Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  I said it slowly, quietly, so that he had to lean in to hear me. I told him the facts, beginning with the last day he had seen me, Wednesday, in the cafeteria, May 17, 1976. He had pulled my braid in line for food, and I had been holding my tray, but then Cole had come up behind me and whispered in my ear, “C’mon Birdie, Mum and Papa are here. They want to take us to Aku-Aku.”

  And then I was gone.

  And then I was gone.

  “My mother, you see, she got this idea in her head that it wasn’t safe to stick around Boston—and my dad had taken off by then, to Brazil, with my sister—so my mom and I had to go and I had to change my name.” I glanced at him. He was watching me, lips parted slightly, eyebrows raised. I hesitated. “Yeah, I had to change my name to—” I hesitated, then faltered. “To a different name, and wear this Star of David around like I was Jewish.”

  I laughed, a hard embarrassed laugh, but he was quiet. So I went on.

  I told him everything that I wasn’t supposed to tell—about the women’s commune and even about my life in New Hampshire. As I spoke, I saw my mother’s image from before—in a Take Back the Night T-shirt, laughing with Bernadette, a bottle of Rolling Rock in hand—and felt a pain in my chest.

  So I spoke as if in a trance, staring not at him but straight ahead, at the dome of the State House as if it were a crystal ball that had hypnotized me, had made me speak these forbidden words. I was conscious all the same that I was breaking the rules, and my fingers trembled so badly I had to sit on my hands.

  But I kept talking, telling this truth, and it felt unnatural to do it. The words seemed flat and unimaginative in their factual accuracy. I told him I still didn’t know if my mother was in trouble for something big or something small, or if she had ever been in trouble at all—only that she was back in hiding and I didn’t know when I would see her again.

  When I was finished I looked into my cup, at the cocoa mix that had created a ring of darkness around the bottom of the paper, and said, “So, basically, I’m fucked. My mother’s still on the lam. If I go back to her, I go back to living this crazy lie. My dad and sister have dropped off the face of the earth. And Dot has her own kid to raise.”

  Ali just kind of whistled a little when I was done. “Shit, that’s some madness.”

  I nodded, biting my lip, looking around now for eavesdroppers. It struck me how stupid this was, to tell him this story across from the State House. I couldn’t have picked a worse place to spill my guts. Ali put his arm around me and knuckled my head with his other hand. My head was pressed to his chest, and I could smell his sweat mingled with laundry detergent. It was the same smell as Nicholas’s—the smell of a boy whose mother still washes his clothes.

  I heard his voice say, “And you have no leads for your dad and sis?”

  “Nope. Zilch. It’s like they never existed.”

  Two silver-haired men walked past Ali and me at a fast clip. They wore dark suits and talked with their heads close, their brows furrowed over something important. They were officials of some sort, on the wrong side of history, as my mother would put it, that side that was well-documented and well-portrayed. I wondered if they had ever been angry enough about anything to bend the rules, had ever been tempted to forgo their birthrights and switch their fates the way my mother had. Her brother, Randall, had accepted the fate he was assigned with a smirk of indifference. He had become the man they all expected him to be, and his rebellions had been negligible, infractions within some boundary of forgiveness—some boundary my mother had crossed. It wasn’t clear why she had been the one to cross over, cross out, and not Randall—if it was simply a roll of fat that had sent her to the other side, or something beyond that, something that she had understood about the world that the rest had been blind to.

  Ali was quiet, and I watched his long dark fingers as they tore apart the paper cup he had been drinking from. They were delicate fingers, with big knobby knuckles, fingers I could watch all day. Gleaming silver cars swished by us on Beacon Street, and pale somber faces looked out at us from their heated chariots. They saw a dirty and bruised white girl and a black teenage hoodlum—the illusions that were our skins—sitting before a landmark, a historical monument, a Negro battalion.

  Ali said, his voice breaking slightly, “They were friends, weren’t they?”

  “Who were friends?”

  “My dad and your dad. They were friends.”

