by Danzy Senna
Cole shrugged. “Yeah, and there are consequences if you do.”
We were silent on her bed for some time. I could hear her housemates laughing downstairs, the little boy squealing madly in a hyperactive burst, and bass-heavy music. It sounded like a party, and I turned to ask Cole about her roommates, but she was somewhere else, twisting a curl and staring out into the night.
Finally she said, staring down at her fingers, which fiddled with a loose thread on her sweater, “Where is she?”
I thought of my mother’s words: Nobody can know where I am. Nobody.
And I smiled, thinking that this was the one exception in the world to that rule. The one exception she hadn’t needed to tell me, because we both had known it all along. So I said, “She’s in New Hampshire. Hiding out still. You should call her. I have her number.”
Cole didn’t think it was safe to call from her house, so we went for a walk into town. As she put on a flaking leather jacket and a bright turquoise scarf, she explained, “Mum wasn’t fooling around, you know. The FBI—the government, whatever—wanted her bad, wanted to set an example. I mean, I’m sure she did something really wicked. I’m certain of it. Who knows if they’re still after her, but you can never be too careful.”
I nodded, but really I was thinking that Cole couldn’t begin to know what it was to be too careful. She hadn’t lived the way I had lived all these years. She hadn’t known what it was like waking up at three in the morning in order to flee, learning to see danger in the face of every stranger, cultivating paranoia. She hadn’t known what it was to live as a fugitive, all the while looking longingly for the person I missed every day—her.
Of course, I couldn’t ever really know what she had been through either in Brazil or in Oakland, living all these years as my father’s daughter. We were sisters, but we were as separate in our experiences as two sisters could be. I had to face this, if I could. I didn’t know if I could.
“No, you can never be too careful. You’re right about that,” I said to her. “About anyone or anything.”
I pulled on my musty and leaden coat, explaining to her as we went out that it was our grandfather’s. I giggled and told her what I had done at our grandmother’s, but she seemed distracted, tense, her mind already on the phone call. I was still sick with the flu. My head felt hot, and yet I shivered. My mother, if she were here, would make me drink ginger tea and eat graham crackers. She would put a wet washcloth on my forehead and hand me a book to read. My mother believed books were as good a medicine as any.
We found a pay phone at the North Berkeley BART, and Cole seemed hesitant, unsure, as we approached it. She bit her lip and turned to me. “Is she still fat?”
I shook my head. “No, she lost all that weight after you and Papa left. It was like she didn’t care enough to eat anymore. The running wore her down.”
She nodded and looked away, up toward the sky. “I dreamt about her a lot. That she was thin and that she was different. She lived in this little white house in a nice suburban neighborhood, and when I came to her door, she didn’t recognize me. She thought I was a Jehovah’s Witness trying to convert her, and wouldn’t let me in. I had to explain to her who I was.”
She put out her hand, which was trembling, and I wrote the number on the back of it with the pen we had brought. She looked at me then, and I knew she wanted to do it alone. So I said, “I’ll be waiting at the corner.”
I watched from a distance as she dialed. Occasional cars swished by, but the night was otherwise empty, a blank slate waiting to be written upon. She stood hunched over, still twirling her hair, her eyes hidden. She was calling collect, and I heard her say, “Cole,” loudly.
After few moments, I heard her say, “Mum? It’s me.” And then her crying softly, muffled words that I couldn’t understand.
I saw my mother seated on the couch, reading glasses on, opera playing faintly from the television. The phone rings twice, and she is nervous, doesn’t like phone calls this late into the night. She picks up on the third ring and says, “Hello?” Operator says, “Hello. Collect call from Cole.” And for a moment she wonders if it’s me playing tricks, and she says, “I accept.” And then a voice that is not mine comes through, crackling, a street noise behind it. A voice that is her firstborn. A voice that is her. And she feels something long buried come rising up to meet that voice, she feels someone waking deep inside her. And she is holding the phone so tight that later her hands will ache, when she is beside Jim in that wide country bed, staring into the silent night. Then she will close her eyes and see the New Hampshire license plate with the words “Live Free or Die” imprinted across the bottom, and will know it was never as simple as that. But she will know that her daughters are safe, sleeping together under one roof, and that will allow her to rest tonight.
MY MOTHER AND COLE agreed that the three of us would meet in the summer, after classes ended. Cole and I would meet her in New York, at Penn Station, where we wouldn’t stand out.
Cole held my arm as we walked to her house, and seemed lighter. Some of the sadness had disappeared, at least for the time being. She told me she wanted to go to Guatemala after we met our mother; she was part of a group of women that planned to bring food and supplies to friends working there. Hearing this, I panicked, reminded of the last time people I loved had left the country. I told her I wanted to go too. She said she’d think about it. She worried it would be dangerous.
She asked me questions about where I’d been, and when I told her about our time at Aurora, she shrieked a laugh and said, “Papa would keel over! He’s pretty uptight about anything outside of race.”
