by Danzy Senna
But it wasn’t just that. When I closed my eyes, it was my father, mother, sister, and I that I saw together. No Carmen. And certainly not this shaggy white man in clogs. My mother was supposed to be waiting for my sister, but also for my father, so we could start where we had left off.
She glanced at me, momentarily surprised by Bernadette’s words coming out of my mouth. Then she slapped the steering wheel. “Oh, come off it, Jesse. Give me a little more credit than that, please. I have lived a little. I’m not stupid. And don’t start quoting Bernadette, ‘cause I’m not hearing it. She could criticize me all she wanted, but she acted like a chauvinist pig when it came down to it. I don’t even want to hear that kind of crap from your mouth. I’m doing the best I can.”
She took a violent drag on her cigarette and held her breath for a long minute before exhaling gray fumes out the open window.
I crossed my arms and stared at the trailer park we were passing. The park was emitting a blue light and a faint electric buzz from the bug-zapper lamps. At one of the trailers, I could see a girl my age sitting on some steps, smoking a cigarette and rubbing her foot in the dirt. In the distance, her cigarette looked like a firefly buzzing before her face. I twisted my head around as we passed her, and realized with a start that it was the girl who had called me a zoo animal just a few weeks back.
My mother turned up the volume on the radio—it was Willie Nelson—and hummed along, off-key and loud enough to halt any further discussion.
Before bed that night, I stared at the bathroom mirror and saw a twelve-year-old girl who might be a boy if it weren’t for the scraggly ponytail falling down her back. The dark trace of a mustache over her lip, and eyebrows that met faintly in the middle. There were no curls, no full lips, still no signs of my sister’s face in my own. There had been a time when I thought I was just going through a phase. That if I was patient and good enough, I would transform into a black swan. I mouthed the word shimbala at myself in the mirror. It was somewhere between a noun and a command in Elemeno, but I couldn’t remember what it meant.
OVERALL, JIM’S STORY seemed pretty flimsy to me. He told us he had spent five years, from 1968 to 1973 —during the Vietnam war—living in Jamaica, where he had worked odd jobs, spending most of his time in a pot-inspired daze. He told us he had burned through an inheritance for those years in Jamaica. Now that he was back in America, he explained to us, he had a part-time job programming computers in Boston, where he commuted three days out of the week. In his spare time, he gardened and built furniture.
Not only did it seem absurdly suspicious that he disappeared three days a week to Boston, of all places, and not only was it strange that he seemed to have an endless supply of money from his supposed computer job, but he was vague about what he had been doing in Jamaica. He blamed his bad memory on the pot. Those years, he explained, were a blur for him; it was hard to pin down the specifics, except that he had found something approaching nirvana in the island people he had lived among. He had a few photographs of himself in some tropical setting, his skin a brighter shade of pink, surrounded by poverty shacks and white stretches of sand. But that wasn’t enough for me. I had questions. If he had spent those five years in Jamaica, wouldn’t he have been draft-dodging? And where were the pictures of the friends he had made, the women he had loved? There seemed to be no people other than himself in the photos. His past was as unclear as our own.
His voice gave me the creeps. He talked in a soft, restrained voice most of the time—so softly you had to lean in slightly to catch every word. He told my mother that he believed in women’s lib, and I think he thought his soft-spoken voice made him less threatening, less of what my mother called a “brute.” But to me it was just as bad. It forced me to stand closer to him than I really wanted to. And while most of the time he seemed benign, laid back—if not a little goofy—there were moments when I believed I saw the real Jim emerge. Someone stern and red-faced and dictatorial—someone I could imagine wearing mirrored sunglasses and a dark suit—someone I believed was out to get us.
He lived in a little shack filled with Jamaican artifacts and plywood. When he wasn’t in Boston, he spent his time shuffling around his house in clogs, playing folk songs on his guitar, gardening out back, and smoking “the almighty ganja.” He loved reggae music “more than life itself” and that summer introduced me to the sounds of Peter Tosh, Jimmie Cliff, The Wailers. The house was suffused with a heavy smoke of marijuana. There were green sprinklings, like oregano, around the kitchen table, and strange smoking contraptions set up in the living room. Jim’s lips often had little blister marks on them from where the burning spliff had come too close.
