like “Well, she’s not, crackerjack. She’s black!” But instead she just smiled kind of sadly and said, “Yes, mother, she could be.”

  It was then that my mother embraced my grandmother. It was a strange and alarming moment, and I saw my grandmother stiffen. They never touched, and my grandmother’s hands hung awkwardly by her side as my mother held her for that moment.

  Then my mother turned and took my hand, and the two of us made our way across the grass to the car, where Cole sat waiting in the front seat with some Donna Summer hit playing faintly from the radio. Just as we were about to get into the car, I heard my grandmother shout out across the lawn: “Sandy!”

  My mother turned. My grandmother looked thin, fragile, standing there on the porch. She shouted to us, “Sandy, you should visit more often.”

  My mother just nodded and lifted her hand in a halting wave.

  IN MY MEMORY, this is when things speed up. This is when something starts to dawn on me, begins to clarify, but before I can stop it, it’s too late. Like a deer who pauses in the road to watch the oncoming traffic, I froze as well, to watch what was coming at me, what was coming at all of us.

  By springtime, I had mastered double-dutch. I jump-roped as if my life depended on it, while the other girls sang around me: “Ice cream soda with cherry on top!…” I moved strong and hard, my skirt flapping around my knees. Summertime was just around the bend, and the sky seemed to press down on the world like a bright-blue veil. I squinted across the playground. Ali and a group of boys sat hunched in a circle, getting into trouble. I could see my sister sitting against a wall with a group of the older girls, staring wistfully onto the city streets, leaning secretively into one another while one of them played a love song on her transistor radio. And beyond that I noticed a man at the far corner of the school playground wearing a long sheepskin coat, too warm for this weather, and watching us with a thin smile.

  Seeing him there, I stumbled on the rope, nicking my knee against the pavement.

  Maria shouted, “Aw, Birdie! You was about to beat your record!” I looked over at her. She was laughing and appeared small and far away. I felt dizzy. I stood up and walked away, saying under my breath, “Someone take over. I gotta go sit down.”

  I left them there singing and skipping and went to the fence, where I sat down, rubbing my scraped knee with a wet finger. The man at the fence who was watching us all was someone I had met before, and now I looked up to see him moving toward me, still smiling, as if we were old friends.

  It was Redbone—same orange-brown kinky hair, same freckled skin, same dirty teeth. It hit me that he looked a bit like our portrait of Cotton Mather, the octoroon dandy. He wore the same slightly sneering expression. He had his hands in his pockets and seemed different somehow. His clothes were more like a businessman’s, and his hair was neatly trimmed to his scalp. He stood behind me, on the other side of the fence, gripping the bar. He squatted down so that he was at my level.

  “Hey, Ms. Birdie. What you doing sitting by yourself?”

  I shrugged. I remembered his fight with my father from way back when. I looked over toward my sister, but she was dancing now before the group of girls, swaying her braids in front of her face.

  Redbone said, “How’s your mother? I ain’t seen her in a while. She chickening out on us?” He paused, looked up at the sky, and closed his eyes as if sunbathing. “You can tell her I said hello.”

  “Okay. But I gotta go,” I told him, pointing across the asphalt at my sister. “My sister’s over there.” I hoped she would see me pointing.

  Redbone squinted at her. “Yeah. I see her. What happened there? You sure you got the same daddy?”

  “Yeah, of course we do,” I said, trying to sound casual, though I was sweating and feeling my lungs close up. “Well, see you later, now.”

  He smiled. “Hold up. Not so fast. I was just kidding you. Tell me, how’s your daddy doing? I haven’t seen him in ages either. He don’t got time for the revolution?”

  I frowned at him, then said something I remembered my father saying: “No, he’s writing a masterpiece. He doesn’t have time for you.”

  His smile disappeared, and he watched me for a moment, fascinated by something on my face. I averted my eyes from his gaze. He said, “You look like a little guinea. Anybody ever tell you that? That’s what they used to say to me.”

  He stuck his hand through the metal bars of the fence and began to play slightly with my hair. The children around me were loud, raucous. I looked over at the red metal door of the school, where Mrs. Potter and Professor Abdul stood talking, holding plastic foam cups. They were deep in discussion and wouldn’t hear me if I screamed.

  Redbone whispered, “I got a camera. Mind if I take your photo?”

  I knew enough to stand up and walk away at that point. I made it a few feet across the playground when I heard him say, “I’m gonna miss you, Birdie Lee.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. It was an odd thing to say, and I turned around and looked at him from the safe distance.

  “But I’m not going anywhere.”

