by Danzy Senna
“Okay, then.”
He paused. “You can always come back to my place tonight, if you need to. If you don’t want to stay here. You got enough money for a cab?”
I nodded.
I couldn’t make out his expression, but his voice cracked slightly as he asked, “Will I see you again?”
Something told me to say no, to tell him I didn’t want to see him ever again, that he had been a bad, neglectful man, that he had let me go once and hadn’t earned the right to see me again.
But then my mouth said the words that seemed far more true: “Yes, Papa.”
We didn’t hug good-bye, just looked at each other as if agreeing on some unspoken rule, before I stepped out of the car.
And then he was gone, down the street at his old-man’s pace, cautious now as he had ever been.
I stood in front of the big house, looking up at the darkened windows, then went up the stairs. I hadn’t really slept in days and was moving on automatic. I felt a little lightheaded as I knocked on the door.
A woman who was not my sister answered. She was chubby and dark, with a big-toothed smile. She wore a long braid down her back and a man’s oxford shirt over jeans.
She waited for me to speak, and when I didn’t, she said, “Can I help you with something?”
“I’m looking for Cole Lee. Does she live here?”
The woman looked me up and down now, curious. “Sure does. But she’s not here right now.”
I choked the words “Please, I need to see her. It’s important. Where is she?”
I had expected somehow that the woman wouldn’t trust me, but she just smiled warmly. “Oh, not far. She’s studying for tests tomorrow. She’s at that café up on Shattuck. The one next to the bank.” She gave me directions. I could hear now that she had a slight Spanish accent. Then, perhaps realizing after the fact that she should have asked who I was, she said, “You a friend from school?”
I shrugged and looked out onto the street, where the parked cars sat wet and gleaming under the streetlights. “Yeah. We used to go to school together a long time ago.”
She looked ready to ask something when I abruptly thanked her and turned, stamping down the steps and into the rain.
I walked briskly in the direction she had pointed, over the shimmering asphalt, my hands shoved deep in my pockets. When I glanced down, I saw that worms carpeted the sidewalk, small lumps of unformed life waiting to be crushed. The sight of them, helpless, soft, identical, revolted me, and so I walked down the middle of the street to avoid killing them. I walked in long strides, nearly running, and at one point a car came around a corner and toward me, its lights on bright, blinding me for a moment. I stopped to let it pass, leaning against a parked car, but it splashed me just the same. The driver honked as it drove by, and I looked after it, the red taillights fading into the distance.
The rain against my face felt warm and dirty. It had soaked through the cashmere, so that my grandfather’s coat had grown heavier and cumbersome to walk in. This wasn’t how I had wanted her to see me. I looked at my reflection in a nearby car window. My hair had come out of its loose ponytail and hung in wet clumps around my face. I didn’t think she’d recognize me. The last time she’d seen me, I’d been neat and pressed, my hair in a tight braid, gold hoops in my ears. Now I looked a tattered wreck, gaunt and perilous and lost.
But I was there already, at the corner of Shattuck, and I saw the soft light of the café that the woman had described, saw that it was filled with people seeking shelter from the rain.
I hesitated, not sure whether to go inside. I considered just waiting outside, catching her on her way out. Just then, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find what I was looking for. But the cold was creeping in under the cashmere to my skin, and I had a pounding headache, like great waves crashing in my skull. So I walked into the café, letting the warm, rich smell of coffee surround me.
The door swung closed behind me, jingling a string of bells, and a few strangers looked up. They didn’t seem to see anything remarkable or horrifying in my face, and went back to their conversations without much pause. I stood there, stock still at the door, and scanned the room of hunched figures curved over newspapers and books and one another, steam rising up from their mugs, smoke from the cigarettes perched between their fingers.