“His story’s bogus and you know it,” I told my mother one afternoon while we stood at the edge of the road just outside the Stop & Shop parking lot, clutching our grocery bags and waiting for Jim to pick us up. He was at the hardware store a few miles down the road. “It’s so obvious. I bet he’s never even been to Jamaica. It’s all an act. The pot. The music. The clogs. I bet he spent those five years killing villagers in Laos. Or no—I bet he never even got his hands dirty. I bet he just gave orders from an office in Washington.” I paused and kicked a rock with my sneaker. The sun felt strangely cold on my back, and I shivered. “I mean, don’t you think it’s a little odd that he disappears to Boston—Boston, of all places—every week? I can’t believe you don’t see it. I thought you were good at this. I thought you were the expert.”
My mother shifted the weight of the bag onto her other hip and stared with a slightly pained smile at the line of pine trees across the wide road. She whispered, though there was no way anyone would hear us, “Oh, come on, Jess. Don’t do this. The man has done nothing to deserve your wrath. I understand you’re just looking out for me, but Jim is not a Fed. That much I can assure you. They’re much easier to spot than that. I’ve seen them. I know.”
“Yeah,” I said, scoffing. “Like you did a great job spotting Redbone.”
She breathed in quickly and looked at me. “That was different. A lot of us trusted him,” was all she said. But I could see I had hurt her. She pursed her lips and blinked her eyes as if holding back tears. I felt a little sorry for her, but also perplexed by her sudden, insurmountable stupidity.
I tried another tactic: “But what about Papa? What’s he supposed to do when he gets here and you’ve got a boyfriend?”
She looked away, a pinched expression making her features pointy, severe, like her own mother’s. She glanced at me, her cheeks pinkening slightly as she said, “Babes, your papa left with Carmen. Remember? We were no longer together. That still hasn’t changed.”
My eyes stung as I looked at the cars swishing by before me. Country cars. Good-old American cars. Brady Bunch cars. Big brown station wagons with fake wood paneling. Suburbans, Buicks, Tonka trucks grown to life size. My father had never had any faith in American cars. He said they were shit. He liked to say that he believed in meritocracy, not mediocrity. The Marshes must have felt the same way. Their old silver Saab had the same feel and smell as his car. It made me want to get inside and close my eyes and just inhale the leather, the dust, the slight gasoline smell leaking from the old European motor.
Watching the cars pass by now, I felt an urge to stick my thumb out and let some stranger take me wherever they were going. A trucker would be the best. We could just keep driving forever. I did put out my thumb then, and stared wistfully into the distance, hoping to annoy my mother. But she just laughed slightly, and I heard tires crunching behind me on the gravel of the roadside. It was Jim’s Buick. His silver hair glimmered from behind the windshield. He leaned out the window and said, “Going my way, ladies?” My mother and he grinned at each other.
As I pushed past her to get to the back door, she whispered to me from beneath her smile, in a low, clenched voice: “I got us this far, baby. Now, leave the rest up to me.”
ONE DAY, late in July, while my mother and Jim were busy swaddling themselves with coconut-smelli
ng lotion, I meandered along the edge of the town lake, bored by their whispers, to collect rocks. It was late in the day, and Jim and my mother wanted to get in a swim before the mosquitoes got too bad. A gold light coated the surface of the water, and it seemed that the bodies that littered the beach were suffused in a similar yellow gauze. I stopped at some length, plopped down, and began to bury my feet in the sand.
A group of children approached me like a committee. They were the kind of kids that Maria would have called “stanky”—the kind of white people that she claimed had warts on all their fingers, lice in their hair. My mother would have called them “real, honest, working people.” They wore an odd assortment of bathing suits, from Goodwill, I supposed, and held hands. Their ages ranged from about four to about eight. None of them was even close to my age.
