Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  compared

  to what

  chocolate city

  It wasn’t clear to me then why I had fled New Hampshire on that particular night and not another—whether my escape had been set into motion much earlier, in New York City, with the flying bodies on the pavement, or if it had begun just that night, with the half-nappy girl in the woods, and the rain that slapped the trees.

  Later these questions would cross my mind, but for now, on that bus ride to Boston, I simply watched the world float by outside the bus window, beyond my own pale reflection, and thought that this was where I felt most safe—on a moving vehicle, rolling toward some destination but not quite there.

  And when the daylight began to creep over the world and the twin dark forms of John Hancock and the Prudential grew visible in the distance, I considered staying on that bus, living on that bus, letting even this city, this vestige of my former life, roll on by. But I didn’t have enough money to travel farther, and so I stood up with the rest of the red-eyed and rumpled travelers, fetched my backpack from the overhead rack, and stepped off the groaning vehicle and into the morning city, thinking how strange that this had been two and a half hours away all of that time.

  I had nothing much to go on. Just the address I had found on the postcard in my mother’s book. The address for Dorothy Lee. Aunt Dot. I fingered the postcard in my pocket. I had no idea when or how the postcard had reached my mother. And there was no guarantee Dot was still at the address she had given. The Dorothy Lee I had known had fled America in 1975, had gone to India with the words “permanent exile” as her only guide. It was improbable that Dot would still be living back here, in Boston, the very city that had sent her and so many others running.

  A cracked and faded sign read, WELCOME TO BEAN TOWN! beside a Celtics leprechaun. Beneath that, a clock. Eight-thirty. My mother would be waking now, sitting at the butcher block table, the newspaper spread out in front of her and a cup of milky coffee growing cool in the handmade mug I had made her in arts and crafts. She would be curious to know how my big night had been. If I had a crush on anyone. She would be tempted to wake me for breakfast and find out the details, but she would wait for several more hours yet—several more hours to open the door to a sheet and a bed and an open drawer, clothes spilling out onto the floor.

  The bus depot was filthy. Lumpen bodies slept under blankets made of newspapers. A tiny man who looked like Mickey Rooney was pulling open the grate that covered Dunkin’ Donuts. I was slightly dizzy and thought it might be hunger. Or maybe it was just the alcohol. I had been drunk when I left New Hampshire.

  It had been six years since I had been in this town. Six years since 1976, when my mother had taken me from bed and dragged us both into the dawn. Now it was March 1982, a whole new world of styles and sounds.

  I had imagined Boston many times since then. In the Boston of my mind, streetlamps shone over cobblestone streets; swans in sneakers paddled around the Public Gardens; the Charles River glistened a silver white while crew boys glided swiftly across the water, their arms perfectly synchronized in motion; a raised black fist waved over a classroom of dashiki-clad children. Boston had remained to me as frozen as a body packed in ice.

  But now, here it was before me—dull, muted colors, biting winter air, tacky signs advertising happiness. The faces around me seemed stony and mean, bitter and as closed as shutters.

  The faithful pink-and-brown decor of the Dunkin’ Donuts was all that was familiar. I went inside. A huddle of older men sat at the counter, drinking their coffee and joking with the waitress, a slim red-haired girl with braces. She looked underage. Her uniform was too large, with empty darts where her breasts should have been. I got a coffee with cream and sugar and a chocolate eclair, handing the girl a crumpled five-dollar bill. I had counted my money on the train. After the twelve-dollar bus fare, there were forty-five dollars left. It would get me to where I wanted to go, to that address which I had figured out was in the South End. Forty-six Montgomery Street. The place where Dorothy Lee was supposed to live.

  I had the brief impulse to sit at the counter among the men, catch my breath, eavesdrop on their conversations about the Bruins spoken in thick local accents. My mother once had admitted a prejudice against just such accents. We had been lying side by side in a Motel 6 when she explained to me that she was prejudiced against three accents in the world: the German accent, the white Southern accent, and the Boston accent. All three accents made her suspect a person of great evil.

  The Boston accent sounded a lot like the New Hampshire one. Noo Hampsha.

