by Bella Pollen
“Come, come,” a Perspex bracelet insisted. “Everyone needs a passion—or if not a passion, at the very least a hobby.”
Oh, I had a hobby. I liked to discredit anything my sister said and/or impose forced labour on my brother—a career that, in the unregulated market of sibling slavery, yielded unexpectedly high returns.
I also had a passion. In my free time I liked to torture dolls and stuffed animals. Run-of-the mill stuff really—singeing their hair, twisting off their heads. My parents encouraged it. No doubt they saw a future with Médecins Sans Frontières. Right from the get-go it was obvious she wanted to help, I imagined them saying. You should have seen her, practise, practise, practise!
And sometimes, so as not to arouse terror in their hearts, I’d pretend to do just that.
“There now,” I’d say, zipper-stitching Teddy’s severed head onto the ragged stump of his neck. “Those should stay in for a fortnight, but after that you’ll be as good as new.”
Truth be told, I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in good-as-new teddies. As I joyfully dislocated Winnie-the-Pooh’s shoulder or lit a match under Barbie’s slender heel, I pictured them weeping—not from pain so much, but because they’d been betrayed by the very person who was supposed to love and protect them. Then, at the apex of their sadness and confusion, I’d turn it all around and comfort them, re-secure their love and forgiveness—until the next time.
I guess the calling I was loosely aiming at lay somewhere between Munchausen by proxy and Stockholm syndrome, but my parents’ cocktail parties were hardly the moment to announce it. And thus the need for a more acceptable aspiration was born.
In her house back in England, our grandmother kept a dressing-up box, a beautiful red-lacquer Chinese trunk. Its contents were constantly in flux, but a rummage through them one summer yielded a pair of thick green tights, a suede tabard and a pointed felt hat. At eight, I had yet to pinpoint the difference between identity and career. It never occurred to me that the latter was something you stripped off at the end of the day. Robin Hood had potential. Years of filching quarters from the pocket of my father’s tweed coat ticked the crime requirement, while running people through with a sword is one of those skills you’re either lucky enough to be born with or not. I released Marcus from indentured servitude and promoted him to Merry Man, a role for which he dressed, somewhat obscurely, in a scarlet pirate’s outfit. In her ruffled flamenco dress, Susie might have done for Maid Marian had it not been for her irritating habit of archly tossing her head and walking with elbow stiffly akimbo in the manner of a slutty Spanish infanta. For a while, “Outlaw, cheerful robber, Robin of Loxley!” was a crowd-pleasing answer at parties, combining altruism and political activism with a giant dollop of cuteness. Then, disaster. One day my mother seized my outfit and threw it into the washing machine, where it shrank fatally. To be Robin Hood, garden gnome, was not such a lofty ambition, and once again I found myself between careers.
The heroic age was followed by the cretinous. “I want to fence like Wellington,” I announced to cocktail guests, “paint the birth of Venus, build a potato gun that can fire on the moon.” Finally, one day when my guard was down, I blurted out the truth: “I want to be black.”
The Lord John suit who’d posed the question snickered nervously into his whiskey sour, but the minute I’d said it, it seemed so obvious.
My mother had been born and raised in Rhodesia. I lived in New York. Could the term “African-American” have actually been coined for me?
By the latter half of the 1960s, civil rights was an amorphous, dispersed movement being fought on multiple fronts across America. Malcolm X was dead. Martin Luther King’s relationship with Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration was deteriorating. It was the time of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party. Civil resistance and inner-city riots were raging every day on TV, but whatever it was about the cause that excited me had little to do with racism. I lived in my own bubble. I did not, for instance, take my favourite book, The Story of Little Black Sambo, to be an example of racial stereotyping with illustrations of “darky” iconography. Far as I could see, it was about a smart black kid with dubious taste in red shoes who outwitted a bunch of mean tigers. Little Black Sambo had been my mother’s favourite book when she was a child and the copy she read to us was her own scuffed version with the original drawings. I never tired of it or its sister tale, The Story of Little Black Mingo, and even if I wasn’t yet ready to apply their lessons—that courage was everything, while bullying and greed accomplished nothing—I took note.
