Caucasia

by Danzy Senna

  He went on, oblivious to the expression on my face: “Anyway, it wasn’t like I had a lot of time on my hands to go searching for someone who didn’t want to be found. I’ve been working on this book. The book is all I’ve been able to do for the past few years. And I had all this information I’d gotten in Brazil, data I needed to put into writing. The book just devoured me. Ate me alive.” He paused, laughed shortly. “Seven hundred pages, baby. It’s done. Pretty much, that is. Except for the footnotes on the last chapter. I think it’s ready.” He smiled at me. “You can see it if you want.”

  He was speaking, but somehow I wasn’t registering his words. “See what?”

  “See the book, baby. Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing all this time?”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of foreign brown cigarettes. “I don’t show it to too many people anymore. I mean, not after that derivative son-of-a-bitch, Chip Dewey, tried to tout my ideas as his own. I try to keep it pretty quiet. You learn your lessons the hard way. But I’d like for you to see it.” He lit up his cigarette, squinting into the haze. “Come on.”

  Then he was striding toward the study, Spanky and me at his heels.

  The study was dark now, with only a bar of light from the street making the silhouettes of objects visible. The window where I had climbed in was still open, and from the shortwave radio came the voice of a British reporter—a man, this time—talking in quick excited tones about the massacres in Central America. My father turned on a lamp in the corner and went to a battered black file cabinet, which he unlocked and began to rifle through.

  He finally pulled out his manuscript—the whole thing. He handed all seven hundred pages to me, smiling, as if it were a gift, as if I would be ecstatic to receive it. I took it with both hands and looked down at the cover page.

  The Petrified Monkey:

  Race, Blood, and the Origin of Hypocrisy

  by Deck Lee

  And beneath all of that a big copyright sign beside the year 1982.

  He said, “There’s been some interest, but people are scared of this book. They know I’m on to something. All those Negroes in the academy publish the same old drivel every year, talking the same tired talk year after year, and nobody wants to hear something new. Man, those fools are a broken record, singin’ the same old song, dancin’ the same old dance we’ve been doing since 1863.”

  He seemed to remember I was there and said, “Anyway, this is what I’ve been doing all this time. It really did take over everything. Ask Cole. She’ll tell you.”

  I looked at him. He was smiling rather sweetly, as if he truly believed that this had made up for his absence.

  I cleared my throat, just now finding my tongue.

  “Papa, do you even know where I’ve been? Do you even care? I’ve been living as a white girl, a Jewish girl. I’ve waited and waited, and I kept the box of crap you gave me. But you never came.” I paused. I was hugging myself, my fingernails digging into the thickness of the coat, but still I wasn’t crying. “I passed as white, Papa.”

  He was frowning at me, and I thought he was going to go into a tirade about the evils of passing. But he only shrugged and said, “Of course I care where you’ve been, Birdie. I want to hear all about it. I love you. Of course. But baby, there’s no such thing as passing. We’re all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. It’s a costume. We all wear one. You just switched yours at some point. That’s just the absurdity of the whole race game.” He was turning professorial on me again.

  He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. “That’s how big a fucking blunder they’ve made, baby,” he said. “And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it’ll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It’ll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same again.”

  Listening to him talk, it struck me that the most terrifying thing about my father was not that he was wrong, but that he was right, no matter how rarely he actually looked me in the eye.

  Now he looked me in the eye, disarmingly. I was taken aback. He said, “And the worst thing is when you realize your whole life’s work is going to have to be about correcting somebody else’s four-hundred-year-old mistake. Now if that don’t cause some existential angst, I don’t know what will.” His voice sounded thick and weary as he added, “I’m telling you, it’s the myth of fucking Sysiphus.”

  He looked old to me, older than his years, and I had a brief pang of worry that he was sick. His skin didn’t look as brown as it once had. More gray. And his eyes had a yellowish cast to them. While he once had seemed tall to me, he now looked stooped and slight.

  He smiled a little and said, “Let me show you something.”

  He took my arm and led me toward the living room, the one room I hadn’t had a chance to investigate. It was shabby, but neat, with a plaid sofa and a small fake-wood coffee table. There was tinfoil on the television antenna, and the news was playing with the sound turned off. On the wall near the bookshelf hung an elaborate chart my father had made, a chart with the words “Canaries in the Coal Mine” written in black magic marker at the top. It depicted a row of pictures of mulattos throughout history—some of whom I remembered from the walls of the Nkrumah School, others from my father’s old study at Boston University. I recognized Alexander Pushkin, Phillipa Schuyler, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer—Xeroxed photographs of their sallow faces above the dates of their lives, and beneath that their “fates,” brief descriptions of their desolate or violent deaths: Pushkin, shot in a duel; Nella Larsen, obscure and poverty stricken, with no records of her birth and no obituary to mark her death; Phillipa Schuyler, the child genius of the Harlem Renaissance, passing as white, in a firelight in Vietnam. The last column of the chart was a snapshot of Cole and me when we were eight and eleven, holding hands and grinning in front of my father’s house in Roxbury, a grainy and slightly blurred photograph revealing the street around us as dilapidated and urban. On the chart, my father had handwritten our names, Birdie and Cole Lee, beside our birth dates. For Cole, 1964; for me, 1967. Under the last column, where the others had their fates written, there was a blank space.