As we walked arm in arm back to her house, Cole asked me to stay with her, to live with her. I said yes and tried to picture myself living in this house, with Cole and these strangers, my father skulking around the edges with a notebook in hand and a hypothesis on his tongue. It was still hard to imagine myself settling down anywhere.
She told me, “You should to go to Berkeley High. That’s where I went.” She chuckled and said, “If you ever thought you were the only one, get ready. We’re a dime a dozen out here.”
I saw myself as a teenager in a high school with a medley of mulatto children, canaries who had in fact survived the coal mine, singed and asthmatic, but still alive. Then I thought of Samantha and felt a wave of sadness. I wondered what would happen to her.
When we got back to the house, the woman named Alma was up watching television, with the little boy asleep on her lap. The others appeared to have gone out. There was a big half-finished banner on the kitchen table that said, “No Nukes.” Cole pointed to it. “There’s some rally tomorrow. I’m supposed to go.”
I remembered that Jim had been hysterical about nuclear bombs and like to fantasize over dinner about what he’d do in the event of one. He had always struck me as the type who would build a hole in the ground and hide there with cans of soup, just to save himself. But it had been the one issue he seemed really to care about, the one subject I could bear to hear him go on about.
I took a long-awaited shower while Cole got ready for bed. I scrubbed myself hard, washing away the grit and grime of my travels, before slipping into the plaid flannel shirt that Cole had given me to wear as a nightgown. When I went upstairs, Cole was lying in bed, flipping through some textbook. She wore reading glasses that made her look older. She glanced up at me over the tops of them and said, “I keep expecting you to vanish.”
I WOKE CONFUSED. There were green glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, and for a moment I thought I was back in New Hampshire, on Nicholas’s bed. It was only when I turned and looked beside me that I realized where I really was.
Cole had stolen all the covers and had spread her limbs out across the bed the way she had always done. I shivered at the edge of the mattress, on the verge of falling off. My stomach was cramped with hunger. The morning light was just beginning to seep through her lace curtains. I slipped out of bed quietly, without waking Cole. My clothes were
musty, so I put on some of hers—a pair of jeans, which were too baggy, and her Irish sweater from the night before, which still smelled of her perfume. The money from my sneakers was crumpled into a moist, smelly ball on her dresser. I took it and went off to buy breakfast food.
Outside, it wasn’t clear yet what kind of day it would be. The air was crisp, and the sky above was a bruise of colors from the just-rising sun. As I made my way up Virginia Street, the hills in the distance were only partially visible, hidden behind the morning fog. I passed a bike shop at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and glanced in at the bright bicycles that hung upside down, their wheels stagnant in midair. The houses I passed along the way were crooked and tumbling, with political placards and winter blossoms shooting up from overgrown gardens, half-destroyed cars parked out front.
As I turned onto Shattuck, a big, old-fashioned school bus sat idling at the curb, boarding a herd of noisy kids, and I looked at them, surprised, somehow, that children still went to school, that children went on with their lives. The bus was closing its doors, and I peered up at the faces just settling behind the windows. They were black and Mexican and Asian and white, on the verge of puberty, but not quite in it. They were utterly ordinary, throwing obscenities and spitballs at one another the way kids do. One face toward the back of the bus caught my eye, and I halted in my tracks, catching my breath. It was a cinnamon-skinned girl with her hair in braids. She was black like me, a mixed girl, and she was watching me from behind the dirty glass. For a second I thought I was somewhere familiar and she was a girl I already knew. I began to lift my hand, but stopped, remembering where I was and what I had already found. Then the bus lurched forward, and the face was gone with it, just a blur of yellow and black in motion.
Acknowledgments
There were so many who inspired and supported me during the writing of this book. I would especially like to thank the following: my wonderful editor, Cindy Spiegel, whose critical vision was essential in bringing this book to fruition; my agent, Binky Urban, for believing in, and finding the right home for, this book; Farai Chideya, and my cousins Rebecca Quaytman and Jeff Preiss, who all opened their homes to me when I needed the space to live and write; Omar Wasow, minister of information for the Mulatto Nation, who showed me the mestizo imperative; Joeritta and Adjoa Jones de Almeida, for opening up worlds for me; Nelson Aldrich, for sending me in the right direction; Maya Perez, for her support and warm enthusiasm; my colleagues and professors in the writing program at UC-Irvine, particularly Geoffrey Wolff and Judith Grossman, for their generosity and wisdom; and a special thanks to Phil Hay, a great reader, writer, and friend, who was so much a part of this process.
All my thanks and love to my sister and brother, Lucien and Maceo, my East and my West, who give me strength, joy, and especially laughter. And to my father, who showed me that in matters of color, there is always more than meets the eye.
And finally, deepest gratitude to my mother, an incredible woman and writer, who taught me what really matters.
Danzy Senna was born in Boston in 1970. She graduated from Stanford University and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. Caucasia is her first novel.
