No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Meeting Justino Santiago was both a blessing and a curse, for now there was no denying that she had African blood. She wondered if she was now considered a black person. As she walked the anger subsided, but the question remained, gnawing at her. Was she now a black person? Were all Puerto Ricans who shared an African background black? She had been to North Africa and the people there were mixed. In Morocco and Algeria the people looked a lot like Puerto Ricans, and that made sense, because the Moors had been on the Iberian peninsula for centuries. It would be difficult to make Arabs believe that they were black because they had Negroid ancestors, which many across Northern Africa obviously did. Was it because being black was a bad thing? Was it something to be ashamed of? Was she ashamed? Were black people ashamed? Was the bravado, the attitude all a protective device because they were ashamed of being black? As she went over the subject she shook her head. But the doubt remained, interfering with everything else she thought. Was she looking at things from a white or a black perspective? How could a black person feel about it? How did she feel about it? Did the way she feel have to do with the blackness? She felt like such a phony, with all that Kunta Kinte stuff.

  When she got to the store the usual crowd was hanging around, talking and listening to raps on a boom box outside. Not too loud because they knew it hurt business. Inside, a couple of homeboys were playing the Super Mario and one of the other machines they recently had installed. As soon as Cookie saw her, she knew something was the matter. Vidamía went into the back of the store and collapsed in a chair. The tears flowed from her in a combination of anger and regret about how she’d treated Wyndell. There was no doubt that the subject of his blackness was important. She had been insensitive. She was such a hypocrite. All her liberal crap about respecting the dignity of all people, and she was setting herself apart from the person she loved.

  Cookie called her friend Gloria, who was standing just inside the door of the store, and asked her to come behind the counter and take people’s orders. It was about six on Saturday and people were coming in from shopping to rent movies. Fridays and Saturdays at this time were the busiest. When Gloria went behind the counter, Cookie immediately rushed into the back and found Vidamía with her head turned to the wall.

  “What happened, Vee?” she said. “Was it those slimy lowlifes again?”

  She was referring to the four homeboys from Avenue B who had followed them home a couple of weeks back. They were really nasty until Billy, walking up the street, saw what was happening and crossed the street and the four homeboys turned off at Rivington and kept going, goofing and slapping hands, their caps askew and their baggy pants low on their hips. Their father had asked them what had happened, but they’d said it was nothing. “Just stupid boys,” Cookie had said. Their father had nodded and opened the door to the building and they went up on the elevator, agreeing later that they didn’t want to worry him.

  “I can get a posse on them,” Cookie said. “Raymond told me he’ll get his brother Miguel from the Wald Projects and he and his homeboys’ll straighten them out.”

  “It wasn’t them, Cookie,” Vidamía said. “I had a big fight with Wyn. My fault, I think.”

  “What about?”

  “About that whole thing with me supposedly being black and whatnot.”

  “Girl, qué es lo d’él? What’s the matter with that man? What’s he want you to do, frizz up your hair and wear dark makeup and shit? He wants you to be like that chick Eddie Murphy talks about in that show. Right? You have to put a bone through your nose and ride around on a fuckin’ zebra and whatnot? Gaw! He is too much, child.”

  “No, nothing like that,” Vidamía said, laughing through her tears at her white sister who could talk Afro-Rican better than anybody she knew. “Anyway, I’m sorry I’m late, baby.”

  “That’s all right, mami. Don’t worry about it. Take your time. Mario’s not due here until seven. I’ll take him with me when I go change. He can hear me in the shower and know that I’m in there esnua, homegirl. Totally nekked, like they say down home. You gotta keep them under your power. Cliff’s late, too, so don’t worry.”

  “I should’ve been more understanding,” Vidamía repeated.

  Cookie sat down and made her dry her tears and go and wash up, and then while Vidamía was in the bathroom, she talked about how she and Mario had at least one big fight each month, but always made up, and wondered if maybe Wyn was worried about his decision not to pick up phony gigs anymore and make a commitment to only playing jazz.