They watched me packing my feet underneath the sand. Finally, the oldest, a thin blond girl with albino-white skin, said, “You want to play?”
I shrugged. I didn’t feel like baby-sitting.
A smaller one piped out, “Want us to bury you?”
I stared at them. They seemed normal enough. And I was lonely. Nicholas hadn’t come by to visit me like he said he would. Besides, I was beginning to whisper to myself when nobody was looking. I said, “Sure.”
They descended upon the sand with a terrifying enthusiasm. They began to dig a hole next to me, their little fingers working quicker than I had ever seen. Before long, they had created a shallow hole in the sand, as long and as deep as my body.
A stumpy redheaded girl, about six, with a pink birthmark around her eye, said, “Well, aren’t you gonna get in?”
I rolled into it, and they began with an equal fervor to fill up the hole on top of me. The sand was cool and heavy. I liked watching my long limbs, my skin, my red Speedo bathing suit that was getting too small for me, disappear under the beige sand. One of them had built a pillow for my head out of the sand, and I rested my head against it, knowing I’d have to wash my hair later to get it all out.
The oldest sat alongside, watching her younger siblings. She seemed bored by their antics, as if she had seen them bury strangers before. She asked me, “Where are you from?”
I glanced back down the beach, where my mother and Jim now splashed in the water together.
“India,” I told her without much thought.
The children stopped their shoveling and patting and stared at me.
The oldest girl’s eyes widened, and I felt a twinge of excitement as they all waited with rapt attention for more details.
“My Indian parents, they’ve left me in the care of that couple over there.” I nodded my head to Jim and my mother, who were kissing, her legs around his waist as he held her up in the water. I sneered, “They’re horrible. They make me scrub the toilet and walk ten miles to school. And he, that guy, he beats me with a switch on the backs of my legs.”
The children gasped. “Are you going to run away?”
“Naw, I’ll probably just wait till my real parents come get me. There’s a war going on, you know. They wanted me out of India until it was safe. We’re a pretty important family. I’m a princess. My name’s…” I paused, my mind racing for something exotic. “My name’s Tanzania.” It was a word from the Africa map at the Nkrumah School.
The children had gathered in a circle around my head, the only part of me exposed. They belted out questions, their fascination rising with each of my lies.
Can you do that funny dance where your head moves back and forth from side to side?
Why don’t you have a dot on your forehead?
Do you have slaves?
Do you live in a castle?
My words flowed freely, weaving a picture of a pampered princess from Calcutta who threw bread to the beggars and spent afternoons getting pedicures by a coterie of beautiful house girls.
“My favorite slave,” I continued, “she wakes me up every morning with a fresh bouquet of roses and a kiss. Then she fans me with palm leaves, and her girls sponge-bathe me in a silver tub filled with tulips…”
I went on and on, taken away by my own story. It was a few minutes before I realized, with annoyance, that the children weren’t paying attention. They were looking over my head. A shadow had fallen across my line of sun.
Jim appeared from behind me then, arms akimbo, staring down at me with pinched, angry lips. He had gotten too much sun. I could see he’d be in pain later. Tonight his skin was going to be a horrid blazing pink.
“Jesse, what are you telling these children?”
“Nothing,” I stammered. I sat up, breaking the blanket of sand on top of me. I scrambled to my feet, wiping my legs. My skin felt like sandpaper. “Let’s go.”
I turned to the children with a wild smile and said, “‘Bye, now. Gotta go. See you around,” and began to walk off.
But Jim’s hand grabbed my arm and held it tight.
He looked down at me a little sadly, as if to say, “This hurts me as much as it’s gonna hurt you, Jesse.”
I struggled in vain to pull away. “What? Can we go now? I have to pee. Bad.”
“Jess, you know lying’s not cool. Now why don’t you tell these kids the truth? Go on. Be brave about it and we can stop at Dairy Queen on the way back.”
I heard my mother’s voice behind him. I hadn’t known she was there. “Jim, don’t embarrass her. Let’s go.”