  Confused, I nodded. We had already had this conversation. I didn’t feel like reminiscing about our fathers’ friendship again, about two disappearances.

  “They were real tight?” he asked, now turning his head away from me to squint into the distance, as if waiting for someone who was late.

  I said, “Yeah, don’t you remember? My mother used to call them Beauty and the Beast, ‘cause your dad was so fine and my dad was so twisted.”

  He laughed a little, but it was a strained laugh, like his mind was on other things.

  Finally, he looked at me and said, “All right, Birdie. I lied. My dad isn’t missing and he isn’t dead. He’s alive and well and he lives not too far from here. So if you want to talk to him, you can. Maybe he’ll know where your pops is.” He looked down. “I’m sorry I lied and shit. I didn’t know how serious this all was. I just don’t talk to him no more. Can’t stand the punk. But I know where he is. So you want to see him, or what?”

  HIS FATHER’S HOUSE was within walking distance. I felt only a slight spark of hope as we made our way up Spruce Street in the toniest section of Beacon Hill. Ali’s mouth was turned down in tension, and his eyes scanned the street as if he were trying to remember his way. I didn’t know why he had lied to me, and for all I knew he was still lying. I knew only that I had nothing to lose by following him—no other leads. I tried not to think what I would do if Ronnie knew nothing—or simply didn’t exist, was a figment of Ali’s imagination. Then my father and sister would be truly lost to me, and I hadn’t begun to imagine a future beyond that point.

  Ali walked so fast I had to jog to catch up. Finally he halted before a small crooked townhouse with blue-gray shutters. Yellow lights filtered through curtained bay windows.

  We stood for a moment before the house, our breaths visible in the cold air. It looked like Randall’s old house. I wondered how Ali’s father—a documentary filmmaker the last time I saw him—was able to afford to live here. I figured it was better not to ask.

  Instead I whispered, “So, this is where he lives?” I wasn’t sure why I was keeping my voice low, but it seemed appropriate.

  Ali jerked his neck and seemed almost surprised to see me next to him. “Yeah. Pretty spiffy, huh? Well, come on.”

  I rang the doorbell, and we waited. After a few minutes, someone’s crisp footsteps were heard, and there was a pause as someone peered at us through the peephole. I tried to look respectable. Ali looked at the ground. The door opened, and a silver-haired white man with sharp blue eyes, a white oxford shirt, and khakis stood staring at us. He held a tumbler in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Billie Holiday crooned behind him. He was not Ali’s father. That was clear. Ali’s father didn’t exist, I thought, and saw my future in an instant: me, once again at Braddock Park, leaning into a Cadillac, my foot raised behind me to reveal the sole of a scuffed red pump jemson.

  “Ali.” The man had a British accent and he said the name slowly, as if he were making a statement of great weight and consequence. Ali just looked away, down the street, as if he couldn’t bear to look at the man. I smiled anxiously to make up for Ali’s clear disdain.

  For a moment it seemed that Ali was going to change his mind, call the whole thing off, but then he spoke: “Is my pops here, Gideon? I need to see him about something.”

  A faint smile crossed Gideon’s lips. “Of course. Come in.”

  I paused at the doorway, fighting a brief paranoid fantasy that Ali was leading me to the Feds. That would explain why he was acting so strange, why he avoided my eyes. He felt guilty to be handing me
over to my captors. I imagined they had spoken earlier and decided this would be their ruse, their code message: to ask for Ali’s pops.

  But I entered the hallway behind him anyway, handing myself over to fate. The decor was familiar, a disheveled Wasp chamber like the Marshes’ or my own fallen family’s. But this was somehow brighter, as if it only referred to that shabby aesthetic, then strived beyond it. Gideon told us to wait while he went to get Ronnie. Then he disappeared, leaving us in a film of gray smoke from his cigarette.