She sat toward the back of the café, in a connected area with a glass roof, like a greenhouse. I recognized her immediately. She had my mother’s high forehead, my grandmother’s deep-set eyes—only on a light-brown girl with a tumble of thick black curls to her shoulders. She was sitting at the table with another girl, and she was laughing, a quiet laugh, at something the other girl, whose face I couldn’t see, had just said. She was sitting curled in on herself and holding a coffee mug between two hands like a prayer. She was the same at eighteen as she had been at twelve—the same anxious serious eyes, the same face that knew it was being watched—only her body, I could see even from that distance, was softer, a fuller and more womanly body than my own.
I remained at the door, blocking the entrance, my hands still in my pockets, just watching her across the steamy clutter of bodies. And I felt oddly content, as if I could stand there all night just watching, never being seen.
But she looked up then, abruptly, searching into the faces of the strangers who surrounded her, as if she had heard someone call her name. And as her eyes moved over my face, I felt a slight heat, like a match held close to the flesh, but not touching. Her eyes kept moving, past my face, not recognizing me, turning back to her friend with a lonely smile. She had seen me and not known me from the foreign bodies that surrounded her. And I thought I would leave then, just turn and walk into the unknown city, disappear like my mother. Perhaps it was enough to know where she was, to know she was safe, to know she was laughing with a friend. But then she glanced up from her table again, almost shyly. She glanced toward the girl at the door, the thin pale girl in the big man’s coat, at me, where I stood shaking and dripping and holding my breath. Her smile faded and she watched me, squinting, her eyes scrutinizing my features, searching them for something. Then seeing it, and lips parting and something breaking, a hand moving to touch the girl beside her, the girl whose face I couldn’t see, as if to warn the girl of some great danger. And we just watched each other then, watched for that minute when the whole restaurant seemed to grow quiet, grow still, the bodies around us melting into one another, into a blanket that surrounded us, and then I began to float toward the back of the café, like an apparition, a memory of myself, toward my sister, who rose to meet me.
WE PRESSED OUR bodies together for a long while, not talking or crying or trying to make sense out of anything. I could smell the oil from her hair, could feel the shine and crunch of her curls tickling my cheek. I saw nothing then but those yellow spots against the darkness of my eyelids, but I heard everything around me with a crystal clarity, the public noises that were somehow reassuring—spoons lightly clinking the sides of cups, an old man coughing up phlegm, the tinny rock music from the radio behind the counter. Those ordinary sounds solidified my sister in my arms.
When we parted, her face was wet and she looked crushed. She held me away from her and stared at my features hard, then at my hands, examined my long ones with her own delicate and trembling ones. Today she wore a bulky Irish sweater, and her eyes had turned a similar gray, with flecks of green still showing through. We hadn’t spoken yet, and it didn’t seem necessary. She held my hands (hers were warm, mine cold and stiff) and turned me toward the girl at die table, whom I hadn’t seen yet. The girl was the color of well-steeped tea and wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and her hair short like a boy’s. She smiled at me as if we too had known each other once before, and said to Cole, “She’s the one in the photograph, isn’t she?”
And Cole nodded, still clutching my hand, shadowing her eyes with her hand now, as if blocking out a bright light. “This is her,” she said in a quiet, throaty voice. “I’m going home with her now. We’ve got
some catching up to do.”
The girl laughed, and squeezed my sister’s hand. “Of course you do.”
She looked at me. “Cole’s been waiting for you. For a long time now.”
COLE DROVE A BUTTER-YELLOW Karmann Ghia with a punched-in nose and jungle-print seat covers. As she unlocked my door, she glanced at me, shy suddenly, and said, “You’re really big. I somehow thought you’d still be a kid.” Inside, the car smelled of dust and must, along with a slight lingering of something pungent and chemical, like development fluid in a darkroom. The rain made a hollow tin pattering on the roof.
As we sat waiting for it to warm up, I explained, “Papa brought me to your house. Your roommate told me you were here.”
She nodded. “He always said you’d come back, looking for us. But I didn’t believe him. I thought we should have been looking harder, you know. Not just waiting.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry, Bird. I didn’t know how. They made it so hard.”
I looked out at the café, at the bodies inside, sheltered, happy under that bright light, then repeated her words: “They made it so hard.”
