Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  I threw up all of Gideon’s fancy cheese, my hands resting on the rim of the toilet seat while my head grew heavy. After I was finished, I went to the sink to wash up. The bathroom wallpaper was made of red velvet; it gave my face a rosy tint in the antique mirror. I thought of Linda’s fate—fourteen years behind bars. Was that the same fate my mother would have faced? Perhaps Dot had been wrong. Perhaps something real had made us run; it had not been just in my mother’s head. I remembered her hissing to me one night in bed, while the New Hampshire air sat still and black and starry beyond the glass: You think I’m making this up? You think this is some little game we’re playing here? Trust me, these boys don’t play. They want me. I know it for a fact. They want to make an example of me. There are political prisoners rotting away right now because they dared to stand up. People dying in prison. Women. They don’t care if you’ve got children or a family. They’re ruthless motherfuckers. Believe me.

  Deep down, I hoped my mother had done something. I hoped that she was bad and brave and guilty as charged. I wanted her to be involved in something that had changed history, not just me. And it struck me as I stared at my rouge reflection that I might have told Ali too much. For all I knew he was telling his father right now. I had no idea who any of these men really were—just who they once had been. My mother’s words: Trust nobody. Nobody is beyond suspicion. Nobody.

  I went back into the living room. Ronnie had vanished, and Ali sat with his head tilted back in the chair, his eyes closed. I didn’t believe, really, that either Ali or Ronnie was to be feared, but at that moment I saw everything through the prism of my mother’s rules.

  I hissed, “Ali!”

  He jumped awake with a start and looked at me. “Are you feeling okay?”

  I nodded and glanced around me before whispering, “What I told you about my mother. Forget it. Everything I said. You hear me?”

  He nodded, looking slightly frightened of me. My face was still dripping with water, and I was shivering.

  I said, “Did you tell your dad already?”

  “No,” he said, seeming surprised at such a prospect.

  “Well, don’t—” I started to say.

  Ronnie came back in just then with a tumbler of something more serious—Scotch, I could see, from the bottle he held in his other hand. He looked at me. “You drank too much wine. You were gulping that down like it was water.”

  I sat back down on the couch. “Sorry.” I glanced back at Ali with my fiercest look of warning.

  Ronnie said, “So, whatever happened to your mother? Or is that top secret—”

  “I don’t know. I mean, you tell me. She disappeared years ago.” I paused. “Do you really think she was in serious trouble?”

  Ronnie scoffed. “Of course she was. I don’t have any proof. But there was talk that she was caught planning something big and had to split. Had to disappear. And you know, once you’re on their list, you stay on their list. Forever. That’s not the kind of thing they forget about.”

  Ronnie’s words sounded like the truth. And his story fit in with what I remembered of Redbone and the men in the night. Dot had seemed conviced otherwise. But she always had been more spiritual than political. Most of her friends didn’t even read the newspaper. It brought with it too much negative energy. Ronnie had been closer to the movement, I told myself. His story was the one I wanted to believe.

  He asked where I had been all these years. And as always, my story flowed. “I’ve been away at boarding school. My grandmother put up the cash.”

  He seemed to know I was lying and winked at me as he said, “Well, I hope Ms. Sandy’s safe, wherever she is. Give her my regards if you see her.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Now, what did you need help with? Gideon and I have plans for the evening.”

  I was running out of time. I said, “Have you heard from my father? I’m looking for my father and my sister. I know they’re in Brazil, but I was wondering if you’d heard from them.”

  Ronnie stared at me blankly for a moment, as if I were speaking in tongues. Then he stood up and began to pace. Finally he turned to me and laughed a little abruptly, as if he saw something funny on my face: “Well, hon, as a matter of fact, I saw your dad.”

  I stopped breathing. “You were in Brazil?”

  He looked down at me. I couldn’t read his expression. “So, you mean you haven’t seen them in all this time?”

  I shook my head.