  After Vidamía came out of the bathroom, Cookie sent Gloria for pizza and sodas and then Mario Wong came in with his friend Gilbert Montoya and his girl, Nicole, and the four of them left. Two minutes later, Cliff walked in, trailed by his girl from Performing Arts.

  The rest of the evening went quickly, and at nine-thirty they began to clean up and get ready to close the store. At ten o’clock Vidamía and Cliff counted up the receipts, put them in a bag, called Tito Delgado, who was a cop, and he came over with his car and drove them back home. They paid him his fifty-dollar fee and he waited until they were inside the building and the door was locked. Vidamía walked in and immediately went to Lurleen, gave her the bag, and reported on the sales for the day. She kissed her father, who was sitting in his rocker, reading the newspaper and listening to music with the headphones on. He looked relaxed, his face placid, as he kept time by nodding his head lightly as he looked at the paper through his reading glasses.

  Vidamía fixed herself something to eat and sat with Fawn and Caitlin while they watched television. Caitlin was her usual unconcerned self, but Fawn looked uncommonly sad. She moved closer to her and smoothed her hair. Fawn stiffened at the touch, but eventually leaned into her and put her head on Vidamía’s shoulder. Vidamía asked her if she was all right. Fawn nodded, whispering that she’d gotten her period. Vidamía said she understood and wondered what Fawn’s thing could look like. Whenever Fawn wore pants there didn’t seem to be a bulge in her jeans, but then again they were generally baggy, so it was hard to tell. She wondered if Fawn knew that Cookie had told her about it. Of course, Cookie’d only seen it once, back when Fawn was seven years old. Vidamía couldn’t imagine how it would feel to have both organs.

  After Cliff and his girlfriend went back out, she felt the urge to call Wyndell, but she decided that Cookie was right and he should make the first move. He was leaving in a few days and maybe he’d crash or something would happen to him and she’d have regrets. She decided to take her chances. She wanted to discuss the issue with Lurleen, but she was reading and Vidamía didn’t want to disturb her. She went to her room, came back out in her bathrobe, took a shower, letting the fine spray of warm water relax her body. She tried not to think of the times she and Wyndell had taken showers together and how fascinated she still was at the contrast between the color of their skins, at the patterns they formed when they held each other. Lying in bed together with him gave her a sensual rush and she often thought that if she were a painter she would do many poses of the two of them in different types of light at different times of the day, both of them nude. She washed her hair, stayed under the water a long time and then came out of the shower, put on her thick terry-cloth bathrobe, and sat on the toilet seat to blow-dry her hair. When she was finished she dried herself again, put on deodorant, powdered her body, and put on clean underpants and her cotton nightgown.

  She thought the shower would make her sleepy, but she was as wideawake as she had been when she walked into the apartment. Her mind was flitting back and forth between the argument with Wyndell and her concern with how she was to identify herself when she was asked what she was. It had been so easy when she was young. She was American. She was Puerto Rican—American. But that wasn’t good enough, because there was no such thing. It wasn’t like Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans who had come here as immigrants. Puerto Ricans were American citizens, whether they were in the United States or back in Puerto Rico. Barry and her mother had said this over and over
, never talking like other people did about “the island” and “the mainland.” By saying “mainland,” Barry had said, we’re admitting that P.R. is part of the U.S., and that’s just capitulating and not upholding its right to independence. But they were. They couldn’t help it, they were Americans. Did she want Puerto Rico to be a state? No, it was wrong. If it became a state it could never be a country. Puerto Rico should be free, just as Quebec and Northern Ireland and everyone who had a distinct culture should be free.