  But in Dunkin’ Donuts that morning, the Boston accent, even on these grizzly red-faced men, sounded comforting and welcoming to me. I wanted to stay for a while, just breathe in the fact that I was really here, in my old city where my mother once had said we would never safely set foot again.

  MY BODY REMEMBERED the city. And outside, déjà vu hurt my eyes, made me squint as if to block out brightness, though the sky was gray. I scanned the stained bricks and cracked pavement with a vague longing. The eclair and coffee rolled around in my belly, seeming to clash and boil, causing a pin pressure just below my rib cage. Church bells rang somewhere not so far away. Nine strokes. My mother and Jim would be lying on the couch, doing their Sunday-morning ritual, half-reading the newspaper, half-massaging each other’s feet.

  I stopped. My body had led me to the T station. Copley Square.

  Outside of the subway entrance was a map under glass, and I stared at it for a long time, at the lines of red and green and purple and blue and orange, a bright webbing of artificial colors, thick and primary. My father had told me once that those lines were racial codes. He said green led to Jews in Brookline and Newton. Red to Cambridge Wasps. The blue and the purple to the suburbs, where the Irish and Italian townies lived. And the orange line, he had told me, led to Chocolate City. To Dorchester and “the Berry.” Roxbury. To your people, he had said.

  People were passing me now. A gray-haired businessman with crumbs on his jacket banged against me as he made his way underground, and he looked back, annoyed. He seemed to do a double-take, and I felt a sharp tug of panic. I thought he looked at me suspiciously, as if I were something he had read about and was just now seeing for real. Had he seen my face on a post-office wall? I knew it was ridiculous, but I looked down just the same, letting my hair fall like a veil over my eyes. I turned to join the passing people in their march along Boylston Street, and when I glanced in a car window and saw my reflection, I understood the real reason the businessman had looked at me that way. I looked like a runaway. My clothes were the ones I had worn at the party the night before, the ones I had walked for miles in. They had partially dried on the bus and were musty and wrinkled. My makeup was smeared by rain and maybe tears, I couldn’t remember—making my face appear blurred, like a photograph of someone caught in motion.

  I FOUND MY WAY to the South End, where the brownstones sat stern and impenetrable, like troops before battle. Occasional laughter, footsteps on pavement, a brush of a passerby. Street cleaners pushed their brooms, and shop owners pulled up grates. My eyes rested on a house across the street, beyond the blinking red hand of the traffic light.

  The brownstone that had housed a revolution.

  As I got closer, I could see that the shutters had been painted a pale blue. A vase of paper lilies sat in the front window. My mother hadn’t cared for such accoutrements. The dining room window was adorned with heavy red drapes, and upstairs I saw a soft light peeking out from my mother’s old bedroom. I went up the steps slowly and read the name on the mailbox slot: “Thurman/Lewis.”

  I sat down on the top step and bent over, holding my head in my hands. I could feel the weight of its contents—my brain and the case it came in. My teeth had begun to chatter. I tried to envision a warm kitchen, with a cup of steaming hot chocolate and a wool blanket. It was a mind-control trick Bernadette had taught me. Think warm, be warm. I rubbed my bare hands together and hunched forward eve
n farther, letting my head fall upside down, so that all the blood rushed into it. I had a thick blue vein like a subway line etched in my forehead, which stuck out when I turned upside down. At Aurora, Alexis had told me once that it made me look like Frankenstein. I had liked that image of myself as a monster, an unfinished creation turned against its maker, and had terrorized a shrieking, giggling Alexis, walking toward her with my arms out in front of me, my legs stiff as wooden planks.

  I had brought with me only a thin denim jacket. I wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth, my cheek pressed against my leg.

  I had been lost in strange cities before, so many times, but always with my mother. She had turned danger and displacement into an adventure that we would solve together. I had believed then that my mother could take on anybody, do anything. And mostly I had been right. Few men messed with her. She wore an expression that said, “Don’t fuck with me.”

  A voice cut into my thoughts.

  “Hey, sister, you got any cigarettes?”

  It was a singsong, taunting voice. A voice of royalty. I looked up. Some version of Diana Ross stood with her head in the air. She wore her long, black curls loose around a slightly ravaged mahogany face. A white faux-fur waist-length jacket wrapped around her slim form. Tight jeans and a pair of red, scuffed pump jemsons. There was a hoarseness beneath the voice, a thickness to her neck.