  He turned away from me. “Baby, your papa didn’t spend more than two years in Brazil. I bumped into him in San Francisco just a few years back. I was, you know, just walking down through the Mission when I saw this familiar figure coming out of a library, carrying a pile of books. I stared at him, then said, ‘Shit, if it isn’t Deck Lee!’”

  I wanted to get up and leave then, just walk away from the story this man was telling me. For the first time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the truth. Ignorance had been my bliss. Lies had become my only comfort. But something held me to the chair, and I watched Ronnie dumbly from my seat, not even blinking. Even Ali had perked up to listen in.

  “Yeah, it was Deck, all right. I mean, he was always a little, well, how should I put it?” He flashed me a bright smile. “A little intense about his ideas. Well, girl, let me tell you, your pops was more obsessed than ever. With his own high-falutin’ ideas about color and class and all that shit. He wouldn’t talk of anything else. He didn’t seem to notice how I had changed until about ten minutes into our conversation—or, I should say, his conversation—that I was wearing platforms and I was looking kind of fierce.”

  Ali made some racket behind me—a chair moving and a grunt in the back of his throat. He had his face in his hands now, and was rocking his head back and forth slowly, as if in great pain. I thought, a little guiltily, that I should have let him go home when he asked.

  Ronnie shook his head, then continued: “Anyway, as I was saying, midway into this conversation, Deck looks at me—really looks at me—and starts to laugh, this weird inside kind of laugh. He said some shit that put me off—especially with us being old friends from the movement and all that. And then he was gone, down the street, blending in with the rest of the city. It was a strange encounter, but it was him, Birdie. He looked different—a little disheveled, unkempt—but it was definitely Mr. Deck Lee.”

  I spoke without feeling my lips move. “Did he say why he came back? Do you remember?” My fingers pressed into the cool glass in my hands.

  Ronnie sat back down, squinting at the floor, searching his mind before he spoke. “Yeah, I do remember. He said he’d been back since, like, 1977, I think. Brazil was a bust. You know how he thought it was going to be this Xanadu, this grand Mulatto Nation? Well, he said he’d been wrong. It wasn’t the racial paradise he thought it was going to be. There was some anthropological thing he had been looking for there called—what the hell was he calling it? Something crazy—your dad always was a genius. But he said the Brazilians were more racist than the Americans. He went on and on about it until he noticed my platforms. Then he wanted to get as far away from my faggot ass as he could.”

  Ronnie finished off what was in his tumbler and snorted, looking into the bottom of the empty glass as if to read tea leaves. “Your dad had changed. And I guess I had, too.”

  I blurted out, “Well, what about Cole? I mean, was he with my sister? Did he say anything about her?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember him saying anything about her. No mention of Carmen, either—”

  I barely let him finish. “Did he give you his address? His phone number?”

  Ronnie thought for a moment. “You know, as a matter of fact, I think he did give it to me. He said he was living in Oakland at the time. Who the hell knows if it’s still the right one. This was about two years ago. Wait right here.”

  He left Ali and me in the living room together. Ali was watching me. His scowl had passed, and he seemed to have returned to himself. He came and sat beside me on the c
ouch. “So, what’s up with that, Birdie? What are you gonna do?”

  I felt a little queasy still, and held my head in my hands. “I don’t know. I guess go find them. In Oakland.”

  “Get there on what? That takes dollars.”

  He was right. I would need money to fly to Oakland. Dot had so little, I wouldn’t want to ask her. And I was afraid to see my mother again, afraid that she would be able to stop me from leaving the next time, afraid I wouldn’t want to leave. I looked down at the fancy cheese on the table, and the half-finished bottle of expensive Scotch. Their smells were mingling into one, a sharp odor of aging delicacies that knocked me back to my grandmother’s house.

  Ronnie returned with a napkin in his hand. He handed it to me. “Here it is. Deck Lee. Hope he hasn’t moved.”

  I looked down at the napkin. It read, in Ronnie’s childish script: “Deck, 24 Brighton Street, Apartment #1, Oakland.” And a phone number.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, still staring in shock at the address. It seemed so simple and ordinary. Words and numbers on a napkin. No fireworks or smoke.