  He explained to me his theory—that the mulatto in America functions as a canary in the coal mine. The canaries, he said, were used by coal miners to gauge how poisonous the air underground was. They would bring a canary in with them, and if it grew sick and died, they knew the air was bad and that eventually everyone else would be poisoned by the fumes. My father said that likewise, mulattos had historically been the gauge of how poisonous American race relations were. The fate of the mulatto in history and in literature, he said, will manifest the symptoms that will eventually infect the rest of the nation.

  He pointed to the chart. “See, my guess is that you’re the first generation of canaries to survive, a little injured, perhaps, but alive. And,” he said, smiling, “it’s a good thing you showed up—”

  Something in my face made him stop.

  “What is it?” he said, reaching out to touch my hair.

  He was as mad and brilliant as Ronnie had described. He was the same father who had started me, who had begun but had never finished me. The same father who cared more for books and theories than he did for flesh and blood. There was a smell of burning in the air, burning Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, but neither of us moved to get it.

  I heard myself say, “Fuck the canaries in the fucking coal mines. You left me. You left me with Mum, knowing she was going to disappear. Why did you only take Cole? Why didn’t you take me? If race is so make-believe, why did I go with Mum? You gave me to Mum cause I looked white. You don’t think that’s real? Those are the facts.”

  I knew I sounded out of control, but I couldn’t stop myself. I scoffed, looking at the chart, my face and Cole’s face on the bottom of this row of history’s victims. Something t
hat had been pushing from the inside cut through just then. The words came out of my mouth, fast and harsh, like my mother’s. “You think this makes up for anything? This silly chart? Your big book of numbers? I waited for you all this time. I believed you were coming back. But you never even planned to. You knew it was for good, but you didn’t care. Mum’s right. You are an overintellectualized creep.”

  He frowned at me for a moment. Then he glanced at the chart beside himself as if to find answers in the faces of those ragged specimens. Not finding them, he said, “The food’s burning,” and turned to go to the kitchen.

  I followed him and stood against the doorjamb, staring at a spot on the linoleum, while he tried to resuscitate dinner.

  He pulled the macaroni out of the oven and began to scrape the burned edges off as he spoke, haltingly, his face turned down.

  “It wasn’t just me. You’re mother was in on it, too. It was a decision we made the week before we split. You’d go with her, I’d take Cole. We didn’t know whether we’d be able to meet up again. Things were dangerous then, bad as they’d ever been in Boston. Worse than it was after the Civil War. It was the only way. Cole couldn’t have gone with your mother. Not just for safety issues, imagining there were any. But also because it just wasn’t working out. Cole needed a black mother. It was important to her.”

  He turned to me, his hand in a flowered cooking mitt, the now-mangled TV dinner thrust toward me like some strange peace offering. He looked me in the eye, and I thought I sensed some sadness as he said, “Man, in America, that’s the kind of decision you gotta make.”

  He let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, then said to himself, “And wouldn’t you know it? Cole turned out to be as different from me as any child could be.”

  We just watched each other silently, and I saw that the food in his hand had begun to tremble. His face was a browner, older version of my own.

  He put the food on the counter, seeming exhausted. “So, you want to see Cole.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I want to see her.”

  “Well, let’s eat first.”

  He fixed me a plate and poured me a glass of Coke. We sat at the small table under the bright glare of the kitchen light, eating our macaroni and cheese in a polite, strained silence. The Coke was flat, but the food was good in an artificial kind of way. I was hungry, but there was a lump in my throat that made it hard to swallow. He ate the way he always had, with one eyebrow raised and his head cocked to one side, as if weighed down with thoughts. He glanced at me from time to time, scanning my face, then looked back at his food. When we were finished he said, “You know, you look a little like my mother. I never noticed that before. Same skinny body, broad shoulders. Same eyes.”

  HE INSISTED THAT he drive me there. He said he wouldn’t want me out on the Oakland streets alone, and besides, I was sick. Even he could see that. It was raining softly now, a pattering of moisture on concrete. He put on a gray Members Only jacket, a fashion that had gone out of style many years before. I noticed that all of his clothes were like this—an assortment of styles that were three years too late, and that fact somehow touched me, warmed me to him, against my will.

  He brought out an old-fashioned big black umbrella, and the two of us huddled together under it as we made our way to his brown Chevy Citation. Inside, it smelled like cigarettes and stale air freshener. I wondered what had happened to the orange Volvo after he had left for Brazil. This car was so different, so American, like something Jim would drive.

  I rested my head on the glass of the window as he started up the engine.

  I asked him, “So, what happened to Carmen?”

  He snorted through his nose as he pulled away from the curb. “Carmen. She’s long gone. After we got back from Brazil, we had had just about enough of each other. We didn’t have much in common, you know. She didn’t care about ideas. She just wanted the comforts of life. I guess she’s still living in Atlanta, down near her folks. Last I heard she got married to some clown, a radio celebrity.”