I also had a golliwog family of whom I was very fond. Unaware that I was supposed to revile these as colonial caricatures, I made sure to subject them to experiments equally as sadistic as any endured by my white Ken doll. (It can’t be denied, though, that Ken’s muscular, tawny limbs were particularly delicious to melt.) But all that’s beside the point. Privilege allows for multiple shades of colour blindness.
Then, as now, America’s rage was fuelled by intractable and deeply rooted issues of class, bigotry, urban blight, economic deprivation, police brutality and wretched unemployment. I wish I could say I wanted to be black in order to whomp these, but in truth, I wanted to be black because I was a needy little ankle biter and most of the people my parents paid attention to were black—the activists they admired, the musicians they listened to, even the sportsmen they watched, from Bobo Brazil to Hank Aaron, whose giant baseball ad dominated Times Square. Black Is Beautiful was out on the street, and its energy crackled in the air. If you were born in the 1960s you didn’t get to actually live in them—just watch them pass by in a series of vivid images. To me, black people looked like they were going somewhere and they were getting there in the best hair and the funkiest pantsuits ever.
“So,” I asked my mother, “what do you think?”
“About being black?”
“You said I could be anything I wanted to be.”
My mother considered me and I held my breath.
If ever a girl hankered after dark it was me, but I was born dishwater beige. This might not have been such an issue had I not belonged to a family of ink-heads. A drear little chiffchaff dropped into a nest of beguiling ravens. The blue eyes didn’t help. Drama teacher after drama teacher cruelly stereotyped me in the role of jejune dimpled Gretel, while I ached to be the bony-legged witch. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my blandness got me bullied at school, but I’ve always had a thing about my colouring.
“I’m sorry, darling.” My mother tucked a mousy tail behind my ear. “Maybe you should think again.”
One day, strolling hand in hand along Fifth Avenue, the two of us chanced on a street stall selling wigs. All the big names were there, the Jackie O, the Catherine Deneuve, the Andy Warhol. I mittened through until I found what I was looking for.
In awe, I ran my fingertips over the Afro’s kinked dome. Every tight coil was zinging with soul, the rhetoric of King, Satchmo’s rasp, and the ball-bouncing skills of NBA champions.
“Please,” I begged my mother. “I’ll do anything.”
My mother was sympathetic to the concept of wigs. She had, she confessed, recently bought herself an Elizabeth Taylor in which to meet my father at Kennedy Airport.
“And guess what?” she chuckled. “He walked straight past me, silly fool!”
Being black was a big decision, she counselled, as though I’d asked permission to marry a cult leader and raise quintuplets on his pig farm. “Wait a while. If you still feel the same at Christmas, we’ll see.”
Street Afros and other wig styles were available in a diverse range of female icons: the Kathleen Cleaver, the Billie Holiday, the Eartha Kitt.
“Get the Pam Grier,” my mother advised in December. “It’s closest to your skin tone.”
The Pam Grier suited me. I have a preternaturally small head, but the Afro’s radiant halo compensated nicely. I wore it to and from school, and though it tended to be itchy, particularly with the advent of warm
er weather, I frequently slept in it too. As my confidence grew, so did my creative ambitions. Why the traditional orb? Why not shape the thing a little? I began to see a future for myself in Afro topiary. Scissors, a salon. It felt good to have a plan.
In those days we had a black cleaning woman named Lenor, who came three times a week. She arrived as we left for school and was often gone by the time we returned. I remember her as a scrupulous woman with a constellation of moles on her forehead and flat-ironed hair sprinkled with silver. At a guess, she might have been in her late forties, although a fondness for hatpins pointed to a more remote decade. She reminded me of a Beatrix Potter character, a wise and clever Mrs. Brock—the kind of upright wife who would never have allowed Tommy to topple into the moral abyss of bunny kidnapping. If Lenor thought it odd that I’d recently become black, she was elegant enough not to say so. The first time she saw my Afro she gave it a cautious pat, as though it were a small dead Pomeranian I’d taken to wearing on my head as a trophy. The following day she took a pick from her bag and instructed me in the art of back-combing. A week or so later, she pinched the curls and murmured, “You might want to use a little castor oil on Pam,” producing a bottle of the stuff from her coat pocket. “Cost no more than a dollar,” she said, waving away my thanks. “Keeps her soft, you know?”