  I found my voice. “No, sorry. Nothing.” My eyes were fixed on the woman’s feet. They were even bigger than mine.

  The woman persisted, tapping her toe to the pavement in time as she said, “Well, how about some change? You got any? For coffee? I just need fifty cents. My head’s a mess.”

  I saw something I liked in the woman’s cracked mask. I dug into my pocket and handed her two quarters. I knew I should save my money, but the action had been automatic. Besides, I reasoned, fifty cents wouldn’t make or break me.

  The woman scooped the coins from me, and the tips of her nails tickled my palm. She winked at me and said, “Thanks, girl. I got no time for this headache.”

  She began to walk away, then paused and turned back around.

  “You live here?”

  I shook my head no. The woman examined me now, shrewdly, letting her eyes travel up and down my body. I automatically looked down, letting my hair swing forward across my eyes.

  After a brief moment, she asked, “You all right?”

  It was the hint of sympathy in her voice that broke me, and I cursed myself as I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the warm wet trick-lings against my cheek. I held my stomach and bit my lip as I rocked myself back and forth, trying to get ahold of myself. The woman came closer. I opened my eyes, and she said in a voice deeper than the one she had been using before, “You hustling?”

  I shook my head, just now getting control of my breathing. My tears still streamed, and beyond them the street appeared to be floating.

  The woman stepped closer and took my hand. “You’re a runaway. This is your first night out here.”

  I nodded yes, then spoke in quick, halting sentences: “My aunt. She lives here. I mean, not here”—I gestured to the house behind me—“but in Boston, I think. I’m trying to find her. I used to live here—”

  The woman cut me off. “Baby, you got an address for her, or something?”

  I nodded and began to rifle through my backpack. The postcard came out, crumpled but still legible. The woman reached into her fur coat pocket and pulled out some glasses. They were drugstore reading glasses, decidedly granny-looking, and she put them on, reading the postcard with a turned-down concentration as she twirled a black curl thoughtfully.

  After a moment, she looked up and smiled brightly, flashing a gold tooth with the letter C engraved in it. “Come on. I’ll show you. It’s not that far even. Buy me a coffee and I’ll show you anything you want.”

  She called herself Corvette, and we walked through winding tree-lined streets together, arms linked, looking for the address while Corvette rambled on about her past to me. I was content just to listen.

  “I ran away from home when I was your age. How old are you? ’Bout fifteen? Yep. You might not believe it but I come from a well-to-do family. In D.C. Uppity Negroes. You know?”

  The streets around us were growing less posh. Corvette waved at an old man across the street and called out, “Hey, Louie! How’s life treating you?” Then she continued: “My daddy was a doctor, mother was a bitch. Professionally, I mean. She was real pretty, though. Good hair. That’s where I got my hair from. Anyway, though, my daddy didn’t like me. ‘Cause I was too fine, and I knew it. So I ran. First to New York. Then here. It’s all right here.”

  She had found a cigarette in the bottom of her purse, and she lit it now and took a drag before continuing. “This neighborhood used to be all black and Rican. Now the white faggots are taking over. They’re bringing in all the money. All the business. It’s cool, ‘cept when them teenage ruffians be fucking with us.”

  I didn’t know who “us” was, but I saw a sign becoming clear in the distance. Montgomery Street. I pointed to it.

  Corvette said, “Told you I’d find it.”

  Forty-six Montgomery Street was a narrow tenement with shingles the color of limes, a white trim, and a placard for a political campaign in the dilapidated front yard. Say Yes to some proposition. I turned to Corvette, handing her a couple of mangled dollars. “Well, thanks—”

  Corvette smoothed out the bills, clearly pleased with the bonus prize. She dragged on the cigarette again. “Thanks. You want me to wait with you?”

  I wanted her to, but at the same time felt an odd sense of pride. If Dot didn’t live here, I didn’t want Corvette to know. To see how lost I really was.

  “Nah,” I said, waving my hand and looking away. “I’ll be fine. I mean, I know she’s here.”

  Corvette took a suspicious drag of her cigarette, then said, “Okay, if you say so. But you come find me if you need anything. I hang out over in the park on Braddock Street. With my girlies. We’ll set you up if you need it.”