  Ali leaned against the doorway, staring at his boots as if they held great secrets. Since he wasn’t talking, I wandered in and began to examine the pictures that lined the walls. They were familiar images: a boy dribbling on a basketball court; muscular young men on a street corner, turning hostile glances at the camera; a child picking at a scabbed knee; a group of girls playing double dutch. They were not original in their subjects, yet there was something macabre about the way they had been shot, something slightly haunting. The light fell on the bodies like a coat of ice, and the eyes were dazed, glassy. It looked as if Medusa were in fact the photographer and these unwitting subjects had been turned to stone, reduced to this moment, stopped in the act of whatever they were doing last.

  From upstairs, someone turned down the volume of the jazz. After a moment, a man emerged from the shadows of the hallway to greet us.

  Even as a child I had recognized Ronnie’s beauty. Now I could see that it had deepened with age. There were only slight crows’ feet at the edges of his eyes. He wore a white tank top, blue jeans that hugged his slender hips, and flip flops revealing perfect feet with neatly clipped, shaped, and buffed nails.

  He leaned against the doorjamb as he took a long drag from his cigarette, then said to Ali as he let out a curling breath of smoke, “Surprise, surprise.”

  I felt myself fading into a backdrop. Ronnie said to his son, “To what do I owe this great honor?”

  There was a thick silence as the two men surveyed each other, Ali with narrowed, contemptuous eyes, his father blinking, almost amused. Finally Ali said quietly, “I’m not here to see you. I’m here to introduce you to someone.”

  His father looked at me through a veil of nicotine as if he had just noticed my presence.

  He came toward me, brushing past Ali, who flinched away from his father’s body as if it held electric currents that would shock him. Ronnie extended a hand to me, and I took it.

  He clearly didn’t recognize me.

  Ali was quiet, so I said, “I’m Birdie. Birdie Lee.”

  Ronnie blinked a little coldly for a moment, men a smile crept into his expression and he yelled, “My God, Deck’s daughter! I remember you.” And he opened his arm, engulfing me in an embrace. I felt the same sense of relief I had felt upon seeing Dot for the first time, upon her recognition of me.

  Beaming now, I glanced back at Ali. He stood hunched and uncomfortable, hiding in the corner. He seemed to have lost his looks after entering the house. He had become small and tortured, a sneer of disgust marring his usually delicate face. He said to me, “Listen, Birdie, this is on you. I brought you here. Now I gotta go.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my mom’s. This shit is crazy.”

  I looked at his father, who just shrugged a little sadly. “Ali doesn’t want to be seen near me. He finds me revolting.” There was a hint of Gideon’s British accent under Ronnie’s voice, and I remembered then that he had been making a film on race tensions in Brixton the last time I’d seen him at the Nkrumah School. Back then he had been railing about the limits of black American politics, about how he, too, wanted to go international. He must have found Gideon on his travels.

  I didn’t want Ali to leave. Whatever I found out, I didn’t want to be alone with it. I pleaded with him, “Just hang around for a while, Ali. Please? It’s important.”

  He stared down at me a little coldly, looking just like his father in that flash of disdain. But I must have sounded desperate because he mumbled, “Okay, okay. But I can’t stay long.”

  His father led us into the living room. A framed poster of Diana Ross, looking like an afroed and emaciated princess, hung over the mantelpiece, reminding me of Corvette. The decor had more funk than the hallway had let on. Candles stood in tall, gothic holders, and African cloths were strewn everywhere. An old hood from a yellow taxi cab was propped against one of the walls beside a lumpy green velvet sofa. Inside, the photographs continued, a series of portraits—all shades of black folks—with the word “Miscellaneous” scrawled in huge letters across their faces. Ali went immediately to a corner chair, slumped down, and stuck his nose into a book of primitive art.

  Gideon appeared briefly to bring out a bottle of wine and a platter of crackers with expensive, smelly cheese. He stood staring at Ali with a clear fascination. “The unprodigal son,” he said before clucking his teeth and disappearing back into the kitchen.

  After Gideon had gone, Ronnie settled back in his armchair across from us, cradling a wineglass in his hands, his legs stretched out before him.

  I ignored the unfolding family drama and set into devouring the food and wine Gideon had placed in front of me. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, before my mother’s near-arrest. I took large gulps of the wine, as if it were grape juice. I glanced up as I refilled my glass, and Ronnie was watching me. I felt self-conscious and slowed down on the food. I wasn’t sure how to begin.