  As soon as my words had come out, so had his camera—a small automatic—and he leaned in between the bars, snapping me in two deft flashes of light. I blinked at the flash, trying to dispel the yellow spots that danced before my eyes.

  He laughed. “Gotcha.”

  I turned and ran all the way across the playground to Professor Abdul, falling into his arms. He looked down at me, smiling. “Why are you running so fast, B?” />
  I was out of breath, and I bent over, my hands on my knees.

  I finally managed to say, pointing behind me, still not daring to look, “Redbone.”

  Professor Abdul looked confused. “Red-who?”

  “Redbone,” I said again.

  Professor Abdul paused, then said, “What did that fool want?”

  “He took my picture.”

  Professor Abdul looked angry then. “You sure you aren’t telling stories, Birdie?”

  I nodded and only now dared to turn back to where Redbone had been. He was gone from that spot, but in the distance, across the street, I could see a car starting up and, vaguely, behind all that glass, a face, pale and blurred from the distance, staring back.

  Professor Abdul said, “Well, next time you see him, you come get me or one of the other teachers. He shouldn’t be hanging around here.”

  On the way home from school later that afternoon, I told my mother and sister what had happened. Cole, seated in the passenger’s seat, was sucking on a Blow-Pop. She squealed, “Yuck! Sounds like a pervert,” and my mother swerved the car, nearly crashing into an oncoming one in the left lane. She didn’t say anything, but I could see that something was building in her clenched jaw as she pulled us into the parking lot of a Roy Rogers on Huntington Avenue.

  Cole asked, “We’re gonna get dinner here?”

  But my mother had no intention of getting out of the car. She turned to me and grabbed my arm painfully, pulling me forward toward her. “Tell me that story again. Slower now.”

  I told it, my voice trembling as it struck me that I might be in real trouble for talking to this man. My mother had drummed it into our heads time and time again not to talk to strangers. But Redbone, I reasoned to myself, wasn’t really a stranger.

  When I had finished, she pointed a finger at me and said, “If he ever comes near you again, scream your little head off till someone comes to the rescue. Hear me?”

  I nodded.

  Her gaze seemed distracted as she searched the parking lot for something. She turned to start up the engine. “Cole, keep an eye on your sister.”

  She blasted the news while we drove home, and all of us were quiet.

  The weekend came with no more mention of the Redbone incident, and I put it out of my mind the best I could. The crocuses were in bloom that Saturday, and my father came by to take Cole and Carmen to a museum. Although he had barely seemed to notice the other times I had stayed home, that day he seemed particularly disturbed that I wasn’t coming along with them. Cole and Carmen sat together in the backseat. Cole rested her head against Carmen’s shoulder as she described some boy story in great tragic detail. My father pulled me to him at the car door and spoke to me. He wore a coffee-stained T-shirt, his wire-rimmed glasses, and faded jeans with sandals. He stroked my hair back away from my face, staring at me with an unusually attentive expression. Ordinarily, he was distracted when talking to me, but at that moment he was all there.

  “Hey, baby, we’re going to the Egyptian exhibit at the museum. Your favorite. You can touch Anubis’s nose.”

  I managed a weak smile, taken aback by his affection. “I don’t know. I think I’ll stay home.”

  “What, you don’t want to be around your papa anymore?”

  I glanced quickly at Carmen, trying, without words, to relay why I wasn’t coming. Carmen looked up at me from the backseat and said in a bright, false tone, “Hey there, Bernie.” She consistently mispronounced my name, no matter how many times my father corrected her. She looked me up and down. I wore jeans and my mother’s denim shirt, which fell down mid-thigh, and I thought I saw a barely perceptible sneer cross her face.

  He sensed something and looked disturbed. “Carmen,” he called out rather sharply, as if speaking to a small child, “tell Birdie she should come with us. You wanted to take the girls to Filene’s tomorrow, right?”

  Carmen nodded and looked back at Cole. “Yeah, they have the cutest spring selection, girl. I saw something that would look sharp on you.”

  My father had finally seemed to notice that Carmen didn’t speak to me. I could see it in the way his lips grew thin. He said then, softly, to me, “You’re my baby girl. I want to spend time with you, sweets. And I don’t know when I’m going to get a chance again soon. We can do something tomorrow, just the two of us, if you want. I’ll take you shopping alone. We can go to Copley Square.” He looked away, toward the film of pasty clouds that muted the afternoon light. “Things are about to get real tight, baby, and we gotta spend time together now. You know?”

  He seemed particularly insistent. I both did and didn’t want to be left alone at the house with my mother. There was an aching in my chest that surprised me, and my eyes were watering up against my will.

  All morning my mother had been talking to Jane in the bedroom, and their voices had risen and fallen so that I had made out only snippets of their conversation.