We drove the short distance to her house without any more words, and she kept looking over at me, away from the road, as if afraid I would evaporate.
She was renting a room in the house on Grant Street, and inside it was comfortable, shabby, politicized. Two women—one black, one the heavy-set Latin-American woman who had answered the door—sat around the kitchen table, smoking and talking when we came in, a half-finished bottle of Chianti on the table beside a plate of chips and salsa. The older black woman had a toddler on her lap, a little boy with a wild dusty afro. His face was puffy with sleep.
Cole stood with me at the door, her arm around my shoulder. They looked at us and said expectant hellos, and the little boy screamed, perking up, “Cole! I’m Superman!” I thought of Taj in her Wonder Woman costume, and I missed her. I could see her and Dot here with me. I remembered I had promised to call them when I got here. Right now, though, I could talk only to Cole. I would call them tomorrow, to tell them I was safe. I knew I would have to contact my grandmother as well, but was dreading it. I would have to face up to my lie.
The woman who had answered the door earlier said to me, “Oh, good, you tracked Cole down.”
I nodded. Cole held me by her side as she said, beaming, “Alma, Simone, Jay, this is my sister. Birdie.”
They all paused, wide-eyed, and I could see they had heard of me. Cole had been able to talk about me to strangers. She hadn’t had to erase me completely. The women seemed excited to see me in the flesh, and gushed about how they had been hearing about me for so long. They offered me a cup of tea and some dinner, but I didn’t think I’d be able to hold anything down. I was still sick. I needed sleep. Cole took my hand and said to them, “We’re going upstairs now. Birdie’s tired. And we need to catch up.”
Her bedroom was at the top of the stairs. It was different from the rest of die house—austere, bare, and colorless, with a pale-blue duvet on the bed like the ones in my grandmother’s house. On her dresser were two photographs framed in silver. One of an older, thin, and ravaged man whom I now recognized as my father. Another of us at ages five and eight, in Halloween costumes. She’s Bugs Bunny, I’m Daffy Duck. My mother is crouched behind us with a tall, pointed witch hat on her head and a silly grin on her face. She had dressed up as one of the Salem witches that year.
I picked up the picture of my mother, Cole, and me, and looked at it, feeling a twinge of resentment that Cole had been able to keep everything exposed. It seemed strange to see us all together, out there in the open. My mother looked happy in the photograph, happy and fat and married to a man she loved, with two children she loved. I wondered what she was doing now. If she had come back to fetch me from Dot, or if she had been scared away by the run-in with the cops.
When I turned around, Cole was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She smiled softly. “There’s so much to say, huh?”
I nodded. “I know. I don’t know where to start.”
I went to her. We lay on the bed, facing each other. She began to speak to me then in broken Elemeno. At first I didn’t understand it, but then it began to come back to me.
simapho. nooli stadi. beltin caruse mestiz jambal. kez wannaba. fello mao-tao burundi. simapho. ki wo fela.
We talked about where each of us had been. I kept my story short. There was too much to say, so I settled for not saying much. There would be time for details later. I told her that my mother and I had traveled for years without going anywhere far, and that I had passed as white, if such a thing were possible.
She told me some of her story—how she, my father, and Carmen had gone to Brazil with such high expectations. But over those first few months in Rio, it had slowly dawned on them that the poor people living in the favellas resembled Africans, the rich people in power resembled Europeans, and everyone in the middle was obsessed with where they and their children would fall on the spectrum of color. Our father’s disappointment over this realization had tainted everything; he was no longer able to see what was beautiful about Brazil. And over time, Carmen had grown bored with his obsessions; she spent her days complaining about stomach pains, the lack of plumbing, and the flying cockroaches. Cole had been forced to spend most of her time alone, yearning for America, for Black America, whose pathology she at least could call her own. When they did finally return, Carmen had taken off to be with her family in the South. Cole had come to Oakland with our father, and had been living in the Bay Area ever since—just an ordinary American girl.
“But why didn’t you come to get me?” My throat went dry as I asked the question.