Jim turned to her, incredulous. “Sheila, I don’t know what your child-rearing methods are, but allowing her to lie like she does just isn’t good for her. You know that.”
My mother bit her nails and avoided my eyes.
The children were fascinated by our heated exchange. One of them called out, “Are these the ones? Are these the ones your parents left you with? Want us to get our parents? You can live with us until your real parents get back, Tangaria!”
Jim turned to the kids. “Listen, kids. Her name’s not Tangaria, it’s Jesse. And we’re her parents. She was lying. Now, Jesse, you want to apologize?”
I kicked the sand. The kids were looking at me quizzically, as if they were beginning to lose faith in my story. Jim was blinking at me expectantly, and I got the feeling that he didn’t really like me much, that I was getting in the way of something. My mother was staring off, too ashamed, I think, to look at me. Finally, I blurted out to the kids, “I told you they were crazy.” Then I ran the length of the beach to the car without stopping.
tintin in the congo
My father was fading on me. Not the Jewish father. I could see David Goldman clear as day, in a rumpled tweed jacket, a yarmulke bobby-pinned precariously to his loose afro, as he bent over some ancient text. It was my real father, Deck Lee, whom I was having trouble seeing. First his eyes, then his nose, then his mouth had faded until all I could see was the back of his head, his hands drumming on the steering wheel, and his voice, singing along to something on the eight-track cassette, something falsetto and sentimental like the reasons that we’re here, the reasons that we let our feelings disappear. I tried to see his front side, his face, but he lived only with his back to me while his words, his music, reached me all the same. I wasn’t really sure why it hadn’t happened to me before, this fogging in my memory of him. Maybe the perpetual motion had kept my vision clear. It was as if the blankness of our identities before had left enough room for the old to survive. Now that we had stopped moving, allowing our new selves to bloom, it seemed the old had to disintegrate.
I wondered what my father would think of us if he could see us now—me as a Jewish girl, my mother pantomiming the life of some ordinary white woman. When we had first chosen Jesse Goldman that day in the Maine diner, I had thought of it as a kind of game. For those first few months on the lam I believed my father would see our situation as innocent and practical, just as my mother liked to see it, as the only way for us to remain free while we waited for him to fetch us. I had even convinced myself that my passing for this white girl, this Jewish girl, this Jesse Goldman, would support my
father’s research.
I used to fantasize that once I got back to Boston, I would write it up as a report to hand in to the Nkrumah School.
I even thought up a series of potential titles for my report.
“What White People Say When They Think They’re Alone”
“Honkified Meanderings: Notes from the Underground”
Or something more casual and funky—“Let Me Tell Ya ’bout Dem White Folks.”
I imagined that my report might develop into a pompous Papa-style lecture, the kind I had seen him deliver in university auditoriums. I saw myself presenting it in the Nkrumah School auditorium, complete with a slide show, candid and grainy color photographs of the white folks around me: one of the crew-cut boys loitering in front of Dairy Queen; another of my mother and Jim swaddling each other with sunscreen; a third of those tow-headed girls down the road in their bare feet, short-shorts, and dirty knees. When I was finished gesticulating to the audience of rapt faces before me, I would clear my throat like my father did and step back from the microphone, mumbling, “That’s all, folks.” The whole school would pause for a moment, then stand at once, applauding wildly, and Professor Abdul would jog onstage to grant me the award for best seventh-grade report. He would shout over the hoots and applause still belting out from the audience: “She’s the spy we all love. And she always reports back to headquarters….”
Maybe that’s how it had been at first. A game. But something was changing here. Something slow and sneaky. At night I stared into my box of negrobilia, fingering the objects—the fisted pick, the Nubian Notion eight-track cassette, the Egyptian necklace, the black Barbie head—and tried to tell myself, “I haven’t forgotten.” But the objects in the box looked to me just like that—objects. They seemed like remnants from the life of some other girl whom I barely knew anymore, anthropological artifacts of some ancient, extinct people, rather than pieces of my past. And the name Jesse Goldman no longer felt so funny, so thick on my tongue, so make-believe.