  Ronnie said with a curious smile, “I always wondered how you and your sister would turn out. I remember your mother telling me how worried she was about you at the school, how the other kids were giving you trouble.”

  I hung on to his words, my own proof that I hadn’t been making up this past. The wine I had put back so quickly made me slightly dizzy, a little queasy, but I strained to stay alert. Ronnie went on, not pausing to wonder why I was there.

  “I used to see you in the crowd of other kids, when I’d come to pick up Ali.” He gave Ali a meaningful look, then took a sip of his red wine. “You were like this pale speck in a dark circle. I remember thinking your parents were such great mad scientists, embarking on this marvelous, ambitious experiment with you and your sister. I guess we all were back then. But I always wondered how it would turn out.”

  He stopped laughing abruptly and said to Ali, “How’s your mother? And Lou?”

  Ali glanced up from the book he appeared to be reading and said, coldly, “Everything’s fine. They’re fine. But this isn’t a family reunion. We’re here on business. I’m just trying to help Birdie.”

  A slight, barely perceptible hurt registered on Ronnie’s face, then he waved his hand at his son and said to me, trying to smile, “He’ll regret all this some day, when I’m on my death bed and he’s got less testosterone flowing through him. You’ll see. He’ll regret all of this childishness.”

  Ronnie leaned in close to me and whispered, “He saw me downtown the other day. He was with a bunch of his little ruffian friends. I was with Gideon. He ignored me. He looked right past me as if he didn’t know me from Adam. But some of his friends saw me and shouted names. Now that was a sheer delight.”

  Ali rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, you could act normal. You don’t have to act like such a fucking faggot. It makes me sick.”

  Ronnie sighed. “You’re right, Ali. I don’t have to act like this. I could do what I did for all those years and play the straight man.” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. I noticed his hands were trembling. He glanced at me. “Shit, I got so good at playing that part of the positive brother I could have won an Emmy. But I’m not going back. This is the father you were born with, Ali. I’m sorry.”

  I kept my eyes to the floor, twisting a napkin around my hand like a bandage. Ronnie’s was a familiar story to me. The women of Aurora often had talked about what lies they had lived as Stepford wives—before they had become real, roaring, natural women. I thought about Bernadette and my mother, their blatant kisses and hugs and nude romps to the lake. Abou
t Alexis and me, our games of honeymoon. In the context of Aurora, it had come to seem as natural as anything else. And it was my mother’s affair with Jim, not with Bernadette, that had disgusted me. I wondered if Ali would turn against me if he knew my full story, if he knew all the worlds I had lived in, worlds I still carried inside of me now.

  Ronnie settled back in his chair, and we all were quiet for a few minutes.

  “Well, whatever happened to Sandra Lee?” Ronnie finally said. “The blue blood turned black-and-blue blood.” He chuckled at his own joke. “She was a real loose cannon. I always liked her for that.”

  His face turned serious, a little sad, as he said, “They all disappeared that year. We used to call them the Boston Four. Hassan. That Jane chick. Your mother. And of course, Linda, the Puerto Rican bull dyke. I heard rumors that Linda was turned in a few years ago—by her own lover, mind you. They were living in Berkeley together. Crazy. Heard she got fourteen years. She’ll probably die in there. And for what? It’s a shame, a crying shame.”

  I felt a sharp pain in my stomach and bent over. My mouth began to water. I was going to be sick.

  Ronnie was still talking: “Such bullshit. I mean, really. Those Cointelpro motherfuckers killed the best people we had, or at least sent them into hiding, where they couldn’t do shit to help— Hey, you all right?”

  I stood and held the back of the chair to steady myself.

  I glanced down at the half-eaten roll of cheese, green and blue lumps, a marshy smell wafting up from it. I put a hand over my mouth. “I’m sick—” I managed to say before rushing into the hall and into a small cubby bathroom under the stairs, instinct telling me where it was.