  Then Corvette was gone, clipping down the street in her tipsy-topsy heels, fluffing the collar of her white fur coat as she moved out of sight. I felt an urge to chase her, cling to the hem of her jacket, anything. But I took a deep breath instead and made my way up the steps.

  Inside, I took a moment to adjust to the dark. The front door to the building had been unlocked, and inside, the hallway smelled strongly of foreign cooking. Sunday smells. The address had said apartment number two, and I went up the stairs to the door at the top.

  I was about to knock when I saw that the name on the door read “Ghalif.” Not Lee. It was the wrong address, the wrong name, the wrong family.

  I leaned my head against the door and closed my eyes. A wave of exhaustion and a growing pressure in my bladder, the intoxicants from the night before, Samantha’s words, seemed to weigh on me with a sudden force. I could hear a television jingle inside. A child’s voice singing along to a commercial for Cap’n Crunch cereal.

  I had drunk that large coffee at the bus depot, and the pressure in my bladder was what made me knock finally. I knocked lightly at first. Then louder.

  After a moment the door opened. There stood a child with reddish-brown skin and a head full of wild, blue-black curls. She had thick eyebrows and wore a red cape, leotard, and Danskins, with a tinfoil W safety-pinned to the front—a Wonder Woman costume.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I shifted. “I’m Jesse—I mean, Birdie. Birdie Lee. And who are you?”

  “I’m Taj, and I’m gonna be four next month. You want to come to my party?”

  “Sure, I’d love to,” I said, imagining somehow that I really would come to her party, even if this wasn’t Dot’s house. I paused before asking, “Does Dot live here?”

  The little girl shrugged. Then put out a small hand and said, “My mama lives here. C’mon. She’s cooking me breakfast.”

  The apartment was warm and narrow.
I glimpsed the living room when we passed through the hallway. Bright cloths hung over the furniture, sculptures from Africa and India were squeezed between huge tropical plants, and the floor was scattered with Legos and stuffed animals. Big Bird and Snuffelupagus were arguing on a small black-and-white television. The child named Taj led me, pulled me, toward the kitchen at the end of the hall, where heat and the smell of something good hit me in the face.

  A woman stood with her back to us over the stove. She was singing something incomprehensible. Her hair hung down her back in thick ropes of dreadlocks.

  She yelled with her back still to us, “Taj! Come get your food! It’s gonna get cold.” She turned then, with a plate in her hand.

  Taj and I stood at the door together, still holding hands.

  It was Dot.

  She frowned at me for a moment, with a stranger’s hostility. “What the hell—?” she started to say, then stopped in midsentence. Her hand came up and covered her mouth, and she dropped the plate to the floor, where it miraculously didn’t break. The food splattered around her feet.

  “Sweet Jesus. Is that who I think it is?”

  I had imagined what I would say. I had a practiced speech to make Dot keep me. But now I was silent, afraid that if I spoke, everything would come out and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

  Dot came toward me, and her eyes were wet as she held out her arms. She held me to her. She was bony, as always, and smelled of some kind of scalp oil. Something familiar.

  She laughed as she held me and rubbed my back. “Baby Bird, where the hell have you been all my life?”

  I PEED FIRST. Then I looked in the mirror. I looked tired and thin and rough. My denim jacket stank, and my jeans had dirt stains on the knees. My shoes had little splotches of Mona’s vomit on them. I tried to run my fingers through my hair, but it was matted with tangles. There wasn’t much I could do, so I just splashed my face.

  When that was taken care of, Dot fed me. Eggs, cornbread, grits with hot sauce and butter, coffee with lots of sugar, lots of milk, just the way I liked it. She sat across from me, watching me wolf down the food, while Taj snuggled on her lap, sucking on a peach, never taking her wide, liquid black eyes off me. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but Dot seemed to be studying me with some degree of caution, suspicion. A voice entered my head, a voice of doubt, and I cursed it, knowing it was my mother. Do you trust Dot with your secrets? Is she above the law, below the law, willing to go against the law and bring you into her home? Because you are against the law, Birdie Lee. Your body is a federal offense. Do you trust her with your secrets?…