  The thought of her—the way she had made me want to disappear—still angered me. I wondered if my father knew. Someday I’d tell him.

  He drove me around for the next forty-five minutes, weaving through the streets of Oakland at a snail’s pace. I fidgeted beside him, afraid I’d miss Cole if we didn’t get there soon. Afraid she’d disappear into thin air. He said he was taking me on the long route so I could get a chance to know the neighborhood, but really he didn’t seem to notice the neighborhood. He was too busy talking, lecturing to me about the world, politics, race. The same thing he had always done. This time, though, it seemed he was actually speaking to me, rather than to the air or to my sister or to Carmen.

  He talked in circles, pointing at people on the streets as if they proved his theories right—women dragging their children roughly behind them, men lined up around a block for a soup kitchen, beggars pushing grocery carts full of junk. He told me that the only ones who had benefited from the civil rights movement were the black middle class and white women. He said that the movement had failed the poor. He said racism mattered, but that it was being exploited by the elite. “Birdie, do you understand what I’m telling you? These overeducated pompous Negro fools in the academy have everything, and still want to feel like victims. They’re addicted to racism, because once you got money and the approval of the white academy, you need something to remind you that you’re not a total sellout.” He said it was the same with rich white women who had black maids at home, caring for their children. “They need to talk about sexism because without it they’d have to admit what side they’re really on. You get what I’m saying?”

  I got what he was saying, but I also knew what I had seen and heard in New Hampshire. Who I had become. That was as real as anything else. I looked at the projects we now passed. Mothers with baby carriages and grocery bags tried to get in from the rain. Looking at them, I remembered how when I was little, I used to think that socialism meant that everyone got free umbrellas when it was raining outside. I thought that in a socialist country, whenever it rained, a big truck would drive through the center of town throwing black umbrellas and yellow raincoats to die people in the streets. I don’t know where I’d gotten that picture. I don’t know why I’d fixated on umbrellas.

  “Have you ever read Fanon?” my father was saying. I nodded. My mother had drummed Fanon’s teachings into me when we were on the road. I opened my mouth, about to quote Black Skin, White Masks—to show off just how well I knew Fanon—but my father cut me off. He said that Fanon hated black women and only wanted power over them. He said that Fanon was proof of what Simone Weil wrote: When the weak get together, they mimic the actions of the formerly powerful. “Now Simone Weil,” my father said, “she was a real radical. You should read her if you want to hear what a truly great mind has to say.”

  I smiled slightly to myself, thinking how alike my parents still were. My mother had read aloud to me from Simone Weil one night in the parking lot of a Ground Round. I had been too tired to listen, but remembered her name just the same. We had been planning on sleeping in the van that night, behind the Ground Round, but sometime past midnight we were awakened by a security guard banging on our window. He told us he was going to call the cops if we didn’t move. My mother had sped away, shouting curses and waving her middle finger at him.

  My father went on, making me a little dizzy as he discredited one revolutionary after another. After a while I didn’t really register what he was saying, just the sound of his voice bouncing off the glass, and the rhythmic squeal of the windshield wipers. Eventually he seemed to tire of talking, seemed to be broken by the weight of his own thoughts. He grew quiet, pensive. He drove like an old man, signaling long before the lights.

  I stared out the window at the crooked streets and miserable pedestrians who huddled under bus stop awnings. The lights and colors seemed somehow seedy and beautiful in this black night. My father turned on the radio to a news station and listened to t
he woman speak about Reagan’s latest welfare cuts, with his head tilted to the side, his brow furrowed in grim concentration.

  He broke the silence for only one brief moment, when we sat at a stoplight on University Avenue. “Your mother. How is Sandy these days?”

  I had seen her face just the day before, but it seemed long ago, some other girl’s life story. I had glimpsed her face behind the car glass, moving away in Jim’s Buick, and she hadn’t seemed well at all. But I said to my father, “She’s okay. She’s got a new man. She’s doing just fine.”

  “Where is she? Did she settle down somewhere?”

  I looked out the window at a bag man on the sidewalk. He stood like a sculpture, hair matted into dripping dreadlocks, feet great stumps of brown cloth, a trash bag wrapped tightly around him. I wondered where his mother was. Who had let him come to this. I knew where my mother was, but wasn’t allowed say. I didn’t trust my own father with that information. So I said, “I don’t know.”

  He was quiet, tapping his fingers to some beat against the steering wheel. We started to move at the green light, and he said, “I miss her.”

  COLE LIVED IN A wood house that was set back from the narrow ramshackle street. As my father pulled in front of Cole’s house, I tried to imagine this sister I would meet. No image came to mind. It was as if all those fantasies that had kept me moving had dissolved upon seeing this flesh father, this crumpled cerebral outcast.

  I turned to him. The motor was still running.

  “Are you coming inside?”

  Even as I said it, I hoped he wouldn’t. I still remembered that whenever they came together, I disappeared.

  He looked at me across the darkness of the car. “No, Birdie. You go alone. She’ll want to see you alone.”