It was around this time that Sotheby Parke-Bernet held the “Treasure of the Spanish Main” sale. A beachcomber in Cape Canaveral, Florida, had spotted something sticking out of the sand which turned out to be a gold necklace belonging to the admiral of the Spanish fleet. The necklace was made of links shaped like roses and had a clasp in the form of a dragon.
“You pulled the head off the dragon,” my father told us, “and inside was a tiny spoon for clearing the wax out of your ears.”
The ship carrying it, one of a fleet, had gone down in a storm in 1715, and when it was raised from the bottom of the sea, the treasure had been recovered intact.
A key part of my father’s job, it turned out, was to liven up the stuffy world of the auction house. The sale he designed was an extravaganza. Before bidding started, lights were dimmed. Silhouettes of the stricken fleet, flung about by a wrathful sea, were projected onto an enormous screen behind the podium. Over the howl of the storm came the melancholy voice of Edward G. Robinson reading letters the shipwrecked sailors had sent to the king of Spain, begging for help and signing themselves “your loyal subjects.”
Among the haul was a trunk of gold coins. These were offered for sale to children only, the auctioneer scrupulously addressing each peewee collector as “sir” or “madam,” while behind him a large scarlet macaw named Julius, purchased by Dad especially for the occasion, screeched, “Pieces of eight! Get your pieces of eight!”
“So, what about this bad boy?” a stagehand shouted as the sale was dismantled later that night.
“The parrot?” my father said. “Oh, I’ll take him. My wife was born amongst the wild things. She adores all creatures, great and small.”
My mother quickly identified the macaw as an emissary of Satan.
“Lift up your skirt, lift up your skirt,” Julius lisped the first time he encountered her.
“So, he’s a little gauche around women,” my father conceded. He had bought a state-of-the-art perch and was filling its seed cup with salted macadamia nuts.
“But personally, I find him most companionable.”
Indeed, whenever my father was at home, the bird’s manner was as unctuous as that of Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice. Bowing deferentially, Julius would squawk, “You OK, Captain? At your service, at your service.” Soon as Dad left for the office, though, he would decamp from his perch and take flight, beating his wings against lampshades, displacing pictures, and depositing exquisitely sculptured blobs of pistachio-vanilla whippy-shit in difficult-to-clean places. The geography of our apartment was unusual, consisting of a series of rooms connected by an isthmus of a corridor. This strip of land Julius commandeered as his personal runway. Blasting off from the dining room, he managed to work up quite some momentum before reaching the sitting room, where in lieu of braking, he’d crash-land on the tops of the curtains, apply a little reverse thrust, then rake his claws down the fabric, shredding the chintz as he went and ignoring my mother’s attempts to level him with a broom.
These avian capers went on until the moment my father’s key rattled in the lock, at which signal Julius would calmly take up position on his perch, tilt his head coquettishly, and trill, somewhat camply, “Welcome home, Captain! Make a sale, make a sale?” After which he’d burp, a sound I believe my father mistook for a kiss.
“He’s got to go,” Mum said.
“We’re his only family,” my father countered. “What kind of message would that send to the children?”
“A farewell one,” came the acid reply.
For a while, Julius had the upper hand, so to speak, but my mother was no slouch in the revenge department. She patched the curtains and bided her time.
“Take care of Julius, won’t you?” my father entreated, before he left on one of his last-minute peregrinations to Chile.
“Oh, you can bet on it,” my mother said sweetly and promptly sold the macaw to an unlicensed pet dealer in an obscure corner of Queens.
In retaliation, on his next trip my father brought home Papagoya, a South American caique.
Papagoya was dazzling. A compact, Liquorice Allsort sweetie of a bird with a black crown, plump orange cheeks, emerald wings, and a bright yellow chest.