  Ronnie shrugged. “Yeah, well, you tell your pops I said hi if you see him.”

  At the door, he kissed me lightly on the cheek and whispered into my ear, “Take care of yourself, little sister.” Then he put out his hand to shake with his son. Ali hesitated, then accepted it, keeping his eyes fixed on their hands—his darker one, his father’s lighter—as they pumped together. His face was tense, concentrated, as if he were fighting to stay true to some inner hardness, but something in his eyes was beginning to thaw slightly, against his own will.

  Outside, Ali and I were quiet as we made our way past the Negro battalion, over the Common, and to the T station at Downtown Crossing. I was thinking. I had to call my father from a pay phone. Here and now. See if he really existed. Tell him I was coming to see him. Coming to be his daughter again.

  When we reached the entrance to the station, Ali asked me where I was going.

  I told him that I didn’t know, feeling more comfortable in this lie than I had ever felt in the truth. I warned him one more time that my mother’s whereabouts were a secret, and he nodded, solemn. I trusted him.

  He scribbled his phone number on a Prudential matchbook and handed it to me. “If you need help or anything, just call.”

  “Thanks, Ali,” I said, taking it from him. I crossed my arms and felt shy all of a sudden, as if I were saying good-bye on a first date. “I mean, thanks for bringing me to your father.” I paused, looking for the right words. “It was everything.”

  He smiled kind of crookedly, seeming embarrassed. “No problem, B.” He kicked the pavement with his combat boots. “It ain’t that deep, you know? It ain’t that deep.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but before I could ask, he was gone, striding away with his head bent against the cold, toward the Cheri 1-2-3 movie theater to meet his friends. He looked fragile from that distance, just a body buffeted by the wind, and I felt a burn of loss watching him go. I wished I had asked him to join me. But I hadn’t, and I knew, deep down, that the job was mine to do alone.

  After he was out of sight, I went in search of a pay phone. It was freezing outside now, and my throat felt raw. It was painful to swallow, and there was a pounding pressure in my ears. I didn’t know if it was from the retching at Ronnie’s house, or if I was getting some kind of flu. I found a phone at the entrance to an alley. At the far end, I could see a group of men huddled around a tin-can fire. Their laughter floated toward me, and it was somehow comforting in the night air. I held the phone in my hand for a while before dialing, whispering to myself, “Hello? This is your child. This is Birdie,” over and over in different tones of voice. Finally, when my hand was stiff with the cold, I dialed the operator. It would have to be a collect call. He owed me that much. The woman took my name and the number, and then there was the sound of ringing. I was biting my nails, my cheeks burning despite the frigid air. I thought maybe I’d just hang up at the sound of his voice. All I needed to know was that he was there. That he existed.

  Nobody picked up. After the sixth ring the operator told me I had to hang up. She said to try back later. I hung up and tried it again, twice, with two different operators. Both times the same thing happened. Nobody was home. Try back later.

  I felt someone behind me and turned. It was a man in an Army coat, watching me from the corner. He had red hair and red skin and was grinning. Redbone. He had found me. It was over. My mother had been telling the truth.

  But then, as my eyes focused, I saw it wasn’t Redbone at all. It was a white man with a windburned face and scraggly blond hair coming out from his ski cap. He was walking toward me, still grinning, his hands in his coat pockets. I was transfixed, frozen by his image, and I smiled slightly back, relieved it was nobody I knew. He was only a few feet away when I looked down at the movement in his wrists. His coat was moving apart, and there was a flash of flesh, of bristly red hair. I turned and fled toward the light of the T station.