  What was she? She tried reading a book of classic American short stories. There were stories by Steinbeck, Hemingway, Welty, Faulkner, O’Henry, and many others. She began reading Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” reread the first two paragraphs over and over, but could retain nothing as a basis for going on. Her mind was focused totally on herself and her confusion. How could she have been so moved by Alex Haley’s book and yet resent Wyndell’s contention that she was black? She looked at her arms and legs, then got up from the bed and looked at herself in the mirror. Around the eyes there were similarities between herself and some of her black friends, but that was understandable. She had African blood, and that was fine. But the way that it was being presented to her by Wyn, it meant that all the other aspects of her background, the Irish part and the southern white part, no longer counted. That Africa was part of her background was without question, but why did she have to wear a badge that announced to the world I AM BLACK. Was she black? Weren’t those the rules of the race game? The slightest trace of African heritage and you were black. It wasn’t fair. Her silent plea angered her, for in the desire for personal justice, for a need to have the issue adjudicated in her favor, she was admitting that to be black in the United States meant a sentence of suffering, of pain and rejection, of a perpetual shroud of slavery, which she was not willing to wear.

  The thought filled her eyes with tears, and in a moment she had turned to the wall and was sobbing quietly. If she believed that everyone was equal, why couldn’t she give herself up to being black? What was the difference, white or black? If she truly believed that deep inside there was no difference, why couldn’t she choose? Wyndell was absolutely right. She pounded her pillow several times in anger, then sat up and stared at the wall of her room. Even the poster on her wall—the African savanna extending to the horizon with Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance, a pride of lions in the foreground—made her feel shame, for in her stance she was also rejecting the essence of that beauty.

  To the right of the poster there was a picture of Wyndell, holding his tenor saxophone just as tenderly as he held her. It was the same photograph due to appear the following week in the Village Voice to announce the gig at the Village Gate. She thought then of a folk song’s lyrics in which a girl is asking to be held like a baby that will not fall asleep. Above her desk, on the bulletin board, there were pictures of the two of them. Written with Magic Marker on the bulletin board was the innocent Vidamía loves Wyndell 4 Ever, the letters curleycued within a heart. In every photograph you could see how much Wyndell admired her. At least a dozen photos, each of them showing how in love they were: at the Central Park Zoo near the Polar Bear pool, at Jones Beach, under the arch at Washington Square Park, eating at a sidewalk café on the Upper West Side, and dozens more.

  On the desk there was a mug from Harvard University. To the right of the bulletin board there was a pennant from the school. She had been accepted, had gone up for a summer weekend to get acquainted with the campus and in the fall, in little more than a month, she’d be attending the school. The only other person accepted to Harvard from her graduating class was Todd Carey, whose father was a graduate. People said it was the Kennedy influence, that Harvard favored the Irish. She’d felt pride when they referred to her as Irish. And she was that, too, wasn’t she? These thoughts plunged her once again into an agitated state. Her Irish was up. No, it was her Latin temper. Or maybe it was the savage African blood in her. For the first time in her life she didn’t want to be herself.

  She got up out of bed, turned off the light in her room, went to the refrigerator and cut herself an enormous slice of chocolate cake from the half left over from dinner, put about four spoonfuls of strawberry ice cream on the cake and poured herself a large glass of milk. When she came back to the living room, Fawn and Caitlin said good night and went off to sleep. She asked Lurleen if she minded her turning on the TV again, and Lurleen shook her head without looking up. She was reading a book about space. Vidamía turned on the television and switched to MTV and mindlessly ate the cake and ice cream and drank the milk, knowing she’d have an awful stomachache in a while. She would become a fat pig, and then she wouldn’t have to deal with the whole business of color. When you saw fat people the first thing that struck you about them was their size, not their color. No one would care what she was when they saw her. She would just be a fat chick, a fat broad, a fat cunt, a fat cocksucker, a fat bitch; but then people would get to know her and find out that she was a fat Irish Puerto Rican black bitch. So it didn’t matter. She felt nauseous and thought that maybe she’d become bulimic like Pam Ashley, who didn’t break a thousand on her SATs and said she was going to kill herself because her mother had gone to Vassar and so had her grandmother, and they had turned her down and she’d have to go to some state school or maybe community college. She turned off the TV, got up, went to the sink, rinsed out the glass and dish, came back to the living room, and told Lurleen she was going up on the roof.