She had a lot of reasons, and she rattled them off while I listened, not convinced that any one of them was good enough. For a time, she believed our mother had killed herself when they left. Then she believed our mother was alive, but wouldn’t want her anymore. After all, why would she have let her go in the first place? And then there was always our father’s reasoning, which she had accepted as her own: It would put us in jeopardy if they searched for us.
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Cole. I did. I understood that it was a mixture of fear and lethargy that had kept her away. But the bottom line was that she hadn’t tried to find me. She had gone on with her life. I hadn’t been able to.
I had believed all along that Cole was all I needed to feel complete. Now I wondered if completion wasn’t overrated.
Cole looked at me. “Mum is okay, isn’t she?”
I nodded. “Yeah, Cole. She’s okay.”
She hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “I hated Mum for a long time. For leaving me. For letting me go. Then I hated myself. I blamed myself because I was so stupid and teenage and so mean to her. I picked Carmen—this woman I didn’t even know—over Mum ‘cause she could do my hair and she looked like a woman who could be my mother, and she wore lipstick and didn’t make scenes in public.”
As she spoke, I studied her face. She had something of me in her, though it wasn’t as visible as a bend in the nose, a curve of a lip, a slant of the eyes. It was something hidden, untouchable—an expression of someone who will always be waiting.
She said, looking away now, biting an already gnawed fingernail, “Did Mum want to find me?”
“Of course. She was never the same after you left,” I told her. “She did mantras every morning. She always believed you’d be back. But she was too scared to go looking.”
Cole stared up at the ceiling and sighed heavily. “There are others like her. Ones who did get caught. The sacrificial lambs of the movement. They’re the ones who made everything else possible. And the FBI is ruthless. They haven’t given up. They’ll let you die in there if you’re not careful. It happened to Timothy Dove, it happened to Maria Cabrera. I believe Mum. I do.” Cole wiped a tear away. “But mantras, Birdie? That wasn’t enough. She should have done more to find me. To contact me.” She was crying freely now, her face in her
hands, as she said, “They should have stuck together. They should have tried harder.”
I felt for her. I, too, hoped our mother had been for real. I wanted her to be one of the radicals whose names she had toyed with using that morning in the Maine diner: Grushenka, Tanya, Angela, Sojo. Instead she had become Sheila Goldman. And while her friends, at least some of them, had paid for living out their beliefs, my mother had gotten away with it. All I’d been left with was the charade itself; she’d been that good at it. It was strange, but her conviction could be her only vindication—the only way Cole and I would ever know for sure what her role in history had been. But at the same time, if she was for real, neither Cole nor I would ever want to see her caught.
I could see the night outside Cole’s window. It was thicker now, a more solid starless black. It had stopped raining. There were sycamore trees outside her window, and they brushed against it, the branches making tapping noises like fingers against glass.
I said, “I know they should have. And you know something? Now Papa says I’m not black or white anymore. He’s changed his tune completely. He’s stuck on this canary thing. It’s too much to keep up with.”
She laughed through the crying. “I know. Canaries in the coal mine. Choking on all the fumes.”
I giggled, thinking of the picture of Cole and me at the bottom of his chart. “He says there’s no such thing as race.”
She shrugged. “He’s right, you know. About it all being constructed. But”—she turned to me, looking at me intently—“that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
“I know it does,” I said, nodding. Something seemed to clarify as I looked into her face. I thought of Samantha, in that thick forest, with her cheap white shoes and blue eye shadow. I thought of Stuart at the party, laughing along to all those jokes spoken to him in fake slang. That was how they had learned to survive it. Everybody had their own way of surviving. My mother had her way, my father had his, Cole had hers. And then I thought of me, the silent me that was Jesse Goldman, the one who hadn’t uttered a word, the one who had removed even her Star of David. It had come so easily to me. I had become somebody I didn’t like. Somebody who had no voice or color or conviction. I wasn’t sure that was survival at all. I spoke my thoughts aloud. “They say you don’t have to choose. But the thing is, you do. Because there are consequences if you don’t.”