  THE AIR AROUND Harvard Square, my mother used to say, has a particular smell. It’s the smell, she said, of hypocrisy. A smell she didn’t find in New Hampshire, among the working people who called a spade a spade, a spic a spic, a kike a kike. It was the smell of aging cheese and even older Scotch. A smell of dust embedded between yellowing history pages, of tobacco on stained fingertips. The smell of Cristalle perfume on a silk blouse, and lemon-scented cleaning solution on a pair of brown hands. That smell had been so strong to my mother that she was hardly able to breathe when she was around it, for fear of suffocation. She used to tell me and Cole to inhale when we drove for visits with my grandmother, over the Harvard Bridge that linked Boston to Cambridge; she would say, “Do you smell it, girls? Oh, God, it’s strong today.” And we would stick our faces out of the open window of the Pinto, the wind washing our faces, turning us numb as we tried to smell Cambridge. I did in fact catch something pungent hitting my nose then, and Cole did too. Bringing our heads back into the car, we would nod to our mother, wrinkling our noses, letting her know that she was not alone.

  She said she could see it if she looked hard enough, a low rolling cloud rising up from the sycamores and weeping willows and making its way across the silver surface of the Charles River, through Harvard Yard, and into the dank corners of Lowell and Quincy streets, to Brattle Street, where it still lived.

  The Square was bustling tonight with students and street musicians, a few homeless men waving freebie newspapers into the faces of the annoyed passersby. In front of Out of Town News, a crew of scruffy white teenagers in mohawks and ripped clothes smoked and performed dangerous tricks on skateboards. They reminded me of Nicholas—the person he might have been if he had escaped New Hampshire and his family. As I crossed Massachussetts Avenue, I scanned the faces for the Shirley Temple girl I had spotted just the day before from the bus window, but saw no one like her.

  Soon I had wandered away from the bright lights, populace, and music of the Square and was heading down the darker residential streets that led to my grandmother’s house. I felt nervous in the dark, alone, and imagined red-haired rapists dressed like Feds, waiting for me in the bushes. I found solace in trying to imagine my mother as she made her way home one dark night, after she had met my father, after he had asked her that question: Do you drink coffee at night? And I almost felt her beside me, young and fresh-faced and plump, carrying her copy of Camus’s notebooks under her arm, asking, “But why?” to some unanswerable question.

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE hadn’t changed much in the six years since I had seen it. The air around it was thick with the smoke of burning wood that floated out from chimneys. Her house was set far off the road and was hidden by the bars of sycamore branches, branches now bare and coated in a thin layer of ice. I shivered in front of the house, my teeth chattering, but the facts I had learned about my father distracted me from my body, from the flu I was now certain I had. Ronnie’s words had at first seemed to sharpen my life
, like a photograph coming into focus, but then had blurred it again, as if he had turned the lens just too far.

  I made my way up the walkway. A dark-green Volvo sat in the driveway, my grandmother’s ancient car, which she had rarely driven when I was around. She would be in her eighties now, and I wondered if she drove at all anymore. The car was proof that she still lived here, that she still lived at all.

  I crossed her lawn and reached the bottom of the steps leading up to her front door. On the first floor, the lights were on. My grandmother had been a grande dame of the social world of Cambridge—she might be having one of her famous dinner parties tonight. I imagined myself knocking, Edna answering, gray-haired now, and shepherding me into the dining room, where my grandmother would pause in mid-sentence at the sight of me, her long-lost grandchild. The chicken has come home to roost. The other guests would stare at me with bewildered expressions, wondering who this young ruffian standing before them was.

  Instead of risking this scenario, I prowled around the side of the house, scraping myself against the line of bushes. In the springtime, those bushes bloomed lilac and pink and yellow roses. On one ill-fated visit, Cole and I, in a game of mad scientist, tried to make them into perfume. While my mother and grandmother argued on the veranda, we cut a bunch of her best roses, brought them inside, and put the petals in a sealed plastic baggie, which we placed between the pages of my grandmother’s huge Encyclopaedia Britannica. We believed they would crush into a puddle of perfume. We brought the book to the top floor of the house and promptly dropped it out the window, where it sailed past my mother and grandmother on the veranda, and onto the lawn below. My grandmother scolded us harshly when she saw that the spine of the encyclopedia was broken; she told my mother we were being raised as savages and had no manners. But the roses did leave a kind of pasty perfume along the sides of the baggie, which my mother let us take home and put into a bottle with some water and alcohol. We soon forgot about it. Years later, we found the jar and opened it to the stench of mildew and fermented flowers.