  “At this time of night?” Lurleen said, and then looked up and knew immediately there was something the matter. “What happened?”

  “Wyn, Mama,” she said, standing in her long nightgown, feeling foolish. “We had a big fight. Ever since he got back from the West Coast he’s been on my case.”

  “You feel like talking about it?”

  She nodded and at that moment her father came over, leaned down, kissed Lurleen, and then came over and kissed Vidamía and told her not to let stuff get to her. When he was gone, the tears came back. Lurleen asked her if she wanted some chocolate cake.

  “No, I had some already,” Vidamía said, and laughed ironically. “It was good, but I ate too much and my stomach hurts.”

  “Poor baby. What did you argue about?”

  She told Lurleen the entire story and said she felt worse because she was a hypocrite.

  “I don’t know what it all means, Mama,” Vidamía said. “I’ve been going up to see my grandfather, and, like I told you, he’s dark, but he looks like my mother. He’s not black. I mean, you can tell he’s African. But not like Wyn, you know. He behaves totally relaxed. He’s not uptight all the time. It’s cultural. It’s like African people in the U.S. and African people everywhere else behave differently.”

  “Well, I’m gonna tell you something,” Lurleen said, pushing back her lank hair. “I don’t know what we all are, either.”

  “You and Daddy and the kids and all of us?”

  “Just me and the kids. Let’s go up on the roof.”

  They took the elevator to the seventh floor. Lurleen turned on the light to the roof and they went up the stairs. The night sky was high and cloudless and there was a breeze blowing in from the south bringing with it a blend of tropical air and the sea.

  They sat across from each other at the picnic table and then Lurleen asked for her hands. When she placed her hands on the table, Lurleen took both of them and said that whatever she told her she must promise never to discuss with anyone. She almost thought that Lurleen was going to tell her about Fawn, but Lurleen began talking about being a young girl in Tennessee and learning how to play the accordion, and later the fiddle.

  And then she talked about the time in 1963 when she was thirteen and her aunt April Sanderson got married to a young man down near the Gulf, but inland from Biloxi, and they had all gotten into her uncle Bobby Meekins’s car, all scrunched up in the back with her cousins Mel and Lloyd and her brother Morgan and her sister Laurel and their mother, and up front her uncle Bobby, his wife, Clara,
and her own daddy, Donald Meekins, who had a bad leg from being in the war and couldn’t hear and got terrible headaches all the time. And they drove all day, it seemed, stopping off to pee at gas stations and eat at diners, until they got down to a little town called Surrender, Mississippi, and this big farm where a whole bunch of tables had been set up for the wedding reception.

  Lurleen told her how they’d all piled back up into the car and found a motel and each family rented a room and they’d all slept in the same bed, her mother and father in the middle and she and her sister Laurel on her mother’s side and Morgan on his father’s side. The next day, they woke up early in the morning, got dressed up, and went to the church, which was painted bright white and was in this grove of pine trees with sandy soil and little patches of grass growing out of it. There were blue jays and crows squawking and squirrels and chipmunks running around in the trees. It was hot and uncomfortable in the church, and she kept thinking about her fiddle and maybe they’d let her play someone’s, but then she thought that maybe all she really wanted to do was show off.

  57. Passing

  The wedding was pretty, and her aunt April looked beautiful dressed all in white. The groom was tall and not bad-looking, although he did looked frightened. He had red hair and his ears stuck out a little bit, but she figured her aunt must love him very much. All the women cried, and while people were standing around getting ready to go back to the reception, she and Laurel and another cousin, Glenda, giggled and poked each other with their elbows and made jokes about the wedding night because they all knew what happened then and thinking about it made them giggle even more and whisper to each other whether they thought she’d take her wedding dress off first and maybe she didn’t have bloomers under the dress to make it easier, until her mother snuck up behind them and heard what they were saying and grabbed Laurel, who was fifteen, and pinched her arm, took her off, and gave her a good talking to.