My father had successfully smuggled him back on the plane, or so he claimed, by sedating him with vodka and hiding him inside his shirt. When at first light Papagoya woke up and began emitting hungover bird noises, the passenger in 10C said nothing, possibly assuming that Dad was suffering from a debilitating stomach ulcer. A couple of generous Bloody Marys saw all three of them through customs and immigration. But there can be no yin of the pusher without the yang of an addict. From the day he came to live with us on Ninety-Second Street, Papagoya was a feverish alcoholic.
My father took his vodka neat without enhancers—no ice, lemon, or Schweppes. Papagoya matched him shot for shot. When not blotto, he was everything you could want in a pet. A lively little parrot, full of personality, he slept against my father’s chest, making wet rasping noises. When awake, he’d roost for hours on Dad’s shoulder, chewing devotedly on his ear lobes while Dad read the newspaper. And if his snuggling took on a new urgency at cocktail hour, it has to be said that the entire family willingly enabled him. Sunday lunch, traditionally a festive occasion, soon became even jollier. While the family tore into roast chicken, Papagoya guzzled booze from my father’s glass until, on more than one occasion, he toppled unconscious to the floor.
Numerous after-lunch games were hastily invented for the little caique’s amusement. Voyage Around the World saw Dad swinging him round on his finger at high speed while Papagoya held on for dear life. Spin the Parrot on the Lazy Susan produced even louder squeals of delighted terror. Another of my parents’ Sunday rituals was to force my sister and me to walk around the table with books balanced on our heads to improve our deportment. Onto a stack of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, my father would now drop the little bird, who would shuffle from foot to foot like a dizzy windup toy. How we laughed at his endearingly cross-eyed expression! How we giggled at the eighty-proof hiccups erupting from his mouth.
After washing up, my father would slip Papagoya into his pocket and the family would head for Central Park, where a baseball diamond would be constructed out of sweaters and the bird pitched from backstop to infielder in the manner of a feather softball. For Papagoya, it was a far cry from his Amazonian origins, but his naturally obliging nature combined with a high blood-alcohol ratio made him happy to go along with almost anything. What a cutie! Not even a new baby, not even a fat little biblical angel—and heaven knows, they’re pretty adorable—would have been as welcome an addition to the family.
There was onl
y one problem.
Papagoya was not only a drunk but a card-carrying white supremacist.
Was this perceived? Inherent? Cause-and-effect conditioning? Surely racism requires complex thinking and bias that birds do not possess. Nevertheless, the minute he heard Lenor’s tentative tread outside the kitchen, Papagoya puffed out his chest and began goose-stepping up and down his cage, muttering slurs under his breath. Poor Lenor tried everything. She cooed at him, sang to him, but Papagoya regarded her with absolute disdain. When I look back now, I wonder how we could have missed the burnt-rubber fumes of hatred filling our own house. I mean, we knew Papagoya didn’t like Lenor; we just didn’t understand that he disliked her because she was black. In retrospect, it was no wonder she put off cage cleaning by taking up the art of laundry origami. There’s nothing quite like the joy you get from transforming a simple white shirt into a flower!
Lenor never ratted, she never complained. I only noticed that from the day Papagoya arrived, instead of leaving before we got home from school, she began mysteriously meeting Susie and me at the elevator. In the hallway she’d silently hold out her hand for my Afro, sweeping every protest aside. “Coils,” was all she’d say, hanging the wig on a hook. “They need to rest from time to time.” Then she’d put on her blue coat and press a finger to the down button. Gone were the glory days of Afro Sheen and grooming tips. Regarding my ambition to be black, Lenor’s commandeering of my wig felt like a giant backwards step.
One afternoon the elevator opened to an empty hallway. Inside the apartment, Lenor’s blue coat still hung on its hook. I thought little of it. With no wig check to delay me, I boogied on down the corridor with nothing more pressing on my mind than a bowl of après-school junket. I barely registered the sound of Papagoya’s screaming. That was the deal with winos—they often woke up screaming.