  “I know they’ll trace it to me. I just know it,” she had said.

  “Don’t be so paranoid, Sandy. Jesus. Nobody is going to find out. I mean, how could they?”

  “Something just isn’t right. I can feel it.”

  When my mother and Jane came out later, my mother’s eyes were swollen. I didn’t want to go up there and listen to their whispers. It seemed serious, dark, strange in the house.

  I looked back at Carmen. Rifling through her purse for something, she said, “If she wants to stay here with her mother, let her, Deck. But we gotta get going.”

  My father stared at me for a moment longer. “Well, you want to come, sugar-puff?”

  I shook my head no. Cole threw me an apologetic look but didn’t ask me to come.

  I went up to my room after they drove away, and ran to the window to see the car moving out of sight. I felt a sudden inexplicable panic. I had seen in my father’s face a flash of my own, an expression we both wore when we were scared. According to my mother, I had inherited only two things from my father—asthma and eczema, both of which Cole had been spared. Now I felt my breathing shorten, and I felt comforted by that shortness, invisible proof that I was his daughter. I had a brief strange fantasy that he would take me to Egypt that summer to do research, just the two of us, circling pyramids in matching white turbans. He would talk and I would take notes, his little scribe, and at the end of the day we would sit drinking tea and talking over our findings—cross-legged in some tent—while flies buzzed beyond the mesh door.

  Just then my mother came bounding into the bedroom, interrupting me from my daze at the window. When I turned, she appeared enormous to me. It struck me that she had been eating lately with a hurricane energy—with even more gusto than usual. She wore a flowered sundress with a thermal underwear top underneath, the fabric stretched tightly across her torso.

  She stood over me, hands on her hips, seeming not to notice the wet stain on my cheeks, and said, “Baby Bird, I’m in big fucking trouble. Let’s go get a banana split.”

  As we drove to Friendly’s, I kept my feet against the dashboard and fiddled with the radio to find the funk station. In Boston the black-music stations were scarce, and the best, WILD, came on only AM, a fact that “added insult to injury,” according to my father. Now it crackled a tinny rendition of Roberta Flack singing “Killing Me Softly.” I wondered what my father and Carmen and Cole were doing at that moment. Probably something ordinary and fun, I supposed, like a real family. Meanwhile, my mother was whispering things to herself as she drove, her head at a crooked angle. “Goddamn him. Brazil. What’s in Brazil? A book, my ass. Escapist overintellectualized creep.”

  At Friendly’s she wolfed down her banana split, getting chocolate around her mouth and a little dot of whipped cream on the tip of her nose so that she looked clownish, like Golliwog. She didn’t say much, except to ask me if I liked my father’s new girlfriend.

  I confessed to her, stirring my coffee ice cream in its silver bowl, that Carmen adored Cole, hated me, and that I didn’t know why.

&
nbsp; “She’s a bitch,” I stated, words I had never said. “I can’t stand her.”

  I expected my mother to look sympathetic, but instead she smiled queerly, as if I had confirmed some theory she had been concocting. She rolled a maraschino cherry between her fingers as she spoke.

  “So, Miss Black and Beautiful doesn’t think you’re good enough, huh? You probably remind her of me, and that’s what they’re all trying to forget these days, you know—that they ever dabbled in the nitty-gritty land of miscegenation. Well, you can tell her and that righteous brotherman—your father—that it’s my white ass that’s going to end up in prison!”

  She barked these words across at me, and a couple of the roly-poly waitresses halted their gossiping and looked at us, their curiosity piqued. My mother didn’t notice them, but she saw the startled expression on my face and whispered across the table, trying to lighten the moment with a playful routine of ours, “Let’s split this banana joint, eh, Tanya?”

  I was supposed to answer, “Sure thang, Che, baby,” but I just shrugged and slipped out of the booth.

  In the car ride home she kept her eyes on the rearview mirror, and the car seemed to steam up with the heat of her nervous energy. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings into the air in a flamboyant gesture. When we got home there were rings of sweat under the arms of her thermal underwear top.

  disintegration of funk

  Aku-Aku is a “tropical Polynesian getaway” just around the corner from Fenway Park. On this particular Tuesday afternoon, the restaurant was empty, shrouded in its perpetually hungover darkness. It was three o’clock, a strange time to be drinking Polynesian cocktails and toasting to our family love, against all odds, through the fire, and all the rest of those cliches. Stranger still that we all were together, my mother and my father speaking to each other in civil, almost affectionate, tones. They had told me it was just a meeting to catch up on old times. But they had pulled us out of school early and they hadn’t had a civil conversation in as long as I could remember. Something wasn’t right.